The Curse of Sea And Land

Chapter 1: Birth of the Wolf.

The only story that treats the birth and early childhood of Don Santiago López y Viguera was recorded in 1715 by José Martín de Noyola, who named the narrative 'The Birth of the Wolf' in his manuscript. This account is one of many that claimed that López was actually a female. The story places her age at 30 when she vanished in the Atlantic "five years past", and claims that she was born on St. Anne's Day, which is July 26. Therefore, her birthdate is surmised to be July 26, 1680. Her father, named Ignacio in the story, was a shipwright who repaired boats in the harbor in San Juan, Puerto Rico. As Noyola tells it:

"This was how I heard the story: I went down to where the Dulcia was harbored at Santo Domingo, and sat with an old sailor who was watching as it was loaded with its goods. Upon my admittedly tiresome questioning, he said to me roughly, 'Young man, why should I tell you about Don Santiago, who went to his final judgment these five years past? What can I say, other than he was truly no man? A woman, she was; daughter of a shipwright called Ignacio. Of that I have no doubt. Thirty years was too long for her on the earth.'

'Where did this Ignacio reside?' I asked.

'The harbor of San Juan,' said the venerable old sailor. 'An honest man; his father was a shipwright before him, and his father's father.'

'And what of Don Santiago's mother?'

'She died giving birth to the child.' The sailor pointed upwards at the sky, as if to silently signify the mother's piety to me, and her heavenly reward, in direct opposition, it seemed to me, of where he expected her ill-fated child to be. 'The child was born on St. Anne's Day. They say that the child's father was filled with grief at the death of his wife, and forgot to have a priest baptize the child. Her true Christian name is unknown, the Lord only knows if she ever had one. They say that that is why she was cursed from the start.'

What he said about the child not being baptized could well have been true. I found no record of a SantiagoLópez in the baptismal records of the churches in San Juan, or any López born on or within days of St. Anne's Day. Perhaps, without a mother to nurse, they expected that the child would not survive. 'But surely, someone must have nursed the child?'

'That is not part of my story,' the sailor snapped, shaking his wrinkled finger in my face. 'This child was not like the others; as honest as her father was, he was poor and could not think being able to scrounge up a decent dowry to marry her off. And yet, when his grief passed, he desired to keep his child. So he raised her as he would have raised a son and taught her the art of shipbuilding and the ways of the sea. But one day, he was struck with fever and died when his child was fourteen. With nowhere else to go, she disguised herself and sought a place on the ships that passed to and fro in San Juan's port. The first ship that took her on was the unfortunate La Serena. On her very first trip, the ship was wrecked off of Cornuall [Cornwall], swept off course by a terrible storm. None survived, save for López.'

'The mermaids?'

'So the story says. The child made for a most beautiful boy and they were enamored, to the point where they implored the sea, their lord and home, to destroy the ship and deliver this boy to them. Yet somehow he made his way from that wreck to Seville, and was soon on the Malaspina headed for Veracruz. It, too, was lost before it even reached its destination. Every ship López boarded was wrecked or sunk.'

When I returned to San Juan, I scoured all of the documents available on the Serena and the Malaspina, which were the only two of the rumored ten ships, which López' curse had caused to sink, to be named in any account. I confirmed that the first had indeed been sunk off the Islas Sorlingas, and the second had been lost near la Florida, as the old sailor had intimated to me. Yet the list of sailors and passengers was, to my great frustration, lost."

The records from La Casa de Contratación in Seville indicate that the ship La Serena was indeed lost in 1695, matching the timeline given to us by Noyola's storyteller. The ship was blown off course by freak winds, and was finally destroyed by a storm that swept it into the "Islas Sorlingas", or the Isles of Scilly, which were already infamous as the site of many previous shipwrecks. The Spanish, of course, were unable to recover anything lost in the wreck, as their bitter rivals, the English, would have had something to say about that. The same records show that the Malaspina had managed to successfully make its way across the Atlantic before being struck by a startling sudden hurricane in the Caribbean. The contents of the wreck were later salvaged by Spanish explorer Hernando Chavez, who, it is said, learned of the location of the wreck from López herself.


