I could not tell you how many times we did the act of love that long afternoon, but it was a creditable number, I assure you, and I was not the first to weary, though I was nigh on being twice her age. We lay back at last.
She said, then, “Oh, and one thing more. When we are in Lisbon, Don João and I are to be wed, by a Cardinal of the Roman faith, in full pomp and majesty. But nay, be not so dejected! The governor’s wife will not be too proud, I pledge you, to keep an Englishman as her lover, when she returns to São Paulo de Loanda. Am I not faring finely, Andres? Am I not faring finely?”
7
Her ship embarked for Portugal. Governor d’Almeida made a great public show of going to the harbor and bidding Don João and Dona Teresa farewell, displaying more anguish over Don João’s departure than he had shown when his own brother Don Francisco had crept off into shameful exile. I saw that such mariners of the colony as Pedro Faleiro and Manoel Andrade, that had sailed with me on my two voyages along the coast before, were on board the very same ship, as overseers of cargo. Seeing Faleiro thus depart was a puzzle to me, for if he was not here, who was to be the master of the pinnace that soon would sail for São Tomé?
I had the answer swiftly to that. For soon after the sailing of the Portugal ship I was sent for by Don Jeronymo the governor, to interview with me on the subject of the São Tomé enterprise.
This Don Jeronymo was the younger brother of Don Francisco d’Almeida and could not have been more than five-and-twenty years of age. Nevertheless he appeared a far more consequential person than his brother, being tall and imperious, with a princely bearing about him. It seemed to me that Don João would have a formidable task in displacing this man from the governship, royal commission or no.
He stood throughout our entire meeting, and though I am a man of more than middle height he well overtopped me, so that I felt somewhat ill at ease. Briefly he questioned me on my willingness to serve his government: to which I replied truthfully enough, that my continued welfare depended on my loyalty to my masters here, and therefore I was entirely at his service. He stared at me long and hard, as if trying to read my soul and see if I meant to betray him in some fashion for the advantage of Don João; and his eyes were as fierce and penetrating as those of the Jesuit Father Affonso, who had pronounced the excommunication. But the intent of treachery was not in me, and so how could Don Jeronymo find it there?
He said, “Are you able to read, Piloto?”
“Aye.”
“Read this, then.”
And he did hand me a document, all beautifully lettered on a piece of white parchment. I had some trouble with it, both because it was written in so fine a hand and because my knowledge of the language of the Portugals was only a speaking knowledge, not a reading one; but I made my way through it well enough and looked up all amazed, saying, “Am I to be captain of the pinnace, sir?”
“This is your credential to present to the governor. You are pilot and master. We have too few men to spare: you will be short of crewmen, and you will have to play two roles yourself. Have you commanded before?”
“Never.”
“Only piloted?”
“Aye,” I said, not volunteering to tell him that even my piloting experience was limited but to two voyages on this coast and one up the river to Masanganu.
“Many pilots have become masters after,” said Don Jeronymo. “They tell me you are very capable. I count on you to carry yourself well.”
I was honored by this; but also it gave me thought that I might be doing treason against England, to be taking command of a Portuguese vessel, which was a new and higher degree of service for me. It was one thing to serve as pilot, and another indeed to be the master of a ship, Portugal being formally at war with my own land. Yet I told myself it could make no difference what cap I wore aboard my vessel, so long as I committed no hostile acts against England. And I had no further time to think upon these things, because Don Jeronymo was drawing forth other documents that I was to present to the governor at São Tomé, one that set forth the problems of the Angola colony and requesting a force of some hundreds of soldiers to aid in pacifying the restless sobas of the outer provinces, and another that pledged that the São Tomé men would be permitted to harvest here as many slaves as they felt was proper, in payment for their assistance. When I had read these things Don Jeronymo’s secretary came, and sealed them all with thick brown wax, and so it was settled, that I should have charge of the voyage.
They had built a new pinnace, or rather had rebuilt one, taking an old wreck that was sitting off the isle of Loanda and putting her seaworthy. She was the Dona Leonor, not quite so tight and pretty as the Infanta Beatriz, but not vastly different in general, and she would do. But my crew was shorthanded indeed, owing to the losses by shipwreck and Jaqqa ferocity, and I had barely half the complement there had been on the Loango journey. Some of the men were known to me, such as Mendes Oliveira and Pinto Cabral and Alvaro Pires, but most were newcomers to Angola, having arrived off the recent ships from Brazil and Lisbon. If they were startled to find themselves having an Englishman as their captain, they said nothing about it; but perhaps they took it easily, thinking it was no more strange than anything else they had encountered thus far in Africa. I made my preparations swiftly and we took ourselves out to sea on the fifteenth day of June in Anno 1593.
This isle of São Tomé lies in the Gulf of Guinea some two hundred leagues northwest of the mouth of the River Zaire. Four years previous I had paid a brief call there, when I had been shipping with Abraham Cocke aboard the May-Morning, and the current or else the ignorance of Captain Cocke, or his greed, had carried us very far south of our course. Now, coming upon São Tomé from the other side, we had a hard time of it, for dry northerly winds were blowing in our teeth all the while, and we beat our way up the coast with no little expenditure of effort.
To avoid the outflow of the Zaire I took the pinnace a fair way out to sea, and that went well, but I was almost discomfited very badly in going back toward land, when I intended to halt for water and provisions at Loango. The great merit of being both master and pilot is that you are accountable to no one save God and your conscience; during our difficult passages I kept my own counsel, made a brave face of it, consulted much with my rutters and charts, and did such a shortening and lengthening of sail, such a shifting about of ropes and lines, that no one dared say me nay. We had one very bad moment when the wind veered violently from north to west in devilish gusts, a wind so strong it seemed to have a color, a light purple hue, and I was painfully reminded of the wind that had heralded my late calamity. It kicked up a high roughness of the sea as we wallowed about. Three great green waves broke over the ship and the lurches she gave burst the rigging and the shrouds on the larboard side, and one of my men was swept away and lost. But then it grew quiet, and we made repairs and continued onward to the coast, where soft waves beat mildly against the white line of the sands. At Loango we discovered the town safe: the Jaqqa encroachment that they had feared so greatly had not fallen upon them, and all was prosperous, for which they gave high credit to the mokissos that guarded them against all demons.
Beyond Loango the waters were new to me, but my charts provided me good guidance and it was only a matter of battling the contrary winds, which a sailor finds as much a part of daily routine as is pissing or putting on boots. In all these slow weeks, though, the hardest time for me came when the wind was gentle and we were making good passage. For at that hour I was standing on the bridge with Mendes Oliveira my lieutenant, both of us idle and looking toward the west, where the dark blue bowl of the sea seemed to curve away into emptiness for a thousand thousand leagues. I turned to Oliveira, a man of forty years with a weatherbeaten ugly face and a long narrow white beard, and said lightly, “This sailing goes slow. I think Don João will be in Portugal before we get ourselves into São Tomé.”