Inquisition

by David Gibbins

  He slung his weight belt on the sand and dropped his mask and fins beside his tank. Rebecca and Jeremy were already in the shallows, sitting down to put their fins on, and Costas was sitting on a rock in the tattered remains of his boiler suit, the dismembered elements of a regulator second stage spread out over his lap. “Got an equipment problem?” Jack said, pulling on the arms of his wetsuit. “You can always buddy-breathe with me.”

  “Nope,” Costas replied, pulling a wrench from his tool belt. “It’s a new bit of kit they finished at the engineering lab while we were away, with a piston bypass to give a greater volume of air. I’m just seeing how it works.”

  Jack smiled, shaking his head, and then walked down to the water’s edge, seeing that Mike Trethowan was already in the sea some ten meters away, in the shadow of the island, where the fault line went underwater. Jack waved, catching his attention. “Costas and I won’t be long. I can’t wait.”

  “It’s looking good, Jack,” Mike shouted back. “The vis is great, and there’s only a bit of slurp through the tunnel. We should be okay.”

  Jack stared at the dark patch that he could see underwater at the base of the cliff beside Mike, the entrance to the tunnel that went through to the far side of the island and the open sea. Above the entrance was an opening, visible now at low tide, where the water that surged through the tunnel came out in a blowhole, the “Devil’s Bellows” of local legend. He remembered the words of a Victorian traveler who had seen it in full vent: “an immense chasm, into which, as the tide rises, the sea rushes with such impetuosity as to force the water out at an opening above, and the accompanying noise resembles that of thunder.”

  Jack himself had stood on the headland overlooking the island during heavy seas and experienced the bellows in full fury, a stupendous sucking and draining sound followed by a geyser of water that exploded out of the blowhole, spraying him with flecks of foam and water even though he was more than fifty meters away. For a diver to venture into the blowhole in anything other than conditions of dead calm could spell death, through being thrown against the walls and crushed by the surge and suck of the current, or being trapped in the middle, unable to get out either way as the water surged in and out, a kind of living purgatory that could only end in drowning. It had happened before, and for many years divers had shunned the place, knowing that even when the surface of the sea appeared calm, there might still be enough swell to create a lethal surge inside the tunnel. To dive there was only viable after several days of dead calm, which was what had led Mike to call Jack on the day of his return from Bolivia and suggest that they organize a dive as soon as possible. It was exactly what Jack had needed after all they had been through, and he had relished the chance to return to this place of cleansing that so encapsulated his love for the sea and for diving.

  He pulled up the back zipper of his suit and watched Mike drop underwater with his camera to film the entrance to the tunnel, Jeremy and Rebecca now snorkelling overhead. From here the black maw of the cavern looked like the entrance to the underworld, like the cleft in the lava that he and Costas had explored in the Phlegraean Fields near Naples several years before; for a moment he imagined that the soft slurping of the blowhole was the music of the sirens, or the lyre of Orpheus, as if the god of the underworld were tempting him to leave the paradise of the cove and plunge into his clutches. Today, though, the devil was slumbering, and he knew that they would conquer his lair.

  He remembered Mike’s excitement on the phone the day before when he had suggested the dive. Mike had been speaking to an old local diver, one of the few remaining from the first generation to explore this coast when aqualungs had become available after the Second World War. The diver had been down the tunnel, the first ever to do so, and had seen a cannon and a pewter plate concreted to the rock, and then had explored the ledges in the cove beyond and discovered a smattering of potsherds, blue-and-white Delftware from Holland of the late seventeenth century. That had convinced Mike that they were on the right track, that the story of the pirate Henry Avery’s ship being wrecked in Kynance Cove could only refer to this site; even the pottery fitted, if the stories were true that Avery’s last ship in the Caribbean had been a commandeered Dutch vessel.

  All they had to hope for now was that the storm of the last week that had blown them off the Schiedam excavation and had been battering this coast all the time they had been away might have shifted the sand from the seabed on the far side of the island, and that as they swam through the tunnel they would see before them the king’s ransom in gold and silver from the Mughal fleet and the treasure ships of the Spanish Main that Avery had plundered during his career as a pirate. Jack knew that it would probably remain no more than a dream, a dream of treasure that had sparkled before him all his life, but he also knew that he would be thrilled enough to find a few more pieces of pottery and to see with his own eyes that a wreck really was there. It would open up another page of history for him, and that was all the treasure he needed to keep alive the quest for adventure and discovery that had driven him forward since he had first dived beneath these waters as a boy.

  He turned to Costas, smiling as he saw the familiar figure in his boiler suit festooned with tools, the regulator put back together again and hanging from his scuba rig in front of his chest. Jack put on his weight belt and donned his own tank, kneeling on the sand to shift it into position and tighten the straps, and then took Costas’s hand to help heave himself back up again. He clipped his hoses into place, and after he and Costas had checked each other’s air, they walked toward the water’s edge carrying their fins and masks. Moments later, Jack was in the sea, feeling the immense sense of release he always experienced as the water cushioned and enveloped him.

