the cracks in the rock with such force that great plumes of foam exploded upwards and the white water streamed in waterfalls back down the stone and into the churning sea.
The air throbbed with the screams of seabirds. The gulls were much like those that used to drag me from my sleep in Belém with their raucous screeches, but others were some of the oddest-looking birds I’d ever seen, small black and white creatures with huge red, blue and yellow beaks covering most of their faces. The cook and a couple of the seamen were tossing weighted nets over the side trying to capture them as they bobbed about on the boiling foam as serenely as ducks on a village pond.
‘Dinner, if you can stomach it,’ the boatswain said glumly, as he joined me at the rail. ‘Still, you’ll be supping on shore soon and after a few weeks eating on this isle you’ll think that puffin and ship’s biscuit is the food of angels.’ He laughed, evidently relishing the misery he thought lay in store for us.
‘You’re surely not going to try to land here?’ I said, staring with horror at the fanged rocks and crashing seas.
The boatswain regarded me as if I was an imbecile. ‘You’d best pray we don’t get within spitting distance of that shore else it’ll be us that’s the dinner … for the fishes. No, the captain’s heading for a bay further round the cliffs, only a piss-poor village there but that suits the captain fine.’ The boatswain lowered his voice. ‘There’s a few little trifles he wants to unload.’ He tapped his nose and grinned.
It wasn’t until almost dusk that we finally sailed into a long, narrow inlet, dropping anchor in the ghastly embrace of steep black cliffs which circled us on three sides and threatened any minute to clasp their long, bony hands and crush us. The sides of the inlet, though jagged enough to be scalable, assuming you didn’t slice yourself to ribbons, were so high as to hide any glimpse of the land that lay beyond, and I guessed to hide the ship from anyone staring out to sea, unless he was perched right on the cliff edge. That’s if there was anyone living on that godforsaken lump of rock, which I seriously doubted. But someone had been there. A small strip of white sail cloth had been lowered down from the top of the cliff and was fluttering in the wind against the black rock. It would have been easy to mistake it for a gull, if you were not expecting it to be there. But the captain evidently was. He had promised a gold coin to the first man to spot the signal, a pledge guaranteed to miraculously sharpen any man’s eyesight.
A ruby-red sun was sinking into the sea, staining the water, as if blood was seeping from a corpse. Then out of the dazzling light, the dark outlines of two small fishing boats emerged from around the headland and made straight for us. As soon as they came close enough they tossed ropes to the ship and remained fastened up just long enough to be loaded with bales, boxes and barrels, all lowered down to them by the sailors, though not until after they had sent up several large bales of dried cod and a good heavy purse which the captain took himself off with the ship’s master to count. I grinned to myself thinking of Dona Flávia’s many chins wobbling in outrage had she been here to witness such nefarious goings-on. The old she-whale would probably have burst her corsets in sheer indignation. I was almost sorry she wasn’t there.
It was dark by the time the boats slipped away, and we stayed at our anchorage for the night. It was too dangerous to navigate round these murderous rocks in the dark. I tried to get Isabela alone, but she insisted on eating her meal with all three of us at the table and afterwards it was impossible to shake the other two off. It was almost as if they too were trying to find a way to get her to themselves, but none of us succeeded in that.
At dawn we weighed anchor and sailed on for more than half a day, before finally docking in a small harbour at the mouth of a broad, flat river valley. The sailors had scarcely fastened the mooring ropes before six men scrambled over the ship’s rail and bounded on