Treasure Hunters

by Allan Baillie

  ‘Um, that lion ’’ Pat groped uncertainly.

  ‘Yeah, we’ll get something –’

  ‘Why isn’t the lion next to the cannons?’

  Matt and Col whipped their eyes to the buoy, then stared at each other.

  ‘Oops,’ Col said softly.

  17 / the hit

  Diego fiddles with the token Juan gave him as he stares at the glittering mountain on the wharf.

  Juan slaps his shoulder. ‘You can throw that piece of tin away now.’

  He looks down at the token, the odd number eight with what’s maybe Arab writing. He has drilled a small hole at the edge so he can hang it round his neck with a piece of string. ‘No, I don’t think so.’

  ‘Why not? Look at that pile! You’ll be getting a bit of it.’

  Diego gently rubs the token. ‘It brings good luck.’ And anyway he doesn’t believe in the glittering mountain. That’s an incredible dream that will disappear in the morning. He knows this, but the token will still hang from his neck.

  Greybeard is climbing aboard the Flor, muttering that he has seen the richest treasure on earth, and Diego catches his own wonderment reflected in the old man’s eyes. Greybeard had given his men three days to empty the city into Flor and two other ships and now the ships are too small.

  The fighting is over. The Sultan and his battered army are somewhere in the jungle and Portuguese soldiers with local workers are building a stone fortress around the hill of Malacca. Diego is staring at a mountain of glittering gold on the wharfs where months ago he and Magellan had rescued forty men, but he cannot believe what his eyes are telling him. This is a magic story, a dream, and tomorrow he will wake up.

  But he touched some of the gold on the wharf, and it was very heavy, far heavier than a cannon. And he licked it, just to taste it. On the tongue it was like iron, but not quite ’

  Diego keeps on staring at the sixty tons of gold on the creaking wharfs, sees the Sultan’s throne, the bags of coins and the stacks of ingots and begins slowly to accept the impossible. Someone said the gold from just the palace alone was valued at fifteen million Portuguese crowns. If in a month he earned one crown he would think he was very lucky. And there is more than that on the wharfs.

  There is another mountain of gold from the merchants and there are two hundred chests of diamonds, emeralds, rubies, sapphires and other precious stones ’

  And two bronze lions from China.

  ‘Galahs on a power-line in the rain,’ Matt said.

  Col looked down at his sodden clothes. ‘This is bloody ridiculous!’ And he stomped to the cabin. He came out with a cake of soap and lathered himself so thoroughly behind the wheelhouse that foam drifted from the Tub.

  ‘Mad bloke,’ said Matt, with his hair scribbled over his dripping face.

  ‘What happened?’ said Pat.

  ‘We’d stopped thinking. But you hadn’t. Thanks, kid.’ Matt scrabbled Pat’s skull.

  Pat scrunched his eyes. ‘Yeah, great, but what’d I do?’

  ‘They managed to get the ship off the reef, but they weren’t out of trouble. No way. And if I am right this is the second time that the ship has hit rocks.’

  Col snorted loudly from the shelter of the wheelhouse. ‘Whatever that ship is down there, we are going to do it properly this time.’

  ‘Sure, sure.’ Matt was grinning.

  ‘I suppose we could do some work now.’ As if Col had caught Matt’s Flor fever. ‘We have a couple of hours of daylight ’’

  ‘Now that is a very good idea,’ Matt said in surprise. He marched a grinning Pat to the stern.

  Hey, we’re doing something, Pat thought. Because of you! All right, then!

  Matt and Pat connected a larger yellow buoy to a bright red pennant and a small grapnel and dropped them over the reef. They both whistled at Col, who immediately started the motor, clanked up the anchor and opened the throttle so quickly that Pat could feel the deck vibrate through his feet.

  Suddenly everything is in a hurry, Pat thought: the Tub kicking up a speedboat’s wake, Col spinning the wheel, Matt hurrying to the wheelhouse. Even the grey clouds are belting past – we are going to find that ship today!

  Then he saw that Col was turning the Tub away from the red pennant, away from all that had been found.

  He caught up with Matt. ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Col’s making sure we don’t miss the ship.’

  ‘Oh,’ Pat said wisely.

  ‘Pat ’’ Col beckoned. ‘You take over, I’ve got to make a grid.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘You can’t hit anything. Just stay on 200 degrees.’ Col stepped back from the wheel and began to work on a chart.

  Pat moved behind the wheel, saw it trembling and flexed his hands uncertainly in the air. Matt reached towards the wheel and for a moment Pat thought he was going to take over, but he only wanted a prismatic compass from the bench to sight the top of the mountain. Pat twitched a smile, took a breath and gripped the old wooden wheel, immediately stopping the trembling.

  Okay, he thought. It’s not really going fast, you could walk faster. It’s trying its best, but it is only the Tub. You can do this.

  He found the 200-degree mark on the large compass before him, turned the wheel slightly and felt the heavy Tub move under his hands.

  He smiled. He felt like Diego with his huge tiller.