The first time it happened, Santana awoke to the sound of singing. The song was nothing like any tune she had ever heard before, in a throaty, strong voice.

There was a throbbing pain in her side – yes, she remembered a sharp piece of wreckage embedding itself in her side as the ship was smashed to bits before her darkening eyes . Her mouth was dry and gritty, nothing like the sand beneath her, which was wet and sticky – meaning that the tide had not gone out yet. As if on cue, the water rushed back in and filled her mouth with sea foam, effectively shaking her out of the daze she was in.

"Good, you're awake. I can't stay out here much longer." It was not Spanish, it did not sound like Spanish in such a strange voice, or any language Santana knew, really – but she understood it all the same. She tried to open her eyes, and was temporarily blinded by the sting of the salt water blended with the high sun's glare.

"Who are you?" Santana croaked, her voice parched. "Who are you?"

"I have to go," the voice replied.

Santana thought she felt a cool, wet hand pressing against her cheek, but then it was gone. She finally succeeded in opening her eyes this time and scrambled to a drier patch of sand so that she could wobble to her feet. But when her eyes finally regained focus, she saw nothing but a glimmer of gold against the waves breaking against the craggy shoreline.

She was several thousand miles away from anything familiar or friendly – and her only thought was that she had to return to the sea, if only to find out who had rescued her.

The second time it happened, she was still conscious enough to feel strong arms pulling her from the morass of the shipwreck, while valiantly trying to keep Santana's head above water until they reached a sandbar. Santana crawled onto the driest patch of sand within reach and turned her bleary gaze around to look for her rescuer.

"It's you again. We should stop meeting like this," a familiar voice chirps, and Santana's heart seizes up in her chest.

"I found you," she says, and her voice rises sharply. "I found you!"

The reply is tinged with amusement. "Do you always have to say things twice?"

She was reclining in the surf, naked – or what Santana could see of her, anyway. Her hair was gold, but brighter than the gold that she'd seen in the ship cargoes headed for to Spain. Behind the golden curtain of hair were two bright blue gemstones of eyes, crinkling at the edge as she smiled guilelessly at Santana. She looks barely older than Santana herself. "Who are you and what are you called?"

"Sant—Santiago."

The mysterious girl frowns. "That's not your name."

Santana scowls. "Who says it isn't?"

"Because that is a boy's name, and you are not a boy. You're too pretty to be a boy, so you are clearly a girl. I can see you. Who are you really?"

"Tell me who you are, and I'll tell you who I am."

For a moment, the mysterious girl hesitated, and then slowly lifted herself out of the water into a standing position. Her legs were clothed in a lacy pattern of sargassum –legs that she apparently did not have much experience using, as she stumbled with the onrushing tide. Without thinking, Santana rushed forward to support her, catching her around her bare waist.

The girl leaned forward and whispered in Santana's ear, "Bertaèyn." And then she stilled, her cool hands loosely wrapped around Santana's shoulders, waiting for Santana's response.

"Santana. That is my name."

With a happy smile, the other girl suddenly slipped like a fish from Santana's grasp and bounded towards the water. "I knew it. I will see you again, Santana!" she cried, before plunging into the water and disappearing.

The third time it happened, Santana was a little more prepared, and escaped the doomed ship on a lifeboat before it could sink. She had repeated the name over and over in her head until it morphed into something completely unrecognizable. Bertaèyn. Bretaña. Brittany. The name, spoken in that voice that could not really be bound to any language, now sounded like treasonous English in her head; and that was unpatriotic, to say the least.

Her lifeboat ran aground on a coral reef, but the water was shallow enough for her to swim to a rocky outcropping without much trouble. As she climbed up to it, someone was already there, sitting with her back to Santana.

"Oh, it's you," Brittany said cheerfully, and in all honesty, Santana should have been prepared for the fish's tail that flicked towards her in greeting. It glittered like newly minted coin under the light.

