LC 04 - Skeleton Crew

by Beverly Connor

  Valerian, I discovered, is a man who devises contrivances, some of which are most useful, others quite fanciful. He carries with him one of the latter. He set a heavy chessboard with a clank on a table and grinned at me as he took pieces from a leather pouch and set them with a clink, clink, clink, on the board. When they were all arranged in their ranks, he gestured with a bow. The pieces stayed, defying the lurching of the ship. I picked up my queen and felt a slight tug as though she were reluctant to leave her square. The clever Valerian had inlayed the bottom of intricately carved ivory pieces with lodestone and made a board of iron. I laughed at his brilliance and we sat down and played. Juan Lopez stayed and watched our play after turning to Bellisaro and making sure that we were not offending him.

  "Of course not," said the pilot. But Bellisaro left the cabin and I wondered if perhaps he was weary of the ever-jovial Lopez. I, for one, am beginning to find his presence tiresome.

  Valerian's servant, whose name is Jen, is a secretive fellow, but seems to get along well with the rest of the crew. He has no obligations except to Valerian, but he readily helps the crew with various tasks. He eats by himself, having his own cup and bowl. At first it was a cause for taunts from the crew. They eat from a common bowl and, I must add, as with dogs, this has on more than one occasion been the cause of fights. Sailors fight with knives, which they all carry for their work. They fight readily and cut one another viciously. They can just as easily make up. Have I mentioned that, also like dogs, the crew sleep where they can find a place on the deck, and usually in a different place each night? If the place where a man has chosen to lay his head is needed during the night, he must move. My own opinion is, every person needs a place of their own. Being a lowly sailor is a fate I would not wish on anyone. I don't know why anyone would choose it.

  The sea has been smooth for the last few days and the winds favorable. By smooth, I don't mean like the still, mirrored surface of a lake. The ocean is never still. On the calmest of days, the sea has a sparkling, green-blue, coarse surface. The crew tend to repairing sails or washing the decks. During these tasks, which the men find monotonous, they sing, accompanied by Jen on the Veracruz harp. It surprises me that he plays a Spanish instrument. Not one of his ancestors seems to have come from Spain. The favorite entertainment for the crew, and I confess for me as well, is Valerian reading to us from books he has found in other lands about lost cities and strange creatures and quests for treasure. It is very easy to entertain a crew by talking about treasure. Valerian is clever enough to add many texts praising God, which I suspect are not in the book, but keep Valerian from being accused of blasphemy and allow the crew to listen without guilt.

  I am becoming accustomed to our community here at sea. I do not mind the repetitive daily routine. It is a comfort. I believe it is Lopez and the captain whom I need to overhear, but it is not easy. I am trying to make friends with Lopez. One would think it would be easy. But it is not. He talks incessantly, but says nothing. He acts like your friend, but I sense it is false. Sometimes when I engage him in deep conversation during meals or in our cabins, I see Valerian eyeing me, not suspiciously, but knowingly. Sometimes it seems as if he can see through me. I want to know what secret he has with the captain and Lopez-he is so very unlike them-and if it has anything to do with the business for which the House of Trade has sent me on this journey.

  Today for all my attempts to listen to important conservation, quite by accident I overheard a fragment between the captain and Lopez. It was early morning, the sun had not yet risen above the arc of the horizon. I stood on the weather deck at the stern of the ship, waiting for the golden sunrise, when quiet voices just below me rose, along with the steam and smoke from the galley hearth, through the grating. I heard what sounded to me like the captain saying something like, ". . . obstinate. I can't change him." Another voice that I am sure belonged to Lopez, for it was clearer, said that there will be no obstacle in the way of their detour. That was all. I then heard footfalls and the voices stopped. I do not understand what they spoke of, nor am I sure how it fits with what I was sent to discover, but I know it was important. Moreover, talk of a detour fills me with fear.