  Diego has been in the bottom of the Flor for a very long time. The bilge water laps around his feet and its stench turns his stomach. He would like to do anything else, to be anywhere but here, but he has his orders, and that’s it. Since he stepped from the dawn to the darkness he has been passing bags of sand ballast to Juan and other soldiers to carry them ashore. Without any ballast the ship would sit lightly in Malacca harbour until a strong wind knocked her over. But those sand bags are being replaced.

  Spaces have been created where the cannonballs, the gunpowder casks, the sacks of food and the cow were. These spaces are being packed so full that the ship will seem to bulge.

  And now the last sand bags are gone and in their place Juan is handing gold, silver, bags of diamonds and rubies to Diego. Then statues of jade women and carved horses – the stink is still there, but the job has become a little better. Finally he’s able to haul his aching body to his tiller. Even there it’s crowded. A bronze Chinese lion is glaring at him.

  A Javanese dance troupe is entertaining Greybeard on the quarterdeck as the sails are pulled up. Greybeard is planning to show them off to the King in Lisbon.

  Diego can hear their strange music, but he is trying to catch the captain’s orders through the carpenter on the step. As the Flor pulls away from the smoking city Diego can feel the ship’s great weight through his tiller ’

  ‘I know we can use the satellites for a fix,’ Matt was saying to Pat. ‘The satellites give the GPS – the Global Positioning System – which tells you where in the world you are, but it is not dead accurate.’

  ‘It also costs a bit.’ Col muttered as he finished ruling light lines like a wall of bricks on the chart.

  Matt shrugged. ‘Anyway it’s better to use things you can see, like the leaping tiger on that mountain and the red pennant that we dropped before. Now slow down and turn.’

  ‘Yessir.’ Pat almost saluted as he reduced the throttle and spun the wheel. ‘Where do I point? Which degree?’

  ‘Just get the Tub going back into its wake.’ Matt made a mark on Col’s chart before stepping across to the rail and dropping another of the yellow buoys.

  Col shoved on the earphones and turned to the clutter of machines to read the seabed.

  Matt released a side sonar fish from the stern. The finned cylinder tugged on its light cable and then ducked underwater. He was rubbing his hands as he came back to the wheelhouse. ‘Now just watch, we’ll have Flor any moment.

  That was what you thought ’ Pat wrinkled his nose smugly, glancing at the two moving rolls of paper coming from two of the machines.

  Col sighed
. ‘Why don’t you settle for just a normal old wreck?’

  ‘Nope. Down below is Flor.’

  Col grimaced at Pat. ‘What I have to put up with.’ He watched the sonar fish beginning to map the bottom of the seabed as it glided below the Tub.

  Matt leaned on the wall of the wheelhouse. ‘You know, I didn’t think we would find Lady Jane. Sorry about that, I just wanted to get away from the accident.’

  ‘I know, mate.’

  Everyone knows about it but you, Pat thought.

  ‘But this is different. I can feel it, I can smell it,’ Matt said.

  Col snorted.

  ‘Have faith,’ said Matt.

  ‘Faith? I don’t know what we are going to find down there – if anything – but I know that it will not be the Flor do Mar! It sank all right, but in a different sea ’’

  Diego is in the dark tunnel battling the tiller with two straining seamen. The ship is heaving in an angry sea, twisting the planks under his feet. Black waves crash at the stern, exploding through the slot at the tiller to swirl around his legs. In the shadows Juan locks his frightened eyes on him. That soldier has faced a charging war elephant with a broken sword but this storm is far worse. Like the glittering lion on the deck, Juan has nothing to do but wait.

  ‘It’s all right.’ Diego feels his lucky token moving on his chest and smiles at Juan. ‘This is a good ship. We can ride it.’

  Then he can hear Greybeard shouting in the wind, and the carpenter roars on the steps, ‘North, north!’

  Diego and the sailors pull the massive tiller slowly downwind and heavy objects begin to crash under his feet. Sloppy lashing, he thinks. Not mine.

  But then Flor is suddenly jolted, the solid hull shudders and stops. The mainmast quivers like a grass stem in a breeze, the sails hurl the wind against itself, Juan collides with other soldiers and they slide across the deck.

  ‘We’ve hit!’ Diego yells.

  ‘We know that your ship hit some rocks off north Sumatra, right?’ Col said.

  ‘Yep.’ Matt aimed his compass at the mountain again.

  ‘We know because Albuquerque – Greybeard – and a few others were picked up from a raft by one of the other ships. And some survivors made it to north Sumatra, and reached Pasai River.’

  ‘Yep. Watch it Pat, you’re wandering,’ said Matt.

  Critic, Pat thought.

  ‘Well it’s not here, is it?’ Col said.

  Matt scratched his nose. ‘Southeast Asia Salvage went over that water, looking for Flor. They found two Pasai Rivers and searched the waters near both. They spent thousands and thousands but they found nothing but old wood, tanks, a junk rudder, a propeller, plane parts.’

  ‘Ye-ss.’

  ‘But they didn’t find Flor.’

  ‘I don’t care,’ Col glowered. ‘That was where it hit.’

