David Wood, Rick Chesler
Splashdown
Prologue
Juan Diego de Guerrero emerged from his cabin onto the stern deck of the Nuestra Señora de la San Pedro and narrowed his eyes against the driving rain. It was not the precipitation that concerned him, however, but the wind that drove it and the sea’s response to that steadily increasing force. He frowned, wiping cold salt spray from his weathered face as he gazed out on the marching waves, a single terrifying word dominating his mind: Huracán.
I should have known.
Upon waking with the sunrise he’d been pleased to see that they were beyond sight of land, well underway across the great Atlantic to his Spanish homeland. But even then he’d noticed the unusual conditions — the decreasing interval between swells, the electric tang in the air. Now these were undeniably magnified. It was like the hand of God pulling him back from his goal. Had he done something wrong?
“Captain, I was just coming to find you.” Luis López de Olivares, Guerrero’s first mate, skidded to a halt on the damp decking. His deeply tanned face was pale, and his calloused fingers worked with nervous energy. “The weather is turning against us.” He gave Guerrero a meaningful look, knowing he did not need to finish the thought.
Somewhat of a maverick, Guerrero had been warned about being caught in this part of the world during the summer months. But he had not planned things this way. It had taken him longer than he had anticipated to find what he was looking for and to load it into his ship’s hold. Not satisfied with the usual bounty of gold, silver and jade figurines making their way to Europe in a steady stream from the New World, he had meandered much farther south than his contemporaries, in search of ever more exotic treasures and curiosities with which to impress King Charles. Eventually he had come to a southern land known to him only as Río de la Plata, where there were rumored to be entire river valleys lined with silver, complete mountain ranges made of the same.
“We will make it.” Guerrero stilled his voice to a calm that he did not feel. “We always do.”
Olivares turned to look out at the sea. “We shouldn’t have traveled so far south. The silver wasn’t worth it.” The words came out in a low murmur, clearly not intended for Guerrero’s ears, but the captain heard.
“It will be all right.”
A pang of guilt caused Guerrero to wince. It wasn’t prodigious amounts of silver that had drawn Guerrero months’ worth of treacherous sailing out of his way. Early reports from his notable predecessors, including Amerigo Vespucci, had spawned provocative talk that Guerrero, then a child dockside laborer, had routinely eavesdropped on in the shadows of Spanish seaports. The explorers’ gossip told of a wealth of strange and interesting minerals in addition to silver and gold, some of which had never before been witnessed in all of Europe. At the age of sixteen he would join the King’s navy and for a time he forgot about the particulars of the tales of his youth, but still they drove his desire to remain at sea, to explore the world and locate its riches for Spain.
And so it was that decades later, after many false starts, tribulations and general hardships, he came to command the King’s vessel, the treasure frigate San Pedro. It was also how he’d come to try the patience of his weary crew. Following an arduous coastal voyage, Guerrero’s ship had landed at Rio del Plata. Guerrero himself spoke to the indigenous tribes who met them on the beach about the minerals he had heard of, and he was introduced in short order to a shaman who claimed that the stones had very special powers, perhaps to a dangerous degree.
The indigenous priest agreed to allow Guerrero’s landing party to traverse their territory accompanied by local guides to a distant, rugged site where the natural resources might be excavated, but only under the condition that he first be allowed to bless the entire expedition in an elaborate ritual. To Guerrero, who reflected the widely held sentiment of Europe as a whole, these people were little more than savage heathens prone to the most base superstitions and animal urges, not yet having found the truth of Catholicism.
Olivares turned to face him, straightened his lanky frame, and clenched his fists. “Captain. What are those stones?”
Only by sheer force of will did Guerrero maintain his calm. He wondered the same thing, though he was not about to admit it.
He had heard tales of these strange rocks for many years, though, and he thirsted for the chance to finally bring some back to Spain. At the same time, Guerrero knew that the time required for the overland trek would likely put him beyond his safe weather window for the return trip across the Atlantic, but he was on the voyage of a lifetime and it was a chance he was willing to take.
To Guerrero’s men, however, the raw ore they painstakingly recovered and transported to the ship’s cargo hold proved most unremarkable indeed. From whispered rumors of Guerrero’s descriptions, the crew had been expecting some kind of lesser known gemstones — something that looked like rubies, garnets, maybe emeralds. But the rocks were plain-looking by comparison to those usually of value. Nothing they could easily trade in the ports of call for the favors of women and barkeeps. For these drab rocks they had trekked many miles through dank, insect-infested jungles and snake-filled swamps, scrabbled up and down the side of a bleak never-ending mountain of loose shale in order to extract examples of these rarest of New World specimens. A few of the men expressed dissatisfaction at going to such extremes to retrieve minerals not precisely known or valued rather than accepting more of the golden gifts readily offered by the coastal natives.
Guerrero had silenced the most vocal of these dissenters upon return to the ship by having them tied to the mast and whipped until dead while the rest of the crew was rewarded with a wine drenched feast. “Blood shall flow like wine for those who dare speak against his orders,” he had shouted over the tortured cries of the condemned. For Guerrero, only absolute authority could command and control such a motley assortment of common men enduring long months at sea. His seafaring career had been long and varied, met overall with mixed success, and he was determined that this was the voyage with which he would finally make a lasting impression on the King.
But now, a sudden and vicious storm stood between him and that opportunity.
Guerrero ignored the question, took a deep breath, and looked down the decks of his hundred-foot-long ship. He was not surprised to see his crew already taking appropriate actions: reefing canvas, securing the cannons and various loose objects on deck, the helmsman adjusting course at the wheel to head them into the waves while barking orders to crew in the rigging.
“Was there something you needed from me, or did you think the middle of a storm was an appropriate time to debate my choice of cargo?”
Duly chastened, Olivares shook his head.
“In that case, resume your duties at once.”
Olivares threw up a ragged salute, turned on his heel, and stalked away.
Guerrero clenched his fists. The mate was not wrong. I should have headed north sooner! Or perhaps if I had made the crossing to Africa and then headed north to Europe from there instead of travelling north into the heart of the New World…
But as a wave crashed over the stern deck, the highest on the ship, and he watched a man fall to his death from the crow’s nest, he knew that his second-guessing could no longer make a difference. It was a matter of mere hours at most before his ship would be ingested by a hurricane, and with God’s blessing they would withstand the storm and be able to limp home. Without it, they would succumb to its fury.