Roma Eterna Read online

  And then I returned at last to Tauromenium; and reclaimed the book from Spiculo and read its every word in three astonishing days and nights, scarcely sleeping a moment. And found in it, along with many a tale of wonder and beauty and strangeness, many things that indeed I would not have imagined, which were not so pleasing to find.

  Though it was written in the rougher Latin of medieval days, the text gave me no difficulties. The Emperor Trajan VII was an admirable writer, whose style, blunt and plain and highly fluent, reminded me of nothing so much as that of Julius Caesar, another great leader who could handle a stylus as well as he did a sword. He had, apparently, kept the journal as a private record of his circumnavigation, very likely not meaning to have it become a public document at all, and its survival in the archives seems to have been merely fortuitous.

  His tale began in the shipyards of Sevilla: five vessels being readied for the voyage, none of them large, the greatest being only of 120 tons. He gave detailed listings of their stores. Weapons, of course, sixty crossbows, fifty matchlock arquebuses (this weapon having newly been invented then), heavy artillery pieces, javelins, lances, pikes, shields. Anvils, grindstones, forges, bellows, lanterns, implements with which fortresses could be constructed on newly discovered islands by the masons and stonecutters of his crew; drugs, medicines, salves; six wooden quadrants, six metal astrolabes, thirty-seven compass needles, six pairs of measuring compasses, and so forth. For use in trading with the princes of newly discovered kingdoms, a cargo of flasks of quicksilver and copper bars, bales of cotton, velvet, satin, and brocades, thousands of small bells, fishhooks, mirrors, knives, beads, combs, brass and copper bracelets, and such. All this was enumerated with a clerk’s finicky care: reading it taught me much about a side of Trajan Draco’s character that I had not suspected.

  At last the day of sailing. Down the River Baetis from Sevilla to the Ocean Sea, and quickly out to the Isles of the Canaria, where, however, they saw none of the huge dogs for which the place is named. But they did find the noteworthy Raining Tree, from whose gigantic swollen trunk the entire water supply of one island was derived. I think this tree has perished, for no one has seen it since.

  Then came the leap across the sea to the New World, a journey hampered by sluggish winds. They crossed the Equator; the pole-star no longer could be seen; the heat melted the tar in the ships’ seams and turned the decks into ovens. But then came better sailing, and swiftly they reached the western shore of the southern continent where it bulges far out toward Africa. The Empire of Peru had no sway in this place; it was inhabited by cheerful naked people who made a practice of eating human flesh, “but only,” the Emperor tells us, “their enemies.”

  It was Trajan’s intention to sail completely around the bottom of the continent, an astounding goal considering that no one knew how far south it extended, or what conditions would be encountered at its extremity. For that matter, it might not come to an end in the south at all, and so there would be no sea route westward whatever, but only a continuous land mass running clear down to the southern pole and blocking all progress by sea. And there was always the possibility of meeting with interference by Peruvian forces somewhere along the way. But southward they went, probing at every inlet in the hope that it might mark the termination of the continent and a connection with the sea that lay on the other side.

  Several of these inlets proved to be the mouths of mighty rivers, but wild hostile tribes lived along their banks, which made exploration perilous; and Trajan feared also that these rivers would only take them deep inland, into Peruvian-controlled territory, without bringing them to the sea on the continent’s western side. And so they continued south and south and south along the coast. The weather, which had been very hot, swiftly worsened to the south, giving them dark skies and icy winds. But this they already knew, that the seasons are reversed below the Equator, and winter comes there in our summer, so they were not surprised by the change.

  Along the shore they found peculiar black and white birds that could swim but not fly; these were plump and proved good to eat. There still appeared to be no westerly route. The coast, barren now, seemed endless. Hail and sleet assailed them, mountains of ice floated in the choppy sea, cold rain froze in their beards. Food and water ran low. The men began to grumble. Although they had an Emperor in their midst, they began to speak openly of turning back. Trajan wondered if his life might be in danger.

  Soon after which, as such wintry conditions descended upon them as no man had ever seen before, there came an actual mutiny: the captains of two ships announced that they were withdrawing from the expedition. “They invited me to meet with them to discuss the situation,” Trajan wrote. “Plainly I was to be killed. I sent five trusted men to the first rebel ship, bearing a message from me, with twenty more secretly in another boat. When the first group came aboard and the rebel captain greeted them on deck, my ambassadors slew him at once; and then the men of the second boat came on board.” The mutiny was put down. The three ringleaders were executed immediately, and eleven other men were put ashore on a frigid island that had not even the merest blade of grass. I would not have expected Trajan Draco to treat the conspirators mildly, but the calm words in which he tells of leaving these men to a terrible death were chilling indeed.

  The voyagers went on. In the bleak southern lands they discovered a race of naked giants—eight feet tall, says Trajan—and captured two to bring back to Roma as curiosities. “They roared like bulls, and cried out to the demons they worshiped. We put them on separate ships, in chains. But they would take no food from us and quickly perished.”

