The earthquake in July had literally split open the seabed, leaving a fault line running from shore as far out as the eye could see. The pit was perhaps eight meters deep, and had been reinforced inside with closely spaced scaffolding. He could now understand why Jason had been so anxious about the path of the hurricane forecast for the next day. Not only would the storm tear up the scaffolding at this shallow depth, but it would also destroy the mass of airlift tubes and hoses that were trailing down into the pit, connected to the bank of pumps they had seen on the shore opposite the site. Pulling those hoses out and stowing them safely away would be a daunting task for the next team of divers. Jack remembered the image on the meteorology chart, and glanced at his computer. Time was not going to be on their side. They would need to keep this dive brief and to the point if they were to make way for the work that would need to go on for the remainder of the afternoon and into the evening.
The corrugated tube nearest to him bucked and strained as it sucked sediment out of the pit and took it away to the anchored buoys a hundred meters to the east, where the outflow ejected it down-current away from the site. Around the edges of the pit the silt was continuously trickling in from the surrounding seabed, and he could see how even a slight increase in the current might defeat them, making the job of clearance impossible. He turned, seeing Jason come out of the murk beside him and float above the edge of the pit. Costas’s voice crackled through the intercom. “I’m just catching you guys up. Little Joey has gone walkabout.”
“Can’t Jacob send him a treat, some kind of electronic biscuit?” Jack said.
“That’s the plan.”
There was a whirring in the water in front of him and suddenly a pair of eyes appeared out of the gloom only inches from his face, blinking and staring at him, miniature water jets pulsing on either side. Jack reached out, and Little Joey came forward, nuzzling his hand. It was hard to tell which was most disconcerting, that or the alarmingly lifelike blinking. “I’ve got him,” Jack said. “Are we good to go?”
Costas came up alongside them. “Give a dog a bone, and he’s yours.”
“What do you mean?”
“You were the first person Joey saw after Jacob sent him the biscuit. He thinks you’re the provider. He’s bonded to you for this dive.”
Little Joey shot round the other side of Jack, peering defensively at Costas, blinking hard. “Just what I needed,” Jack said. “Jacob, are you there?”
The intercom crackled again. “Roger that.”
“Are you fully in control of Little Joey?”
“Roger that.” There was a pause. “Well, mostly. Just look on it like taking a dog for a walk. He’ll strain at the leash when he senses anything interesting. He’s been programmed for this dive to react to any features that seem too regular to be natural, brick and masonry especially. Also he might jump up and try to lick your face.”
“Great. I thought that was supposed to be Costas.”
“You were in the right place at the right time. He’s yours now.”
Jack turned to Jason. “Okay. Are we ready to move?”
“We need to drop down in single file,” Jason replied. “This is going to be an exercise in careful buoyancy control. Hit the side of the pit, and you’ll cause an explosion of silt that will reduce visibility to zero for the rest of the dive. Our egress point is the entrance of a buried warehouse, about twenty meters ahead.”
Jason swam forward over the pit, activated his helmet lights, and slowly descended below the level of the seabed. Jack followed suit, with Little Joey hovering at his shoulder, and Costas came behind. The silt suspended in the water reflected the light from his headlamp, but even so he began to make out brick and masonry protruding from the walls on either side, substantial sections intact for a meter or more in height. Most excitingly, between the courses of brick he saw wooden planking, preserved for more than three centuries in the anaerobic sediment, evidently part of the cladding of a wall. A window frame loomed into view, surrounded by brick and packed with fine sediment that oozed out of the room beyond.
“It’s incredible,” Jack said. “I’ve only ever seen anything like this in towns buried by volcanic fallout, at Herculaneum and Pompeii and at the Bronze Age site of Akrotiri in the Aegean.”
“Okay,” Jason said. “We’re nearly at the bottom now, so it’s time to activate your virtual screen.”
