Rapture of the Deep

by L. A. Meyer

  I swim down, planning to explore a bit more to the west. We had moved the Nancy B. in that direction yesterday before securing for the day. A quick scan of the sandy, coral-dotted bottom shows nothing but the usual flora and fauna; and as I work my way down to the deeper depth, I reflect that I am using up too much of my air in just getting to the bottom, leaving very little time for looking around before I have to go up for a breath. I have an idea and kick back to the surface and hang on to the side of the raft.

  After I've gulped in a lungful of air, I call out, "John Thomas, take the lifeboat's anchor and tie a long line to it. Put a knot in the rope every three feet. And then drop it over the side right there. Straight up and down. Nice and taut."

  "Aye, Cap'n," says John Thomas as he goes to do it.

  Since I know it'll take him a while to rig that up, I pull myself onto the raft. The Doctor, who has been looking through his glass-bottomed bucket, gives me a questioning look.

  "I'll be able to climb down the rope hand over hand and so get to the bottom quicker. It's much deeper here, you know."

  He nods as I stand and then go up the ladder and to the deck of the Nancy B. As always, Higgins is there with a towel to dry me. Then I pop down into my cabin to see how Joan-nie is doing.

  Quite well, it seems, and she is chafing at being kept abed.

  "I'm ready to get up now, I am," she declares.

  "You'll get up when the Doctor says you're ready to get up," I say, "and not before." I go to my bookshelf and pull out a book. "Here, read this. Since you cannot perform your usual duties, you might as well study."

  She sticks out her lower lip in a fine pout, then says, "Wasn't my fault that thing tried to eat me." She picks up the book and opens it. "Looks like it's for babies."

  "It is McFeeney's Eclectic Reader, Volume One," I reply in my best schoolmarmish voice. "A very respected schoolbook, it is. It will teach you grammar and moral lessons on behavior. When you are done with it, I will test you, and if you pass, I shall give you some more grown-up things to read."

  The lower lip comes out even further as I leave. Outside my door I see Daniel Prescott hunkered down beside the bulkhead. I heave a great sigh and say, "All right, you little rascal, get in there. But be good. She needs her rest."

  He is in there in an instant. I don't know what good my warning will do, but, hey, I ain't their mother.

  Going below and thinking to grab a bite, I hear Jemimah up forward, feeding the chickens, and I go to join her, where I hear the hens clucking and her singing.

  Cluck old hen, cluck and sing,

  Ain't laid an egg since way last spring.

  Cluck old hen, cluck and squall,

  Ain't laid an egg since way last fall.

  I hear the seed corn hitting the deck as Jemimah scatters it, and I hear the hens scratching about. Higgins had brought several crates of chickens onboard back in Boston, but he didn't know quite what to do with them, 'cept to chop their heads off and have 'em for dinner. For the ones that managed to survive until she came onboard, Jemimah had a better idea. She set up an area forward, where they could get some sunlight, and made up some nests for them so they would be comfortable and maybe lay more eggs.

  My old hen, she's a good old hen,

  She lays eggs for the workin' men.

  Sometimes two, sometimes ten,

  That's enough for the workin' men.

  I know that Jemimah likes her chickens, but I also know what happens to a hen what won't lay, as we have seen several of them on our plates on the mess deck, and very tasty they were, poor things.

  Cluck old hen, cluck in the lot,

  Next time you cackle, you'll cackle in the pot.

  Ah, well, it's a hard life for both chicken and person, and what can you say about it all? I dunno.

  Jemimah sees me watching her feed the chickens and says, "Come over here, girl, and learn somethin' that you don't know."

  I obediently walk over, where I see a nest that a large brown hen has just left so she can eat some of the seeds that Jemimah has been spreading around.

  "What we got here is a broody hen. See, the other girls let me take the eggs they lay, but this one, uh-uh, she means to hatch these ones out. Musta got with a rooster."

  I nod and continue to absorb all this chicken lore as Jemimah goes on.

  "Y'see, those round eggs is gonna be hens, and those two more pointy ones is gonna be roosters. And that one there, that tiny one is gonna be a banty—a real small little rooster, what ain't good for nothin' 'cept struttin' around all proud and causin' trouble. Jus' like that one over there."