  They finned on the surface toward the other three, coming to a stop just as the sand dropped away toward the dark hole that yawned beneath the rock face. Mike had risen to the surface, and filmed them as he spoke. “Everything looks fine down there. I’ll be just behind you.”

  “You should go through first,” Jack said. “This should be your discovery.”

  “We don’t know if it’s just going to be sand yet,” Mike replied. “Anyway, I want to turn around and film Rebecca and Jeremy entering the tunnel. Don’t worry, if there’s gold to be seen, I’ll be there like a shot.”

  “Okay.” Jack turned to Costas. “You ready for another dark hole in the sea?”

  “I’ll dive with you anywhere, Jack. You know that. Dark holes and light.”

  Jack held his regulator ready. “Good to go?”

  “Good to go.”

  They dropped down together, coming to a halt four meters deep at the base of the sandy slope that marked the beginning of the tunnel. Above them the lip of the cavern was fringed with kelp, vivid green in the sunlight, the fronds wafting to and fro with the current. The bellows proper, the aperture for the water spout, could be seen above that, part of the fault line that rose from the tunnel. In front of them, all Jack could see was blackness, a forbidding hole that he knew carried on for another sixty meters or so until it came out at the other side. He took out his light and switched it on, seeing Costas do the same, and they played the beams around the stark rock walls, smoothed and swept clean of growth by the water that raged through here for much of the time.

  He glanced behind, seeing that the other three were underwater too and watching through the cavern entrance, and then he began to swim slowly forward, sensing the darkness closing in behind him. He felt the current push him back, but he finned steadily, knowing that the surge would soon return in the opposite direction. It was easy to see how the tunnel could be a death trap, but he knew they would be safe today. He sank down on the sand, Costas behind him, and then looked up and saw that a crack of light had appeared along the top of the tunnel, showing where the fault in the rock was beginning to open out toward the far side. Ahead of him he saw the light at the end of the tunnel, an opaque glimmer that became clearer as he rose off the sand with the next surg
e and moved forward again. He no longer needed his light, and he switched it off, stowing it in his BC pocket. The tunnel had become more like one of the caves in the headland, a sinuous, expanding cavern that opened out into sunlight, and he began to see the first sparkles of light on the water above.

  So far he had spotted little evidence that the level of the sand had dropped. But as he rounded the last corner, it fell away dramatically, leaving outcrops of rock and boulders on the seabed exposed. And then he saw it, something that made his heart pound with excitement. Wedged between two boulders was a highly eroded cannon, with another one concreted into a rocky cleft beyond. In the fissures below he could make out blue and white sherds, the same type of pottery that the old diver had described, and farther on a large patch of concretion. All of it was devoid of marine life, and had clearly been buried for years. He swam farther, beyond the rock walls of the tunnel, and came to the apex of the little cove that formed the far side of the island, a gully some twenty meters across with rock ledges on either side and in the center a sandy plain that sloped off in the direction of the open sea.

  He paused, waiting for Costas and Mike to come alongside. He was elated by the discovery, and because a tunnel that had seemed so forbidding had led them to another place of great beauty, surpassing even the cove they had left behind them. He looked up, squinting against the rays of the sun, and then down again, watching a spider crab shimmy across the gully. The sand was sparkling in the sunlight, but there were no rocks or cannon sticking out of it. He turned round, looking for Rebecca and Jeremy, knowing that archaeological riches could await them in the cracks and crannies of the seabed around the cannon. But as he did so, out of the corner of his eye he saw Mike gesturing from where he had swum ahead on to the sand. Costas grabbed Jack’s shoulder, turning him back round, and they both swam forward, dropping down beside Mike to see what he had found.

  And then, extraordinarily, it all opened out before them. What had seemed like sunlight sparkling off sand was a mass of coins, thousands of them, covering the seabed as far as Jack could see. The storm had stripped away the mobile sand and exposed a more compacted layer, one that had cushioned the coins on its surface and prevented them from working their way deeper into the sediment.

  It was an incredible sight, like nothing Jack had ever seen before. He reached down and scooped up a handful of coins, feeling their weight. The silver coins were discolored and patinated, but the gold ones were immaculate, most of them as sharp as they had been the day they were minted. They included Mughal issues of the Indian emperor Aurangzeb—exactly what Henry Avery and his gang had plundered from the Mughal fleet in the Indian Ocean—but Jack could also see Spanish cobs, hundreds of them, both silver pieces of eight and gold escudos. He caught Mike’s attention, but an okay sign seemed wholly inadequate, and they stared at each other in numb incomprehension before both dropping to the seabed again and trying to grasp the enormity of their discovery. Costas had gone off on his own to the edge of the gully, trying to trace the perimeter of the deposit, and Rebecca and Jeremy had arrived over the sand, swimming slowly off in different directions with their masks glued to the seabed, clearly in the same state of disbelief that Jack himself had experienced a few moments ago.

