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course if you are in sight of land, it is all different. You take bearings from objects on the chart, which gives your position—if the chart is right, and if you have not picked the wrong island or mountaintop or whatever.

    By the time I had learned even half this stuff, we were a long, long way out from Veracruz. So good night!



4
Spain

    WE CROSSED THE Atlantic with the galleon, which meant we had to match its speed. In light airs, it would hardly move, so we spent days and days creeping along under reefed topsails. When the wind whistled in the rigging and spray came over the side, the old slowpoke
Santa Lucía
turned into a racehorse, setting sails in places most ships do not even have and creaming the sea for a mile behind her. We had to do our best to keep up, all plain sail set and the deck so steep you couldn't walk on it without holding on to something. I do not know how close we were to capsizing, but I would not want to come an inch closer than we came a dozen times a day. When we finally split up—us heading north to Coruña and the
Santa Lucía
east for Cádiz—we were all praising God and blessing the Virgin. It was the only time I ever saw the whole crew smiling.

    We unloaded at Coruña and were paid off, each of us going up to the captain one at a time and having the book explained to us before we got ourmoney. That was when I found out that I had worked for a week to pay for two shirts and two pairs of pants.

    I will stop here and explain that I still had the little bag I had brought from the monastery, but there was not much in it besides one pair of slop-chest pants and a slop-chest shirt. I had lost my sandals in Havana, kicking them off so I could run faster, and my T-shirt had been worn to rags and thrown away. You know what happened to my jeans.

    When the captain had explained everything and paid me, he told me it would probably be a couple of weeks before the next voyage. He would see his family while the ship went into dry dock to get her bottom scraped and so on. But when she was ready to go again, he hoped I would come back and sign on. That made me feel good. I thanked him for it, and I meant it.

    After I had been paid, Señor asked me to help him take his parrots to the bird seller. I said sure and off we went, him carrying three cages and me carrying three. The cages were wood, woven out of sticks and tied with twine that the parrots kept picking at with those big strong bills parrots have. They were not heavy, and I had carried and cleaned them many a time.

    The bird shop was interesting, and I had plenty of time to look around in it while the bird man and Señor argued over prices. There were three parrots there already, gray ones from Africa that would talk to you and do everything they could think of to keep you with them. They were all hoping to be let out of their cages, but they did not know how to say that. It seemed to me then that it was about the only thing they did not know how to say, and I decided that if I ever had a parrot of my own, I would not cage it. If it stayed with me, fine. If it flew away, that would be fine, too.

    Then a young lady came in, wanting to buy a bird. She saw Señor's and got him to take each of them out so she could see it better. The bird seller kept explaining to her that they were new birds who had not been around people much and might die before long, could not talk, and so on. I got one of the redheaded green ones to say, "Pretty miss! Pretty miss!," cocking its head. It was something I had said to all of them sometimes. After that, she had to have that one. She asked Señor how much, and he told her a lot more than he had been trying to get from the bird seller. So everybody argued about that for a while—the lady and an old woman in black who was with her, and Señor.

    While all the palaver was going on, her maid and I were looking each other over. She would peek at me, and I would get embarrassed because Ihad been staring and look away.