  The broody hen hops back up on the eggs and settles in, eyeing us suspiciously. I look over into the gaggle of chickens and see a very small black-and-white rooster. He walks about with an air of absolute authority, flipping his cockscomb back and forth over his head and keeping his beady black eye on us and on the only other rooster left in the flock—a big red fellow twice the size of the banty. Uh-oh. Apparently the red rooster gets a little too close to a plump and comely white hen and the banty flies into a rage. Giving out a wild cock-a-doodle-doo, he leaps at the other suitor and brings the spurs he carries on the back of his feet down on the unfortunate red and fiercely pecks at him, the banty's head hammering back and forth. The bigger rooster runs off, wings out and squawking.

  "All right, that's it for you," says Jemimah, reaching out and snatching up the little rooster by his neck. With her other hand she grabs the small hatchet she keeps next to the stove. "You ain't much, but you'll sweeten the pot tonight, you will."

  The banty fixes his eye on Jemimah, as if daring her to do it.

  "Stay your hand, Jemimah, if you would," I say. "Let him live a while longer."

  She casts an eye on me and says, "If you don't lay, you don't stay."

  "I just want to give him a sporting chance, Jemimah. You'll see." And a sporting chance is exactly what I have in mind.

  "All right, girl." Jemimah sighs. "You just do what you wanna do."

  She releases the banty, who shakes his feathers and gives a look as if to say that all this was a serious affront to his dignity and he is not pleased. Jemimah then grabs the much gentler big red rooster by his neck and pulls him flapping and fluttering from the coop. It will do him no good. As I leave the hold, I hear a thunk! and reflect on the qualities of a warlike nature and those of meek nature, and I can draw no conclusions.

  I go back on deck, where I find that things are ready for me to take my deepest dive yet.

  I adjust my goggles, hop down to the raft, and put my hand on the anchor rope that John Thomas has set up.

  "Be careful, Miss," says Dr. Sebastian. "There are things that happen to people in the depths and science knows little about them."

  I nod and take three great gulps of air, hold the last one, and drop into the water. This is much easier, I think, pulling myself hand over hand down the rope, glad of the knots. In no time, and at the expense of very little air, I am at the bottom, thirty feet below.

  I look around. While there are some very interesting corals and the usual brilliantly colored fishes milling about my face, they are not what I am here for. A kick and I am into the deeper water that lies to seaward and ... What's that?

  There, half buried in the sand that slopes into the depths, is something that looks out of place ... A roundish, white thing ... Not a clam shell, not a piece of coral...What is it?

  I've still got some breath left, so I leave my anchor rope and swim over to the object. There is not much silt down below here in the Keys, but there is some, and what there is obscures the thing I am studying. Hmmmm...

  Out of my way, little ones, I say to thebrightlycolored fish that always gather in front of my face when I'm down here. Scat, you. I've got work to do.

  It looks like a pot of some sort. I wave my hand in front of it to remove the silt, and as it flies off, I find myself looking into the empty eye sockets of a human skull. Oh my God!

  Shocked, I grab the anchor rope
and fly back up and gasp when I break the surface.

  Calm down, girl. The dead cannot hurt you.

  "What?" asks Dr. Sebastian. "What did you find?"

  "Something ... Maybe," I say, panting. All the rest of the crew is hanging on the rail looking down at me. "I'm goin' down again."

  Another three big breaths and then under.

  This time I am more calm. I see that the skeleton lies with his head down the slope. The rib cage is still there, but the legs are gone. With one arm left, its boney hand seems to be pointing down into the depths below. Pointing down to a lost ship? Could it be? I brush the dust from the face of the skull and see a gleam next to the right side of it. I reach for it because I know instantly what it is—a golden hoop, a sailor's earring.

  I put it between my teeth and go back to the surface to hold up the piece of gold before the crew. There is a common intake of breath.

  "I have found a skeleton down there. Give me the net bag," I say. "We must bring him up."

  The Doctor looks mystified, but the sailors—each of whom, like me, wears an identical hoop in his ear—are not. It is a fellow seaman down below, and he must be brought back up.

