by Caleb Wygal
Darwin already had a paper cup of steaming coffee sitting in front of him along with his portfolio and a notepad. Lucas poured himself a cup and settled in across from his large friend.
Lucas studied Darwin as he concentrated on studying his notes. It had been over two years since Lucas last saw him. When Darwin left Concord, he was clean-shaven and Lucas questioned his ability to grow facial hair at that point. Nevertheless, he must have developed that in his latter stages of puberty. He now sported a thick, long beard. He looked wiser and more mature. Lucas didn’t know if college life had been good to Darwin, although he looked prepared to face the world.
He remembered Darwin as a quiet kid doing his first job as a busboy for Mahoney’s. He came from a single-parent home. His dad had disappeared when before Darwin reached Kindergarten. His parents had vicious fights before their split where a young, impressionable Darwin had a front-row seat. His mom taught him how to dial 911 when he was three should the arguments turn violent.
Young Darwin ended up calling the number three times before his dad left.
The circumstances of his early years left Darwin shy and reserved. He elected to hang out in the background during class, at lunch and at recesses. That became more difficult as he got older. By the time he was in fourth grade, he wore size thirteen shoes and was taller than all of the teachers in school.
In middle school, football coaches talked him into joining the team. He was larger than every other kid on the squad was, but Darwin found he had no interest in sports, particularly ones involving contact. When the coaches wanted him to get fired up and knock someone on their ass, he remained passive. The years of seeing his dad strike his mom made him abhor violence. He only wanted to keep to himself and read books.
He was a special person, and Lucas knew he had to treat him differently. Darwin finally looked up. Lucas asked, “So, what do you think?”
“The archaeological method isn’t going to work here,” Darwin said, tapping the table with a finger the size of a sausage. “We have no credentials.”
Lucas could tell Darwin had given this a lot of thought during their car ride. “So, what? Give up and go home?”
“No, no. Not at all,” Darwin said, shaking his head. “We just might have to go about things differently.”
“How so?”
Darwin looked at the ceiling and collected his thoughts. “The archaeological method is a set of practices on how to identify and excavate a potential site. I went to the Badlands in Montana the summer before last to work on a stegosaur dig. It is a time consuming process. Here we have two major problems: one is time; the other is that we don’t have a site nailed down.”
Darwin pulled out two copies of Blackbeard’s map and handed one to Lucas.
“My thought is,” Darwin continued while Lucas studied the map, “is to go into Bath and try to talk with the locals, as you said. Maybe see if they have a marina where we could show this to some of the people who trawl these waters. See if they know of an area such as this.”
“Sounds good to me,” Lucas said. At first glance, there was something oddly familiar about the area depicted on the map, but he couldn’t put a finger on it. It really could be one of a thousand places. He couldn’t tell what the scale was. Every inch could depict several miles or several yards. He assumed that if this area was somewhere along the Atlantic seaboard, then true north would be on the right side of the page. He smiled, “Sounds fun”
“Then, if that fails, we hop on a ferry and ride out to Ocracoke Island. That’s where he spent a lot of time during 1718, and had a weeklong party with some other well-known pirates. That’s also where he was killed by Robert Maynard and his men.”
Lucas took a sip of coffee, and sloshed it around in his mouth before swallowing. Not bad, he thought. He could tell it was a cheaper blend S&D made. Still not bad.
The year of 1718 was the height of the Golden Age of Pirates, and Blackbeard was the most notorious of all. Darwin explained that Blackbeard, or Teach as the locals called him, only spent six months in Bath Town after receiving his pardon and before his death. During that time, he married Mary Ormond, built a house, and possibly resumed pirating.
By that summer, piracy reached its peak around the world. The waters of the Atlantic and Caribbean were filled with the blood of innocent sailors, while the holds of many pirate ships were filled with grains, spices, rum, wine, slaves and other valuable trade commodities.
