Pedro's Journal

Pedro de Salcedo is fourteen and works as a ship's boy aboard the Niña on Columbus's 1492 Atlantic crossing — close enough to the crew to hear their fears, young enough to keep recording when the men have given up hope. Conrad writes in the voice of a child who understands what he is witnessing only gradually: the first signs of land, the confusion of encounter, the questions that have no answers yet. The voyage sailed under Spanish commission, but it left from shores shaped by the same Portuguese navigational tradition that made Lisbon the center of fifteenth-century exploration.