A Signal Victory Read Online Free

toy, and struck.
    It was more than any of them knew how to handle. The ship could not be controlled. It pitched in the sudden darkness, was swept off balance, careened up and down gigantic hills of water, hit Los Viboras, smashed, split, and with a gurgle in the holds, began to sink.
    The Spaniards did not know where they were. They had never heard of Los Viboras, or, for that matter, of Jamaica, off whose shore those razor shoals still lie. The two women and fifteen of the men managed to get away in the only boat. The fifteen men included Valdivia, who was a person of importance, and so went first; Aguilar, because a priest to save others must first save himself, which in those days was his perquisite; and a sailor from Nieto, Gonzalo de Guerrero, taken at the last moment, because priest to overweigh the boat or not, Valdivia wished one man with him competent, and Guerrero was competent. So competent, indeed, that Valdivia had mistrusted him until now. He did not know his station. But in a time of danger, fear means nothing, and neither does station. He was the best man, and Valdivia meant to reach land.
    The question was, what land?
    For fourteen days they drifted, they scarcely knew where, across the surface of that once more deceptive sea. The arm of the Gulf Stream carried them north, but they knew no more than that. Nor is their suffering a part of this story. Sufficient to say it was the women who died first.
    They had given up all hope of land. Yet by a swerve in that cold river of whose existence they knew nothing, when they were ready for death, they began to approach a shore.
III
    Nowadays a man shipwrecked and cast adrift is not so hopelessly at sea. He knows which waters these are, and where the shores are, that monsters are rare, currents certain, sharks timid without the lure of blood, so they say, and that to drink salt water will not kill him. There are other ships, he had time to send out an S O S, and he really does believe that he lives in a known world. He may suffer, but he is not doomed.
    Of the men in that boat of 1511, some could retreat into delirium, some into faith, but the others had no comfortable knowledge to pull them through. It was only the will to survive itself that survived there, for the calm would not end and the sun was not the glorious light of heaven, but the Devil’s eye. The eye came closer and closer. It swooped crackling down, it became a coal, they felt the heat against their eyelids, were conscious of the hiss of steam, and went black blind.
    Was the will to live then, only an impiety, that we are justly punished for?
    Aguilar would have said so. He belonged to the heresy we take with us. He was a Manichee. That was the thing that made bigots out of Christians, nothing else, but then that was also the thing that made Christianity a slave religion and was essential to it.
    Guerrero watched him. He was not a Christian, but a gipsy. He belonged to the older dispensation. He knew how dangerous to others your man of faith could be.
    He was also an ordinary man, and an ordinary man learns a certain rule of thumb, which serves him well enough. He measures the world up into women, men, and real men, and that simplifies things. The women were gone. You couldn’tkeep a corpse in that sun. So they went back into the sea they came from, while Aguilar mumbled the office for the dead. Valdivia was a real man. He could depend on Valdivia. But Valdivia had a wound in his leg, it festered fast, and he wasn’t competent just now, only quarrelsome and almost motionless.
    On the late morning of the fourteenth day they left that almost invisible current and were caught up by a little ripple thirty miles off the coast of Yucatan. But Yucatan is low and invisible from that far at sea, and though they heard the sound of surf, they had heard the sound of surf before. It only meant another reef.
    And besides, the movement of this ripple was so slow.
    There were only two erect in the boat now, one at