Adventure in Foreign Climes

On the 15th June in the year of our Lord 1604, the good ship El Revestimiento de Plata set sail from Callao on the Eastern coast of the 'New World', amid the broken ruins of the Incan Empire. She was bound for Spain, her cargo a collection of the exotic and unusual, gifts for King Phillip from the darkest corners of the Incan territories. Accompanied by two Galleons as escort and protection, El Patin de Santa Monica and El Villa-Lobos de Sanchez Ramirez, it was expected to be a largely uneventful voyage. None of the ships or sailors made it to their homeland. Here follows selected extracts from the personal journals of one of the sailors on the Revestimiento, a young tar named Ignacio Garcia:

July 3rd 1604.

The morning had been like any other aboard ship. Bright it was after a clear, warm night. All bodies of my watch had rested well and spirits were high. We are two weeks out from the New World, with no black ague or tooth loss apparent in any man. Duties were as normal, Cabo Perez, our watch officer, having us mend rope and sail on the aft deck after rations were taken. It occurs to me now how thin and faded these memories seem to me, as if the harsh light of the events I have witnessed since have made them somehow faded and less real. I attempt to recount the truth of my fate as a means of countenancing these events, though how any soul that should read this journal could not dismiss my words as the rantings of a madman I cannot conceive.

It was noon, the Sun directly overhead, when my world changed forever. I recall being in conversation with Blanco, as we sewed rents in sail, planning our intended exploits when payment we received at voyage's end. A hoarse cry came from aloft, the fear in the lookout's voice gaining sharp attendance instantly. All eyes turned to our port side, the Villa-Lobos positioned roughly a quarter mile from us. Less than a quarter mile from her bow squatted a vast ship. My first thought was to wonder how it had crept up upon us on a clear, bright day. Then it dawned on me how truly huge it was. A thing that was half a mile away and yet still appeared to be that large seemed vastly out of scale and I exclaimed a profanity in disbelief. I knew of no ship in the world that could be built to that size and not collapse under its own weight.

I once saw the San Salvador as a young boy, the most enormous ship in the world to my childish eyes, yet that ship was as a rowing boat compared to this leviathan before us. My will drained away, sapped by the stark strangeness of it and the certainty of our deaths. I had an intense foreboding that this beast of a ship would devour us. Confusion and fear reigned in my mind. Looking about me I saw my fellows mirroring my emotions, several jaws sagging open. The monstrous ship gleamed in the sunlight, brightly painted red and gold. What seemed to be hundreds of glassed windows and cannon portholes were set into its side, and seven masts towered hundreds of feet up into the blue with many bowsprits and fore-masts so that it was a veritable maze of canvas above its deck, which swarmed with oddly shaped figures and unfamiliar machinery, the Black Jack flying proudly from what I supposed to be its Mizzenmast.

The crew of the Villa-Lobos were a frenzy of activity; readying cannon and arming themselves to repel the fearsome vessel, when I spied great crossbow-like weapons being raised skyward on the deck of the pirate ship. In an instant, three projectiles shot up in a very high arc. I shaded my eyes to follow them and again thought my grip of reality to be slipping, as the projectiles opened in flight, unfurling into two brightly glowing weights at either end of a long length of thin chain. Two missed the Villa-Lobos completely and the third caught her roughly a third of the way along her length, the weights falling one either side. The weights hit the water and the chain was instantly wrenched downwards so violently that it sheared the Villa-Lobos into two pieces. I could not help but stutter a litany of profanity at this and I was not alone. I have never in my life seen a weapon of strength sufficient to tear a ship in twain as if it were made of kindling.