  A man fell from a yardarm to the deck today. I had awakened and come to the deck early as is my habit. The page was reciting our thanks to God and turning the sand clock. The sun was rising and the sky was bright red and the sea was quiet. It would be a fine day, I thought. But the sailors on duty grumbled to themselves. Acosta, the ship's captain, assembled the crew and reminded them that God is with us. (Not even in church do men beseech our Lord as often as they do on board ship.) Then he ordered the men fed. This surprised me. It was not a usual mealtime and the captain was unusually generous with the food. I mentioned this to Bellisaro, who had taken up his station. He answered that I might go down to our cabin. I shrugged and went to the forecastle deck to breathe in the fresh air.

  "There's a storm coming." Valerian appeared beside me. He can be a very quiet man. "I heard you speak to Bellisaro," said he. "They feed the men before a storm, for there will be much work for them." I shivered as the first gust of wind blew across my face.

  The wind increased, and Bellisaro ordered the topgallant sail to be furled. I watched several men scurry to the top. So tall is the mainmast that I had to crane my neck to see them. They loosened the bottom of the sail and were gathering it up to tie it to the yardarm when a gust of wind billowed it, knocking a sailor from his perch. I stood unable to move as he fell. I can barely remember his falling cry, but the sound of his body hitting the deck of the ship is forever in my head.

  Valerian and I were the first to reach him. He was clearly beyond our help. The two of us, without waiting for an order, picked up his hands and feet and hauled him away. For my part, I wanted the sailors attending to the ship if a storm was coming. Valerian, however, is a man who does what needs to be done.

  Valerian and I, followed by Father Hernando, took the poor soul down to the sailmaker, who quickly checked him over as Father Hernando prayed over him. The sailmaker removed the sailor's clothing and sewed him into sailcloth, the first stitch going through his septum. By the time the sailmaker finished, the ship's rocking had increased considerably. I prayed silently.

  I went to my cabin to sit out the storm. Valerian kept me company. We talked at first, he telling me that it is good we are in the middle of the ocean, that there is greater danger nearer the coast. It was little comfort to me. At least nearer the coast I could swim to the shore.

  The pitching of the ship became too violent for us to talk and we simply held on to whatever we could. I was glad that I had not eaten since the day before for surely it would not have stayed down. More than once was I slammed into the wall so hard I thought I would surely die. I pitied the poor men on deck and envied the man in the sailcloth.

  I do not see how the ship withstood the fierce pounding of the ocean. The ocean is so vast and the ship so small. How could it possibly hold together? How in God's name could we survive? God help us, I whispered over and over.

  "We are in good hands," Valerian yelled above the din to me. "Bellisaro is a good pilot. See, we pitch bow to stern, not side to side. This is good."

  I hung on to his words as tightly as I hung on to the table leg, which was, thankfully, fastened to the floor.

  We did survive. Abruptly, the heavy pitching of the sea stopped and we bobbed like a bottle of wine in the water. I was so relieved I forgot my aching body for the joy of finding myself alive and the ship whole. Valerian pulled himself up. "Thank God it's over," he said, and together we went up on deck to survey the damage. I thought I would find the men resting after such an ordeal, but they were busy pumping water from every deck and setting things right. A sailor must never rest. I pity them.

  As it turned out, the storm was a harbinger of evil. The Orgullo de Espana was lost. There were but three survivors found clinging to pieces of broken mast floating in the water. The Rosario took in two of them, we the third-a sailor named
Sancho.

  Chapter 10

  LINDSAY WAS UP early. She downed a glass of milk and had a sausage and biscuit from the mess before returning to the recovery of her unfortunate seafarer. Someone had brought a CD of sea chanteys, and she was greeted to the rhythmic strains of "What do you do with a drunken sailor?" She took up her spot beside her grid unit and removed the plastic covering. The night crew had finished the removal of the fill and the whole of the skeleton stood out in relief on the sea floor. His skull faced upward, his torso was twisted on its side so that the left set of ribs lay across the right set. His arms were at his sides-the right arm under the ribs and the left on top. The pelvis was slanted faceup like the skull, and the legs were extended. A yellow-brown textile covered half the face, part of the ribs, and upper legs. Fabric was also under the skeleton.

