A Sailor's True Tale

a memoir

Early summer is a coming of age. It brings a leap into maturity for Nature and for human hearts. The sun is rising up to rule the sky; the moon has turned her crescent and is falling low. It is a time for us to plow and sow. It is a time to glory in the forces rising in the Earth and dance in Heaven's light. Why not rejoice?

One autumn night a gale came howling in across the rocky northwest coast of Spain, in from the trackless sea. Eight brave sailors and a leaky boat were lost. The tons of corn for which they cast their lives into the game were lost. High hopes and pride were lost. The money in the game was lost. All was lost save I who was their captain and three other shipwrecked wretches, beaten, bleeding and torn, twisted and broken, cast up high upon the cliffs, spared by fate to die a different day. The year exactly I do not recall but I see my shipmates still through driven rain and foam clinging to the leaping deck, all eyes straining through the raging dark, to spy the horror which must surely soon appear: the looming eminence of rock. The moon was high enough and just past full that night but we were riding in the vanguard of the gale, not even shreds of gleam, and doom was still invisible a rod away. I still recall the sudden pounding roar of surf. I still recall the crashing splintering and screams. I still recall my scream. I still recall the brutal wet and pain and cold. I who was their captain had been proudest of them all.

It's summer now; the world is waking now to warmth and light. It is a time to grow. It is a time for all that went before to burst into new form, a time for all the fields forgotten through the winter's gleaming night to sprout with green. It is a time to take possession of yourself and do things right.

We were boys together, all of us were boys. I was twenty-one that awful night and my first mate was twenty-three. It was my uncle's boat. Father long ago had run away to Africa to die in glory against the Moors and my uncle took his place; a good man was he. My uncle was a smiling merchant with warehouses in Seville and Malaga and other towns, and interest in many ships. I walked his partners' decks since I could walk at all and he placed great trust in me. I sailed as mate and navigator and supercargo all up and down the coasts of Spain and France and Italy and showed my aptitude and grew in pride and made my reputation, all before a razor ever met my cheeks. It was an age of glory when Spaniards trusted fate and trusted a man among men. I trusted my self-learned notions of the winds and storms and currents and tides. One year at last a rotten little tub fell to his hands entire – he owned it himself outright – and he lent it to me. Three years I sailed as captain of this little tub with daring pals as crew. Three years we sailed in weather no one else would dare, for glory and for money too. We counted all our earnings out among ourselves in shares, like pirates or privateers, and always claimed percentage from the merchants, not a rate. We took the dangerous consignments, dogged the hurricanes, set sail against the tide in lowering skies; we did whatever I the captain calculated we should dare. They obeyed me and I was proud. I loved them too. We went around the towns with purses too full to jingle and our names on every seaman's lips. I was a hero in these little towns, a man among men, but still I was a boy.

It is magic how the green sprout shoulders by the clod and stands up to the sun. It is magic how the calf emerges from the cow and stands on wobbly legs and looks around. The butterfly emerges from the worm, the nestling from the shell, the leaf and blossom from the bud. Long have they waited for this hour and suffered much. The field lay fallow half the year to rot in ice and snow. The tree has budded in every thaw and frozen back. A thousand worms will die to feed the bird. The cow was hobbled long by her great belly and lies at last in pain. With staunch enduring courage Nature hoarded up Her power to burst forth now in glory.

Shame! Shame! There is no end of shame for one whose heart is swollen full of pride, and all the channels of his heart are stopped with stone. My heart was broken by the sea that night when all but three of my trusty and beloved followers died, broken by the sea which I had set to tread and conquer. My heart was shattered on the rocks where I had led them. My heart was broken, thrown up on that desolate coast and yet somehow left beating still. When morning finally broke and fog was lifted by the coastward wind, when our damned gale was far off ripping at the roofs of Leon, a fine clear autumn day came on with frosty breeze and the three survivors shouted for us all by name an hour or two. But neither I nor the other dead answered. They struggled their way inland while I cowered in the rocks in shame. Oh, in my guilty misery how I longed to be transported back one single day, or else to die! And I was still a boy.

The story runs on quite long but I'll make short of it. I passed another night up in the cranny of the seaside cliffs, and strangely it was fever and thirst which made me want to live. Dreams clotted my brain; every admiring stare which ever greeted me in any town and every tavern toast was turned back to me now in despising hate; my murdered comrades' women jostled one another in my dream for stones to strike me. I longed to live, but far away in exile. Another morning and a sail came by; I hailed it with all my feeble might and the good men came in their rowboat to my rescue. Their sloop was outward bound to the Canary Islands, leagues away far out to sea, and there on those dry islands life dragged on for years. An old bitter merchant woman lived there with a run-down wharf and warehouse from her husband's legacy and I ran that warehouse for her. She was meaner to me than to any one else; I dressed in rags and suffered from her tongue and drank myself to stupor with Canary wine and counted it my due.

There is a striving in the human soul toward home. We struggle so but only long to lie down at the Mother's breast and hear Her crooning lullaby of peace, of rest; we long to hear Her say that all our failings are forgot. We know She waits somewhere on a summer isle with open arms and open heart. Yes, all that matters is the way left yet to go. Oh, blessed forgetfulness! This world is a long hard school for a child of man and oft we must forget the lies to learn the best. I did not know the way to Her. My only oblivion lay then in a flask of wine.

