Robert Silverberg - Lord of Darkness

What, you say? Was my father maddened by grief? Nay, he was only transformed. The mere hunger for treasure had not been enough to draw him from his duties in the Channel and the North Sea. But the cowardly and lying way the Spaniards had fallen upon unsuspecting Englishmen, with the loss of so much precious life, had altered his direction. He wanted nothing now but to help Drake take from Spain whatever he could, in partial repayment for the life of his son. “There are more ways of serving God and the Queen,” my father told me, “than by piloting ships into the mouth of the Thames.”

So in 1570 he was with Drake on the Swan to harry the Spanish Main, and again in 1571, and a year later he was one of those from Drake’s Pasha that seized the royal treasury at Nombre de Dios on the Isthmus of Panama. The torments of that voyage, the fevers and disasters, were God’s own test indeed, but my father must have prospered beneath such burdens, for when he returned after a year and a half he looked miraculously younger, more a brother than a father to Henry and John, and all three lean and hard and dark as Moors. I went to Plymouth to meet their returning ship. I was then nearly fifteen and grown suddenly tall myself, and I think the disease of piracy was already bubbling in my veins. I embraced my father and my brothers and then they thrust me toward a robust man of short stature with a fair beard and dainty garments, whom I took to be some lord or gallant, and gallant indeed he was. “You see, Francis,” my father said, “I have kept one son in reserve.” And Drake cuffed me lightly on the arm and ran his hand the wrong way up my newly sprouting soft beard and said, “God’s blood, boy, you have the gleam in your eye! I know it well. I tell you this, that you will journey farther than all your brothers,” and so I have, into a realm of darkness so terrible and so strange as never a man of Essex imagined.

For the next few years there was little privateering. Her Majesty had no stomach for war with Spain, and patched up a peace with King Philip, and not even Drake dared to tamper with it. My father returned to his piloting, my brother Henry went off with Frobisher to seek the Northwest Passage, and I know not what became of my brother John, though I think he may have gone to Ireland, where he died in some wild feud ten years after. And I? I had my first taste of the water. At sixteen I was hired aboard the George Cross, a 400-ton carrack in the merchant trade, that hauled casks of claret from Bordeaux. She was a slow and clumsy old tub, three-masted, square-rigged on fore and main with lateen mizens, not much like your pirate brigantine or your caravel of exploration: a coarse heavy thing. But when you are at sea for the first time you find any vessel a wonder, most especially when land is out of sight and the hard waves wash at the hull. Knowing that my father had from my birth intended that I live a safe life ashore, I felt some fear when I came to him for permission to sign on. He looked at me long and said, “Henry has put the Devil in you, eh? Or was it Drake?”

“Sir?”

“When we landed at Plymouth, and we saw how you had grown, Henry said to me, Master Andrew is too sturdy now for a lubber’s life. He must have said something of the same to you. And then Drake, with his prophesying of your travels—he overheated your soul, did he not?”

“Aye, father. It was like that.”

“Tell me the sea is calling you. Tell me that it is a pull you are unable to resist.”

I shifted from one leg to another, uneasily, not knowing if I were being mocked.

I said, “It is not entirely like that.”

“But?”

“But I would go.”

“Then go,” he said amiably. “You’ll be in no jeopardy in the Channel, and you may learn a bit. Will you be scrubbing decks, d’ye think?”

“I have some learning, father. I will be tallying records, and making bills of lading.”

He shook his head. “I would rather have you scrubbing decks, and I myself had the learning put into you, too. That was an error. You were meant for the sea, boy. But I suppose no harm is done, if you have a sailor’s body, and a clerk’s wit. Better that than the other way round, at any rate.”

And with that somewhat sidewise blessing he let me sign on.

I look back across forty years at that boy and I confess I like what I see. Green, yes, and foolish and silly, but why not, at such an age? Quiet, and diligent, and tolerant of hardship, such little hardship as I had known. I had stubbornness and devotion and the will to work, and I had some intelligence, and I had steadfastness. From my father I had inherited something else, too, the wit to know when it is time to change one’s course. There are those who sail blindly ahead and there are those who tack and veer when they must tack and veer, and I am of that latter sort, and I think it has been the saving of my life many a time.

For eleven months I served on the George Cross. I knew some seamanship before I went aboard, from what I had heard at home and seen in the Thameside docks; that is, I knew not to piss to windward, and which side was larboard and which starboard, and what was the quarterdeck and what the forecastle, and not a whole much more. I had little hope of learning a great deal waddling about between Dover and Calais, but as it happened the old carrack went wider than that, to Boulogne and Le Havre and once to Cherbourg, so I saw something of storms and concluded a few conclusions about winds and sails. That would be useful to me, though I knew not then why. There was aboard the ship a certain Portugal as the carpenter, one Manoel da Silva, very quick with his hands and with his tongue, who long ago had married an English wife and given up Papistry. He had a fondness for me and often came to the cabin where I struggled with invoices and accounts, and in his visits he spoke half in English and half in Portuguese, so that by and by I picked up the language from him: um, dois, tres, quatro, and so forth. I learned that I had a skill with language. And that would be useful to me one day also.

In those months I grew a liking for good red wine, I discovered the way of walking a deck without sprawling, I had my first real fight and gave better than I got, and, long overdue, I left my aching virginity in the belly of a dark-haired French whore. Thereafter I worried about the pox for days, without need. I found I could sleep well on hard planks and I came not to mind the drench of salt spray. My body hardened and my legs lengthened, and I told myself I was now a man, and the sound of that had a good ring in my ears. Betimes I imagined myself a thousand leagues from home, on my way to the Japans or Hispaniola or Terra Australis on a voyage that no one would ever forget. Well, and I was only plying a tub between England and France, ferrying wine.

Nor did I even then think to make the sea my trade. For all my eagerness to straddle the globe and see strange lands and marvels and fill my purse with Spanish gold, my true and deepest notion was to set by some pounds and one day buy me the freehold of a farm, and marry and prosper, and live comfortably in hard work and the bosom of a family, reading books for pleasure and attending the plays betimes in London, like a gentleman. At the end of my year’s voyage I found I had set by not as much as I had expected—two shillings less than two pounds. But even that seemed a fair fortune for a lad of seventeen, and more than I could have earned ashore, for in those days a skilled workman—a thatcher, say—could hope for no more than seven and sixpence a week, out of which must come rent and clothing and food and all, and a young clerk hardly that much. So I went to sea again after two months at home.

This time it was a farther voyage, to Flanders and Norway, and the year after that all the way to Russia aboard a vessel of the Muscovy Company, and a cold time I had of it then. But these journeys were making a complete sailor of me, for each time I did less clerking and more seamanship, and I was finding my way around the maps and charts, the compasses and leads, not because it was asked of me but because my curiosity led me to know at first hand what sort of trade my father and his son Thomas the pilot had plied. So the years of my early manhood went.