“Well I’ll be damned,” Jack said. “It’s a piece of eight. That really clinches it. Brilliant.”
“Take a look at the obverse. It’s more worn and patinated than your coin, but you can clearly see the mint mark, that T symbol with the S superimposed. I looked it up, and that’s the mark for Potosi, the Spanish colonial mint in Bolivia.”
“Cerro Rico, the Silver Mountain,” Jack said, staring at the symbol. “The largest industrial complex in the world at the time, and the nearest to a real-life El Dorado that the Spanish ever found.”
“El Dorado from hell, you mean,” Jeremy said. “Worked by Inca slaves whose lungs turned to concrete with the dust, and whose women died of arsenic poisoning in the town’s silver refineries.”
Jack peered at the surface of the coin beside the mint mark, where the shield design was just visible. “It may be wishful thinking, but I can just make out the same overstamp here as on our coin.”
“That’s what I really wanted you to see,” Rebecca said. “Before coming here, we popped into the metrics lab and I put this under the ultra-high-frequency scanner, enhancing the surface depth. There’s no doubt about it. It’s the same Star of David symbol, from the same die punch.”
Jack stared at the coin. “Bingo,” he said quietly. “One of those stamps alone could have been an oddity, a previously unknown assay mark perhaps. But two of them means we’re definitely on to something. I think we’re looking at a merchant who uses his own die stamp to mark his money in a very particular way.” He passed the coin back to Rebecca, who bagged it and replaced it in her pocket. “Okay, Jeremy. Now your turn. Our friend Samuel Pepys?”
* * *
A little over an hour later, Jeremy stopped talking and sat back, and Jack contemplated the scans and photocopies that had piled up in front of him as Jeremy had passed them across. They had examined in detail the material related to the Schiedam in the papers of Lord Dartmouth, Admiral of the Fleet, and in the Admiralty Papers in the National Archives, including all the references to the ship by Samuel Pepys in his capacity as Lord Dartmouth’s assistant in Tangier and the King’s secretary for the affairs of the Admiralty. They had seen Captain Shovel’s account of his capture of the Schiedam from Moorish pirates, the stores lists in Tangier that had detailed her armaments, and Pepys’s own urgent instructions for her employment in the evacuation of Tangier:
I have thought it very necessary for His Majesty’s service that the Schiedam, taken from the Moors of Sally by His Majesty’s Ship the James Galley, should be forthwith fitted for sea, manned and victualled and appointed to carry to England the workmen, stores and all other things belonging to and lately employed in the works of the Mole here.
What Jack had found most striking was the attention that Pepys had devoted months later to the salvage of the wreck and the exoneration of her captain, Gregory Fish—the former naval stores officer at Tangier who was described pathetically in a letter after having been pulled from the sea, who “lies abed and cries instead of saving any of the wreck.” Pepys was a scrupulous record-keeper in all his dealings, and by concerning himself with the salvage, with “such of the great guns, bronze and iron, mortars and balls” and other ordnance that could be saved, he was simply doing his job, but his support for Fish—a man who would normally have received the full force of his opprobrium for his evident incompetence—was very unusual, not least his efforts to see the ship’s captain acquitted at court martial and to have his pay continued. It almost seemed as if Pepys, who had been responsible for Fish’s appointment in the first place, was attempting to exonerate himself, though Jeremy had suggested another possibility: that he was trying to conceal something else that might have been revealed had there been a full court of inquiry.
Naval captains often took on private cargo for profit, and even in the evacuation of Tangier, where the Crown was ostensibly paying for everything, some of that private dealing might have been going on as well, in particular payments by merchants to captains for extra vigilance in the transport of money and valuables. Such transport in Royal Navy ships was strictly illegal, and for Pepys to have been shown to be involved in it in some way would have cast him in a damaging light, so it may have been in his best interests to pay off Fish after the wrecking in order to keep him quiet. A string of related questions came into Jack’s mind. Was the private cargo in question the treasure in Spanish silver that they had now begun to find on the wreck? If so, did the overstamping with a Star of David suggest that the treasure belonged to a Jewish merchant? Could that merchant have been none other than João Rodrigues Brandão?
