1Some sixty years after the goldsmith of Mainz lost his presses, five ships lay in the river below Seville, taking on biscuit and wine and powder. They were old ships, patched and black with tar. They were going to look for a way to the Spice Islands by sailing west, which no one had done, through a gap in the new lands that no one had found.
2There was a boy on the ships whom the men called Grillo, the cricket, because he was small and never quiet. He was thirteen and had no father he knew of. He had signed for the voyage with a cross, for bread and a place to sleep.
3His work was the glass. It was a glass of sand that ran out in half an hour. When the last grain fell, the boy on watch turned it over, and sang a verse of a prayer so the whole ship knew that he was awake and the glass was turned. Eight glasses made a watch. The pilot counted the watches and wrote down the days. So the ship knew how long she had sailed, and from that, how far.
4"The glass is the ship's memory," the pilot told him. "If you sleep, we are lost and do not know it." Grillo did not sleep.
5The captain of the fleet was a Portuguese with a limp, named Magellan, who served the king of Spain. He was a hard, silent man. The Spanish captains under him hated to be led by a stranger.
6There were more than two hundred and thirty men in the five ships. One was a gentleman of Vicenza named Antonio Pigafetta, who had come for no pay, only to see the world. Every evening he sat on a coil of rope with a book on his knee and wrote down what the day had held: a fish, a storm, a word of a strange tongue. The sailors laughed at him. He wrote that down too.
7Another was the captain's slave. The Spaniards called him Enrique. He had been bought as a boy in the market of Malacca, on the far side of the world, and carried west to Portugal and Spain. He was the captain's interpreter, for if they ever reached the islands, he alone would know the speech. He was kind to Grillo. On night watches he showed him how his own people named the stars.
8They sailed south along the coast of the new lands until the Pole Star sank into the sea behind them and was seen no more. New stars rose ahead that no one on board had a name for. There was a cross of four bright ones, and two small clouds of light that did not move with the weather. Pigafetta drew them in his book.
9They looked into every bay for the gap, and every bay was closed. Winter caught them in a harbour of grey stones at the bottom of the world. The captain cut the bread ration and would not turn back.
10One ship was wrecked on the rocks, scouting. And then, in the spring of that cold country, they found the gap.
11It was a narrow crooked water between mountains of snow, with the tide ripping through it. At night, all along the southern shore, they saw fires burning, the fires of people who never showed themselves. The sailors named it the Land of Fires.
12In that strait the largest ship, with most of the food, turned in the night and ran home to Spain. Three ships came out the western end into an ocean no one in Europe had sailed. It lay so calm that morning that the captain named it the Peaceful Sea.
13He thought the Spice Islands were a few days off. All the maps were wrong, for the men who drew them had made the world too small.
14They sailed for three months and twenty days and did not touch land.
15The biscuit turned to a powder that crawled with worms and stank of rats. Then the powder was gone. They ate sawdust. They cut the leather from the great yard of the mast, where it kept the ropes from chafing, and dragged it in the sea for four days to soften it, and broiled it on the coals. A rat sold for half a ducat of gold.
16Then the sickness came that sailors get on long waters. A man's gums swelled over his teeth until he could not eat even what there was. Nineteen died in that crossing and went over the side sewn in sailcloth.
17Through all of it Grillo turned the glass. His legs shook and his verse came out as a whisper, but each half hour the sand was turned, and each noon the pilot marked the day. It was the one thing on the ship that was still as it should be. The men would look up when he sang, and some of them said the words after him.
18Then one morning there were islands, and green hills, and people in swift boats with sails like wings.
19They went on from island to island. And on one beach, when the people came down to trade, Enrique the slave spoke to them, and they answered him.
20Grillo saw his face when it happened. It was not quite his own tongue. But it was a tongue of his own sea, that the traders of his childhood had used. He had been carried west from this part of the world as a boy. He had gone on west, always west, and now here were its words again in front of him.
21No one on the beach understood what that meant, except perhaps Enrique. He was the first person who ever went the whole way round the earth and came back to where his own speech was spoken, and he did it in chains.
22Now hear how the captain died, for it was not the sea that killed him.
23On a large island he made a friend of a king. He set up a cross, and many were baptised. Then he chose to show that king how strong his friends were. There was a chief on a small island close by, named Lapu-Lapu, who would not bow. The captain went with sixty men to burn his village and teach him.
24The tide was low, and the boats could not come near the shore. So they waded in, forty-nine men in armour, up to their thighs. Lapu-Lapu was waiting with fifteen hundred. The captain's men burned some houses, and that only made the islanders more fierce. The captain was struck in the leg, then in the arm, and went down in the shallow water, and they could not bring away his body.
25He had sailed where no one had sailed, and read the winds of an unknown sea, and held his men through hunger. He died in a quarrel that was none of his, trying to make a free man kneel. Both things are true of him. Do not forget either.
26The captain's will said that at his death Enrique should be free. The new captain would not hear of it. He told Enrique he was a slave still, and would be whipped if he did not get up and work.