Santana grips at the rock beneath her. "Was it you, then, who cursed all of the ships I was on?"

"I am the sea's," the mermaid replied placidly, "and the sea is mine. So, yes. I did this because I want to see you."

"Why would you want to see me?" Santana burst out, without really thinking. "You healed me the first time – I know it was you – and you have been following me and sinking every ship I have been on. That's three of them, now. If everyone knew I survived three wrecks, they would either call me a miracle or call me accursed. And sailors are too superstitious to call me a miracle, especially if they knew I am not a boy...isn't your job to enchant sailors into the water and drown them?"

Brittany looked over her shoulder at Santana for a long moment before patting the flat patch of rock next to her. "Sit with me. I give you my word I will not harm you."

"You have harmed me enough," Santana grumbled. "And how am I to trust a mermaid's word?"

"Have you ever heard a mermaid give anyone their word? No? Then you see we don't give our word lightly. Come here."

Despite her better judgment, Santana slowly crawled over and sits down next to Brittany. Brittany placed her pale, slender hand in the small space of rock between them. Santana averted her gaze and looks down at her own raw, brown hands, trying not to think too much. Brittany broke the silence first. "You're not as happy to see me as I am to see you."

"Forgive me if I don't understand why you need to wreck every ship I am on in order for us to see each other."

"But surely you wanted to see me, or else you would never keep returning to the sea." The mermaid said this with the utmost certainty, and Santana scowled darkly, annoyed at being read so easily. "The sea is both nurturing and destructive in its nature. So I must be, too. I couldn't save you without leaving others to die. It is not my way."

"You saved me," Santana said, and it was not a question. She knew the truth of it.

Brittany nodded. "You were at death's door, that first time. And you would have died, if not for me. I could have left you alone, but I didn't…I couldn't bring myself to leave. That's why I had to leave so suddenly when you awoke. I had been away from the water too long…and then," she added with a bright smile, "I decided that I wanted to see you again."

"Yes, I did," Santana suddenly ground out. "I did return to the sea after that. To find you, to seek you out. I think I always knew who – what – you were, even before now. I thought that perhaps you had cursed me. But that didn't stop me. It wouldn't stop me."

"Would you stop seeking me, now that you know my name and what I am?"

Santana looked up at her – it was a mistake. Brittany's startlingly blue eyes would have accepted only one response. A response that Santana knew she would have given anyway. There was no escape.

"No."

The fourth time it happened, the ship was sunk off the Barbary Coast. The ship's navigator and several of the other sailors had pointed their fingers at her, shrieking, "The devil! The devil!" right before a wave rushed up the side of the wounded ship and swept them away.

When she met Brittany on an abandoned Maltese beach, she sat silent and angry as Brittany moved to take her hand. She jerked away from the sympathetic gesture and stormed off, but she knew that Brittany knew that she would return.

The fifth time it happened, people had already begun to notice that certain disaster seemed to follow the fresh-faced young man with the browned skin and thick dark hair everywhere he went. At the first ship Santana inquired at, the captain turned a nasty eye towards her and scoffed. "We'd sink this ship ourselves before we'd let you board it," and waved her away curtly. The people witness to this small confrontation whispered amongst themselves; Santana heard them all too well as she passed them.

"That's him! Santiago López!"

"He looks so young. He hasn't even a beard!"

"I hear every ship he boards is cursed to sink to the bottom of the ocean, because he would have died as an infant had not his father struck a deal with the Devil to save his son's life."

The only option left open to Santana, then, was to stow away.

She snuck onto a smuggler's ship, which had the great misfortune of being stopped, raided, and then scuttled by an English naval warship near Nassau. Santana was captured and dragged to the deck with the other surviving smugglers, whose eyes widened in fear at the sight of her. They whispered, "Ha! So you're here too, maldito! Do us a favor and rid us of this English warship too, won't you, boy?"

