Inquisition

by David Gibbins

  He flipped it over again and peered closely at the worn metal to the left of the shield, rubbing the silver to remove the patina and checking for any irregularities. This was where he would expect to see the letters signifying the mint and the assayer, the man in charge of the mint. As he moved the flashlight slightly, he spotted them: the letters OMP vertically beside the shield. He knew that OM referred to the Mexico mint, the oldest and greatest mint of the Spanish Main, rivaled only by the fabled silver mountain of Potosi in Peru, and that P referred to an assayer who was in charge in the middle years of the seventeenth century, up to 1665. His excitement mounted as he realized what that was telling him.

  The wreck they had been excavating dated from 1684, well within the circulation span of coins minted twenty or thirty years before. It was not conclusive proof that they had found the other part of the wreck, but it was enough to go on. All they needed now was a storm to blow away the sand overburden around the cannon and then a spell of fine weather to allow them to carry out an excavation. This late in the season that would probably mean next year, but Jack had learned from experience to keep his frustration at bay by always having other projects on the go. Wreck archaeology in these waters was a waiting game, a matter of keeping a weather eye on the horizon and being ready to seize the chance at a moment’s notice.

  He clasped one hand around the coin and the other around the flashlight and Costas’s tool, and waited for another lull so that he could crawl forward out of the pool into the cleft for the next wave to push him on after Costas. He held his breath and dropped down underwater, relishing the moment of calm and opening his hand to look at the coin once again. Something had been niggling him, something else that he had seen but not properly registered, and now in the half-gloom it was there before his eyes. Over the shield was the faint outline of another design, with straight lines like the cross on the reverse. At first it looked like the impression of a double strike, a common enough feature where the first strike had been too shallow, but in this case unlikely as it was a different design from the one underneath. And then he suddenly realized. It was a six-pointed star, a Star of David, a sign struck into the coin after it had been minted, perhaps years later. It was exactly the same as the sign they had found engraved into the lid of a small bronze box uncovered only days before in the excavation, a box that had been wrenched open during the wrecking, spilling what Jack now knew must once have included a treasure in silver bullion.

  He punched the water with his clenched hand. His hunch had been correct. They had found the other part of the wreck.

  He clasped the coin again, relishing the infusion of history he always felt when handling artifacts, his mind working overtime as his elation quickly turned into questions. If the chest contained the treasure of a merchant, why had he stamped his coins with the Star of David? Jack already knew that the ship they were excavating was an English vessel transporting equipment and people back from the failed colony of Tangier in present-day Morocco, on a route that would have had them sailing through waters off Spain and Portugal, where the Inquisition held sway. If the merchant was Jewish, why would he have openly revealed his faith at a time when to do so would have risked imprisonment or worse for him and his family?

  Jack had already set Jeremy and Rebecca the task of researching the documentary evidence for the ship, of unearthing all possible material in the archives that might be of use to them, and this question would now go to the top of their list. As happened so often, one result, one discovery opened up a Pandora’s box of further questions, leading to a path of discovery that Jack himself could never hope to navigate alone, knowing that it was always a team effort that drove the story forward.

  He positioned himself to ride the next surge, hearing the water beginning to rush up behind him, and thought of Costas somewhere ahead in the light at the end of the tunnel.

  He could hardly wait to show him what he had found.

  2

  Jack walked over the grassy headland above the cannon site and down the coastal footpath toward the beach. He had left Costas in their van beside the far cove after they had changed out of their wetsuits, having decided to return via the footpath to the expedition headquarters close to the excavation. To his left, the cliff dropped precipitously thirty meters or more, its course jagged and irregular where storms had gouged great chunks out of the rock and caused the land to slip down onto the foreshore. He veered right, avoiding a dangerous drop where erosion had undermined the path, and then passed an exposed section of cliff where a landslip earlier in the year had revealed the skeletons from a mass burial, soldiers whose uniforms still had their brass buttons attached, one of many places along the coast where the victims of shipwrecks had been laid to rest. Before the nineteenth century it had been the custom to bury unclaimed bodies close to where they had been cast ashore, without shrouds or coffins and often without ceremony. The Act of Parliament that ended the practice, the Burial of Drowned Persons Act 1808, had been a direct consequence of the wreck only a mile farther up this coast of the frigate HMS Anson; a local solicitor who witnessed the tragedy had been so dismayed by the treatment of the bodies that he had drafted legislation. Today the location of those mass graves was marked only by the subsidence of the soil over the bodies as they had decayed, leaving depressions in the meadow and gorse at intervals all along the coast.

