A vessel of two hundred tons, named La Trinidad, commanded by Captain Pedro de Scarza, was then passing the high bar which is formed at the entrance of the bay by the waters of the Bezos, and the Llobregat mingling with the sea; and when she caught the eye of the Emperor, he ordered Blasco to try his experiment on her.
She was laden with corn, and had just come from Monte Colibre or the Columbretes islets, which lie near the coast of Valencia, and poor Pedro de Scarza, in his ignorance and fear of what was about to be done to his ship, rent his beard and tore his slashed doublet as he stamped about her deck and gave himself up for lost, when ordered to furl every thing aloft as La Trinidad was to sail without canvas, or as he believed, about to be bewitched.
Blasco told his secret to none; but it was observed that he placed across the vessel's deck, and bolted thereto an axle, at each end of which was a large wooden wheel. Amidships were several other mysterious wheels with bands and bars, and a necromantic-looking iron boiler of great size, which he filled, however, with water from the holy well of Montserrat.
The moment this water attained boiling heat, by means of a fire which burned in a grating underneath, the wheels revolved, and again Pedro de Scarza rent his beard, while most of his crew jumped overboard; for now the vessel ran right across the Bay of Barcelona against the wind which was blowing fresh, to the great astonishment and terror of the people.
Charles V., whose mind was more occupied by wars and conquests, by battles and sieges, than the arts of science and peace, ordered his treasurer to inspect this strange machine and report upon it.
The treasurer, in doing so, got his trunk breeches torn by a portion of the machinery, by which accident about three pecks (Spanish) of fine cedar sawdust, which formed the bombasting thereof, were spilled on the deck of La Trinidad; so being a solemn, proud, and pompous grandee of Old Castile, he justly considered himself insulted by a vile mechanical contrivance, which he loudly denounced, stating "that it was not worth adopting, as the vessel did not go more than eight miles in two hours, which any caravel might do; and that the boiler was a Satanic affair, which was liable to burst and scald good Christians."
The Emperor, who was on the eve of departing from Spain to invade France, thus forbade Blasco to think more of his invention; but he bestowed upon him forty thousand maravedis, and created him a knight of the Dove of Castile—an order instituted in 1379, by Henry II., King of Castile and Lord of Biscay—the same who was poisoned by a handsome pair of buskins sent to him by Mohammed II., the Red-faced king of Granada.
But Blasco de Garay, on seeing no further hope of success with his long-cherished steam engine, in the bitterness of his heart dashed it to pieces with a hammer, thus destroying in an instant all that the fond hopes, the deep thoughts, and the labor of a lifetime had developed and constructed.
Disgusted with the world and weary of it, he retired to one of the little hermitages in the Rock of Montserrat, only in time to prevent the Inquisition from burning him as a sorcerer, and there he died, in the year of the Emperor's abdication, 1555.