  "Pretty interesting, isn't he?" The two members of the night crew were coming over, stepping across the planks. "We thought you would probably take him up first thing."

  Lindsay nodded. "Nice job. He looks good. Lewis is here. He'll probably want to see him first."

  As if on cue, Lindsay looked up and saw Lewis, followed by a television crew, descending the scaffolding.

  "The ship's keel is 104 feet. That would make her main deck about 123 feet long. She was probably 37%4 feet wide and, of course, had multiple decks. The Estrella was a big ship. If she had to wreck, we are lucky she wrecked off the coast of Georgia. Trey Marcus, the principal investigator and professor of marine archaeology at the University of Georgia, can tell you more."

  Francisco Lewis was good. Lindsay had to concede that his voice and manner could make even the most mundane statistics sound fascinating. In his jeans, khaki shirt, and tie, he looked ever the popular vision of an archaeologist. All he needed was a whip and a felt fedora.

  The television crew had set up their equipment near the staircase, with the cameras pointing toward the dig and the crew as background. Lindsay shifted on the planks, wishing she could just take up the bones.

  The interviewer turned to Trey. "How did you find the ship?"

  "Two of my students were surveying in the area looking for a Civil War vessel and found a cannon. The cannon had on it an emblem suggestive of a much earlier Spanish ship. We went to Spain and found in their archives records of a ship named Estrella de Espana lost from a fleet of six ships on their way to Havana from Spain in 1558. The fleet lost sight of the Estrella during the night in good weather a few days away from their destination. Actually, we found that two ships were lost from the fleet, but the first ship was lost in the mid-Atlantic much earlier in the voyage."

  "This sounds very mysterious. Was the ship in the Bermuda Triangle? Did that have something to do with her strange disappearance?"

  Lindsay hoped her groan wasn't picked up by the sound equipment. She hated questions that assumed events in history were driven by aliens, lost tribes, and strange forces.

  Trey paused for only a second. "The disappearance was a mystery, but not strange. The ocean is big and full of danger even today, and we have global positioning satellites and all kinds of sophisticated navigational equipment." He held up the instrument he had at his side. "This astrolabe, a compass, wind, brains, and muscle were all that got the ship across the ocean. It was easy to sail off course and become lost. As it happens, we believe this ship was sunk in a storm."

  "How do you know that?"

  "We've found three of what we believe to be her cannons several miles away, and so far we've found none in the excavation. Ships' captains often ordered the cannons and heavy cargo thrown overboard to lighten the ship when they ran into really serious trouble. We've also found anchor rope in a position that suggests they were desperately trying to save the ship from breaking up."

  "So you can tell about her final days from what you find here?"

  "Probably. We've already discovered plenty, and we've virtually only started."

  "How about the crew? Do you expect to find any human remains?"

  "As a matter of fact," said Lewis, "we have just finished excavating a human skeleton. Perhaps you would like to see it?"

  "Oh, no," said Bobbie. "They're coming over here."

  Trey helped them negotiate the walkways as they made their way to Unit 3 and HSkR1, as the skeleton was designated. The interviewer, blonde and in her mid-thirties, named Carma Grey, gingerly stepped over and peered at the remains as Trey introduced Bobbie and the two students.

  "And this," he said, "is Dr. Lindsay Chamberlain. She's in charge of all the skeletal excavation at the site. Dr. Chamberlain is a professor of osteology at the University of Georgia. She also works occasionally with local law enforcement in identifying skeletal remains."

  Lindsay stood, concentrating on not doing something dumb like smoothing her hair, tugging at her clothes, or looking at the man holding the camera on his shoulder. I hate this, she thought, hoping her sentiments didn't show on her face. She smiled.

  "What can you tell me about this skeleton?"

  "I can tell you he is definitely male. He did not die when the ship went down-"

  "Oh, how do you know that?"