  The bag is delivered and I put rump up to make a surface dive and head back down. When I get to the drowned sailor, I carefully drop his bones into the bag. There is not much of him left—just the skull with some backbone attached, ribs, hipbone, arm and fingers—but what there is, I handle carefully, as I would want my own bones handled when the time comes.

  I grab the anchor line and shoot back up into the air. The net bag is taken from me as I pull myself onto the raft and sprawl on my back to regain my breath. I reflect that sometimes I push myself to the limit and maybe I shouldn't do that all the time.

  My chest eventually stops heaving and I sit back up, to find Dr. Sebastian going over the bones. "So what do you think, Doctor?" I ask, kneeling next to him.

  "Well, from the condition of his teeth, I'd say he was young and in good health. Since you found neither sword belt nor sword around him, I assume he was a common seaman. But nothing singles him out as Spanish, or as belonging to the Santa Magdalena. He could have been any poor seaman lost overboard in these waters."

  "I have the feeling that he was a member of that crew," I say. "The way he lay down there, the way—"

  "Wait a moment," says the Doctor. "What's this?"

  Just below the skull and wrapped around the backbone is what appears to be a thin strand of seaweed with a lump at the end of it. Dr. Sebastian takes up the lump and rubs it between thumb and forefinger. It is not seaweed. The black tarnish comes off and what rests in his hand is a piece of silver, a piece of silver in the form of a crucifix.

  "Well, he was Spanish all right," says Dr. Sebastian. "But what that means, I don't know."

  "I know what it means," I say, getting up and climbing back onto the Nancy B. "It means the Santa Magdalena with all her gold is right down there beneath us and I'm gonna prove it right now. Finn McGee, please pull up the anchor rope."

  He nods and starts hauling in the small lifeboat anchor, coiling the knotted rope on the deck. When the anchor comes onboard, I ask him to take it to the other side of the ship and just lay it there, which he does.

  I tighten my goggles and start to take my usual deep breaths before diving, when Higgins asks me, "What do you intend to do?"

  "It's simple. Instead of climbing down the anchor rope, I will just grab hold of the anchor and jump over so I'll get to the bottom that much quicker. And going over this side of the ship will put me a good thirty feet farther out into the deep water. I want to look around."

  Davy and Tink overhear this, and Davy says, "That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. Do you really want to drown? Do you want yours to be just another skull down there? Yours would be thicker than most, but it would still be just an empty skull."

  "I absolutely agree," says Higgins, looking at me severely. "What you have been doing has been dangerous enough. I have always tried to avoid comment on your personal conduct, but jumping overboard in deep water holding an anchor is just too much."

  "Look, I'll ride the anchor down as far as I can for a good look, and when it gets chancy, I'll just let go of it and come back up. What could be safer?"

  "A lot of things could be safer, Jackass," says Davy, fixing his eye upon me. "You know what I think? I think you've got too fierce a lust for the gold that's down there. Prolly 'cause you was poor like the rest of us when we was growin' up and you don't wanna be poor no more. But you gotta know that even if you find all the gold in the world, if'n you're dead, it don't mean a goddamn thing. What did it mean to that sailor you just brought up?"

  Is this mutiny? If so, by God, it must be nipped in the bud.

  "I'm the Captain of this ship, Seaman Jones, and I'll do—"

  "What you are is a royal pain in the ass, Jacky, but we still don't want to see you dead. We—"

  "Here's what we'll do, Captain," says Tink, who takes the end of a long coil of rope and ties it around my waist. "We'll give a long count of twenty and then we'll haul you back up, whether you want to come or not. When you feel the tug, drop the anchor. It'll still be attached to the knotted line, so we won't lose it."

  Ah, John Tinker, the soul of reason.

  "Anybody else got a damned opinion?" I ask, miffed, to the ship at large. "Daniel? Jim? John Thomas? Finn? Jemimah?"

  "I think you crazy to git in the water at all, crazy to prance aroun' half bare like that," says Jemimah from her chair, "so this is jes' more of yo' craziness."

