Disastrous Voyage of the Santa Margarita

By Richard Woodman

Among the coral outcrops of the island of Rota, lies the wreck of a Spanish galleon, the Santa Margarita - Spring 1601. This is a reconstruction of the Santa Margaritas disastrous last voyage, beset by an extraordinary sequence of typhoons and storms. Based on what little is known of the ships journey overloaded cargo, bad-blood amongst the crew an

• Language: English
• Publisher: Severn House
• Release date: Nov 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9781780101965

Richard Woodman

Richard Woodman has previously worked for The Trinity House Service. He is also the author of the Nathanial Drinkwater stories and other maritime works.

Book preview

One

El Sobrasaliente

‘The Devil! There is always a priest!’

‘The señor should mind his tongue.’

The tall figure standing beneath the rustling fronds of the sugar palm spun round to glare open-mouthed at the diminutive figure behind him.

‘Devil take you!’ the man gasped. ‘Where in the name of God did you spring from?’ His hand flew to the hilt of a dagger in his waistband, his face drained of colour.

The dwarf drew back, but appeared otherwise unmoved by the tall man’s reaction. ‘I have been following you, señor,’ he answered, his bearded face with its bulging forehead cocked on one side, his wide, thick-lipped mouth in a grin that revealed broken and caried teeth. To the astonished man, this misshapen lump of humanity was a hideous and a terrifying figure. His grip tightened upon the hilt of his stiletto, which caught the light filtering through the palm fronds above.

‘For what purpose, you damned and hellish imp?’ he asked, partially recovering his nerve, and lowering the blade.

Appearing not to notice this restoration in his quarry’s spirits, the dwarf’s grin widened into a leer. ‘You spoke before like an heretic; now you tremble like one of the faithful caught with his—’

He got no further. The tall man shot out his right hand, grasped his tormentor by the throat and with a single swing thrust the dwarf, with a sickening thump of his head, against the rough bark of the palm tree’s bole. Then he lowered his own head to a point that was level with his prisoner’s, spitting his words in the dwarf’s face.

‘What business am I of yours, eh, you dog? Who sent you to spy upon me?’ After a moment to allow the questions to penetrate a mind more concerned with sucking in another breath than comprehending his interrogator, he released the dwarf, who sank to his knees, gasping for air.

Their positions now reversed, the tall man straightened up and stood over his victim, patiently waiting as the wretch struggled to inhale. When the dwarf looked up, the tall man raised his right eyebrow; a mute but eloquent transfiguration of his expression in which the now desperate but perspicacious dwarf perceived a shred of compassion.

‘Señor . . . Don Iago . . .’ he gasped.

‘You know my name, you damned fiend!’ Astonished, Don Iago’s face hardened again.

‘I know what you are called, señor.’

‘You are bold, and,’ the man added, softening slightly, ‘I think lack not courage.’

‘You do me some honour and, please believe me, señor, I come as a friend.’

‘A friend? You! In this manner? How can you come as a friend?’

‘To say that there are those that speak against you.’

‘How so? Who speaks against me?’

The dwarf shrugged. ‘Some that I have heard of.’

‘And what do they say?’

‘That you are an heretic.’

The tall man sighed. ‘How conspicuous in his conduct at the Mass does a man have to be before he is charged with Pharisaic pride?’ he said, half to himself. ‘Have these whisperers not perceived me at my devotions? Christ knows I have worn my knees to the bone – or is it,’ he went on before the dwarf could answer, ‘because I have come among them in these heathen clothes?’ He plucked at the loose cotton pantaloons, common to the Chinese who manned the junks from Guandong, that he wore under a loose shirt.

‘Señor, I . . .’

But the man the dwarf called Don Iago turned away, returning his attention to the great ship offshore, riding to her anchor surrounded by Chinese junks. She lay in deep water off the beach that spread beyond the shade of the palm grove and the tangle of vegetation marking the edge of the forest. For a moment the air was troubled only by the rustling fronds overhead, but then the noise of her loading came across the water again. They could see bales and boxes being hauled aboard from the crowd of junks and sampans that lay moored about her like piglets suckling from a gigantic mother, except that the traffic was the other way. Borne aloft by the great ship’s yard and stay tackles, the riches of China were hoisted aboard the capacious hull that, day by day, sank lower in the water. Despite this activity in filling her holds, small gangs of seamen toiled in her upper rigging and Iago knew them to be rattling down, fitting chafing gear, worming and serving, setting up the lanyards in their euphroes and deadeyes as the upper yards were secured preparatory to sailing.

