The Year the Island Burned

Hear now what the sea did, in the year seventeen-thirty — and what, being the sea, it did not trouble itself to say.
In the last week of March they sailed from Santa Cruz — the harbor that had thrown the English back to their boats the year the harness-maker’s son was born — and the islands went down behind the stern: blue, and then grey, and then not there.
A ship is a town the sea has agreed, for a while, to carry.
They lived in it the way the poor live anywhere — close, and patient, and praying — six weeks of water with no road in it.
The sea fed them its long sameness, and took, in its turn, its toll: a fever in the hold; a grave with no ground to it; a wrapped weight over the side, and the water closing flat.
They raised Havana in the wet heat of May — a Spanish city, loud, and alive, and entirely indifferent to them — and Havana was Spain, and Havana was safe, and Havana was enough for the families who looked hard at the long road still to come and chose, instead, to stay. The rest went on. The ship rode lighter.
And here is the thing the sea knew, and kept to itself: that while they took the fever-coast of Veracruz, far behind them

Lanzarote had split along its belly and begun to burn — and would burn six years — and half that party were Lanzarote’s, with the name of that island in their mouths for the word home.
They did not know it yet. The news would cross the water slowly.
They had sailed from a house already, even then, taking fire — and would come to learn it inland, in a country with no sea at all.
So — ten families. Four single men. One harness-maker.
The crossing thinned them, and did not stop them.
They went on.