One spring the old widow died. No one owned her ramshackle business then; the sheriff came to lock it up and take her cash. I was soon penniless. How can I tell you what things were like then? I was twenty-nine. I lived in part on charity and part by telling tales like this one in the bars. I preached against pride, and steady on I drank. But I did not despair; there was no passion left in me, not even for despair. I simply waited.

From autumn dusk to winter night, as life subsides to lay down chill and dormant in the Earth, a true man lets his pride and shame both wash away. Then at winter's turning when the Sun has reached His farthest ebb and when the Moon sails high and near, They change Their spiral courses to gradually return. When your hands are empty and the heart beats slowly in your breast, when you lie in lonely exile far from home, when you stand at last unarmed and naked against the tide, with the gates hung open and the wall thrown down; then at long last Wisdom, blessed Wisdom, whispers to your ear: "Be thou still." Force nothing in that time. Long not for the man you were nor for the days gone by. By its own power the rising tide comes fresh and new; let passion swell up new and find its way through clearer well springs in your heart. When summer's full you'll feel the surging power in your hand. Be thou patient, for life is good.

Birth, death, birth and death. One time the waves would sweep across the deck of a Spanish admiral of the Caribbees and a sailor would let go a line, joyful and triumphant, to slip away into the Lady's deep embrace. When next I found that watery way the body was drugged to stupor, drunk, oblivious to the soul-deep grief of a murdered race, stumbling about an alien town as weird as Hell – I was an Indian. Face down in the gutter of the street I lay and called down the merciful rain. Death, birth, death and birth, we are allotted all the lives we need. The loving Goddess weeps for such a failure of a spirit thirsting light but death's forgetfulness can be a critical relief, and a noble sacrifice of clinging hope as well.

Life ebbed down in a youth who waited patiently in the taverns and along the wharves of a port in the dry Canary Isles. Vainglorious guilt for my own wasted years and my own foolish pride had burned down to a glowing grief and then to just regret. It was an heroic age for the Spanish race; the folk would toast their heroes' famous names and deride their victims while I would sit apart. These were the folk who cheered thousands to the Inquisition's burning stake and I had been their child. But nothing was left in my heart of the lust to conquer and the lust for fame which had compelled my deeds before. I knew their way was wrong and I knew that life could hold much finer joy than they conceived. It seemed there was no will left in me anymore for there was nothing I desired except a place to be with Her, the mistress of my dreams, the Lady of Life; unknown to all, my only longing was to somehow make that secret mystic union real. I waited for a death to come and trusted it would take me home.

To learn one lesson in one life is quite enough to call that life well spent. Let me tell you now what it was I learned before I tell you how. (As an Indian I would find that every trail is home, but the Indian's a different time and another tale.) As a sailor boy of the Spanish race I learned a true man walks his trail alone. The waves that cross a heart are nought but ripples on a pond; the true man's heart is deep. The tides of love and joy that swell up in his heart spring from divinity. He walks impeccably; with every step he does exactly what he must and like the eagle's flight his spirit soars. A true man goes upon this earth so like a god and when his time has come he flies away. Full of gladness, always heedless of fools and yet a fool himself, he does his part.

There is scant upon this page to tell the rest, ever so fine I write. Would that I could paint the detail of the morn my ship came in and how the townsfolk crowded all that day and night to hear the seamen's tales. It was a vessel of our ever-victorious Admiral of the Caribbees, from far across the ocean to the west, which hurried home on some important business with our king. Would that all the news of Indians enslaved or dead could reach your ear, the news of heathen cities burned and golden idols melted down for coin. Would too that I could paint the face I saw among that crew, my boyhood chum, my first mate from the long-lost boat, and tell you how among the crowd I fainted at his feet. It is enough to tell how full of pity was my friend to find his friend so low, and how he carried me away and how we talked. I opened my mystic heart to him but he did not approve. We had been together in glorious youth; he was still young and I was old. I told him every vision of our Holy Mother I had seen, and how She differed from the pale weak virgin of the priestly tales, or the harlot Eve. I told him how the love of Her consumed my soul; he begged me never again to speak such dangerous thought. How can I describe the joy it brought to speak of Her at last, as I had never spoken to a mortal soul. He got me on the ship, signed on as a sailor once again and bound for home, and every moment we could steal from duty still we talked. No words can tell the joy it was to speak my heart out loud although in whispers, the peace and comfort and power it bought, and every word was right. I saw then as I'd never seen before that life and death and everything was good; I was with Her at last.

So now this tale is nearly done, take from it what you will. Scarce a pocketful of hours was left before our ship made shore. My friend and I sat whispering in the dark, I full of joy and he of fear. The ship was bounding under lots of sail when suddenly the seas she plowed through turned to great Atlantic swells and she began to lurch; an officer on deck was crying out for men. Carried on wild abandoned joy more than my wasted limbs, I hit the deck with all the rest then crawled and clambered to my work up in the vessel's bow. Heads of good-size waves were crashing over our poor wooden shell. No man has known such combat if he has not been to sea. Foaming torrents buried me head deep and pounded at my frame; scarce was breathing possible and every moment periled I would wash away, and yet I struggled on. Suddenly somehow I came unto the place I sought and yet once there, victorious, found that in such raging chaos I could do nought. I wedged my toes into a crack, braced hard against the sprit and clung for life to the very rope which I had come to slack away. But how long could I stay? The mighty strike of wave increased with every blow. I was submerged entire and strength was failing fast. Well, this human life is strange. Struggle mightily a bit, find your god, learn great things and always in the end you stand alone. So cling to life until you're washed away or let it go? I smiled and let it go.