The Western Passage (Paperback)

The idea was right. The ship was wrong.

Genoa, 1291. Everything the Indies produce comes west through a chain of hands, and every hand takes its cut. Ugolino Vivaldi, a merchant who can read the weight of a cargo from the way the porters carry it, means to go round the chain by sea: out through the Strait, down the coast of Africa, and the first hull in "pays nothing to anybody."

He is given two galleys, the best ships Genoa builds, and a galley pays for what she can do in men. A hundred and fifty-one souls sail in each hull, and a man at the oar in the July heat needs ten rotoli of water a day.

In the ship's book the scrivano, Nicoloso da Voltri, turns the men into casks and the casks into days: water every six days, with a day and a half in hand. The biscuit will outlast the water, but the water decides where the ship goes.

For two months the sum holds. The cloth sells above its estimate, and past Safi the landings become beaches with no name in any Genoese book, while the coast keeps running south.

The annal of Genoa follows them as far as a cape called Gozora. They water there on 20 August 1291 with nobody sick, and nothing aboard puts a decision in front of Ugolino.

The Western Passage is told through the books kept aboard, and its chapter headings lose their place names once the ship passes the last port Genoa trades with. Every figure in those books comes back to the one the ship cannot change: how many days she can go from her last water.