by Josh Lacey
“Now, you’ve got one chance to make things good,” said Otto. “You tell me what you find. Where’s this gold, huh?”
Uncle Harvey must have decided that there was no point in lying, because he told Otto exactly what had happened to us since we left Lima. The only things that he didn’t mention were Francis Drake, the Golden Hind, and Alejandra, simply saying that he’d borrowed the car from a friend.
Otto asked a few questions, then thought for a moment, his hands folded in his lap. We watched him in silence, waiting for his verdict. Finally he lifted his head and looked at us.
“Maybe I just kill you,” he said.
“We’re very close to finding the treasure,” replied Uncle Harvey, smiling slightly and speaking calmly. You’d never have guessed that he was arguing for his life. “We know where it is. Well, we almost know where it is. We just need a little more time.”
“How much time?” said Otto.
“I don’t know exactly, but I should think we could do it in a day. We’ve got to read the manuscript and find the rest of the instructions. If we’re lucky, and we work fast, we might be able to do it in a few hours.”
“You can find this treasure?”
“Yes.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure,” said Uncle Harvey.
Otto thought for a moment. Then he said, “You find it, I don’t kill you. OK?”
“But we had a deal,” said Uncle Harvey. “We were going to—”
“You want that I kill you?”
“Of course not.”
“Then shut up. OK?”
“OK,” said my uncle.
“Good. Now come with me.”
We followed Otto out of the room. Miguel walked behind us and a couple more guards came after him, just to remind us not to do anything stupid.
Otto took us to the library, a large room at the back of the house. There were several comfortable leather armchairs, a couple of long wooden tables, and hundreds of books crammed into shelves around all four walls.
I didn’t know Otto very well, but he didn’t look like much of a bookworm. Maybe having a library is a big status symbol for South American mafiosi. Even if Otto spent all his free time watching TV and playing computer games, he wanted people to think he loved curling up with a good book.
The manuscript was sitting on a table, waiting for us. There was no sign of our bags. While we were talking to Otto, someone must have gone through them, taken out the manuscript, and brought it here.
“What more you need?” asked Otto. “Food? Drink?”
“Some coffee would be nice,” said Uncle Harvey. “And juice for him.”
Otto spoke Spanish to one of his men, then turned back to us. “What more?”
“Nothing,” said my uncle.
“Good. You need something, you tell Miguel. I come back soon, you tell me what you find. OK?”
“OK,” said my uncle again.
And that was that. Otto went out, leaving us in the library with two thugs, a few thousand books, and a manuscript. We sat down at one of the tables and started reading.
Our mission was simple. The original page—the one that Uncle Harvey had been given in that junk shop, wrapped around his necklace—had ended midsentence: We placed them at the Northern tip of the Islande in a line with th—
We were now looking for another page that could follow on from that and tell us where to dig for treasure. I hoped Francis Drake had chosen a landmark that had survived the past five hundred years.
I pulled a page toward me and skimmed through the first few words: We had fayr wether but scant wynd, yet I was seasike, I know not why. For two daies now I have ate nothing but brede and drank onlie water.
That was a no, then.
I dumped it with the rejects and took another: Nycolas Tindal having stoln a shirt was tyed to the maste and whipt. I begged the Captayne for mercie on his behalf but my pleas were ignored and he was beat till he bled.
The Captayne. Who was the Captayne? Wouldn’t that be Drake? If so, this journal couldn’t have been written by him. The writer must be one of his crew.
Opposite me, Uncle Harvey was reading and rejecting too, although he was getting through the pages much faster. He skimmed the first sentence of the paper, checked if it fitted, then chucked it out and grabbed another sheet, not bothering to stop and worry about trivial matters like the identity of the Captayne and who might have written these words.
I knew I should be reading as fast as him. I didn’t want to be killed by Otto. But I couldn’t help lingering over the words. In fact, I found myself going slower and slower, reading further and further down the pages, finding out more and more about the voyage of the Golden Hind.
Like I already told you, I managed to daydream through an entire year of British history. But, somehow, without meaning to, I was getting interested in what I was reading.
It was the journal of a man who was sailing across an empty sea. Each day he wrote down a few facts about the weather and the ship’s position. He didn’t have much else to say. Maybe there isn’t that much to say when your view is always the same: waves, waves, waves, and yet more waves, stretching in every direction. There were some names—Gregory Banester, John Cotton, Thomas Southern—but hardly any personal details, no interesting conversations or exciting incidents, none of the stuff that you’d get in a novel. I had to imagine it all for myself.
I found a page almost entirely taken up with a description of treasure stolen from a Spanish galleon: a chest packed with gold, another stuffed with silver, five different types of cloth, a crate of fruit, a bag of fish, a bag of bread, a bag of salt, and a barrel of “rhumm.” They kept all the gold, ate the bread, and drank the rhumm.
I thought about this little ship sailing up the coast of South America, looting towns and other ships, and I suddenly understood why they would bury eight chests of gold and silver on an island. They were like thieves who broke into a house and found more money than they could carry home. Their boat didn’t have enough room to fit all their loot.
I must have read fifteen or twenty pages when I found one that really intrigued me.