Jeremy picked up a book that Jack had already taken down from his library, a leather-bound volume from the Naval Records Society of 1935. “This is the other great source on Pepys at the time, The Tangier Papers of Samuel Pepys,” he said. “It contains an edited transcript of the diary that he wrote covering a large part of his time in Tangier in late 1683 and early 1684, as well as sundry other notes and records collated into the papers by various compilers and editors. As the editor of this latest edition makes clear, the diary is not complete, and not just because parts of it don’t survive or Pepys himself edited them. It’s also because later compilers chose to excise material. And that’s where the real prize lies for us.”
“Go on,” Jack said.
“Pepys’s more famous diary, the one he wrote when he was a young man in London in the 1660s, is best known for its candor and self-exploration, especially the salacious detail about his sex life. The Tangier diary is of a different tenor entirely, the work of an older, more careworn man, focusing on the task at hand and mainly recording his work interviewing claimants for recompense, assessing the value of property and arranging transport. But there are flashes of the old Pepys here and there, especially when he’s found a bit of his former vigor and has had a night on the town. Knowing the contents of the earlier diary, the first editors of the Tangier diary in the Victorian period were highly sensitized to anything of that nature, and exercised a heavy hand. Instead of just deleting phrases and sentences, they cut entire diary entries when they saw Pepys veering back to his younger self.”
“How do you know this?” Rebecca asked.
“Because the editor of that 1935 edition flags the problem in his preface, saying that he went back to the original shorthand manuscript to find and reinstate material, but also that he continued to censor some of it himself. As a result, I decided that the only scholarly approach would be to go back to the original myself, in Pepys’s papers in Oxford. As it happens, I know his particular shorthand well, because Maria uses it in her introductory palaeography course for new graduate students to show that the study of writing systems and manuscripts is not just about ancient languages, but also about deciphering coded and abbreviated scripts of more recent date.
“I was after three things. First, any reference to the Schiedam. Second, any reference to Henry Avery. And third, any mention of João Rodrigues Brandão.”
“Dad’s and my ancestor, the merchant in Tangier,” Rebecca said.
“Right.” Jeremy put another sheet from his briefcase on the table, a facsimile of a manuscript page in Pepys’s distinctive shorthand. “In the 1935 edition of the Tangier diary, there are only two brief references to the Schiedam. On 15 November 1683, he notes that he sent fifty barrels of gunpowder ashore by Lord Dartmouth’s orders, and ‘discharged a man to be mate of the Schiedam Prize, a flyboat.’ That’s the first one.”
Jack picked up the page and looked at it. “I take it that the gunpowder was part of the supply intended for the Moors, to pay them off for not attacking the town during the evacuation,” he said.
“Exactly. An odd-sounding arrangement, giving your enemy your gunpowder, but it mostly worked, except for the final few days, when the Moorish gunners got itchy. More on that in a few moments, because it comes into the story in a big way. She was called the Schiedam Prize because the word ‘prize’ was often added to ships that had been captured, and a flyboat bec
ause she was a fluyt, a particular type of Dutch merchantman. The second reference, almost four months later, on 29 February 1684, lists the Schiedam among the ships in the fleet beating out of Tangier Roads during the evacuation but then ordered to divert to Gibraltar under duress of weather, and from there to rejoin the main fleet under convoy escort for England.”
Jack looked intently at Jeremy. “So what else have you found?”
