The second man spoke with a whine. “I had rather a Barbary pirate were coming aboard! I had rather be took slave and row a galley!”
The third, a young man, had a whimsical, dark, fearless face. “But we be going to see strange things and serve the Queen! That’s something!”
“The Queen is just a lady. She don’t know anything about deep and fearful seas!”
“Where are you going,” I asked, “and with whom?”
The angry man answered, “The last of that is the easiest, mate! With an Italian sorcerer who has bewitched the great! He ought to be burned, say I, with the Jews and heretics! We are going with him, and we are going with Captain Martin Pinzon, whom he hath bewitched with the rest! And we are going with three ships, the Santa Maria, the Pinta and the Nina.”
The third said, “The Santa Maria’s a good boat.”
“There isn’t any boat, good or bad,” the first answered him, “that can hold together when you come to heat that’ll melt pitch and set wood afire! There isn’t any boat, good or bad, that can stand it when a lodestone as big as Gibraltar begins to draw iron!”
The second, whose element was melancholy, sighed, “I’ve been north of Ireland, Pedro, and that was bad enough! The lookout saw a siren and the Infanta Isabella was dashed on the rocks and something laughed at us all night!”
“Ireland’s nothing at all to it!” answered the angry man, whose name was Pedro. “I’ve heard men that know talk! The Portuguese going down Africa coast got to Cape Bojador, but they’ve never truly gotten any further, though I hear them say they have! They sent a little carrack further down, and it had to come back because the water fell to boiling! There wasn’t any land and there wasn’t any true sea, but it was all melted up together in fervent heat! Like hot mud, so to speak. It’s hell, that’s what I say; it’s hell down there! Moreover, there ain’t any heaven stretched over it.”
“What does it mean by that?” asked the second.