'A smell?' I remembered Biddulph's description of the aromatic galleon. 'What manner of smell?'

'Perfume,' she replied. 'The entire sea smelled of perfume, or perhaps incense. Can you imagine anything so strange? At first the men on board the Philip Sidney thought it nothing more than a hallucination, for hallucinations are common enough at sea. Most have to do with colours, such as when the waves look green so that the ship appears to be moving across fields of grass. Yet no one on board the Philip Sidney had ever known the like of this particular hallucination, not even Sir Ambrose. Then, as the smell grew stronger, a sailor in one of the fighting-tops spotted something on the horizon.'

'A galleon,' I murmured.

'A fleet of galleons,' she replied.

It was the convoy from New Spain, three weeks out of Veracruz: fourteen galleons shaping their course northeast-by-north through rough seas towards the Tropic of Cancer and then the higher latitudes, the 40s and 50s, to escape the northeasterly Trades. Fourteen ships alone on the shimmering water that funnelled and whirlpooled between Hispaniola and the Cabo Maisí, most of them so heavily laden that their lower gunports were all but under water. They should have been met already by the armada de la guardia de la carrera which would escort them as far as the Canaries, but the squadron had failed to arrive, probably on account of the same winds that for the previous two days had battered the convoy along the coast of Cuba. Now thirteen of the ships were huddled together in formation like a pod of whales as they rounded the windswept cape, but the fourteenth was listing badly. Already it had fallen several bow-shots off the pace.

'The Sacra Familia,' I prompted when she paused.

She nodded slowly. 'At first the galleon seemed no more than an apparition. As the Sidney drew closer the strange scent grew stronger and the mariners could see that she looked golden in colour, as if her mast-heads and yard-arms were glowing in the sun or lit by St. Elmo's Fire. Only the threat of keelhauling could convince the most superstitious of the sailors to stay at their posts. But Sir Ambrose knew the smell almost at once. It was not perfume, he realised, but sandalwood, a tree whose oil is used to make soaps and incense. A tree whose golden heartwood King Solomon is said to have used to build his Temple in Jerusalem.'

'The Sacra Familia was carrying a load of sandalwood?' I was puzzled but also disappointed by the revelation, by the reduction of this magical vessel, the subject of so many myths, to a cargo ship, a mere transatlantic mule.

'Not a load, though at first Sir Ambrose thought as much. But then he saw that, despite her list, the galleon was riding high in the water. He realised that the Sacra Familia carried no sandalwood and no silver or gold from the mines of New Spain; no load of any kind, even though she was sailing with the Mexican fleet. You see, the smell was coming from the galleon herself,' she explained, 'from her planks and masts. She had been built from stem to stern of sandalwood, exactly like Solomon's Temple. And so at once Sir Ambrose forgot about the other thirteen ships in the fleet and gave the order to pursue the galleon instead.'

Thirteen ships gorged with silver from the Mexican mines, or perhaps gold bullion, or bales of Chinese silk from Manila. I tried to imagine the scene. The wealthiest convoy on earth bound unescorted across five thousand miles of treacherous ocean for the Gulf of Cádiz. Yet Sir Ambrose forsakes them-and forsakes his holy mission-to pursue another ship, one with an empty hold. A galleon made from sandalwood.

'Such wood may have been fine for Solomon's Temple,' Alethea had resumed, 'but it's hardly suitable for ships. The heartwood is so heavy it barely floats. This must explain why she was lagging so far behind the other ships. It also explains why the Philip Sidney caught her so easily. It was like an Arabian stallion overtaking a mule.'

'But why sandalwood? Why not oak or teak?'

'That is precisely what Sir Ambrose had asked himself. And then he realised. He realised that the Sacra Familia had not sailed from Veracruz with the rest of the fleet. He knew at once that she had travelled from much farther afield.'

'The Pacific,' I murmured, thinking of Biddulph's bamboo rats, his belief that the ship had come through the Strait of Magellan, that narrow passage of shoals and islands at the bottom of the globe.

'He knew that the galleon must have been built from oak once upon a time,' she was continuing, 'because the shipwrights in La Coruña would never have built a ship from sandalwood, no matter how badly their timber stocks were depleted. But at some point a shipwright must have found himself with no choice in the matter. Sir Ambrose understood that the Sacra Familia had been wrecked and then rebuilt by her carpenters in a land where no oak trees grew, a land where sandalwood was the only timber to hand. This must have been on one of the islands of the Pacific, which is the only place where one finds sandalwood forests.'

Yet not even Sir Ambrose realised the significance of this fact until the galleon was overtaken in the hour before dusk. This had been a league off the desolate eastern shore of the Cabo Maisí. The Sacra Familia stood no chance at all, even without a cargo, for the Philip Sidney was the most formidable man-o'-war ever to sail the seas, and her crew was well prepared for battle. At Sir Ambrose's command the soldiers began tallowing the ends of their pikes and the marksmen scrambled into the fighting-tops with their muskets and serpentines. Below decks the gunners filled the wooden cartridges with powder and primed the cannons before roasting fireballs on the brazier like so many enormous chestnuts. But the battle was over almost before it started, because the Sacra Familia was unable either to fight or to flee. Her powder was still wet from the storm and her bottom was barnacled and so fouled with the weed the Portuguese call sargaço that her rudder budged only with the greatest effort. The English ship had come within cannon-range barely an hour after sighting her, at which point a 32-pounder was sent careering across the galleon's beak-head. There was no reply, so two rounds of grapeshot shredded her sails, to say nothing of what they did to the yardmen putting on more canvas in a vain attempt to hoist sail and escape.

The remainder of the battle lasted less than an hour. The marksmen opened fire from above, while fire-pikes were thrown from the decks and flaming arrows shot from slurbows. One of the arrows sailed through a scuttle and started a fire in the forward deckhouse, from which sailors could be seen leaping into the sea. Then more men jumped as the fire spread rapidly through the hull. By this time the galleon was being driven towards the cape, towards a coral reef on which sat, like a gibbeted corpse, the battered shell of an ancient galleon whose name, Emperador, was still legible on her rotting escutcheon. The Sacra Familia joined her soon afterwards and then broke apart in several fathoms of water just as the longboats of the Philip Sidney were being despatched with a boarding party of fifty soldiers carrying rope-ladders and grappling-hooks. The few Spaniards who didn't drown were eaten by the sharks, though not before they were seen throwing overboard or into the flames the galleon's log, her collection of portolan charts, the wooden traverse board, a derroterro-everything that might have betrayed the secret of her voyage. In the end, only the rats survived the wreck, enormous bamboo rats that deserted the ship and swam for the banana plantations along the shoreline.

'Dusk had fallen at this point, and a bright sunset foretold the end of the storms. Sir Ambrose took soundings and ordered his men to drop anchor a mile off the cape, where the Sidney rode out the last of the storm. The galleon burned all night on the reef, and in the morning a party was sent to survey the wreckage and scavenge what was left of her. They were forced to work quickly. The flames would have been seen from the shore and word of the wreck would soon reach Santiago if the smell had not warned the Spaniards already, for by sunrise the wind had turned to the southeast and now the smoke was flowing inland with the smell of sandalwood.'