Jeremy looked at his computer screen. “I worked my way through the entire original manuscript, finding a number of entries that had been deleted, but nothing relevant to us. And then I hit the jackpot with this deleted entry of 27 February 1684, the day before the fleet set sail. You have to imagine a pretty chaotic scene in Tangier, with the final charges being blown to destroy the harbor mole, masses of goods and belongings of all descriptions still being loaded onto transport vessels, people petitioning Pepys with last-minute claims for money, a massive thunderstorm lurking on the horizon, and, for good measure, the Moors having decided to renege on their agreement and lobbing a stream of firebombs into the town. Altogether a fraught time, so for relief Pepys had allowed himself a few hours on the town the night before, liberally oiled with wine and brandy. This is what he writes the next day:
“‘Did feel most abominable in the morning, with the old pains returning, and cold sweats withal. Did however the eve before liberally avail myself of Mrs. ______, who did liberally dispose herself to me, and afterward to the establishment of Madame ______, though only for carousing, for fear of the Pox, it being rampant in these parts, though of little moment to me, my own rampancy having been sated by Mrs. ______ most effectually. Did this morning find Booth’s infernal sniffing most aggravating, and did upbraid him for it, though Booth still being privy to all my affairs, and essential. Received and confirmed Mr. Fish to the command of the Schiedam Prize, he being previously store master to Lord Dartmouth on the docks and most inadequate to seafaring, but there being no others holding the King’s commission who might be given the ship. Trusting that the mate and officers will make up for his deficiency. With Booth I am to accompany the Schiedam to Porto, there to conclude my business, and thence to rejoin Lord Dartmouth in his ship with the fleet standing off Portugal, and thence home, the Schiedam to sail in separate convoy when ready. Did eat some grapes, mighty fine, and drank several more glasses, and did begin to feel myself again, and now to conclude my business with the Moors.’”
Jeremy looked up. “Booth was his assistant, a man Pepys despised and relied upon in equal measure. He is never heard of again after this diary entry; he simply drops off the map. Perhaps he was fed up with Pepys and absconded during their trip home. His disappearance would have been a matter of anxiety for Pepys, as Booth knew all of his business, as he makes clear in this entry, presumably including sensitive Admiralty matters. At any rate, we may never know what happened to him. What we mainly learn here is that the Schiedam was for some reason diverted on her homeward trip, to Porto on the north coast of Portugal.”
“The home port of João Brandão,” Jack said.
Jeremy nodded. “More on that in a moment as well.”
Jack looked at the diary, remembering his reading of it the previous year. “Hadn’t Pepys gone to Spain before from Tangier, on a kind of holiday?”
“Right, in December 1683. That’s the way he portrays it in the diary, as a much-needed break, but it doesn’t ring true. Pepys never went on holiday. And I discovered that he went to Portugal as well on that earlier trip, to Lisbon and then on to Porto. It was in another deleted entry, removed by the Victorian editor because of a lengthy description of a venereal problem that Pepys seems to have picked up in Seville.”
“Official business, or private?” Rebecca said.
“We can only guess. Pepys was assiduous in concluding his work for the merchants of Tangier, ensuring that their goods were shipped to the destination of their choice, but it would have been highly irregular for him to go himself to a foreign port for that purpose.”
“And what was his business with the Moors that he mentions in that diary entry?” Rebecca asked.
“That’s another very interesting question. Pepys had gone on several secretive missions to meet with the Alcaïd of Alkazar, the local chieftain who was besieging Tangier, presumably to negotiate the deal whereby the Moors were to get gunpowder in return for a truce. But I think there was something else going on, a further fold in this story, something that may have been another official part of Pepys’s mission in Tangier. That’s as far as I’ve got with him.”
“And Henry Avery?” Jack asked. “Your second research objective.”
“Ah yes. And so on to the final sentence of that diary entry. He appended it below the main entry, as a kind of footnote. ‘Henry Avery, acting junior master’s mate of HMS James Galley, is appointed to take the Black Swan to Porto, and to meet us there, and thence to Port Royal in Jamaica, with all haste.’”
“So that’s what Avery was up to,” Jack exclaimed. “Fascinating.”
