East and West: Poems

by Bret Harte

Never a tear bedims the eye
That time and patience will not dry;
Never a lip is curved with pain
That can't be kissed into smiles again:
And these same truths, as far as I know,
Obtained on the coast of Mexico
More than two hundred years ago,

In sixteen hundred and fifty-one,—
Ten years after the deed was done,—
And folks had forgotten the galleon:
The divers plunged in the Gulf for pearls,
White as the teeth of the Indian girls;
The traders sat by their full bazaars;
The mules with many a weary load,
And oxen, dragging their creaking cars,
Came and went on the mountain road.

Where was the galleon all this while:
Wrecked on some lonely coral isle?
Burnt by the roving sea-marauders,
Or sailing north under secret orders?
Had she found the Anian passage famed,
By lying Moldonado claimed,
And sailed through the sixty-fifth degree
Direct to the North Atlantic sea?
Or had she found the "River of Kings,"
Of which De Fonté told such strange things
In sixteen forty? Never a sign,
East or West or under the line,
They saw of the missing galleon;
Never a sail or plank or chip,
They found of the long-lost treasure-ship,
Or enough to build a tale upon.
But when she was lost, and where and how,
Are the facts we're coming to just now.

Take, if you please, the chart of that day
Published at Madrid,—por el Rey;
Look for a spot in the old South Sea,
The hundred and eightieth degree
Longitude, west of Madrid: there,
Under the equatorial glare,
Just where the East and West are one,
You'll find the missing galleon,—
You'll find the "San Gregorio," yet
Riding the seas, with sails all set,
Fresh as upon the very day
She sailed from Acapulco Bay.

How did she get there? What strange spell
Kept her two hundred years so well,
Free from decay and mortal taint?
What? but the prayers of a patron saint!
A hundred leagues from Manilla town,
The "San Gregorio's" helm came down;
Round she went on her heel, and not
A cable's length from a galliot
That rocked on the waters, just abreast
Of the galleon's course, which was west-sou-west.

Then said the galleon's commandante,
General Pedro Sobriente
(That was his rank on land and main,
A regular custom of Old Spain),
"My pilot is dead of scurvy: may
I ask the longitude, time, and day?"
The first two given and compared;
The third,—the commandante stared!

"The first of June? I make it second."
Said the stranger, "Then you've wrongly-reckoned;
I make it first: as you came this way,
You should have lost—d'ye see—a day;
Lost a day, as plainly see,
On the hundred and eightieth degree."
"Lost a day?" "Yes: if not rude,
When did you make east longitude?"
"On the ninth of May,—our patron's day."
"On the ninth?—you had no ninth of May!
Eighth and tenth was there; but stay"—
Too late; for the galleon bore away.

Lost was the day they should have kept,
Lost unheeded and lost unwept;
Lost in a way that made search vain,
Lost in the trackless and boundless main;
Lost like the day of Job's awful curse,
In his third chapter, third and fourth verse;
Wrecked was their patron's only day,—
What would the holy fathers say?

Said the Fray Antonio Estavan,
The galleon's chaplain,—a learned man,—
"Nothing is lost that you can regain:
And the way to look for a thing is plain
To go where you lost it, back again.
Back with your galleon till you see
The hundred and eightieth degree.
Wait till the rolling year goes round,
And there will the missing day be found;
For you'll find—if computation's true—
That sailing east will give to you
Not only one ninth of May, but two,—
One for the good saint's present cheer,
And one for the day we lost last year."

Back to the spot sailed the galleon;
Where, for a twelve-month, off and on
The hundred and eightieth degree,
She rose and fell on a tropic sea:
But lo! when it came to the ninth of May,
All of a sudden becalmed she lay
One degree from that fatal spot,
Without the power to move a knot;
And of course the moment she lost her way,
Gone was her chance to save that day.