Simon Leys - The Hall of Uselessness - Collected Essays

The remnants of his little troop re-embarked in disarray. This unexpected rout gave the Christian king food for thought: these strangers were, after all, only temporary visitors, whereas he had to live permanently with his neighbours — it would therefore be wiser to accommodate the latter. He invited to a feast some twenty-six officers and sailors and, in a surprise move, massacred them all. He failed, however, to overtake the three ships; in panic, they lifted anchor and set sail at once, abandoning ashore their dead and dying. Thus ended the stay in Cebu; it had lasted only twenty-three days.

The expedition had not only lost its leader, it did not have enough crew now to man the three ships. It was decided to burn one of them; her crew and equipment were divided between the two remaining units, Trinidad and Victoria .

For the following eight months, from May to December 1521, the search for cloves resumed; the ships wandered through the Indonesian archipelago, now trading, now indulging in occasional piracy. At long last they reached the Moluccas, where they spent six weeks on the island of Tidore, the main producer of cloves. Loaded with this precious cargo, the Victoria set sail for Europe under the command of Elcano. It was out of the question that her crew — so reduced and exhausted — could face again a crossing of the Pacific, followed by the hazards and rigours of the Magellan Strait; therefore, Elcano had no choice but to follow the traditional Portuguese route. The Trinidad could not set sail immediately: its hull, eaten up by shipworms, had turned into a sieve. After various mishaps, the Trinidad was eventually to fall into the hands of the Portuguese. Her crew spent a long time in the Portuguese jails of Malaya, India and Africa; a few last survivors eventually returned to Spain many years later.

The Victoria took seven months to cross the Indian Ocean, to go round the Cape of Good Hope and finally reach the islands of Cape Verde, on the west coast of Africa. Another thirteen men died on the way, of illness and exhaustion. The hull leaked badly; pumps had to be manned all the time. At Cape Verde, Elcano wished to buy some African slaves to work the pumps, which the crew was now too weak to operate. Twelve men were sent ashore to negotiate this purchase; as they were offering cloves in payment, Portuguese authorities immediately suspected that the Victoria had trespassed into the trading preserve of Portugal. They arrested the twelve and prepared to take possession of the ship and confiscate her priceless cargo. Elcano had barely time to lift anchor and escape; his crew, further depleted, scarcely managed to hoist at half-mast a mainsail that was now too heavy for them.

On 6 September 1522, the Victoria returned to that same port of Sanlúcar de Barrameda she had left three years earlier. Of the original crew only eighteen men remained. On Tuesday, 9 September, “they all entered Sevilla, barefoot, each only in his shirt, with lit candle in hand, to thank God for having brought them back alive into port.” And just as Phileas Fogg was to observe at the end of his journey around the world in eighty days, they discovered with amazement that their calculation of the date was mistaken by one day—“and therefore they had eaten flesh on Fridays and celebrated Easter on a Monday.”

* * *

The above narrative should not lead you to believe that I am very knowledgeable on this particular subject. Actually, regarding Magellan, I knew hardly more than the hypothetical educated person quizzed at the outset. However, I have just finished reading a monumental work, Voyage de Magellan (1519–1522): La relation d’Antonio Pigafetta & autres témoignages , edited by Xavier de Castro, Jocelyne Hamon and Luis Filipe Thomaz, and published in Paris last year. It gathers in two volumes (1,000 pages) all the documents pertaining to this extraordinary expedition, as well as contemporary records of participants and witnesses (with the addition of notes on various questions of history, geography, linguistics and anthropology). It is a model of lucid, rigorous and exhaustive scholarship. In what I have written here, I have barely touched on what makes the reading of this book such a disturbing experience. The feeling of absolute outlandishness, of extreme exoticism, does not result from the evocation of remote tribes in far-away lands speaking incomprehensible tongues and practising bizarre religious rituals or weird sexual customs — no, it is in fact the way in which Magellan and his companions appear to us utterly unknowable. In a letter addressed to a woman who wrote historical novels, Henry James pointed out (very courteously) what appeared to him the essential impossibility of her activity:

You may multiply the little facts that can be got from pictures and documents, relics and prints as much as you like — the real thing is almost impossible to do, and in its essence the whole effect is as nought: I mean the invention, the representation of the old CONSCIOUSNESS, the soul, the sense, the horizon, the vision of individuals in whose minds half the things that make ours, that make the modern world, were non-existent. You have to think with your modern apparatus a man, a woman — or rather fifty — whose own thinking was intensely otherwise conditioned, you have to simplify back by an amazing tour de force — and even then it’s all humbug.

What gives such an overwhelming power to this book is precisely the fact that it is the “real thing,” in all its mystery.

* * *

One last word, regarding the Christian king (and his subjects, all converted in one week and baptised en masse): the Western navigators had vested much hope in him, yet did not seem particularly surprised by his eventual betrayal — after all, Christian kings in Europe did not behave differently. There are still in Indonesia — precisely in the Moluccas area — some old Christian communities whose fidelity is all the more heroic that it is maintained against a tide of Islamist persecution. It is remarkable to learn that the Jesuits welcome more novices there than they do in their neighbouring Australian province. One can almost foresee the day when Indonesian missionaries might be sent to preach the Gospel in a largely de-Christianised Australia…

As the Portuguese say: God writes straight with crooked strokes.[1]

TWO YEARS BEFORE THE MAST

After all, most of what we write remains sterile. The small part of our writing which ought to survive is, without doubt, that part which was touched by an inspiration from our youth, one of those strong visions, nourished in secret, and unforgettably coloured by the first storms of virility.

— GEORGES BERNANOS

IT IS OFTEN said that Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast is the most beautiful of all books of the sea, but this seems to me a somewhat poisoned compliment, as if one were to praise Madame Bovary for being the best account of adultery in Normandy or to celebrate The Diary of A.O. Barnabooth as a masterpiece of hotel and railway sleeping-car literature.

Without doubt, Dana’s book successfully conveys the experience of rounding Cape Horn under sail, as well as countless other aspects of seamen’s life and work on the square-riggers of the nineteenth century, with a vividness and intensity that has few equals. Herman Melville vouched for it: “but if you want the best idea of Cape Horn, get my friend Dana’s unmatchable Two Years Before the Mast . But you can read, and so you must have read it. His chapters describing Cape Horn must have been written with an icicle.”

However, the reason it succeeds in suggesting these realities, better than any other book of the sea, is precisely the fact it is much more than a book of the sea. It is something different altogether: under the appearances of a sober autobiographical narrative it hides a singularly rich and complex work of art.