The Journeyer - Jennings Gary - Страница 29

I thought about that, and looked up at the sails, spread out on either side of the ship like a living bird’s wings, and guessed that they must be the liveworks.

“Wrong,” said the mariner. “The liveworks are every part of a ship that is in the water. The deadworks are everything above water.”

I thought about that, and said, “But if the deadworks were to plunge under water, they could hardly then be called live. We should all be dead.”

The seaman said quickly, “Do not speak of such things!” and crossed himself.

Another said, “If you would be a seafarer, boy, you must learn the seventeen names of the seventeen winds that blow over the Mediterranean.” He began ticking them off on his fingers. “At this moment, we are sailing before the etesia, which blows from the northwest. In winter, the ostralada blows fiercely from the south, and makes storms. The gregalada is the wind that blows out of Greece, and makes the sea turbulent. From the west blows the maistral. The levante blows out of the east, out of Armeniya—”

Another seaman interrupted, “When the levante blows, you can smell the Cyclopedes.”

“Islands?” I asked.

“No. Strange people who live in Armeniya. Each of them has only one arm and one leg. It takes two of those people to use a bow and arrow. Since they cannot walk, they hop on the one leg. But if they are in a hurry, they go spinning sideways, wheeling on that hand and foot. That is why they are called the Cyclopedes, the wheel-feet.”

Besides telling me of many other marvels, the seamen also taught me to play the guessing and gambling game called venturina, which was devised by mariners to while away long and boring voyages. They must endure many such voyages, for venturina is an exceedingly long and boring game, and no player can win or lose more than a few soldi in the course of it.

When I later asked my uncle if, in his travels, he had ever encountered curiosities like the wheel-feet Armeniyans, he laughed and sneered. “Bah! No seaman ever ventures farther into a foreign port than the nearest dockside wineshop or whorehouse. So when he is asked what sights he saw abroad, he must invent things. Only a marcolfo who would believe a woman would believe a seaman!”

So from then on I listened only tolerantly, with half an ear, when the mariners told of landward wonders, but I still gave full attention when they spoke of things to do with the sea and sailing. I learned their special names for common objects—the small sooty bird called in Venice a stormbird is at sea called petrelo, “little Pietro,” because, like the saint, it seems to walk on the water—and I learned the rhymes which seamen use when talking of the weather—

Sera rosa e bianco matino:

Alegro il pelegrino

—which is to say that a red sky in the evening or a white sky in the morning foretells good weather in the offing, hence the pilgrim is pleased. And I learned how to toss the scandagio line, with its little ribbons of red and white at intervals along its length, to measure the depth of water under our keel. And I learned how to speak to other vessels we passed—which I was allowed to do two or three times, for there were many ships asea upon the Mediterranean—shouting in Sabir through the trumpet:

“A good voyage! What ship?”

And the reply would come hollowly back: “A good voyage! The Saint Sang, out of Bruges, homeward bound from Famagusta! And you, what ship are you?”

“The Anafesto, of Venice, outward bound for Acre and Alexandria! A good voyage!”

The ship’s steerer showed me how, through an ingenious arrangement of ropes, he single-handedly controlled both the immense steering oars, one raked down either side of the ship to the stern. “But in heavy weather,” he said, “a steerer is required on each, and they must be masters of dexterity, to swing the tillers separately and variously, but always in perfect concert, at the captain’s calls.”

The ship’s striker let me practice pounding his mallets when none of the rowers was at the oars. They seldom were. The etesia wind was so nearly constant that the oars were not often needed to help the ship make way, so the rowers had their only sustained work on that voyage in taking us out of the Malamoco basin and into the harbor of Acre. At those times they took their places—“in the mode called a zenzile,” the striker told me—three men to each of the twenty benches along each side of the vessel.

Each rower worked an oar that was separately pivoted to the ship’s outriggers, so that the shortest oars rowed inboard, the longest outboard and the medium-length oars between them. And the men did not sit, as oarsmen do, for example, in the Doge’s buzino d’oro. They stood, each with his left foot on the bench before him, while they swept the oars forward. Then they all fell back supine on the benches when they made their powerful strokes, propelling the ship in a sort of series of rushing leaps. This was done in time to the striker’s striking, a tempo that began slow, but got faster as the ship did, and the two mallets made different sounds so the rowers on one side would know when they had to pull harder than the others.

I was never let to row, for that is a job requiring such skill that apprentices are made to practice first in mock galleys set up on dry land. Because the word galeotto is so often used in Venice to mean a convict, I had always assumed that galleys and galeazze and galeotte were rowed by criminals caught and condemned to drudgery. But the striker pointed out that freight ships compete for trade on the basis of their speed and efficiency, for which they would hardly depend on reluctant forced labor. “So the merchant fleet hires only professional and experienced oarsmen,” he said. “And war ships are rowed by citizens who choose to do that service as their military obligation, instead of taking up the sword.”

The ship’s cook told me why he baked no bread. “I keep no flour in my galley,” he said. “Fine ground flour is impossible to preserve from contamination at sea. Either it breeds weevils or it gets wet. That is why the Romans first thought of making the pasta we enjoy today—because it is well-nigh imperishable. Indeed, it is said that a Roman ship’s cook invented that foodstuff, volente o nolente, when his stock of flour got soaked by an errant wave. He kneaded the mess into pasta to save it, and he rolled it thin and he cut it into strips so it would more quickly dry solid. From that beginning have come all the numerous sizes and shapes of vermicelli and maccheroni. They were a godsend to us mariner cooks, and to the landbound as well.”

The ship’s captain showed me how the needle of his bussola pointed always to the North Star, even when that star is invisible. The bussola, in those times, was just beginning to be regarded as a fixture almost as necessary for sea voyages as a ship’s San Cristoforo medal, but the instrument was yet a novelty to me. So was the periplus, which the captain also showed me, a sheaf of charts on which were drawn the curly coastlines of the whole Mediterranean, from the Levant to the Pillars of Hercules, and all its subsidiary seas: the Adriatic, the Aegean and so on. Along those inked coastlines, the captain—and other captains of his acquaintance—had marked the land features visible from the sea: lighthouses, headlands, standing rocks and other such objects which would help a mariner to determine where he was. On the water areas of the charts, the captain had scribbled notations of their various depths and currents and hidden reefs. He told me that he kept changing those notations according as he found, or heard from other captains, that those depths had changed through silting up, as often happens off Egypt, or through the activity of undersea volcanoes, as often happens around Greece.