Iago was impressed by the não. She was enormous. He knew the Spanish were capable of building such large ships in their colonial shipyards in Havana, on the Caribbean island of Cuba, vessels to rival those built in Spain itself, but the ship at which he was staring had been built here, in the Philippines, on a slip at Cavite less than a mile from where she now lay, loading the produce of China for the passage across the Pacific to Acapulco on the coast of New Spain. He stared upwards in some wonder, for she bore three yards on her fore and mizzen-masts, the uppermost a recent innovation in Spanish ship-fitting. He had heard of such a tall rig with this additional yard and sail – this juanete – or topgallant, set above what had, until recently, been the topsail.

But Iago, who had been watching the não for some days, was troubled by the dwarf’s intrusion and the intelligence he imparted, and could no longer concentrate upon the loading of the Santa Margarita.

‘’Tis not enough,’ Iago muttered vehemently, half to himself, ‘to have suffered shipwreck and misfortune, but these damned vultures would have a man at the stake for heresy.’

‘You condemned a priest to damnation,’ ventured the dwarf, standing and rubbing his throat. ‘I heard you say so . . .’

Iago returned his attention to the dwarf, ignoring the hostile implication of the freak’s remark. ‘You look Spanish to me,’ he said, regarding the dwarf. ‘You are not an Indian.’

‘I was born in the islands, señor, not here in Cavite but in Manila.’ The dwarf gestured to the eastwards where, on the farther shore of the great bay, the city of Manila lay behind its newly built walls. ‘My father was an hidalgo who abandoned my mother when he saw what she had born him.’

‘A sad and familiar tale,’ Iago said softly, wondering what diseases the noble Spaniard had foisted upon the native woman he had impregnated. And this weird yet pitiful scrap of blood, bones and brain was the result. A reflective expression that approached kindness spread across Iago’s face so that he looked with more attention at the dwarf. ‘What do they call you?’ he asked in the same low tone.

‘I was christened Ximenez.’

‘Ximenez.’ Iago reached out his hand and the dwarf quailed, but the large paw was light upon his shoulder. ‘I am sorry that I hurt you.’

‘It was nothing.’

‘You are used to such treatment, eh?’

‘I live, señor,’ the dwarf said in a low voice as the two men’s eyes met, ‘closer to the maw of a dog than a woman’s mouth, while it pleases God to have me breathe the exhalations of Hell when men fart in my face.’

Iago smiled. ‘I admire one who jokes in the face of adversity. And what would you have of me, Ximenez? If you have been following me—’

‘For days,’ Ximenez broke in, ‘and to some purpose, señor.’

Iago ignored the interruption. ‘If you have been following me,’ he repeated, smiling, ‘you will know that I too am a man outside society and closer to you that I am to any woman’s mouth.’

Ximenez smiled at the jest. ‘A lady’s, perhaps, señor, but there is a girl in the village that they say you brought with you from China.’

‘Ah, you know of her too. And what of her?’

‘Do you wish to take her aboard that ship?’ Ximenez nodded his head at the great não. Above the apparent confusion and industrious clutter about her waist, their eyes were caught by the fluttering pendants at her mastheads and the great red and gold oriflamme of Castile and Aragon lifting at the summit of her high poop. ‘For that is where you wish to go, is it not?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘She is called the Santa Margarita, señor.’

‘I know.’ Iago sighed and turned again to regard the galleon.

‘And the woman who came with you?’ Ximenez prompted. ‘Shall she go with you?’

‘Perhaps.’ Don Iago lowered his gaze from the ship and turned back to Ximenez, changing the subject. ‘Do you not think, Ximenez, that sailors being so rutting a breed, it is curious to name so great a ship after the patron saint of virgins?’

