Today we sail away from another event and another city. There’s new people on board and we need to make them feel like at home, because even though for some of us this isn’t our first voyage, for them it’s all new. Soon they’ll learn life aboard a galleon is not what it used to be. Those people who left all behind and sailed over the seas seeking for a better future would look at us kind of awkward. We also want to prosper and find happiness, but when we reach land we don’t think about the possibilities it offers us to start over, we only see the chance to get back in touch with our loved ones and share our experiences.

Everything is correctly stored and the exposition is covered, for three days we won’t have to attend the visitors questions. Unlike they did back in the day, we don’t hold any treasure with which we would pay for our debts, our hold only contains they info panels and atrezzo necessary to turn this ship into a museum.
Food is already listed and the menu ready. Today we will eat a stew even though it’s really sunny, but it’s been a while since we ate legumes. It’s important to have fresh vegetables and lots of other products like frozen meat to have a healthy and happy crew. Luckily we have stores (and in this country they are huge) to buy those things and we don’t depend on what we fish (because we don’t do very well) or what we steal from other ships. Back in the day what we get without effort would mean for them the difference between a successful trip or a failure.

I am not a sailor but I like to sail, I came here looking for history, but that’s something not easy to find. It’s true that feeling the waves against the bow of the ship gets you closer to knowing what it was like being a sailor than by reading all the books in a library. You also see your need to understand satisfied when you are able to speak to a bunch of american kids and one of them seems to be interested in that history that also belongs to them. Or maybe it’s just that you forget about those selfish goals and focus on showing others those same values. To sum up, history is not what books tell you or what you see at museums (or even ship-museums), it’s what you think is important to understand who you are and where you are heading. Even life aboard a galleon without pieces of eight, without a wench as a bow figure or without lashes on the main grating is also that kind of history…maybe not the coolest one, but as authentic as any.

Mateo Domingo Merino.