Teach and his crew returned to Bath one day in September with salvage, not plunder, from what they claimed was an abandoned French ship they found at sea. If they had boarded the ship and seized the cargo from the unwilling French crew, that would have violated the pardon. If so, Teach and his crew could hang for the offense.
Tobias Knight, the Collector of Customs, presided over a Vice Admiralty Court to investigate the matter. The court found the ship to be a derelict lost at sea. Twenty hogsheads—or large wooden barrels—of sugar were granted to Knight, sixty were given to Eden and the remainder was left to Teach and his men.
Teach and his crew liked to linger around nearby Ocracoke to watch the ships coming and going from northeast Carolina. While there, he met another well-known pirate, Charles Vane.
Vane had rejected the King’s pardon several months earlier, and was on the run from pirate hunters commissioned by Woodes Rogers, who was the Governor of the Bahamas. One of the pirate hunters was Benjamin Hornigold. Hornigold was Teach’s pirate mentor who accepted the King’s Pardon after Teach struck out on his own.
Vane arrived with other notorious pirates such as “Calico” Jack Rackham, Robert Deal, and Blackbeard’s old first mate, Israel Hinds. Vane’s reason for the trip to North Carolina from the Caribbean was to convince Blackbeard to sail south with him. Teach politely refused the invitation, but hosted the visiting pirates on Ocracoke to a weeklong, rum-soaked party.
One man who wanted to see an end of the plague of piracy upon the settlers and explorers of the New World was Virginia Governor, Alexander Spotswood. He and the other Colonial Governors saw pirating grow to the point that its effect could stifle the growth of the colonies. With the pirate-hunting actions set in motion by Rogers to the south, and the pledge to fight piracy along the American coast, the death of Blackbeard would send a message to pirates everywhere that they were of a dying breed.
Teach’s meeting with Charles Vane on Ocracoke scared Spotswood. If the most feared pirate in the world and Vane merged forces, they would have a fleet large enough to lay siege to that part of the world. Although he was out of his jurisdiction, Spotswood commissioned two British war sloops to seek out and to, figuratively, cut off the head of the face of pirating, which they did, literally, when Blackbeard was beheaded in the battle that followed.
“Then the search for his treasure began,” Darwin finished.
Lucas picked up his copy of the map and studied some more. “And the search continues with us.”
“Yes, and we’re armed with something no one else has: Blackbeard’s actual treasure map.”
Lucas set the map aside and worked on connecting his tablet to the Wi-Fi in the lobby. Once accomplished, he started the Maps program and searched for “Bath, NC.”
The application pulled up a wide view with Bath centered. Lucas zoomed in until the small town filled most of the screen. Lucas compared the image with the treasure map.
“There is some resemblance,” Lucas said after a minute.
“How so?” Darwin asked with a measure of excitement in his voice. Were they on to something already? He hoped it would be that easy.
“The shape of the bottom of the island Blackbeard sketched out is similar to the layout of Bath. Bath is obviously not an island like what was drawn, and the mainland is at a different angle as well.”
“What about the half-moon or sun drawn on the left side of the island? What do you think of that?”
Lucas scratched his head. “If what is drawn is one of those, and we can only assume that, then it can’t be a sunrise. If you
are out in Bath Creek on the eastern part of town looking back to the west, then it looks as though the sun would set over the town. It doesn’t look like, however, that there’s a big area in which to do that.”
“Ok, so it may or not be a map of Bath,” Darwin said.
“Looks that way. If Blackbeard was familiar with that area when he drew the map, then I imagine he would have drawn it more like this,” Lucas said pointing down at the tablet, “with place names, landmarks, and references.”
“And we also have no way of knowing when this map was made.”
“Yeah, it could have been at any point during his two years as a pirate.”
To think that Blackbeard’s rise to infamy took fewer than twenty-four months was staggering considering the time in which he lived. Today, with the rise of social media, news and rumors can be reported in the amount of time it takes to compose a 140-character Tweet. It doesn't matter if the news is about war breaking out in the Middle East or someone's aunt getting a new cat. News is instant and can spread across the globe in a matter of seconds.