‘I think it curious to name the Son of God Jesus, señor.’

‘You could burn for that, Ximenez.’

‘I thereby place my life and fortune in your hands, Don Iago.’ The dwarf made a bow.

Iago laughed. ‘You are taking me for more than I am, Ximenez.’ Suddenly he squatted down so that their heads were again level. ‘The only difference between us, my friend, is that you stand barely higher than a hound, and I may converse with an, er, a . . .’

Ximenez frowned as Iago recalled the Spanish for elephant, elefante, and corrected himself. It was not a beast Ximenez knew much about, though he had heard of them in Cathay, or somewhere, but he grasped Iago’s meaning. ‘If the señor wishes to board the Santa Margarita as a sobrasaliente he will need a man-servant.’

Iago stood up again and with both hands gestured at his clothes. ‘A sobrasaliente? Well perhaps, but perhaps not. Do I look like a gentleman that I should need a man to comb my hair? A gentleman’s servant would find his master’s clothes and I think that impossible . . .’

‘I can find you clothes fit for a sobrasaliente, Don Iago, and see your hair dressed like an hidalgo’s.’

‘Can you, by Heaven? Do you suppose that I may support my station and have money?’

The dwarf shrugged. ‘Of course, señor. In a pouch about your neck.’

‘Following me for days . . .’

‘My life and fortune in your hands, señor.’

‘The Devil! And mine in yours, you damned scoundrel.’ But as Ximenez drew back, half cowering, a wry smile crossed Iago’s face. Without taking his eyes off the dwarf, Iago jerked his head at the anchored ship. ‘You see the black-robed fathers yonder . . .’ Ximenez nodded. ‘If their hand is against me . . .’

‘Gold, like a fair word, turneth away even the wrath of God, señor, long enough for the não to depart these islands.’

‘Have you ventured beyond these parts, Ximenez?’

‘No, señor.’

‘Would you really stand as servant to me?’

‘I would.’

‘Why?’

‘I have no family, señor. No ties. A dwarf has no future here.’ He shrugged.

‘A better one here where one is known than among strangers. Do you know where the ship goes?’

‘Across the great sea to the long coast called Neuva España whence my father came.’

‘Do you seek him?’

‘I am told he is wealthy and he was married to my mother by a priest in Manila. I am his heir.’

‘My gold is more certain than his, Ximenez.’

‘One or the other, señor. There is nothing else for Ximenez.’

‘You are damnably bold for your size.’ Iago cast a look at the ship, watched men moving about on her deck, the dark flutter of habits on her poop and the flash of the setting sun upon a steel morion or a cuirass, then turned abruptly and began to walk inland. ‘Come, then. We shall go aboard when you have turned me into a sobrasaliente.’

‘Don Iago’s faith is well placed,’ the dwarf said with a smile of success. ‘Tomorrow your Ximenez will not be found wanting.’

‘My Ximenez? Well, well, already I have hangers on. We shall see, you impudent rogue, we shall see.’

And as the tall man swung off down the narrow path through the undergrowth the dwarf hurried contentedly along behind him, his breath forcing a gasping and tuneless whistle through his broken teeth.

Iago woke lathered in sweat with a sudden twist as he evaded the grip of the Spanish pikeman as he had all those years earlier and had done ever since in his ghastly dreams. And, as it always did, the nightmare had shaken him; even awake in its aftermath he felt the vice-like grip of the Spaniard upon his slender child’s wrist. He could remember nothing of his boyhood prior to that terrible moment; nothing at all. The images of that morning, a morning in which his life had changed irredeemably, eclipsed all that had preceded it. As he swam into the pre-dawn chill of the day he realized it was the dwarf that had stimulated this latest manifestation of his childhood horror. Ximenez had mentioned his own father. His heartbeat slowed and Iago grasped the fact that this was the dawn of a new day, a score or so of years after the one brought brutally back into his sleeping mind by his dream. He thought of his own father. That Ximenez could entertain the notion of finding his own father struck Iago as at best an irony and at worst an injustice. He himself had never seen his father dead, remembering only the last vague glimpse of a man running out of a door with a drawn sword, a back view of a large man pitched forth to meet his death – for he never returned – with the howl of his wife, Iago’s young and fatefully beautiful mother, ringing in his ears.