The writer was still aboard the ship, but now they were moored near land. He described going ashore with the captain—“our Captayne”—and catching fish in a river. Then this happened:
As we were thus busye we chaunced to espye a greate crocodyle in the water, whom we besett with our nettes but coulde not take hym. At lengthe, after much beatinge up and downe after hym, we sett upon hym, some with calyvers, some with fyshgygges, some with speares and others with swordes. At laste Mister Doughty caste a fyshgygge in hym under the hynde legge whereat he gaped with his mouthe which was monstrous to looke upon. My couzen beinge ready with his calyver shott into his mouth. The pylot shott in his legge. Dyvers stroked hym with swordes and with pykes tille he was ded. After we kylled hym we broughte hym to the Pelican, where he was opened and flayed and my couzen, the Captayne, did order hym skinned. Tonite we dined on crocodyle. The meate was bitter and not worth the effort of findeing.
I had two thoughts immediately. The first: what on earth did “fyshgygge” mean? The second: I knew the name Pelican.
But why? Where from?
Pelican, Pelican, Pelican.
Pel-ic-an.
Pelican!
Thank you, Mrs. McNab. All those hours hadn’t been in vain. When Francis Drake sailed from England, heading toward South America, his ship wasn’t called the Golden Hind. He changed its name later, halfway round the world. No, when he left England, he was aboard a boat named the Pelican.
The evidence was mounting.
I read the page a second time and noticed something even more interesting than the fyshgygge or the Pelican.
My couzen, the Captayne.
My cousin, the captain.
I was just about to tell my uncle what I’d found when he clapped his hands together and started singing, “Fifteen men on the dead man’s chest!”
&nbs
p; “Are you feeling all right, Uncle Harvey?”
“Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum!”
“Do you want to go and lie down?”
“No, thanks, I’m good.”
Miguel and the other thug were glaring at us. They probably thought we were crazy. What’s wrong with these gringos? they were saying to themselves. What are they so cheerful about? Don’t they realize Otto is going to cut them up into a hundred pieces and feed them to the piranhas?
I said, “Have you found it?”
“I certainly have.”
“Are you sure?”
“I certainly am.” He picked up a sheet of crinkly parchment and waved it in the air. “Feast your eyes on this, Tommy-boy!”
16
I hurried to his side of the table. He put down the paper and stood back like a proud craftsman waiting for his work to be inspected. This is what I read:
small rocke which lookes likke a fishes head. If anyone comes after us, you must go to the angel. Look to her fifteen feete. Her mouth is black. She has no teethe but she has a deep hart and ther you will find it. When all was done and we were returned to the pinnace, once more our Captayne swore us to be secret. He sayde these monies shall lie here till we return. This gold and this silver, it is the property of her Glorious Magestie the Queene of England and none shall have it but her and her men.
Below this, the entries continued as normal, describing winds and tides and dates and directions, just the ordinary stuff of the voyage, no different from a hundred other pages in the manuscript.
Uncle Harvey opened the blue folder, pulled out the original piece of paper, and placed it beside the one that he had just found. Together we hunched over the two sheets and read them from beginning to end.
“The dates match,” said Uncle Harvey. “You see?”
He ran his finger along the numerals written on each page.
“This page goes 11th, 12th, 13th, 14th, 15th, 16th. This one goes 17th, 18th, 19th, 20th. The sentences match too.”
He read from the bottom of one page to the top of the next:
“We placed them at the Northern tip of the Islande in a line with the small rocke which lookes likke a fishes head. It must be right, mustn’t it?”
“I guess.”
“The only thing is, what on earth does this mean?” Uncle Harvey pointed at some sentences on the second page. “If anyone comes after us, you must go to the angel. Look to her fifteen feete. Her mouth is black. She has no teethe but she has a deep hart and ther you will find it. It doesn’t make any sense.”
“Maybe it makes more sense when you’re actually on the island.”
“It’s just so frustrating! Why doesn’t he give more information?”
“He can’t,” I said. “He’s being deliberately obscure in case this falls into the wrong hands.”
“Yes, I understand that, Tom. I’m not an idiot. But he could be a bit clearer about where the island actually is.”
“Maybe he did before.”
“What do you mean?”
“Look what it says here.” I read from the first of the two pages. “One of them we had visited before, some days earlier, and it was named by our Captayne the Islande of Theeves for the nature of the natives. If we can find the page where he describes their first visit to the island, then we should be able to find a bit more about its actual location.”
“Let’s just hope those two old farmers didn’t chuck it out.”
“Or wipe their butt with it.”
“What?”
I explained where I had found some of the pages.
“That’s just not funny,” said Uncle Harvey.
At which point we both burst out laughing. The thought of that old codger sitting on the pot, realizing he’d run out of paper and reaching for the missing page of a treasure map—you either had to laugh or cry, and we laughed.
We were still giggling when the door opened and Otto marched into the library. “What’s so funny?” he said.
“Just a silly joke,” said Uncle Harvey.
“No problem. You tell me.”
“It’s too complicated to explain.”
For a moment Otto considered arguing, then decided not to bother. “So, you find the treasure?”