  Through storms and wintry darkness they proceeded poleward, still finding no way west, and even Trajan began now to think they would have to abandon the quest. The sea now was nearly impassable on account of ice: they found another source of the fat flightless birds, though, and set up winter camp on shore, remaining for three months, which greatly depleted their stores of food. But when in weather that was fairer, though still quite inhospitable, they decided finally to go on, they came almost at once to what is now known as the Strait of Trajan near the continent’s uttermost point. Trajan sent one of his captains in to investigate, and he found it narrow but deep, with a strong tidal flow, and salty water throughout: no river, but a way across to the Western Sea!

  The trip through the strait was harrowing, past needle-sharp rocks, through impenetrable mists, over water that surged and boiled from one wall of the channel to another. But green trees now appeared, and the lights of the natives’ campfires, and before long they emerged in the other sea: “The sky was wondrously blue, the clouds were fleecy, the waves were no more than rippling wavelets, burnished by the brilliant sun.” The scene was so peaceful that Trajan gave the new sea the name of Pacificus, on account of its tranquility.

  His plan now was to sail due west, for it seemed likely to him then, entering into this uncharted sea, that Cipangu and Khitai must lie only a short distance in that direction. Nor did he desire to venture northward along the continent’s side because that would bring him to the territory of the belligerent Peruvians, and his five ships would be no match for an entire empire.

  But an immediate westward course proved impossible because of contrary winds and eastward-bearing currents. So northward he went anyway, for a time, staying close to shore and keeping a wary eye out for Peruvians. The sun was harshly bright in the cloudless sky, and there was no rain. When finally they could turn to the west again, the sea was utterly empty of islands and looked vast beyond all imagining. By night strange stars appeared, notably five brilliant ones arranged like a cross in the heavens. The remaining food supply dwindled rapidly; attempts at catching fish proved useless, and the men ate chips of wood and mounds of sawdust, and hunted down the rats that infested the holds. Water was rationed to a single sip a day. The risk now was not so much another mutiny as out-and-out starvation.

  They came then to some small islands, finally: poor ones, where nothing grew but stunte
d, twisted shrubs. But there were people there too, fifteen or twenty of them, simple naked people who painted themselves in stripes. “They greeted us with a hail of stones and arrows. Two of our men were slain. We had no choice but to kill them all. And then, since there was no food to be found on the island except for a few pitiful fishes and crabs that these people had caught that morning and nothing of any size or substance was to be had off shore, we roasted the bodies of the dead and ate those, for otherwise we would surely have died of hunger.”

  I cannot tell you how many times I read and reread those lines, hoping to find that they said something other than what they did. But they always were the same.

  In the fourth month of the journey across the Pacificus other islands appeared, fertile ones, now, whose villagers grew dates of some sort from which they made bread, wine, and oil, and also had yams, bananas, coconuts, and other such tropical things with which we are now so familiar. Some of these islanders were friendly to the mariners, but most were not. Trajan’s journal becomes a record of atrocities. “We killed them all; we burned their village as an example to their neighbors; we loaded our ships with their produce.” The same phrases occur again and again. There is not a word of apology or regret. It was as if by tasting human flesh they had turned into monsters themselves.

  Beyond these islands was more emptiness—Trajan saw now that the Pacificus was an ocean whose size was beyond all comprehension, compared with which even the Ocean Sea was a mere lake—and then, after another disheartening trek of many weeks, came the discovery of the great island group that we call the Augustines, seven thousand islands large and small, stretching in a huge arc across more than a thousand miles of the Pacificus. “A chieftain came to us, a majestic figure with markings drawn on his face and a skirt of cotton fringed with silk; he carried a javelin and a dagger of bronze encrusted with gold, a shield that also sparkled with the yellow metal, and he wore earrings, armlets, and bracelets of gold likewise.” His people offered spices—cinnamon, cloves, ginger, nutmeg, mace—in exchange for the simple trinkets the Romans had brought, and also rubies, diamonds, pearls, and nuggets of gold. “My purpose was fulfilled,” Trajan wrote. “We had found a fabulous new empire in the midst of this immense sea.”

  Which they proceeded to conquer in the most brutal fashion. Though in the beginning the Romans had peaceful relations with the natives of the Augustines, demonstrating hourglasses and compasses to them and impressing them by having their ships’ guns fired and by staging mock gladiatorial games in which men in armor fought against men with tridents and nets, things quickly went wrong. Some of Trajan’s men, having had too much of the date wine to drink, fell upon the island women and possessed them with all the zeal that men who have not touched a woman’s breasts for close upon a year are apt to show. The women, Trajan relates, appeared willing enough at first; but his men treated them with such shameful violence and cruelty that objections were raised, and then quarrels broke out as the island men came to defend their women (some of whom were no more than ten years old), and in the end there was a bloody massacre, culminating in the murder of the noble island chieftain.

