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how much each one had been paid. Leonardo Vince was not on the list. Somewhere between the time the Santa Torpedo had left the coast of Spain for America, and the time it had returned, he had disappeared.
    I decided to start at the beginning of the log and
work my way through it. I didn’t have to translate every word. Usually after the first few words of an entry, I could tell that it had nothing to do with Leonardo. Every little thing had been written down. All the spare canvas, all the spare wood for repairs, the food, the cloth, the number of chickens in the chicken coop on the deck, the number of pigs down below, the bottles of wine for the captain, it was all spelled out. Whoever wrote that log seemed to be interested mainly in how much everything cost.
    Still, I began to get a sense of what it was like on that ship. And with the wind roaring over the tent, whistling in the ropes, I had fun pretending that I was right there on board. I knew what the sailors ate every day, and I knew how fast the ship went, and whether the water was stormy or calm. I saw a word that translated as “overboard,” and I got worried about Leonardo. It would be a horrible waste if the great man simply fell over the side one day. Also, our journey to his final resting place would end up uncomfortably watery. But when I translated the whole entry, I found out that it was one of the chickens that went overboard. The cook had been about to cut its head off on the railing, when a gust of wind ripped the chicken out of the cook’s hands and tossed it into the ocean. At first I felt sorry for the chicken, but then I decided that a chicken
stood a better chance in the Atlantic Ocean than in a cook’s pot.
    I skimmed along, munching celery sticks as I worked, translating a word here and a phrase there to get a sense of what was happening on deck. A few hours later and about a quarter of the way through the log, I ran into an entry that was so interesting I put my celery stick down on the table and translated the passage very carefully, word for word. It went like this: “Six good iron rods ruined. One of the men caught entertaining the aft cabin by bending them with his bare hands. When ordered to do so, couldn’t bend them back perfectly straight. Denied rations that evening as punishment.” I remembered that when Leonardo was a boy, he used to do the same trick with iron rods to impress his friends.
    Until that moment, I had been doubtful about my dad’s theory. I could see a lot of coincidences stacking up, but I wasn’t sure that the Leonardo Vince on that ship was really the same as Leonardo da Vinci. Now I felt more certain. Who else would do such a thing? And poor Leonardo, sent to his bed without dinner. I felt sorry for him. He was only trying to amuse the other sailors. I thought about waking up my dad and showing him the passage, but he was still sound asleep snoring on the other side of the tent. I figured I could tell him later; there was no hurry.

    I turned back to the manuscript and continued to skim through the entries, but for a long time I didn’t find anything else interesting. No mention of the Italian sailor. Finally I found the part where the ship reached land. I didn’t understand the nautical notation, but I guessed that my father had deciphered the numbers. He already knew that the ship had landed just north of Manhattan. The first day after the ship reached America, a group of six men rowed ashore, explored a little bit, shot some deer and a squirrel for food, and rowed back to the ship. The next day they sailed a mile down the coast and tried again. They were looking for a river or a stream, so they could fill up their water casks with fresh water.
    The entry for the third day of land exploration went like this: “V. of shore party, disappeared into forest, not seen again. Men searched two hours, no sign. Captain’s opinion, jumped ship. First Mate’s opinion,