Now, as Iago lay panting on his palliasse, the perspiration of the dream beaded about the thick hairs upon his broad chest and running from his forehead on to the damp and none-too-clean pillow, he wondered at the veracity of the image. He had recalled it so many times that he had begun to wonder what it owed to its own seminal moment and what to his last, terrified recollection. It was all so vague, so insubstantial, so overlaid with his mother’s retelling, sometimes sad, sometimes vitriolic as she imbued her first-born, the progeny of her first marriage, with a sense of his true origin.

It was odd too, he thought lying in his sweat, how he knew of this genesis while at the same time seeing himself – somewhere around the age of ten or twelve when his mother considered he should know that he was not the son of the man he called padre – as a little Spaniard; a child of Seville and a familiar of the Guadalquivír along whose reedy banks and muddy flats he had brought a Dutchman’s love of boats, an understanding of the tides and the intuitive comprehension of water running towards the ocean. The Spanish called it the Great River, a name adapted from that of the Moors who had driven their keels deep into Andalucía eight hundred years earlier. But his mother told him of greater rivers, of wider meres and vaster marshes than those of the Guadalquivír; those far away in the north under the cloudy skies over Zeeland and the great branches of the Schelde.

‘You are the son of Jacob van Salingen, Iago,’ she would hiss in his ear when she could trust his discretion, ‘and you were yourself baptized Jacob, a Protestant like your father.’

It was a weighty and confusing secret, a mighty burden for a prepubescent youth abducted and adopted in a Catholic country; one that Iago might have unwittingly betrayed had he not possessed that secret image of the large man darting through a door with a drawn sword. But a boy’s attachment to his mother is strong and he bore the burden of the responsibility of secrecy with a loyal and unshakeable steadfastness. Perhaps he sensed it was his vulnerable mother’s only weapon against a fate that had treated her so callously, or perhaps he recognized a difference between himself and those about him. Besides, he had grown to nurture an instinctive horror of the dark-robed and interfering priests to whom he was supposed to confess his innermost thoughts. Perhaps too he had inherited an aversion to their sacred concern for his welfare, or perhaps he merely imitated his mother’s false ingratiation when the man who had carried her away and made her his wife first brought a monk into the little house in Seville.

It was also strange, Iago admitted to himself, that he could recall nothing of the arrival into his life of the Spanish infantry sergeant whom he afterwards called father. His mother never spoke of the horrors of the sack of the town, when the terrible Spanish pikemen finally forced their way into Zierikzee to rape and plunder. He was aware of the obligation of survival and protection that she owed to this presumptuous stepfather and had assumed, or been told by hints and suggestions, that he owed his own existence to the generosity of the man who had rescued both himself and his beautiful and vulnerable mother from the rapacity of a brutal and licentious soldiery to whom the town had been given over after its spirited resistance. In his boyhood and early youth he made no sense of this, a dawning comprehension arriving only with his own tendencies towards immoderate lust; that and the need to fabricate sins to air in the dark depravity of the stuffy confessional where he learned by proxy of the depths to which men sank when moved by the demonic motives that lurked in their essentially evil hearts. Such turmoil deprived Iago of any pretensions to innocence: he felt he had been born in a crucible of mindless violence and, for this disturbing reason, had sought the solitude of the river bank. Here, he could be free.