“Not yet. But we’re getting there. We’ve found a lot of interesting information which seems to be pointing us in the right direction.”
Otto pulled back a chair and sat down at the head of the table. “Tell me.”
Uncle Harvey explained what we had found and what we now needed to discover: the exact location of the island. He pulled the page toward him and read out the sentences that I had just read to him. “We came to anchor among some islands. One of them we had visited before, some days earlier, and it was named by our Captayne the Islande of Theeves for the nature of the natives. In other words, this was their second visit. They’d been there before. You see?”
“No,” said Otto.
I took over the explanation. “We’ve got to put the pages in order. It shouldn’t be too difficult. Some of them are dated and there are clues in others. Then we can plot their route along the coast. If we can find out exactly where they went, we’ll know where they were when they found the Island of Thieves.”
Otto had a lot of questions, which I answered as well as I could, keeping only a few particular pieces of information to myself. I still didn’t mention Francis Drake or the Golden Hind. It was my first intuition, I suppose, that there might be two treasures, not just one. There was a stash of gold and silver buried on an island. Then there was this manuscript, the scribbled words of a sailor, written on only the second voyage around the world ever completed by human beings. Wouldn’t that be worth something? I didn’t know, but I didn’t want to nudge Otto into thinking these thoughts for himself. So I simply told him that, as far as we knew, the manuscript detailed the journey of an English ship in the sixteenth or seventeenth century, sailing around the coast of South America, robbing Spanish ships and pilfering their cargoes. If we traced the voyage along a map, we should be able to discover precisely where the ship sailed and find the Island of Thieves.
Otto rubbed his hands together. “This is good work. You done well. Now you sleep. We finish searching tomorrow.”
Upstairs, Uncle Harvey and I had adjoining bedrooms, each with its own bathroom.
My bag had been unpacked already, my pants and socks folded neatly away in a chest of drawers, my shirts and jacket hung in a cupboard, my toothbrush and toothpaste placed in a glass beside the sink in the bathroom. I felt as if I had been given a simple message. There is no privacy here.
I knew I should go straight to sleep, but I felt too wired. Too awake. Too full of thoughts. So I spent a long time padding round the room, checking out the enormous bed and the huge TV and the jacuzzi bath with its gold-plated taps, and wondering how my life would have been different if Dad were a criminal mastermind rather than a financial advisor.
17
In the morning, I pulled back the curtains and looked out of the window. I had a perfect view of the pool, its clear water sparkling in the sunshine. Otto’s wife was lying in a deck chair by the diving board, smoking a cigarette.
When I left the room, I found a guard sitting in a chair by the door. He’d probably been there all night. He nodded, pulled himself to his feet, and gestured for me to follow him down the stairs.
He took me to the terrace, where Uncle Harvey was waiting. His own personal thug was there too, sitting at a chair in the shade, also smoking a cigarette.
“Good morning,” said Uncle Harvey. “How excellent to see you! Come and have a spot of breakfast.” He sounded very jolly for a man who didn’t like getting up in the mornings. Too jolly, in fact. I realized he was telling me something. A message meant only for me. Act as if you don’t have a care in the world. Whatever you do, don’t say anything important. There are spies everywhere.
I nodded to the thugs and sat down opposite my uncle. “Did you sleep well?”
“I had a wonderful night, thank you. Ah! Here’s Silvia.”
Silvia was the maid. Somehow he’d learned her name. She giggled at his attempts to speak Spanish and filled the table with good things: freshly squeezed orange juice, a plate of pastries, and a big bowl of fruit salad. It was like being in a hotel. Apart from the thugs, of course, who watched us as we ate.
“Huevos?” asked the maid.
“That means eggs,” explained my uncle.
“Yes, please,” I said.
We both ordered scrambled. Plus toast. When Silvia had gone inside to talk to the chef, Uncle Harvey leaned back, stretched his arms toward the clear blue sky, and said, “This is the life, huh?”
“It’s fabulastic,” I said. “Let’s ask Otto if we can stay for a month.”
Uncle Harvey smiled at me. “What an excellent idea.”
After breakfast the thugs escorted us back to the library. We pulled three large maps from a chest at the back of the room and spread them on one of the long tables. They fit together to form the entire coastline of Peru, stretching 1,500 miles from north to south. Then we piled up all the pages, the rejects and the ones that we hadn’t even touched yet, and read through them again, searching for anything that would allow us to plot the voyage of the Golden Hind.
Just as before, Uncle Harvey rushed through the pages, searching for relevant information and discarding whatever wasn’t useful. I found myself doing the opposite, going slower and slower, spending more and more time actually reading the words on each page, puzzling out the full story of the manuscript and its author.
All the pages were jumbled up. I wasn’t reading them in any order. I’d find a page about the first days of the voyage, plowing past the coast of Spain, then reach for another and find myself in the middle of the ocean, miles from land. But I began to get a sense of the voyage, the strangeness of the experience.
For instance, I read a description of wading ashore on an unfamiliar coast and meeting natives who had never seen a European before, never seen such a big boat. They had spears and shields, but seemed friendly, until something changed—no one knew what—and suddenly they attacked, leaving one of the Englishmen dead on the ground.
