ABSTRACT
Although they had captured the pirate captain, they said that the others that had fled had taken up position a little further on at a headland, and we could not pass without encountering them. We therefore decided to put well out to sea and {[f. 381]} to try to pass that spot at night, but then reliable information came that they had returned to their own land, which is opposite Hormuz, inside the strait. And so we embarked and set sail in the last octave before Christmas and had a fair wind until Circumcision Day,1 when such a fierce storm hit us before dawn that it broke our rudder and we almost went down, but the sailors very quickly attended to it <[f. 333v/322v]> and fixed some oars in its place. Since the wind was very strong, however, the vessel did not respond, and so we sailed with serious difficulty until the sun rose, when some fishermen saw us sailing like that and came in an almadie2 and tossed us a rope so as to tow us to land, which was within sight. But the almadie was small and our vessel heavy, so it often slewed round and took the wind on the front of the sail. Thus with great difficulty and danger we reached the shore, where, since it was desert, we could not find anything with which to mend the rudder. So we tied it with ropes and sailed on along the coast to see if we could find some remedy, but at night the wind started blowing off shore so hard that it took us far out to sea, since we could not put any pressure on the rudder, so that when morning came we had lost sight of land. As we tried to sail back to it, the ropes holding the rudder broke and it floated off a good way from the boat. Some sailors immediately jumped into the sea despite the very high waves, since they could see that that was our only hope, and Our Lord saw fit that they should bring it back. They then tied it on again with great difficulty, and we then had a very hard time until we reached land.