  "He appears to be wrapped in sailcloth. That's what they did with passengers and crew who died aboard ship. They apparently didn't have time to give him a burial at sea, indicating that he probably died shortly before or during the storm. He could, for example, have fallen from a yardarm while trying to adjust the sails. Ships were hazardous places, especially during bad weather."

  "Do you think you will be able to tell how he died?"

  "There is a good chance."

  "Will you be able to find out anything else about him?"

  "We should be able to learn a lot about him. Human bones are not dead tissue. They are remodeled and changed throughout our lives, reflecting what we do, or have done to us. Our bones can speak very eloquently for us after we're gone."

  "What happens to him now?"

  "This morning we are going to take him up. It has to be done carefully, particularly because we have delicate fabric remains to protect. Then he will go to the lab and be put in a series of baths with decreasing percentages of seawater until his environment is gradually changed from salt water to fresh water."

  "Why do you have to do that?"

  "All these artifacts have been buried underwater for over 440 years," said Trey. "They have to gradually get accustomed to being out of water. The wood, for example, will always have to be kept in a climate-controlled environment, even after we rinse the salt water out, or it will disintegrate."

  The interviewer turned to Lewis. "This dam, and everything that goes with it, is very expensive. What is going to come out of this that will be worth the money spent on it? We now have Tang because we went to the moon. What will we get from this?"

  "If our own history is not of value, if discovering information about early nutrition and progression of diseases is not of value, if uncovering forgotten ways of building and manufacturing things is not of value, if the study of ocean currents and weather is not of value, if devising excavation techniques that can be generalized to, for example, underwater rescue, has no value, and if employing people and putting all this money into the regional economy has no value, then I suppose all we get from it is our curiosity satisfied."

  Lindsay couldn't help but be reminded of the silver galleon and its possible value of hundreds of millions of dollars. It worried her.

  The interviewer nodded and smiled as Lewis spoke, showing perfectly capped teeth.

  "So you plan to glean a lot of information from this site?"

  "Yes. Every time archaeologists dig a site, we hope to collect as much information as we can. It's how we add to our knowledge base. It's what we do. It's what makes us who we are."

  The cameraman stayed and filmed Lindsay and her crew carefully placing the bones in plastic tubs and laying wet cloths over them. After a few minutes he moved on to film the hoisting of a large rib of the ship to the top of the dam.

  "Well, I suppos
e it's good publicity." Lindsay carefully lifted each vertebra from the soil and laid it in the tub on a piece of wet cloth.

  "Lewis wasn't half bad," Bobbie said.

  "He handled the questions pretty well. Better than I would have, for sure," agreed Lindsay.

  "I'd have told the broad to hang it up after that crack about the Bermuda Triangle," one of the night crew said with a snicker.

  "Yeah," said the other, "they've always got to know what the monetary payoff is. Don't they care anything about knowledge? You want us to take these bones to the barge?"

  Lindsay shook her head and stood up, stretching her legs. "No, put them by the field desk." If Trey and Lewis took the television crew to the lab, she might take the bones with her and get to work on them.

  After the people from the night crew left, Lindsay gave her unit over to other members of the excavation crew, who troweled out the mud and put it into buckets. Lewis had come back and was working several feet away. Lindsay wondered if it was just for show. She watched him work on what appeared to be figurines. He did seem to know what he was doing. He lifted his trowel and one of the figurines came up with it, apparently hanging from the bottom of the trowel.

  "What in the... ?" he said.

  Lindsay squatted down to look. He took the object away from the trowel then put it back.

  "It's a magnet," he said.

  "It looks like a chess piece," said Lindsay.

  He rubbed the piece gently, then asked for someone to bring him some water. Jeff handed him his canteen and Lewis washed off the piece, revealing a yellowed, detailed carving of a woman with a crown.

  "You're right. A queen," he said.

  Their talk caught the attention of one of the cameramen and he came to film what they were doing. Lewis picked another piece from the mud and washed it off. This one was a black horse with a rider.

  "A knight," he said.