Mayflower (Flor de mayo): A Tale of the Valencian Seashore

by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez

"Pare! Pare!" Pascualet was calling in terror, pointing toward the bow. The other "cat," his comrade, had been there when the Mayflower started to plunge. Now he was gone! The great Destroyer had swept him overboard, and no one had seen! Panic seized on the crew, in that ghastly moment of supreme peril. The deafening thunder claps followed one on the heels of the other. Chain-lightning hissed and snapped close by in all directions over the leaden sky, snakes of fire that seemed to be darting into the water to quench their flaming entrails; and the bangs of thunder came, some of them short, crackling like the roll of musketry; others deep, prolonged, booming. The rain was coming down in a torrential cascade, as though the sky were trying to fill up the valleys in the sea and make its power more violent.

But the Rector took the crew in hand. "God, have we sailors or women aboard here? And you came from the Cabañal, and are afraid of a bit of sea! You'd think you fellows had never been offshore! This isn't going to last. These easterlies are always freakish things! But anyhow! What's the use of getting scared? It's a sailor's place to die at sea! I always said so: sooner a lobster than a mumbling parson and the worms! Pull yourselves together, boys. And lash yourselves to something. The boat's all right. Just don't get washed overboard!"

Tio Batiste and the two sailors knotted the ends of their sashes around the mast. Tonet tied the little boy securely to a ring astern; but seeing that his brother, for a show of bravado, had sat down beside the tiller free, he crouched at the railing, bracing himself against a chock on the deck. A funereal silence settled on the Mayflower. The sea was now in such commotion that the kelp on the bottom showed its streamers in the troughs of the waves. The crests of foam were turning a dirty yellow from the mud stirred up. Spray, rain, bits of seaweed, lashed the faces and hands of the sailors cruelly. They were all now soaked to the skin.

As the vessel rose to the crests, the keel half out of water aft, the Rector could see other boats from the Cabañal in the distance, vanishing in the mists of the horizon. They were all running with poles virtually bare, scudding before the wind for shelter, though it would be much more dangerous making port than to hold to the open sea. And the claws of remorse sank deep into Pascualo's heart. He seemed to be awakening from a horrible dream. That night of horror passed in the streets of the village! Those four glasses of brandy at the tavern! That argument with the men on shore, and his impulse to put to sea! Could he have been guilty of all that? A more criminal wretch he was than the pair who had betrayed him. If he had been tired of life, he could have tied a rock around his neck and jumped off the Breakwater! But what right had he to drive all those innocent boys to death? What would the people at home say of him? It was his fault that half the fishermen had gone out in the very teeth of the gale that morning! And then, his other boat! Every soul aboard her lost, and because they had obeyed his orders like true fishermen! And how many other vessels had met the same fate? There was deep shame on his face as he looked at tio Batiste and the two sailors, lashed to the mast there and whipped and bleeding in the storm! He did not choose to look at his brother nor at Pascualet. Little it mattered if they should die—for at thought of them the thirst for vengeance flamed in him anew. But the other two, sons of mothers, old and dependent on them for support, and tio Batiste, who had survived so many dangers through all those years! Those surely he had no right to kill! And the sight of the three men crouching there on the wet deck, the ropes cutting into their flesh as they held on, half stunned under the buffets that rained upon them like hammer blows, drove all sense of his own danger from the Rector's mind. He scarcely noticed the waves that came splashing up around him. Nothing seemed able to stir that huge frame of his, but an anguish had reentered his soul sharper and more racking than that of the night before. He must live, save himself, leave his personal affairs for later settlement, but meanwhile get those men ashore, get those men ashore, all of them, and not add to the burden that the lost "cat" and the crew of his other boat had put upon his conscience.

The Rector centered his whole mind on the handling of the Mayflower. No need for worry just at present. That hull would stand any sea and they did not have to buck the storm. But how get into the harbor? That was the crucial effort in which so many came to grief. Ahead, just visible through the rain, the spray and the mist, the Breakwater could already be seen, its back looming above the water like a whale driven aground by the gale. How double that projecting point?

From succeeding crests the skipper studied the rocks that were churning in a hell of surf, and his heart sank within him at thought of the struggle ahead. Not another sail was in sight. Many boats, perhaps, had gotten in. The rest were already lost On top of the Breakwater, many, many black points, people, probably, who had come, crazy with fear, to watch the ghastly combat between man and the elements.

All the Cabañal had started down to the giant wall of red rocks as the first crashes of the storm had broken; and the people, indifferent to the breakers that might easily sweep them off, had gathered on the point in front of the lighthouse, as though their presence there might be of some help to their dear ones in the fight to enter the harbor. Under the torrential downpour women kept coming on the run, the rain biting at their faces, the gale washing their skirts about and whistling in their ears. And they stood there on the rocks, their shawls soaked through, praying, screaming, raising their hands to heaven. Men in oil skins and sea boots came hurrying along the shore, jumping from stone to stone, stopping many times, when they reached the Breakwater, to let a wave go by as it leapt over that obstruction into the inner harbor, leaving the red granite shining with the angry sweat of the tempest.

On the farthest projection of the jetty, where the storm surf was dashing highest against the outer rocks, stood Dolores, bareheaded, her face pale, clinging to siñá Tona, who was wild with anguish for her boy, her Pascualet, who was still out there! And the two women, with others also, cursed heaven with the foulest blasphemies, afterwards, suddenly, to bow their heads, crossing their hands over their breasts, and suppliantly promising masses, candles, offerings, to the Virgin of Rosario and the Holy Christ of the Grao, addressing those miraculous beings pleadingly, intimately, as though the divinities were present in the flesh there before them. Dolores finally drew her shawl about her and crouched for shelter behind the outermost rock, the wash from the surf climbing up around her legs, but her eyes she held seaward with the fixed motionless stare of a sphinx. On a stone farther back tia Picores towered on high with her massive bony frame. Anger writhing at her mouth, and her fists clenched in threat, she faced the sea with the sublimity of a tragic witch, insulting the wild turmoil with the gibes of the Fishmarket: "Pig of a sea! Streetwalker! Sow! They call you a woman, but you're a man, I say!"

The rain came in horizontal sheets before the gale, which caught individuals not clinging to their neighbors and tossed them around like reeds. All the anxious watchers were wet to the skin and their clothes clung dripping to their bodies; but absorbed in the enthralling horror of the spectacle, they were unconscious of the chill that was beginning to make their teeth chatter. A curse on the Rector's head! That cuckold was to blame for everything! He was the one responsible for the fleet's going out. It would serve him right if he never got in! And Dolores and siñá Tona caught such angry words, and lowered their heads in shame under public condemnation.

But one by one the boats rounded the Breakwater, cheered by the crowd, and greeted by sobs and cries of joy from the families of the crews who ran off toward the Grao to meet their men. Soon so many of them were in that the throng of the Breakwater was noticeably smaller. The harbor entrance had turned to a veritable hell of wind and wave and whirlpool. Three boats were still in sight, and for an hour, while the people ashore stood gripped in maddening suspense, they tacked and veered in the hurricane, struggling against the dread currents that kept sweeping them down the coast. At last they, too, got in, and a great sigh of relief and satisfaction rose from the crowd.