get aboard without being seen.'
He laughed and clapped me on the shoulder. 'Slipped off, did you? I've done the same once or twice. Got a masthead for it once, too.'
I jumped from the pier into his boat and sat in the bow, as he directed. When we lay against the hawse of the Santa Charita, he whispered to the rowers to ship oars and join him in the stern. That raised the bow a foot or more, and it was no trick to pull myself into the hawsepipe, or to slip into the forecastle as I had planned. The next day I looked around the harbor for the Macerer without finding her, and I soon forgot Capt. Burt and his ship in the work of stowing cargo.
It was mixed, as they say. There were big bales of leather, box after box of dried fruit, and crates of terra cotta cookware. There were also seven parrots in cages, a private investment of Senor's. They had to be carried out of the hold in fine weather and set on the weather deck, and carried back to the hold at night for fear they would catch cold.
The rest of the crew hated them because of the extra work they made, and their noise and dirt. I thought they were cute and did my best to make friends, talking to them and scratching their necks the way Senor did. After one died, I was assigned to water and feed them, clean their cages, and take care of them generally.
It brought me closer to Senor, and that soon paid off in a big way. He would come out and shoot the sun at noon every day, check the logbook just like the captain did, and calculate our position. Then he and the captain would compare their results, and go over their calculations, too, if the results were too different. About the time we went through the Windward Passage, I started asking him about it.
I had been taking care of his birds and talking to him about them, and we were pretty good friends. He was still Senor to me, and I still touched my forehead and all that. But I had showed him he could relax with me and I would still jump when he gave an order. So he answered my questions when there were not too many, and showed me how to work the astrolabe. Basically what he was doing was measuring the angle of the sun at noon. Once you know that and the date, you know the latitude. The farther north you are, the farther south the sun rises and the lower it is at noon in the winter. If you know the date, the table gives you your latitude. Certain stars can be used the same way.
There are a bunch of problems with this system, as you can see. For one thing, it is hard to get a good measurement unless you happen to be standing on a rock. When the sea is calm, you take three measurements and average them. When it is rough, you can forget the whole thing.
And that is not all. In dirty weather you cannot see the sun, so no measurement. On top of that, your compass is pointing to magnetic north, not true north. There were tables for compass deviation, too, but you had to know your position to use them. So what I used to do (now I am getting ahead of myself again) was check the compass bearing against the North Star. If this is starting to sound complicated, you have no idea. I have just given the high spots.
When you have found out your latitude, you still need your longitude, and for us the only way to know that was to measure our speed with the log, and record it in the logbook, which we did every hour. The log is on a line with knots in it to measure speed. You throw the log off the back of the ship, watch the little sandglass, and count knots.
Of course if you are in sight of land, it is all different. You take bearings from objects on the chart, which gives your position-if the chart is right, and if you have not picked the wrong island or mountaintop or whatever.
By the time I had learned even half this stuff, we were a long, long way out from Veracruz. So good night!
4
Spain
Wecrossed the Atlantic with the galleon, which meant we had to match its speed. In light airs, it would hardly move, so we spent days and days creeping along under reefed topsails. When the wind whistled in the rigging and spray came over the side, the old slowpoke Santa Lucia turned into a racehorse, setting sails in places most ships do not even have and creaming the sea for a mile behind her. We had to do our best to keep up, all plain sail set and the deck so steep you couldn't walk on it without holding on to something. I do not know how close we were to capsizing, but I would not want to come an inch closer than we came a dozen times a day. When we finally split up-us heading north to Coruna and the Santa Lucia east for Cadiz-we were all praising God and blessing the Virgin. It was the only time I ever saw the whole crew smiling.
We unloaded at Coruna and were paid off, each of us going up to the captain one at a time and having the book explained to us before we got our money. That was when I found out that I had worked for a week to pay for two shirts and two pairs of pants.
I will stop here and explain that I still had the little bag I had brought from the monastery, but there was not much in it besides one pair of slop-chest pants and a slop-chest shirt. I had lost my sandals in Havana, kicking them off so I could run faster, and my T-shirt had been worn to rags and thrown away. You know what happened to my jeans.
When the captain had explained everything and paid me, he told me it would probably be a couple of weeks before the next voyage. He would see his family while the ship went into dry dock to get her bottom scraped and so on. But when she was ready to go again, he hoped I would come back and sign on. That made me feel good. I thanked him for it, and I meant it.
After I had been paid, Senor asked me to help him take his parrots to the bird seller. I said sure and off we went, him carrying three cages and me carrying three. The cages were wood, woven out of sticks and tied with twine that the parrots kept picking at with those big strong bills parrots have. They were not heavy, and I had carried and cleaned them many a time.
The bird shop was interesting, and I had plenty of time to look around in it while the bird man and Senor argued over prices. There were three parrots there already, gray ones from Africa that would talk to you and do everything they could think of to keep you with them. They were all hoping to be let out of their cages, but they did not know how to say that. It seemed to me then that it was about the only thing they did not know how to say, and I decided that if I ever had a parrot of my own, I would not cage it. If it stayed with me, fine. If it flew away, that would be fine, too.
Then a young lady came in, wanting to buy a bird. She saw Senor's and got him to take each of them out so she could see it better. The bird seller kept explaining to her that they were new birds who had not been around people much and might die before long, could not talk, and so on. I got one of the redheaded green ones to say, 'Pretty miss! Pretty miss!,' cocking its head. It was something I had said to all of them sometimes. After that, she had to have that one. She asked Senor how much, and he told her a lot more than he had been trying to get from the bird seller. So everybody argued about that for a while-the lady and an old woman in black who was with her, and Senor.
While all the palaver was going on, her maid and I were looking each other over. She would peek at me, and I would get embarrassed because I had been staring and look away. Then she would look away and I would start staring again. She had been carrying three packages and a shopping basket when she came in, but she put them down and got out her fan, and fanned herself, and looked at me over the top of it. I kept thinking of how it would be if the two of us were out on a little boat of our own, sailing far away to someplace wonderful.
Finally the lady bought the parrot she wanted, and told the girl to take the cage, saying they would go home now.
'Oh, Senora Sabina, I can't possibly carry all this and that heavy cage, too! Couldn't this sailor carry them for us?' So I ended up with the parrot cage and the shopping basket, walking behind the maid. She was round in all the right places, and it was a nice view. We got to the lady's house a lot sooner than I wanted to, and she smiled and thanked me and gave me a little money. The maid gave me a wink, which I liked a lot better.
I went back to the bird shop thinking about a whole lot of things, including a few I was pretty ashamed of. Senor was still there, and eventually we went off to a cantina together, got something to eat, and drank wine. I was scared the whole time, thinking he might want me to pay for us both. Do not get me wrong here. I would not