  Dr. Sebastian speaks up. "While it is true that you are the commander of this ship, I am the leader of the expedition, and I order that you go down with the rope about your waist, or you do not go down at all. You are too valuable to this project to be lost this early."

  "All right," I say, tired of all this. I hop up onto the rail. "Let's get on with it. Give me the anchor."

  It is put in my hands, and my arms strain to hold its fifty heavy pounds. One deep breath ... another deep breath ... and a third, really deep breath and hold ... and I am over and into the water.

  I plummet like a stone, past the shadow of the Nancy B. 's hull, past her keel, past her anchor chain leading down, then past the big anchor itself imbedded in the bottom, past the slope where I found the Spanish sailor, past all that and down into the abyss.

  It is still clear here, but the light is now far overhead and the bottom of the chasm is dim and I can't see ... My ears start to hurt and I'm gonna have to let go soon and I ... I ... One more moment ... just one more ... and ... There! Coming up at me like a spear from out of the depths— unmistakable—the mainmast of a sunken ship, scraps of canvas still clinging to the topgallant spar.

  I drop the lifeboat's anchor and, at the same time, feel the tug of the lifeline at my middle, towing me swiftly back to the surface.

  When my head breaks through, I gasp, then say, "I've found her! She's right down there! I saw her masts! Don't take up the little anchor. Attach a buoy or something to mark this spot. Oh lads, we have found the Magdalena!"

  Chapter 22

  The elation we feel upon finding what has to be the treasure ship is immediately dashed by a shout from the lookout.

  "Skipper! Ship ahoy! Due south! Two points abaft the port beam!" shouts Daniel in the crow's-nest.

  I rush to my quarterdeck to grab my long glass, then train it on the approaching ship.

  "What is she?" asks Higgins.

  "Don't know yet, but she's big and she's headin' straight for us." I keep my eye pressed to the glass, trying to make out her colors. Then I don't have to look for her flag anymore, 'cause I see something attached to the foot of her mainmast—it is a six-foot-tall golden crucifix.

  Damn!

  "It's a Spanish man-of-war," I say, snapping the glass shut. "And it looks like he means to board us. Everyone take your places. Remember, we are all Americans here. We are a sponge boat with a naturalist aboard and that is all. Doctor, take the ske
leton down into your lab. It will not look out of place there. Me, I shall get back in the water and start collecting sponges. Everybody be calm, maybe this is nothing to worry about."

  Saying that, I hurry back down to the diving raft and, with goggles on, slip into the water.

  I pause for a moment to collect my thoughts. What is he doing here? Could word of our doings have leaked out somehow? I don't know, just collect your sponges, girl, and let things play out as they will.

  Looking down, I see a likely looking batch of sponges on the bottom and dive down to collect them. It's a little deeper here, but I still have no trouble getting to them, then cutting their tough stalks with my shiv, hauling them back to the surface, and slapping them on the raft, water oozing out of their pores. It'd be nice to have Joannie help me with this, but she's still laid up, and will be for a while yet. But she is getting better, which is good.

  I sneak a peek at the rapidly closing-in Spaniard, and then nip back down. As I harvest this newest batch of unfortunate sponge, again I marvel at the ease with which the little fishies that gather about me flit through the water with simple flicks of their tails, while I have to struggle to do the same. And then I see what looks to be a huge ray at the bottom, leisurely flying along as if he were an albatross riding a rising wind. Hmmm ... More study is required on that ... But later—time now to deal with the Dons above.

  A massive shadow moves overhead and I know it is the hull of the Spanish man-of-war. I swim back up, deposit my sponges, and putting my elbows on the raft, I look at the thing looming over me.

  It is a First-Rate Ship-of-the-Line-of-Battle, a huge fighting machine carrying at least eighty guns, six hundred men, and enough firepower to reduce something like us to splinters in a matter of seconds ... And I notice the gun ports are open and the gun barrels sticking out. A worm of worry works its way into my mind, not for the Nancy B.— as we are insignificant next to this floating instrument of death and destruction—but for the Dolphin, due here in a few days, and for my friends who are upon her. If she encounters this ship, she will be honor bound to fight, though she is half its size. Oh Lord, please...