  Jack paused for a moment, looking at the medieval church tucked behind the next headland on the other side of the beach, and contemplated the human cost that seemed at such odds with the tranquility and beauty of the place on a day like this. The old records of the church showed that bodies from shipwrecks had washed up here with appalling regularity, most of them beyond any hope of recognition. Every few years a ship was wrecked within sight of the headland; during great storms, several might be wrecked on a single day. The cove lay on the western side of the Lizard peninsula, the most southerly point in England, and all ships entering and leaving the English Channel on this side would have had to make their way past the notorious reefs off the end of the peninsula. In the days of sail, many ships were blown by the prevailing westerlies into the shore, unable to tack and beat to windward or to hold anchor in the sandy seabed of the bay. And the coast had a siren-like quality, with captains lured to false hope by a long expanse of sand and shingle on the northwestern shore of the peninsula, unaware that the surf concealed a lethal drop-off where the sea had piled up shingle just offshore. Ships would broach to, swinging broadside-on against the shingle berm, and be pounded to pieces in a matter of hours, those on board doomed to perish in the churning undertow only a stone’s throw from the local people watching helplessly from shore.

  He continued on over the beach toward the church, skirting the surf, where he could see that the tide was just beginning to turn. The previous year the beach had been a hive of activity following their discovery of a Phoenician wreck less than three hundred meters offshore. It had been one of the highlights of Jack’s career: not only the oldest shipwreck to have been excavated in British waters, but also the site that had led him and Costas on an extraordinary trail of discovery to the very farthest reaches of Phoenician exploration off the coast of Africa.

  It was after they had returned from that quest in the autumn that Jack had snorkelled by himself one afternoon from the Phoenician wreck around the church headland into Jangye-ryn, the Cornish name for the rocky cove that lay beyond. Years before, as a boy, he had watched local divers raise a cannon from a wreck in the cove, something that had kindled his fascination with diving and archaeology. He had pored over the accounts of that wreck, determined one day to dive on the site himself and see the other cannon that were known to lie there. For decades it had remained no more than a dream, thwarted by a huge storm that had blown sand over the site and buried everything except the tops of the reefs that marked the perimeter of the wreck. The day of his snorkel had followed an unusual southerly gale, creating a rare longshore current that had swept sediment parallel to the coast r
ather than pushing it into the beach as happened with the prevailing westerlies. The current had dumped several meters of sand on the Phoenician site, fortunately after the last timbers had been raised, but it was just possible that it had shifted sand away from the cannon wreck in the adjacent cove. He had gone there with no expectations, but with a feeling that this time he might just be lucky.

  What he had discovered had surpassed his wildest dreams. At first, swimming over the sand from the headland, he had barely been able to make out the bottom, the water still churned up and cloudy from the storm over the preceding days. Every time he had seen something dark he had dived down to investigate, only to find that it was a mass of kelp fragments broken off from the surrounding reefs and floating in clumps. There was still a great deal of sand everywhere, extending off in all directions, and as he swam farther he resigned himself to another disappointment.

  But then, as he neared the far side of the cove, he had seen another dark shape, and dived down again. It had intact fronds of kelp growing from it, so was solid, almost certainly a protruding section of reef. He had felt it and peered under the kelp, at first barely believing what he was seeing. He had surfaced, elated, then dived down again and again, pulling at the kelp roots embedded in the cannon, clearing them away for a better view. The breech was resting on an expanse of reef, swirling with kelp, and he decided to follow that in the direction of the shore. After a few meters he spotted another cannon, a smaller one this time, only the muzzle poking out of the sand. And then he had seen something that took his breath away: a huge cannon at least three meters long, perched on a rocky ledge, the muzzle pointing out over the sand as if the gun were still sitting in its carriage. When he had finally come ashore after cleaning that gun too, he was as exhausted as he had ever been after a dive, and as excited. After all the years of discovery and adventure, he felt as if he had returned full circle, and finally realized the boyhood dream that had started it all.

  Now he reached the end of the beach and began to climb up the rocks toward the church. The expedition camp lay in a small enclosed field behind the churchyard; beyond that lay the rocky beach of Jangye-ryn and the site of the cannon wreck. He stopped below the churchyard wall and looked back over the cove at the site of the Phoenician wreck, now devoid of boats and divers, as if nothing had ever disturbed the waters there. The last of the artifacts had been removed to the International Maritime University conservation labs on the other side of the peninsula almost a year ago, and some of them were already on display in the state-of-the-art museum that was due to open its doors to the world’s press in only a few weeks’ time.

  No project was ever complete until all the artifacts were conserved, studied, and published, a process that would take years in the case of the Phoenician wreck, and many of the students and staff of IMU who had dived on the site would make careers out of researching the finds. But when Jack had showed them the shaky video he had taken with his GoPro camera of the cannon wreck after his snorkel dive, there had been renewed excitement among the team. Conservation and research had its own ample rewards, but after months of diving and the daily adrenaline of discovery, the climb-down could be a difficult adjustment. Jack was not the only one who was fired up by the prospect of another excavation only a few hundred meters from the first, of a wreck much closer in historic time but no less rich as an archaeological site.

  He reached into his pocket and took out the silver four-real piece, letting the sun catch the cross on the reverse. There would now be another focus for the excavation, at the new cannon site under the headland where they had found the coin, as well as at least another full season’s work on the main site of the wreck. He carefully replaced the coin in his pocket and looked at his watch. Slack water at high tide, the best time to be on site, was in less than an hour, and he would need time to kit up and make the fifteen-minute swim out to the wreck from the nearest access point. Before that, he wanted to show the coin to Rebecca and Jeremy, as proof that their discovery of the new cannon site was even more important than they could have imagined. He took a deep breath, feeling the familiar excitement course through him, wondering what the dive on the wreck would reveal today. He could hardly wait to find out.