  He sifted through the coins, picking up one of the silver pieces of eight. It had the same cross and shield design as the piece of four he and Costas had found in the cleft near the Schiedam site. But like Rebecca’s coin find at the same place, this one was not from the Mexico mint, but from Potosi. With a jolt, it took Jack back again to that place, somewhere he had put from his mind since arriving at the cove. He held the coin up, thinking of everything he now knew had gone into creating these coins, the toil and the misery and the human cost. And then, just as he was about to replace it and look at another coin, he saw what it had on the reverse.

  It was stamped with a Star of David design.

  He reeled back, breathing hard on his regulator. And then he remembered Henry Avery’s history of larceny. It was not only the Howard family that he had done out of money. He had also absconded with the coins that he had taken on board in Portugal that day in 1684, the money that João Rodrigues Brandão had intended for his family in Jamaica, along with a far more precious cargo. To Avery, that symbol that João had stamped on his coins to keep others from using them would have been of no consequence, silver being silver to a pirate and the weight being all that mattered in the taverns and whorehouses of Port Royal.

  Jack stared at the coin, feeling that he had come full circle. He looked at the others as they swam over the seabed, reaching down to pick things up, and then glanced up at the surface, where the sparkling water seemed a reflection of what lay below. He swam back toward the edge of the island and rose up the side of the rock face, seeing it continue above him in wavering distortion, and then broke surface, took out his regulator, and injected air into his buoyancy compensator, rolling onto his back and floating head-first into a niche in the rock. He remained there, barely breathing, letting the swell gently rock him, hearing the exhaust bubbles of the others erupt gently on the surface and then dissipate. All he could see through his mask was sun, sea, and rock, a view even more elemental than his vision on the beach before, as if in this place all ambiguity had gone. He thought of what lay beneath the surface, of what he would see if he dipped his mask down, but he dared not do it, in case it should turn out to have been a phantasm. He thought of Rebecca, of her life to come, of the only wisdom that he could impart. There were few certainties, mostly just surmises, and the prize would always be dangling somewhere ahead. But if enough coalesced, if you kept a weather eye on the horizon, then sometimes, just sometimes, the treasure might turn out to be real.

  He held the coin up to the sun, seeing the cross glinting on one side and the coat of arms on the other, the Star of David faintly visible above that. More than three hundred years ago, Henry Avery, former naval officer and apparently reliable merchant, had sailed off with Howard money intended to finance a joint trading venture, but had instead used it to seed-fund the greatest and most rapacious career of plunder ever to be seen on the high seas. For three centuries, the Howards had not forgotten. Now Jack considered the debt to have been repaid.

  He flicked the coin out of his hand, watching it sail high in the air and then fall into the sea, the concentric ripples joining the exhaust bubbles of the divers below.

  They had hit the jackpot at last. He thought of what Costas would say.

  Bingo.

  Author’s Note

  While I was writing this novel, I had beside me the actual coin that Jack finds in the first chapter, a Spanish silver piece of four minted in Mexico in the middle years of the seventeenth century; you can see that coin on the cover of this book, alongside a photo of me diving on a wreck, taken by my brother Alan. In a fascinating connection with this story, that coin was found on the wreck of HMS Association, the flagship of Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovel when he perished with four of his ships off the Scilly Isles in 1707—the event that precipitated the race to find a better way of establishing longitude. As a young captain, it was Cloudesley Shovel who had captured the Dutch fluyt Schiedam from Barbary pirates in 1693, and who then escorted her to Tangier, where she was used in the evacuation of the city by the English the following year. In another connection, the coin is very likely to have passed through Port Royal in Jamaica, the conduit for most of the Spanish coins to reach England at this period, and could even have been taken by an English privateer from a ship of the Spanish Main. I could not have wished for an artifact more closely linked to so many threads in this story, some of which only became apparent to me as I handled the coin and pondered the history that led to it being lost on that fateful day in 1707.

  Even more so than with my previous novels, the ongoing investigation of an actual shipwreck has provided the basis for scenes of diving and discovery in this story. The opening through the cliff where Jack finds the coin really exists, above a cannon site that I discove
red off the Lizard peninsula in Cornwall in 2013. The artifacts found there included a worn Spanish silver coin, one of many to have been discovered along that coast. Not far away in the cove of Jangye-ryn is the 1684 wreck of the Schiedam, the ship that had been captured by Cloudesley Shovel, lying on the seabed just as described in the novel. It had been buried under sand for years, but in a real-life Jack Howard moment my fellow diver Mark Milburn and I rediscovered it while snorkelling over the bay in the summer of 2016. Since then we have recorded many fascinating artifacts, including cannon and cannonballs, mortars, lead shot for muskets and pistols, concretions containing muskets and tools, and hand grenades with their wooden fuses still intact. Other artifacts found in earlier excavations include small columns and pieces of architectural marble that may have been taken from a house at Tangier, just as Pepys sees in Chapter 8 being taken down to the harbor during the evacuation of the city a few weeks before the shipwreck.

  In December 2016, our press release on the site was taken up widely by the media, and articles with photos of me underwater appeared on the BBC and ITN sites, as well as in Diver and Scuba magazines. The process of discovery is continuous; while I was finishing this novel, we found further artifacts, washed ashore during a storm in February 2017, and we are certain that much of the wreck remains to be uncovered.