It was the ancient problem, I knew, that bedevilled all mariners. Longitude is merely another name for the time difference between two places. In principle its calculation, as I understood it, was a simple enough exercise. Whether over London or the Solomon Islands, or anywhere else on earth, the sun always reaches its maximum altitude at twelve o'clock, the local noon. Thus if a navigator in the Solomon Islands could know, at the moment of his local noon, the precise time in London, he could calculate the longitude of his position by the difference between the two times, since each hour equals fifteen degrees of longitude. That was all well and good, but how could someone possibly know the time in London when he finds himself stranded halfway round the world, on the shores of the Solomon Islands?
'Not even the ancients with all of their wisdom could solve the problem,' Alethea was saying. 'Ptolemy in his Geography discusses the method of Hipparchos of Nicaea, who advocates using observations of lunar eclipses as a way of measuring the differences in local time east or west of a fixed point. Then Johann Werner of Nuremberg'-she pointed to a volume on the wall-'proposes in his edition of Ptolemy the so-called lunar-distance method by which the moon and the zodiac form a celestial clock that determines local time at every point round the globe. But neither of these methods succeeds either at sea or in distant lands to which reliable timekeepers cannot be transported.'
'Which is why Mendaña and Quirós were unable to find the Solomon Islands when they returned to the Pacific.'
'Precisely. Because in 1568 Mendaña recorded them at the 212th meridian east of the Canary Islands, only to find when he returned to search for them in 1595 that the 212th meridian was as troublesome to locate as the islands themselves.'
'So Ortelius's map is valueless,' I said. 'It's no more accurate than any of the others.'
She resumed her seat and poured two more cups of tea, which was a rare drink in those days, one I had sampled only two or three times before. It seemed to set my nerves on edge. My hand was trembling as I reached for the cup.
'No doubt the scale of longitude is nothing more than informed guesswork,' she replied at length. 'But the island? Is that also a fiction? And, if so, why should the map have been suppressed?'
'Who suppressed it, then? The Spaniards?'
'So Sir Ambrose believed. And they would have had good reason to do so. Prague would have been the last place on earth where the King of Spain and his ministers would have wished such a secret document to appear. Its colleges were rife with Protestants, Hermeticists and Jews, along with every sort of mystic and fanatic. Exactly the sort who, twenty years later, so terrified the cardinals in the Holy Office. And so the great Ortelius was poisoned and his map suppressed.'
She closed the book and regarded me carefully. I could hear someone crossing the atrium and rain splashing from the downspouts. A large pool of water was enlarging about the sundial, and more was spilling over the cracked rim of the fountain. In the distance, beyond the stunted orchard, I saw the dip-well and cress-pond, also overflowing, their swollen surfaces pocked and bubbling. I shuffled my feet nervously on the carpet, remembering the approaching coach.
'That might have been the end of the story,' she said at last, 'except for one small detail. It concerns a ship, Mr. Inchbold. A Spanish galleon. One discovered quite by accident in the waters of the Caribbean.' Thunder crackled louder now and rain dashed against the window. 'Perhaps in your investigations you have learned something about it? It was called the Sacra Familia.'
Streaks of lightning were followed by mortar-bursts of thunder. In the midst of one of the loudest crashes Bridget appeared in the library doorway with a fish-oil lamp. She set it on the table and removed the tray of tea, her shoes scuffing along the tiles. Alethea too had crossed the floor. For several minutes she worked busily at the shelves, standing on a step-ladder and plucking down books like someone picking apples in an orchard. But then she returned to the table clutching an armful of volumes, which she began scattering in an avalanche across its surface. I caught one of the tumbling books before it slipped over the edge and was surprised to see Duplessis-Mornay's De la vérité de la religion chrétienne, the work of Hermetic philosophy translated into English by Sir Philip Sidney.
'… republished in new editions and translations,' she was saying over the din of the rain as the books tumbled over each other and on to the table. 'The Apologia of William of Orange, The Spanish Colony by Bartolomé de Las Casas, the Relaciones of the English informer Antonio Pérez…'
As she sorted through the pile, I caught a glimpse in the lamplight of the treatise by Las Casas, the Spanish priest who had catalogued atrocities committed by the conquistadores among the Indians.
'Even the printers and booksellers had joined the fight against Spain. These books and dozens of others, all were smuggled by their thousands into every corner of the Spanish Empire to rouse bands of defeated rebels and other malcontents in Catalonia, Aragon and Calabria. They were even translated into Arabic and smuggled into Africa to be read by the Moriscos whom Philip III banished from Spain. Now thousands of Moriscos, like the rebels in Calabria and Catalonia, were poised to pluck up their arms and once more fight the Castilians. Only this time all of Protestant Europe would be fighting at their side.'
So it was that I found myself listening for a second time to the story of Raleigh's expedition, to the tale of scheming bishops and princes from all across Europe making secret plans for a coup de main against their common enemy, the King of Spain. But on this telling King Philip had lost something of his omnipotence. The English and Dutch spies along the waterfront of La Coruña and in the limestone alleyways of Cádiz were reporting that his navy had not yet recovered from the destruction of the so-called Invincible Armada, whose loss in '88 was but the first straw in the wind foretelling the end of his vast empire. The galleons were not being replaced or repaired because timber stocks on the Iberian peninsula had been badly depleted, and because there was no money to build them anyway-for spies in the House of Trade had reported that bullion imports from America had dropped from nine thousand tons per annum to a little more than three thousand. Philip was heavily in debt to the hombres de negocio as a result, as were dozens of merchants and shipowners in Seville who could only watch helplessly as silver collapsed and the galleon trade shrank. A major European war-a war the Spaniards could not possibly win-would put an end once and for all to the Spanish convoys which twice each year swept the treasures of the New World five thousand miles across the Atlantic to Andalucía. All that was wanting was the quickmatch to light the powder-train-a match that was due to be struck by Sir Ambrose and the soldiers on board the Philip Sidney.
But the planned mission ended in débâcle. I listened again to the story of how the daring enterprise was scuppered by informers in the Navy Office and on board the Destiny herself. At least, the enterprise failed until the Philip Sidney, sailing homeward through the Windward Passage, came upon the remnants of the Mexican fleet, which had been scattered along the coast of Cuba by one of the fierce storms that Spanish navigators call a huracán. What followed was an accident, a rare stroke of good fortune in the midst of disaster. Indeed, Sir Ambrose might never have stumbled across the convoy, Alethea said, had it not been for a peculiar smell reported by the deckhands while the ship was in soundings some ten leagues west of the Spanish harbour at Santiago de Cuba.