The British officer shouted something in English, possibly to shut them up – when Santana turned to spit at him, a booted foot shot out and kicked her in the stomach. She gasped for air and crumped — the moment her body hit the deck, gale-force winds suddenly struck the side of the ship and the pulled a dark curtain of clouds across the previously bright blue sky. The smugglers shrieked, "Shouldn't have kicked the boy, you English dogs! This is it! The Devil's coming for our souls!"

As the storm descended upon the ship, Santana took advantage of the general confusion to break free and make her escape. Without even looking back, she leapt over the railing and dove into the violently churning water, knowing that someone was there and ready to meet her. The waves pulled her to a safe distance from the foundering vessel, and her hand closed around another familiar hand that led her away.


Noyola records several narratives, both of English and Spanish origin, that claim that "El Maldito López" (or the "Demon Boy-Spaniard", as the later English stories called him) was responsible for the sinking of a Royal Navy ship, which a day's sail from Nassau. The Spanish ones, Noyola claims, are more contemporary than the English ones, which are unsurprisingly bitterer in tone. Noyola writes:

"The English paid no notice of the growing notoriety of Santiago López until well after the sinking of one of their Navy's ships, which, as it is told, captured and sank the smuggler's vessel on which López was a stowaway. Desperate and facing certain death, the surviving smugglers begged López to save them by calling upon 'the Devil who follows your shadow' to sink the English ship, so as to avoid execution. This López agreed to, and almost immediately a storm descended upon the mighty ship and it was swamped, yet none of the British sailors or the remaining smugglers lived to tell the tale. Only López, of course, escaped.

Yet the English did not hear of López until the above story was spread amongst the smugglers in Trinidad; English smugglers repeated the story until it reached the ears of an English Royal Navy Lieutenant, William Harrison, who was the first in the English navy to hear the name and spread it as a harmless piece of folklore."

Upon inspection of the records of the Royal Navy, one will find the record of the HMS Essex, reportedly lost at sea in 1697 while patrolling the Bahamian coastline. Almost nothing is known of the aforementioned Lt. William Harrison, who seems to have had an unremarkable naval career. He died in 1712 and is buried in Lancashire, England.


The sixth time it happened, it was a Portuguese galleon that met its watery end – and Santana awoke with her head resting in the neat, elegant coil of Brittany's fish-tail. This time she ached all over; her lips were cool and tingling.

"I kissed you," Brittany said matter-of-factly. "It saved you. You almost died again."

"Wouldn't have happened if you didn't sink the ship," Santana retorted weakly. She squeezed her eyes shut against the screams of the doomed sailors still ringing in her ear. If the Portuguese sailors still didn't know about her, they would soon. "Why do you keep doing that?"

"Why do you keep sailing?" Brittany replied calmly.

Santana knew that their answers were the same: I wanted to see you. "I wanted to see you," Brittany said, gazing at Santana thoughtfully. Santana swallowed painfully as pale fingers threaded into her tangled, salt-caked hair, and drifted down to the browned skin of her neck.

The seventh time it happened, after the Spanish frigate she was on under an assumed name smashed into the reef near the Dry Tortugas, Santana worked up the nerve to say it back.


Noyola expressed his doubts as to the veracity of the accounts that said Santiago López was responsible for the sinking of ten ships in the span of two years, from 1695 to 1697. However, almost everyone he approached with this question was in agreement that López was on all ten of those ships, and that his presence was the deciding factor that caused their sinking. When he asked them how López managed to survive all ten:

"The majority believes, and this is reflected in the sheer number of stories I have recorded that say thus, that Santiago López found favor with the merpeople that roam the open seas, and they were enamored of him. Yet I also heard an account from an old ship's pilot in Veracruz that claimed that López actively sought the mermaids' company, and they would summon storms to destroy the ships he was on so that they might spend some time alone with him. 'They are destructive in their nature,' he said to me, 'and for every time they saved López from a wreck, they would exact the price of several dozen souls, or more, as the case may be.'

'So López continued to seek out the mermaids, even with this condition?' I asked.

'He loved a mermaid,' the pilot said to me. 'Any man who loves a mermaid is most accursed, or simply, absolutely mad.'"