  * * *

  “Jack! I’ve got excellent news. The metrics on the cannon worked out.”

  The words came from a burly figure hurrying down the lane toward him carrying a tablet computer. Andrew Cunningham was a former Royal Engineers major whose fascination with historic ordnance had led to a second career with the Royal Armories, as well as an adjunct position with IMU. He had given the team a detailed briefing on the cannons on the wreck, and Jack himself had accompanied him on Cunningham’s first ever open-water dive, to the cannon opposite the cleft, which they had measured and photographed together. He stopped in front of Jack now, breathless and excited, and pointed at the tablet. “It’s exactly what you’ll want to hear.”

  “Walk with me back to the camp,” Jack said. “Tell me on the way.”

  As Cunningham came alongside him, he tapped the screen and brought up a succession of 3-D images. “Your chap Lanowski has been incredibly helpful. He took the high-definition sonar scan and the data from our electronic measurement and produced these renditions. You’ll recognize the two guns at the top as the four-pounders we know from the documentary sources that she was carrying as shipboard armament, as opposed to the other, larger guns, which were cargo, of course. Those two guns were identical, from the same Dutch foundry. We know she was carrying four of them, so unless they were salvaged somewhere, we’d expect to find the other two. Well, bingo. The gun you and I measured below the cliff was one of them. Same bore, same metrics, same foundry. It’s beautiful.”

  Jack paused, took the tablet and stared at it. “Are you sure? It’s not just a standard size of gun that another merchantman of the same period that might have been wrecked off the headland could have been carrying?”

  Cunningham shook his head. “That’s where the metrics come into play. With the precision of our measurements, we can be certain that these guns were cast in the same foundry, by the same founder, at the same time.”

  “Brilliant, Andrew. More proof that we’re looking at the missing part of the same wreck. That clinches it.”

  “You’ve got something else?”

  “Follow me into the operations tent.”

  They turned from the lane into the grassy compound beyond the churchyard. The IMU campus was less than ten miles away, off the Fal estuary on the other side of the peninsula, but it was essential that they have a base at the site, and Jack had enjoyed spending nights here camped with the rest of the team behind the headland. They walked past the equipment store into the large tent that served as headquarters. Standing over the chart table was James Macalister, captain of IMU’s chief research vessel Seaquest and companion on many of Jack’s adventures. With his white beard, blue Guernsey sweater, and silk scarf, he looked the part, though he seemed out of place on dry land. Jack shook his hand warmly. “How goes Seaquest?”

  Macalister folded his arms, looking unhappy. “I never like seeing her in dry dock. I don’t like leaving her like that.”

  “She’s in good hands,” Jack said. “If the Royal Navy trusts the yard to do their ships, then I trust it with ours. They must be pretty close to finishing her refit by now.”

  Two other figures entered the tent, and Jack turned to greet them. Dr. Jeremy Haverstock had been linked with IMU since first coming over from Stanford as a young graduate student ten years before, on the way getting his doctorate under the supervision of Jack’s friend Maria de Montijo at the Oxford Palaeography Institute; since then he had become an indispensable part of the team as well as a close friend of Jack’s daughter Rebecca. She was there, too, looking tanned and fit after spending much of the summer on site as dive manager, having upgraded her diving qualifications to advanced instructor level. She came over and kissed Jack on the cheek. “I gather you and Uncle Costas have been off on one of
your little jaunts together.”

  “Word travels fast,” Jack said.

  “I rang Costas after realizing you two had been missing all morning. You might perhaps have told someone what you were doing. You know, safety backup and all that. Kind of stuff they teach you in basic instructor training. Kind of thing you guys might have learned after all those years diving together.”

  Jack coughed. “Well, we weren’t exactly diving.”

  “What were you doing?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  “You were inside that cleft in the cliff, weren’t you? I knew you’d want to go in there after Jeremy and I spotted the cannon.”

  Jack pulled the coin out of his pocket. “Check out what we found.” He passed the coin to Rebecca, and the others crowded around. “Well I’ll be damned,” she said.

  “Where have I heard that expression before?” Macalister said.

  “Like father, like daughter,” Jeremy murmured. “In so many ways.”

  Rebecca angled the coin into the sunlight. “Dad, am I seeing what I think I’m seeing? Unless I’m mistaken, that shield is overstamped with a five-pointed star.”

  Jack nodded. “A Star of David. Just like the one on the lid of the bronze box from the wreck. What you and Jeremy call the treasure chest.”

  “I’ve got to get a picture of this off to Maria,” Jeremy said, taking out his phone and photographing the coin. “She was with me last week in the National Archives in Kew when I was working my way through the Admiralty Papers related to the wreck, the Samuel Pepys stuff. I’ve been racking my brains about that Star of David, and have shown it to as many colleagues as I can to try to get a parallel. This coin proves that the sign on the box is not just a one-off, that we’re looking at something with definite meaning.”