On Useppa

"The old man unhooked the fish, re-baited the line with another sardine and tossed it over.  Then he worked his way slowly back to the bow.  He washed his left hand wiped it on his trousers.  Then he shifted the heavy line from his right hand to his left and washed his right hand in the sea while he watched the sun go into the ocean and the slant of the big cord." Old Man and the Sea




The great sun god was falling onto the flat blue line in the horizon which left the careened ship El Capitan inside a bristle of dying light, a great long shadow of the fallen mast a sliver across the beach pointing toward the Calusa, as they peered up over the forty foot ridge which lined Useppa Island.

There were not many men on the beach at this point.  They could not have known this themselves, but there was only a skeleton crew left of the Spanish treasure ship, the rest having been sent off with the accompanying galleon on its way back home to the Iberian peninsula for more sturdy supplies and yet another ship for transport, for the El Capitan had been badly damaged on the shoals of the western Florida coast.  The young Calusa warrior pointed out that now that they were closer they could see an enormous hole that had formed on the direct bottom of hull of the great wooden house on water.  All seafaring peoples – and the Calusa, being born onto the sea from an ancient age, were a pure seafaring people – understood immediately the real crisis of a broken boat.  The thirty-five warriors all noticed one other thing that left them with their eyes widened: piled along the upper shoreline in barrel after barrel were the silver trinkets that they had come to recognize from previous accidents of the

foreigners.  The initial thoughts of the men, because this particular tribe had not come in personal contact with the foreigners in strange hats themselves, was to barter shells for the silver trinkets.  Yet something else had come over them from their perch there in the dying sun – they must approach with caution and with only a partial showing of their numbers in case these men were desperate or if they carried with them some ill-will, as had been heard in distant stories of contact from the past.  The

young Calusa, now feeling himself back in charge, and more willing to convey patience if that was what was being asked, gestured to the eight fiercest of the indian warriors and ducked and weaved inside the shadows now formed by the Cabbage Palm and Saw Palmetto, until, in only a few short moments, they moved in upon the foreign men working diligently at a night fire and stirring what looked like paltry sustenance in a pot.  The first man to see the Calusa reached quickly for sword, but another, his first mate, held his own hand down and nodded toward the spearhead of the indian and said aloud in Spanish "peace." Neither understood one another; they could only dictate their next actions based on the universal body language of fight, flight or come in peace.  The Indian quickly demonstrated his pouch of shells and scooped his hand into the back and let many of the whelks and sand dollars fall to the sand.  Useful and valuable to the Calusa, the shells of course meant nothing to

the Spaniards and a sort of smirk fell over the group of Conquistadors, the very smirk that probably lifted them fairly shortly from their lives.  Another man shot a cross bow into the shoulder of the indian. His bag dropped suddenly to the sand.  "They are after the silver!" the man said and traced another arrow into his bow.  This would be all that it took.  The Spanish were ultimately outnumbered.  The Calusa from behind the ridge were accurate to within an inch of whatever they laid aim upon and within minutes the large dark foreign men lay on the beach.  The ship merely waved back and forth  to the waves.  The sun had sunk but a fire had begun to blaze and threw sparkling stars over the ton of Brazilian silver which sat at the corner of the scene like nothing more than the silent spectator it was.