27Three days later the island king asked the officers to a feast. More than twenty went. They were killed at the table. Some said afterward that Enrique had planned it with the king. No one knows. He was never seen again by any man of the ships. Grillo hoped, all his life, that he had simply walked home.
28There were now too few men for three ships. They burned one on the beach. With the other two they wandered half a year among the islands, and at last they came to the place they had left Spain to find. The clove trees stood on the hills in the rain, and the smell of them came out over the water.
29They filled the holds. One ship was leaking past mending and stayed behind. The other was the Victoria, the smallest, with a Basque for her captain, a man named Elcano. He turned her west again, sixty men and a fortune in cloves, to go home the rest of the way round.
30All those seas belonged to the king of Portugal, who hanged Spaniards he found in them. So Elcano kept far from every coast. They ran for months through cold grey waters with nothing to eat but rice, and then no rice. The ship leaked, and the pumps went day and night. Twenty-one went over the side between the islands and the cape of Africa.
31At last they could go no farther without food. There were islands off the African shore, the Cape Verdes, and they were Portuguese. Elcano brought the ship in anyway. He sent a boat ashore with a lie ready: they were a Spanish ship blown back from the new lands with a broken mast. Grillo was in that boat, at an oar.
32Before the boat pushed off, Pigafetta leaned over the rail. He had written in his book every day for three years, and had never missed one. "Ask them what day it is," he said. "I should like to know how well I have kept count."
33On the quay a Portuguese clerk was checking sacks. One of the sailors asked him the day.
34"Thursday," the clerk said.
35"Wednesday," said the sailor.
36The clerk looked at him as you look at a man who has had the sun on his head. "Thursday. Go and ask the priest. He has said the Thursday mass."
37They rowed back with the rice, and the news. Grillo watched the gentleman of Vicenza open his book and go back through it, page upon page, with his finger. The pilot brought up his own log, kept apart. The two agreed. It was Wednesday in both. Every day was there. No day had been dropped.
38Men looked at Grillo then, the boy of the glass. He felt it like cold water. "I turned it," he said. "I never slept. I turned it every time." And it was true, and they knew it was true, for they had heard him sing through the worst of the hunger.
39They had no time to think of it. On the next trip ashore a sailor paid for his rice with a handful of cloves. Cloves grow in one place in the world, and it is not the new lands. The lie was found out by its smell. Soldiers seized the boat and the thirteen men in it, and Grillo was one of the thirteen.
40From the window of the prison he saw the Victoria cut her cable and run for the open sea with all the sail her rotten masts would bear. He was sure he would hang.
41He did not hang. The king of Spain sent letters, and after some months the thirteen were let go. When Grillo came at last to Seville he learned how the voyage had ended.
42Eighteen men had brought the ship in. Eighteen, of all those who sailed. The next morning they had walked through the city barefoot, in their shirts, each with a lit candle in his hand, to the church they had prayed toward in the storms, to give thanks. People said the candle flames shook as they went, because the hands did.
43But it was the lost day that Grillo could not put down. He carried it with him for years, like a stone in his shoe. He had kept the glass. The glass had not lied. Where had the day gone?
44When he was a grown man, a pilot of the coast, he asked a teacher of the sphere in Seville. The old man took an orange from a bowl and a candle from the table.
45"Here is the sun," he said, "and here is the earth, round. Noon is when the sun stands highest over you. Now, you sailed west. You went the way the sun goes, following him. So each of your days was a little longer than a day on land, by a few breaths, for you had run after the sun before he came round again. Your glass could not tell you. You set it by the sun each noon, and the sun himself was giving you long measure."
46He turned the orange slowly once around.
47"Go the whole way round, and all those breaths add up to one day exactly. You saw the sun rise one time fewer than the men who stayed at home. There was no fault in your count. You were given a true answer to a question you did not know you had asked."
48He thought of the hunger, and the cold harbour, and the captain face down in the shallows, and Enrique. So much on that voyage had been done by force and by lying. Men had sworn false and been false. The maps had been false. But the sun had kept its measure to the breath, over every sea, whether anyone was counting or not. The same sun, the same rule, on the far side of the world as on the quay at Seville. It could not be cheated and it did not cheat.
49That seemed to him a strange thing to find at the end of so much death. It seemed to him the only clean thing they had brought home, and worth more than the cloves.
50There is one thing more. After those ships, others went. They carried bread and the cross, and they carried chains also, and sickness, and whole peoples had their ways closed who had done no harm to anyone. That will be told in its place. A great wrong came through that door together with a great knowledge. Do not let anyone tell you only the one or only the other.
51But from that year no one could say the world had an edge. It was one ball, with one sea around it, and the people at the fires in the strait and the people on the quay at Seville lived on the same round stone under the same turning light.
52And far to the north, on a cold shore of the Baltic, a churchman who had never been to sea was asking himself a question about that turning. The sun goes round, and makes the day. Or does it? Now hear what came after.