Jack settled into the space beside Jason, pressing a control on his computer to override the automated buoyancy system and inject an extra blast of air into his suit to keep him well above the silt in the bottom of the pit. One of the airlifts had been anchored just ahead, about a meter above the seabed, and he could see the silt being drawn toward it, clearing the water for a few meters around. The readout inside his helmet flashed up a yellow warning sign, a routine feature when the system was overridden, and he waited for it to reconfigure, watching as Little Joey scampered ahead through the water out of sight and then came hurtling back, halting in front of Jack as he had done before, blinking expectantly. “Jacob, I think he wants another treat,” Jack said. “He must have found something he knows I’d like.”
“Oh yes,” Lanowski replied, his voice edged with excitement. “I’m seeing what he saw, and you are going to like it very much.”
“Jack, are you seeing what I’m seeing?” Costas said.
“I’m just waiting for a system check to finish. Activating now.” Jack pressed the control on his helmet for the virtual screen. He watched the yellow lattice appear before his eyes and take on the shape of the pit, and then saw it begin to show three-dimensional features on either side. As it stabilized, an astonishing scene met his eyes, a breathtaking image like nothing he had ever seen before underwater. He already had some sense of the extraordinary preservation of the buildings on either side of him; now he was looking at a ship, almost intact up to the stumps of its masts, lying with its stern facing them and heeled over slightly to port. He swam toward it, wanting to see it with his own eyes, and out of the gloom began to make out lines of hull planking and then the architecture of the stern, the rudder askew but still hanging off one of its pintles. “A reinforced iron-clad rudder,” he murmured, feeling it with his glove. “Iron pintles, rather than the usual bronze. Fascinating.”
He reached out and placed his hand on the hull planking, seeing the old barnacle encrustations, and Jason came alongside him, his voice crackling on the intercom. “We think that all the other ships that must have sunk during the earthquake were salvaged from the shallow waters, but that this one was driven over the wharf by the tsunami and came to rest where the earth then opened up and swallowed it along with these buildings. We haven’t penetrated the hull yet, but the deck hatches are open, suggesting that it was tied alongside and unloading cargo when the earthquake struck.”
Jack swam back for a wider view, staring at the shape of the stern. “Are we looking at a fluyt?”
“You’ve got it. It’s just like the Schiedam, which was wrecked only twelve years earlier. We think from the wear and evidence of repairs that this was an older vessel, so she could well have been contemporary with the Schiedam, even perhaps from the same Dutch yard. You can see the pear-shaped profile, the narrow deck, the wide cargo hold, the shallow draft. It gives you a brilliant image of how the Schiedam would have looked.”
“And begs the question of what a Dutch merchant ship was doing in the Caribbean.”
“I’ve thought about that too. The Dutch and the English were allies by 1692, so it would have been possible for a ship of the Dutch West Indies Company to dock at Port Royal, though it seems unlikely that they would have been doing trade here; mostly the WIC was concerned with the slave trade from West Africa and the Dutch colonies of the Caribbean, with Port Royal being mainly an English pirate den by this date.”
“What’s her armament?”
“That’s another fascinating thing. The guns are in disarray and several are missing, presumably as a result of the tsunami, but she was fa
r more heavily armed than the usual fluyt, with six eight-pounders on either side. The one gun we’ve been able to see so far with our probe has the Portuguese coat of arms on the breech and the stamped mark of the British Board of Ordnance above that, with the letter T for the Tangier garrison.”
“Tangier?” Jack said. “That’s amazing. Are you certain?”
“I messaged the image just before you arrived to Andrew Cunningham, knowing that he’s been your ordnance expert for the Schiedam. He said that old Portuguese guns from Tangier taken over by the English but not wanted by the Royal Navy could have found their way on to merchant ships all over the place, with many of them, such as those carried by the Schiedam, being destined for sale or scrap. He also pointed out that the Schiedam was not the only fluyt known to have been at Tangier, and that our ship here could even have been equipped with her extra guns while she was under Royal Navy control. A lot of merchant ships of this period have complex histories, when you factor in the number that were captured by North African pirates, rebranded and even commissioned into naval service as transports, as happened to many vessels during the evacuation of Tangier.”