In the early 18th century, the speed in which news traveled was only as fast as the fastest runner, horse, or ship. An Indian attack in the north would take weeks for word to travel to the southern colonies. For pirates, their reputation took months to spread. And spread across the world it did. Sailors, merchantmen, and ship captains quickly learned of the scourge that was Blackbeard. He and his fleet had the ability to shut down entire ports and the shipment of goods. Vital goods to the growth of the New World.
He wasn't alone. Other well-known pirates such as "Calico" Jack Rackham, Anne Bonny, and Charles Vane did their part to hamper the growth of North and South America. They would float along well-traveled shipping lanes of the Caribbean and Atlantic, and attack any ship they thought might have plunder.
During the Golden Age of Pirating from 1715-1722, pirates made the transportation of anything a dangerous venture. This didn't just take place in the Americas. Other, more successful, pirates plied the waters of the Indian and Pacific Oceans. They did their part to place a dent in the spice and fabric trade.
There was something about Blackbeard, however, that captured people’s attention. Something sinister. Something intriguing. For word of him to reach around the world as fast as it did, that told Lucas he must have been talked about by every sailor, captain, passenger and officer who sailed the high seas at that time.
"Yeah, two years sounds about right," Lucas said after a minute.
"I wish I had more time to research him further before we came out here."
Lucas shook his head. "It's okay. At least you conveniently had this week off anyway.” He stopped and then asked, "What were you going to do on your vacation?"
Darwin gave him a blank look. "I didn't really have anything planned. Not much I can do really with just a moped and no money."
"What about your family? Think about going home to see them?"
"I haven't spoken to mom since my sophomore year."
"Why's that?"
He hesitated before answering. "She called to tell me she was moving."
7
Darwin revealed the news without a trace of emotion.
"Oh, where to?" Lucas asked.
"Wyoming."
"Wyoming? Why there?"
He scratched his chin and looked up at the ceiling. "She said she'd met some cowboy ranch hand on a dating website for farmers and was going to go live with him."
Lucas gave Darwin an incredulous look. “A dating website for farmers? When was your mom ever on a farm?”
“Never that I know of. The closest she came to a farm was the produce section at the grocery store,” Darwin said. “Just one day, she called, said she was leaving. Good luck.”
"Wow. Just like that?"
"Just like that," he said. "That was the last I heard from her. She didn't say where exactly she was going, leave a telephone number, or anything."
"Man, I'm sorry to hear that, Darwin," Lucas said.
He knew Darwin's father left him and his mom when he was a small child. Now, he's had both of his parents desert him. Lucas still had both of his parents. He couldn't imagine having neither of them, and to have them leave in the manner in which Darwin's parents left. Poor guy.
Lucas took another sip of coffee and then asked, "What about your friends? Anyone there you could visit?"
Another sad shake of the head. "Don't have many of those either," Darwin admitted. "I kept to myself in school mostly. I think my size kept classmates from wanting to talk to me."
Lucas studied Darwin from across the table. He dwarfed the chair and table in which they sat. Lucas was well above average height himself, about six-foot, three inches. Darwin made Lucas feel small. Darwin’s dark skin was almost the same color as his long, bushy beard, and his hair was unkempt. His t-shirt had a few holes around the collar and sleeves. He wore a pair of horn-rimmed glasses with thick lenses that he’d probably had since middle school.
When Darwin walked across campus, Lucas was sure his friend stood out like a sore thumb. With already low self-esteem, Lucas imagined Darwin spent at least the last four years of his life depressed. That is, if he wasn’t depressed before college. He could see how that would lead him to withdraw from his peers and keep to himself.
At times throughout Lucas’s life, he found himself staying distant from people, even his friends. He didn’t know why, it’s just the way he was. He would come out of his shell when he needed to, though. He could empathize with Darwin to some degree.
“Well, buddy,” Lucas said, “let’s have some fun this week.”