And with this freedom there came in time the mastery of boats. A proficient oarsman at seven, he could handle a boat under sail at ten and was entrusted with errands by the merchants whose houses flanked the quays along the Guadalquivír, scrambling aboard the ships that worked their weary way upstream from the distant ocean, laden with the fruits of the Indies, their sailors burned black by the sun, their ears pierced by the bright gleam of Indian gold from the land of Eldorado. The shore-going of these exotics was accompanied by drunkenness and whoring; they were surrounded by gipsy dancers, the flash and colour of a seductive wildness and the disturbing music of the guitar. Young Iago, for so he was called, observed their ebullient bravado to be accompanied by a stream of endless, good-natured chaffing. All this excited the boy, who took with alacrity the notes and messages from their resplendent masters standing proud upon their poops. Iago ran and conveyed these important missives to the quiet and splendid merchants in their counting houses along the quays of Seville. Occasionally he would be permitted to accompany one of them, carrying the great man’s heavy leather wallet containing the documents pertaining to the ship’s voyage, to the Casa de Contratación. Here, at the great door of the splendid trade-house, he would be dismissed with a coin and stand in awe as the capitáno disappeared into the cool shadows. Once too, he had performed this office as a capitáno went to the Alcázar where he had been summoned to appear in the Cuarto del Almirante. It was from here, the awe-struck Iago learned, that Fernão de Magalhaes was charged with finding the Moluccas by sailing west on behalf of His Most Christian Majesty. That the captain-general did not return alive only added awe to the boy’s tenuous connection with these distinguished and brave souls.

Those capitános who came to know him well would allow Iago to climb on to the yards as they ordered their men aloft to roll the sails into a tight harbour stow. Long before he could read or write he had become a skilled helper, an adept who owed more to his Dutch blood than the encouragement of his stepfather. Nevertheless, his adoptive father, seeing this aptitude in his stepson, insisted he learned all there was to know about such things, and soon Iago knew much about ships and could not only tie most of the bends and hitches required of an able marinero, but could box the compass backwards in quarter-points. This feat alone set him apart from most of the imps who frequented the waterfront in the hope of pickings from the foolish and impulsive generosity of sailors newly arrived home.

This recollected sensation of ascendancy now brought a smile to his face, dispelling the last wraiths of the dream. The past receded into the night and Iago stirred in the swiftly growing light of dawn. He stretched luxuriously, fully awake and again master of himself. Rising, he padded out through the curtain to where the girl slept. Ximenez had mentioned her too. For a moment he paused and looked down at her, moved by a spasm of affection, then he turned aside and went to the door. The house was a primitive dwelling, more suited to one of the shipwrights who had fabricated the vast mass of the Santa Margarita on the slipways of Cavite than to a man who had arrived in the Philippines with a small fortune concealed about his person. It was this that had dissuaded him from too close acquaintance with the Gobernador of Manila or any of his many time-serving and swaggering officials. Iago’s inbred caution sped his exit from the islands. He had been a dissembler all his life, an habitual concealer from necessity rather than vice, but a man to whom self-revelation was not merely anathema, but an impolitic folly the consequences of which might prove fatal. Nor had the manner of his survival been any different, though his manner of arrival in the Spanish stronghold of the Philippines was explicable enough. How he could have betrayed himself so lightly to Ximenez under the palms the previous night he was at a loss to know, but the momentary lowering of his guard under the mistaken assumption that he was alone was a grievous error and the very thought of it brought a sudden apprehensive quickening of his pulse. It was also a measure of his loneliness: occasionally a man must articulate even the most suppressed emotions.

Iago dismissed the excuse of believing himself to be alone as inexcusable, even as it again pleaded for his conduct. Diverting his mind, he wondered for a moment whether sunrise would arrive with a halberdier’s guard and an official from the Holy Office intent upon his arrest, or merely a full rice-bowl. Had he the measure of Ximenez? Did the diminutive and crippled human arouse an injudicious pity in him? Was Ximenez perhaps capable of avenging himself on others more fairly made than himself? And was he himself the sacrificial scapegoat of Ximenez’s imagination? If so, Iago had been fooled. He considered the matter for a moment; somehow he did not mark the wretched creature for an informer, yet doubt lingered as to the dwarf’s trustworthiness. And if he was not to be trusted?

Iago grew suddenly exasperated with himself; he would confront that eventuality when he met it; his sword had a blade as keen as any from Toledo, though its odd shape marked it as a katana from the fabulous islands of Cipangu. In the meantime he needed a shave and, he thought with a contrived but reassuringly wry amusement as he sought the means to accomplish this, if yesterday’s encounter had meant anything at all the wretched Ximenez should be here attending upon his person with hot water and a stropped razor. Perhaps in the dwarf’s reappearance Iago might place some trust. But if he failed to come, or arrived with a company of halberdiers and a dark-frocked priest – Iago lowered the razor and his eye fell upon the katana in its slings hanging handily above the bed – then God help him.