“To me, it’s all pointing in one direction,” Jack said. “This may have been a fluyt fitted out in Tangier, but the only good explanation for it being here in Port Royal is that it was captured again, and yet again rebranded. If I’m right, you’ve made one of the most incredible discoveries ever in marine archaeology.”
Costas came alongside. “You mean it’s a pirate ship. I could have told you that.”
“Care to enlighten us?”
Costas pointed up. “Check out Little Joey. He’s just cleared the silt from the carved wood above the stern window.” They all looked up, seeing Little Joey hovering in the water gazing down at them expectantly. Astonishingly, he had revealed a relief carving of the laurel wreath around a coat of arms, and within it the unmistakable shape of a skull and crossbones. “I couldn’t believe it when I saw it,” Costas said. “I thought that was just Hollywood.”
Jason had risen in the water and was peering at the carving. “The skull and crossbones, otherwise known as the Jolly Roger, was definitely used by Caribbean pirates on flags during the decade following the earthquake, but this is the earliest known example. Fantastic.”
“Well I’ll be damned,” Jack said. “Jacob, are you getting this? Little Joey deserves another treat, big time.”
“Done,” Lanowski said, his voice crackling on the intercom. “I didn’t even have to tell him what to do next. He’s gone off of his own volition to do a high-resolution multi-beam scan. It’s coming online as we speak.”
“It’s actually quite moving for me,” Jack said. “When I was a boy, my father made up a story about a pirate ship full of treasure being found by explorers on a lost Caribbean island, having been hauled up a creek but then abandoned after the pirates had been killed, the hull still intact but overgrown by mangroves and vines. I used to dream about what it would be like to go on board, to find Henry Avery’s brace of pistols still sitting in the captain’s cabin, to see pieces of eight spilling out of treasure chests. As I grew up, I realized that this would be impossible, that the timbers would have disintegrated long ago, but now it feels as if I’ve come full circle. It’s tantalizing to think what might lie inside that ship. This could be a most incredible time capsule of pirate life.”
Jason sank down again beside them. “She may have been a pirate ship, but she would have been a bit of a wallower with that wide hull. My guess is that she was a kind of mother ship, the one in which the more nimble vessels of the flotilla would dump their loot before going after other victims. That scenario would fit in well with her offloading at the wharf. It makes me itch to see what’s inside her too.”
“Pieces of eight,” Costas crowed, parrot-fashion. “Pieces of eight.”
“If that’s the case, we’ll have them coming out of our ears.”
“What do you mean?”
“Wait till you see what I’ve got in store for you next,” Jason said. “Our ship when it blew ashore wedged itself exactly along the line of the street, crushing the fronts of the buildings to our left but leaving those on the right side intact. We need Little Joey to leave the ship and vacuum out the hole in the wall ahead of us. Jacob?”
“Right.” They could hear Lanowski fumbling with something. “Position fixed, feeding in new coordinates now. I’m taking over and going in manually.” Little Joey shot away from the timbers toward the hole, vibrating and spinning in the water as if trying to shake something off. “Small behavioral issue,” Lanowski said, sounding agitated. “He doesn’t like to be put on a leash. Okay, powering off and restarting now. We’re good to go.”
Little Joey advanced toward the hole, his strobe lights playing across the wall. As they swam closer, Jack could see that the hole had been bored into the silt between the wooden posts and lintel of a doorway, with brick facing visible on either side and a step up from the level of the street. “This is a warehouse, a relatively well-built structure, the headquarters of a merchant,” Jason said. “We’ve only managed to get into one room so far, but it’s the strongroom at the back, so it’s particularly interesting. Because the material filling the other rooms is soft silt, your scanners should pick up their dimensions as we go by, giving you an idea of the overall layout of the place.”