As big and as rough around the edges as Darwin appeared, his smile lit up a room. If he smiled more, he’d look much more approachable, Lucas thought.
He gave Lucas one of those smiles. “Sounds great. I could use that.”
“Good,” Lucas said. “I could use a diversion myself.”
“Why is that?”
Reluctantly, Lucas filled him in on the details about Kristen.
When Lucas finished, Darwin said, “Man, you’re right. You could use a diversion. Dang, I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Thanks.”
“If that was what was in her heart, she didn’t deserve you,” Darwin said.
Lucas smiled at the sentiment. “Thanks, Darwin. Look at you waxing philosophical on me.”
He laughed. “Took a few courses in Philosophy at State. Can’t much help it.”
“That’s good. Take any psychology?”
“Yeah, a little.”
“Well, maybe I’ll come lie on your couch later and we’ll have a session I’ll spill my soul to you about my marriage.”
Another laugh. “I don’t know about that. I’m not sure I’m the shrink you need.”
No words passed between them for a few minutes while they assessed the personal news about each other they just learned. The last sip of coffee Lucas took from his paper cup was cold. He set it aside and folded his hands in front of him. “Back to the matter at hand.”
Darwin perked up, remembering why they were sitting in a small hotel near the North Carolina coast and more than glad to change the subject. “Yes, to that.”
Lucas yawned and looked at the clock on the wall behind Darwin. “Okay, how about this? It’s getting late. Why don’t we hit the sack and reconvene here around eight a.m.?”
Darwin nodded. “Then head to Bath?”
“Yes, we’ll go out, get the lay of the land, see who we can talk to, and try figure out if the treasure is there.”
“And what if it’s not?”
Lucas shrugged. “Then we’ll try somewhere else. We have an opportunity to uncover history here, and I would love for us to be the ones to solve the mystery of Blackbeard’s missing treasure.”
“Amen,” Darwin said. He stood up, collecting his folder and map, jarring the table in the process. “Sorry.”
Lucas had a hand on his tablet and notebook to keep them from falling. “No problem
, big fella. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
8
Darwin entered his room. He stood in a standard-looking motel room by any standards. Neutral colors throughout, a TV on its way to being out of date. Mass produced curtains tried to cover the windows. It’s better than what I have at home, Darwin thought.
He walked to the back of the room and ducked through the door into the bathroom. He relieved himself and then washed his hands at the sink where he stared at the unruly mop of hair on the top of his head in the mirror.
He hoped this trip was the start of a new phase in his life. He spent most of his childhood and time in college alone. Most of his classmates shunned him throughout his academic life. To them, he seemed too big, too weird. He didn’t do himself any favors by not being the most outgoing person. He sometimes came off bristly, as in “look, don’t touch.” He didn’t mean to be that way. His father’s abandonment of he and his mom caused Darwin to be untrusting of most people. He didn’t know why his dad left. He remembered them being close during his earliest memories of his life.
Then, things began to change. He remembered being afraid while his mother and father got into frequent arguments. The subjects of the spats were lost on three-year-old Darwin. He remembered they were loud and sometimes came to blows. He wasn’t taught that hitting other humans was wrong—and his parents had no interest in teaching him that—although he figured it out for himself.
After his dad left—a fuzzy moment in his memory—Darwin barely spoke. His mother became concerned, although she didn’t have enough money to afford child counseling for her young child. Eventually, she found a public program that gave free help for Darwin, however, because of their workload, his sessions with a therapist were hurried. He was too young to understand what was happening and therapy did little good.
While his mom tried to hold a job and move on with their lives, Darwin often found himself being cared for by his two aunts. He had no uncles. Like his father, they too were long gone. He spent the most formative years of his life without a strong male presence. He had no one to teach him the responsibilities of being a man, being a father, being a good contributor to society. The few adults in his life taught some values, but his mother wasn’t exactly a pillar of the community. Darwin figured out during his teenage years that when she locked herself in her room, she was oftentimes doing various drugs.