“The Black Swan was another of the ships that Shovel had captured from the Barbary Corsairs, like the Schiedam,” Jeremy said. “They were both originally Dutch fluyts, but unlike the Schiedam, which was designed only for European coastal waters, the Black Swan was an exceptionally well-built ocean-going ship that had been used as a fast packet for communication between London and the English Caribbean colonies. She was also unusually heavily armed, with the same firepower as a warship of equivalent size.”
“Well, well,” Jack said. “Avery may still have been in the Royal Navy, but he gets his new career in the Caribbean off to a flying start.”
“At this stage, all those ships from Tangier were either transporting material and people back to England, like the Schiedam, or taking merchants and their produce to their other chosen destinations, fulfilling King Charles’s promise that they would all be recompensed and relocated as they wished.”
“And that was Pepys’s job,” Rebecca said. “That’s presumably why he mentioned Avery and the Black Swan. From what you say, Pepys was not a man to leave unfinished business. If the Black Swan was stopping off at Porto, then he may have needed to go there for some reason to facilitate her onward passage.”
Jack sat back, his hands behind his head. “And that brings us to João Rodrigues Brandão,” he said.
“Nothing,” Jeremy replied, shaking his head. “Not a single mention.”
Jack leaned forward. “He should be there in Pepys’s records, but he isn’t. As far as we’re aware, he’s the only Jewish merchant in Tangier, and the only Tangier merchant from Porto. There were not that many Jews in Tangier, as a succession of governors had expelled them or made their lives difficult, the most recent one, Colonel Kirke, even insisting that Jewish merchants sleep outside the city walls, and only be allowed in during the day. Incredible. The English could be just as prone to anti-Semitism as anyone else, evidently. As a wealthy trader he would have been a prime applicant to Pepys for recompense and transport, and yet he’s not mentioned. It’s like a black hole. It’s what’s missing that’s telling the story.”
“Are there any other possible leads?” Rebecca asked.
Jack looked pensively at the papers. “There is one other place: the records of the Inquisition in the Portuguese National Archives. The Inquisition was as assiduous about record-keeping as Pepys was. Maria didn’t have time last year to dig out all the documents that might mention João, and there might be more to be found, some clue as to what he was up to before his arrest and why his tribunal was held so quickly. Pepys would have been in Portugal about that time as well.”
“Maria’s out there now, you know,” Jeremy said, putting his papers into his briefcase. “In Lisbon.”
“I knew she was in Spain, visiting family.”
“She hopped over the border to spend a couple more days at the archives. She’s doing some research of her own, but she also wanted to tie up those loose ends about João. I wasn’t supposed to tell you.”
>
“Pretty decent of her, if you ask me,” Rebecca said. “Especially after you blew her out on that dinner date last year.”
Jack leaned forward. “Costas and I had just found the last resting place of the Ark of the Covenant. I think she understood.” He turned to Jeremy. “Anything else from the Pepys papers?”
“There is one final thing. I wanted to wait until we’d finished before showing you.” Jeremy took out another sheet from his briefcase. “This is the same page of the diary that we’ve been looking at, with the deleted entry on Pepys’s visit to Portugal, but it’s digitally enhanced. I saw something in the margin and had Lanowski play with it to see if he could bring out the image more clearly.”
He passed it to Jack, who put it on the table so that Rebecca could see it as well. Just off the right-hand margin in the middle of the page was a small drawing, the image unmistakable. “Fascinating,” Jack said. “The four arms each extending out into two points, with the shallow V-shaped indent at the end of each arm. It’s a Maltese cross.”
“He tried to erase it,” Jeremy said. “That’s why you can’t see it so well on the original.”
“Could it already have been on the paper before he wrote on it?” Rebecca asked.
“Nope. I was allowed to take the original from the Bodleian Library in Oxford to the palaeography lab, to put it under the microscope. The scrape from the pen mark on the final shorthand symbol in the line extends into the nearest arm of the cross, showing that he made the drawing while he was writing.”
“A doodle?” she said.
“Pepys was a scribbler, but not a doodler. This has got to have some significance.”
“At that period it can only signify the Knights of Malta,” Jack said.
Inquisition Page 7