  This section of the journal is unbearable to read. On the one hand it is full of fascinating detail about the customs of the islanders, how pigs are sacrificed by old women who caper about blowing reed trumpets and smear the blood of the sacrifice on the foreheads of the men, and how males of all ages have their sexual organs pierced from one side to the other with a gold or tin bolt as large as a goose quill, and so on and on with many a strange detail that seems to have come from another world. But interspersed amongst all this is the tale of the slaughter of the islanders, the inexorable destruction of them under one pretext or another, the journey from isle to isle, the Romans always being greeted in peace but matters degenerating swiftly into rape, murder, looting.

  Yet Trajan appears unaware of anything amiss here. Page after page, in the same calm, steady tone, describes these horrors as though they were the natural and inevitable consequence of the collision of alien cultures. My own reactions of shock and dismay, as I read them, made it amazingly clear to me how different our era is from his, and how very little like a Renaissance man I actually am. Trajan saw the crimes of his men as unfortunate necessities at the worst; I saw them as monstrous. And I came to realize that one profound and complex aspect of the decadence of our civilization is our disdain for violence of this sort. We are Romans still; we abhor disorder and have not lost our skill at the arts of war; but when Trajan Draco can speak so blandly of retaliating with cannons against an attack with arrows, or of the burning of entire villages in retribution for a petty theft from one of our ships, or the sating of his men’s lust on little girls because they were unwilling to take the time to seek out their older sisters, I could not help but feel that there is something to be said in favor of our sort of decadence.

  During these three days and nights of steady reading of the journals I saw no one, neither Spiculo nor the Caesar nor any of the women with whom I have allayed the boredom of my years in Sicilia. I read on and on and on, until my head began to swim, and I could not stop, horrified though I often was.

  Now that the empty part of the Pacificus was behind them, one island after another appeared, not only the myriad Augustines, but others farther to the west and south, multitudes of them; for although there is no continent in this ocean, there are long chains of islands, many of them far larger than our Britannia and Sicilia. Over and over I was told of the boats ornamented with gold and peacock feathers bearing island chieftains offering rich gifts, or of horned fish and oysters the size of sheep and trees whose leaves, when they fall to the ground, will rise on little feet and go crawling away, and kings called rajahs who could not be addressed face to face, but only through speaking tubes in the walls of their palaces. Isles of spices, isles of gold, isles of pearls—marvel after marvel, and all of them now seized and claimed by the invincible Roman Emperor in the name of eternal Roma.

  Then, finally, these strange island realms gave way to familiar territory: for now Asia was in sight, the shores of Khitai. Trajan made landfall there, exchanged gifts with the Khitaian sovereign, and acquired from him those Khitaian experts in the arts of printing and gunpowder-making and the manufacture of fine porcelains whose skills, brought back by him to Roma, gave such impetus to this new era of prosperity and growth that we call the Renaissance.

  He went on to India and Arabia afterward, loading his ships with treasure there as well, and down one side of Africa and up the other. It was the same route as all our previous far voyages, but done this time in reverse.

  Trajan knew once he had rounded Africa’s southernmost cape that the spanning of the globe had been achieved, and he hastened onward toward Europa, coming first to Lusitania’s southwestern tip, then coasting along southern Hispania until he returned with his five ships and their surviving crew to the mouth of the River Baetis and, soon after, to the starting point at Sevilla. “These are mariners who surely merit an eternal fame,” he concluded, “more justly than the Argonauts of old who sailed with Jason in search of the golden fleece. For these our wonderful vessels, sailing southwards through the Ocean Sea toward the Antarctic Pole, and then turning west, followed that course so long that, passing round, we came into the east, and thence again into the west, not by sailing back, but by proceeding constantly forward: so compassing about the globe of the world, until we marvelously regained our native land of Hispania, and the port from which we departed, Sevilla.”

  There was one curious postscript. Trajan had made an entry in his journal for each day of the voyage. By his reckoning, the date of his return to Sevilla was the ninth day of Januarius in 2282; but when he went ashore, he was told that the day was Januarius the tenth. By sailing continuously westward around the world, they had lost a day somewhere. This remained a mystery until the astronomer Macrobius of Alexandria pointed out that the time of sunrise varies by four minutes for each degree of longitude, and so the variation
for a complete global circuit of three hundred sixty degrees would be 1,440 minutes, or one full day. It was the clearest proof, if anyone had dared to doubt Trajan’s word, that the fleet had sailed entirely around the world to reach the strange new isles of that unknown sea. And by so doing had unlocked a treasure chest of wonders that the great Emperor would fully exploit in the two decades of absolute power that remained to him before his death at the age of eighty.

  And did I, having gained access at last to the key document of the reign of Trajan VII, set immediately about the task of finishing my account of his extraordinary life?