Jack followed Jason into the hole, his headlamps modulating automatically to suit the conditions, and Costas came behind. A baseline had been laid through to the point where Little Joey was entering a farther room about eight meters ahead, visible only as a smudge of light. Along the line, safety tanks had been placed at intervals, as well as the hoses of two surface-demand hookah regulators that connected to pumps on the surface. “The biggest danger in here is roof collapse, so we’ve shored up what we can with scaffolding and wood,” Jason said. “But we don’t want any discharge of bubbles rising into it, so double-check that your systems are in full rebreather mode.” Jack finned cautiously on, watching his buoyancy, taking extra care not to disrupt the silt on the floor. To his right, just before the entrance to the rear chamber, he saw a large opening filled with the ghostly shapes of sacks and barrels. “Do you have any idea of the contents?” he said. “That’s an incredible sight.”
“The barrels are filled with the residue of wine, madeira and port from Portugal. We’ve had it analyzed, and the mineral signature most closely matches the Porto region to the north.”
“Where the Brandão family were based.”
“And the sacks contain tobacco.”
“João was a tobacco merchant first and foremost.”
“Wait until you see what we’ve found in the strongroom.”
Jason swam through the hole at the end of the passage, the other two following. It was a gloomy, windowless chamber, about five by three meters across, with barely enough room for the three of them to fit inside, Little Joey floating above. The only contents was a bronze chest about a meter across and half a meter deep, set against one wall, the lid prised back. “It was open,” Jason said. “At the moment of the earthquake the merchant who worked here was accessing his money, and didn’t have time to lock up before fleeing.”
“Maybe he needed the money to pay for the loot being offloaded from that ship outside,” Costas said. “That’s what they were, brokers for the pirates, weren’t they?”
Little Joey began shaking and whirring, flashing his strobe and pointing his miniature arm toward the chest. “Jacob, he’s doing it again,” Jack said.
“No,” Costas said. “This time it means he’s excited. He wants you to see something he knows you’ll like. He knows you like treasure, because we told him.”
Little Joey gestured again, and then turned to Jack, making what could only be described as a thumbs-up sign.
“Don’t tell me you programmed that into him.”
“He’s just trying to encourage you,” Lanowski said. “To go and have a look at what he’s seen.”
“Sometimes I worry about you guys. Too many late nights in the engineering lab.”
“Don’t diss Little Joey. After all he’s done for you.”
“I’ve got to hand it to him. He is a robot after my own heart.”
They finned forward and peered inside. At the bottom was a smattering of perhaps a hundred coins, all of them silver pieces of eight, patinated after being underwater for so long. “There was also a small box of gold escudos, but we’ve removed those,” Jason said. “There was probably never much more in this chest than was strictly needed for transactions. Port Royal was not a place to store large supplies of money, even in a strongroom like this. The Brandão family and the other well-to-do merchants would have banked their wealth elsewhere.”
“Fantastic,” Jack said, floating back from the box and looking around, Little Joey blinking at his shoulder. “Is this what you wanted to show us?”
“It’s not everything. Have a look on the left side of that chest.”
Jack swam forward and peered over. Beside the chest was a small anvil, with a coin-shaped depression in the top, and on top of it a copper-alloy cylinder about ten centimeters long. “It’s a die punch,” Jack said. “For milling coins.”
“Turn it over.”
Jack did so, staring at the base of the punch, while Little Joey helpfully came alongside and jetted a small stream of water at it, clearing away the silt. Jack stared again, hardly believing his eyes. “Well I’ll be damned,” he said.
“What is it?” Costas asked.
Jack pointed the end at him. “Check it out. The Star of David.”
“There’s a hammer on the floor,” Jason said. “This is what the guy was doing here at the moment the earthquake struck: putting the stamp of his family firm on these coins. It wasn’t João, because we know he was long gone by this point, but it was a member of the family who were here carrying on the business.”
Inquisition Page 19