Iago shaved and broke his fast of rice prepared by the Chinese girl he had brought with him from Cathay. She knelt and served him in silence and swiftly rose with an indrawn breath when Ximenez suddenly appeared in the doorway. The dwarf, decked out in a dark blue doublet of some extravagance but which had clearly been made for him, announced his arrival with a surprisingly discreet cough and a change of attitude.

‘Good morning, master.’

Iago, a small beaker of hot coffee at his mouth, stared with astonishment at the dwarf. ‘I thought the finery to be for me . . .’ he began but fell silent when Ximenez almost impertinently gestured him to silence. Ximenez than stepped back, beckoning to others outside. To Iago’s astonishment three short and stocky Filipinos brought in a number of packages, all of which were bound in woven coconut matting, and laid them respectfully on the ground at Iago’s feet. After they had withdrawn and Ximenez had followed them outside and paid them for their labour, the dwarf returned to the room. Iago had finished his coffee and was ready for Ximenez’s explanation.

‘Master,’ Ximenez began, producing a knife from the waist of his doublet with a flourish and cutting the sisal bindings of the packages, ‘I have provided you with . . .’ There was a brief pause and then he lifted or indicated in turn each of his purchases. ‘A short cloak of broadcloth; two doublets of velvet, one of crimson, one of blue, both with slashed sleeves; five shirts, two of silk, three of cotton; breeches of black, under-drawers, hose, two pairs of shoes for which I beg my master’s indulgence if they do not fit, and, if my master pleases, a fine pair of boots . . .’ There were in addition handkerchiefs, ribbons, three ruffs, two pairs of gloves and some lace that Iago thought might have been made in his natal city.

‘And for your lady . . .’ Ximenez gestured at the Chinese girl who stood coyly watching this extravagant performance in the shadows, ‘knowing little of the preferences and peculiarities of women, I have as yet secured only a gown . . .’ He drew the rustling grey-blue silk from the final bundle and held it out towards the girl. She came forward and Iago could see the glow of pleasure in her eyes.

‘She is pleased, Ximenez,’ Iago said.

‘Even I can see that, master,’ the dwarf said drily and Iago felt in that odd moment a powerful and disturbing sensation as if the three of them were somehow drawn closer together.

‘How much did all this cost . . . ?’ he began but the dwarf cut him short.

‘A little credit, señor,’ said Ximenez, reverting for a moment to the style of address that had preceded the formal change in their relationship. ‘Let us talk of debts later.’

‘And for yourself . . .’ Iago gestured at the dwarf’s own finery.

‘It was the last gift of my mother. She made it for me as the son of an hidalgo.’ Iago saw the glitter of tears in the dwarf’s eyes. ‘I have only once worn it before.’

‘Then you shall be one again, Ximenez. We shall chance our fortune as equals. I am not so set upon this course that I must have a servant.’

Ximenez shook his head, his ugly face strangely softened. ‘I am grateful, señor, but since my mother’s death I have lived too long in the ditch like a cur and been whipped too often to appear transfigured. No, I must be your servant and this,’ he pointed at his velvet doublet, ‘must be thought by the world to be your gift.’ He brought his head up with a spirited assurance that Iago found touching. ‘I fear, master, my attachment to your person, whatever its practical value, will do you little credit when you solicit an appointment aboard the Santa Margarita. I am too well known to raise myself other than by my master’s indulgence. You will be seen as a fool, master, a newcomer gulled by the plausible monster the midwife allowed to survive.’

‘Then we shall have to hide our talents a little, Ximenez.’

‘You are not a Spaniard, señor.’

‘Was your mother a witch?’ Iago responded with a sharp evasion, adding as a half-truth, ‘I grew up in Seville and am as Spanish as yourself.’

Ximenez bowed low. ‘Of course, master. But I am half Filipino.’

The innuendo was clear and there was a moment’s awkward silence and then the girl spoke, diverting Iago’s attention.

‘Am I now lady