  Matt smiled. ‘Maybe it didn’t stay there ’’

  18 / ghost ship

  Diego opens his eyes painfully. His head is throbbing and he finds dried blood on his left ear. Slowly he remembers helping frightened men to move the Flor’s boat from the main deck towards the seething storm. He remembers hearing a shivering crack above him, looking up and seeing the massive ship’s main yard and the torn sail come crashing down on him ’

  But now the storm has gone. All the sails have been ripped or pulled down, leaving a confusion of ropes and fragments of canvas spread across the deck. The ship’s boat is still beside him with that heavy yard sprawled across its broken back. But somehow everyone has left, leaving him alone on the sinking wreck ’

  He sees his lucky token glitter near his nose and touches it. Suddenly he feels a hammering through his cheek on the deck, a regular impact inside the ship. He stumbles to his feet, past the ropes to an open hatch, and climbs down into the shadows. He grips silver arms and tilted gold faces, until he finds Juan and the old carpenter propping a plank against the hull. Water is gushing in around the edges of the plank, but it subsides when a handful of men hammer the plank home.

  ‘Now, we want tar!’ Juan looks up and sees Diego. ‘Hah? I thought you were dead.’

  ‘No, I’m not,’ says Diego.

  ‘Good, good.’ Juan grins at Diego. ‘There’s enough for all of us.’

  Diego sees that the old carpenter and the other men – soldiers and seamen – have stopped being frightened. Now they’re just worried.

  Juan squints at Diego. ‘We have been abandoned. Greybeard and some officers got themselves off in a raft, others swam for shore. We don’t swim. So here we are.’

  ‘Oh,’ says Diego.

  ‘It’s not so bad.’ Juan shrugs. ‘The storm is gone, we are fixing the hole and maybe on high tide we can float the ship.’ Then he suddenly glares at Diego and touches his knife. ‘But if we save the Flor then it’s our ship. If you want to give everything back to Greybeard than you can swim.’

  ‘No, that’s fine, really.’

  ‘Then start pumping.’ Juan points a tarry finger at him.

  Diego works the pumps with a couple of soldiers while Juan and the old carpenter build a rough raft from the yards and beams that Greybeard left. The anchor is lowered onto the raft and paddled towards the stern, then dropped away from behind the ship. Diego joins Juan’s soldiers to wind the thick anchor rope round the capstan until it lifts from the water and the ship creaks.

  The storm drove Flor’s bow onto the reef, now the anchor rope is trying to pull the ship in reverse. But nothing’s happening.

  ‘Maybe we ought to throw things out,’ Diego says.

  Juan licks his lip and shakes his head. ‘Never. Pump!’

  Many hours on the pumps later the ship moves slightly. Diego and the men rush to the capstan and heave. The rope trembles, drops of water are squeezed into the air, and the Flor begins to slide sideways. The men cheer.

  ‘All right, all right!’ Juan yells. ‘Get a sail up!’

  The Flor keeps on turning until the anchor is pulled from the seabed. A small square sail is released from the bowsprit as Diego takes the tiller. He can feel the ship – his ship – moving through the water and grins.

  ‘Where do I go?’ says Diego.

  ‘You see,’ Matt said, ‘that ship would have to have come this way. If Flor sails to India then Greybeard takes it, thank you very much. And they wouldn’t have even considered sailing that wrecked ship into the howling winds around Good Hope to try to reach Lisbon. No, they must have heard about Macassar. Just down the slot to Celebes, now the open port at Sulawesi. They can sell everything to Chinese and pirates with no questions.’

  ‘Oh come on, that is ridiculous,’ Col said.

  ‘Sure. But you have to say it is possible.’

  ‘Yeah, like it’s possible that the Martians have landed,’ Col said. He was studying the creeping paper, the sub-bottom profiler penetrating the seabed with sound waves while the sonar fish viewed the surface of the seabed, but they were only finding scattered rocks.

  ‘Just wait,’ Matt said.

  Diego adjusts the ropes that lock his tiller and moves into the sun. With those ropes Flor sails by herself and that is a relief.

  ‘How are we doing?’ He joins Juan on the quarterdeck.

  Juan grunts. ‘We’re still leaking, that’s why we’re staying close to the shore of Sumatra.’

  Diego looks at the rolling green mountains on his left and realises that he will always have to be close to the tiller.

  Juan shrugs. ‘But we’ve gone past Malacca and nobody has seen us. We’re getting there.’

  Diego turns towards the stern and stares at the open water. He thinks: You’re moving away from Malacca – and Lisbon and the stone house on the hill. Will you ever see your father again?

  Col frowned as he pressed a hand on his earphone.

  ‘Did you hear something?’ Pat said. But the paper had showed nothing for almost two hours. The sun was about to touch the sea, it would be dark soon.

  ‘Maybe.’

  Pat saw that the Tub w
as now moving across the invisible line between the leaping tiger and the red pennant.

  All right, Pat thought. This is it. We were wasting time for those two hours, just making sure the ship wasn’t back there.

  ‘Slow it down,’ Matt murmured.

  Pat eased down the throttle until the Tub rippled across the still water. Okay, there is the red pennant on your right and that’s where the ship hit the reef. They got the ship off the reef, but they’re in trouble again. So they would go straight to the island, the leaping tiger, on your left. Any minute we’ll find something.

  ‘There’s something here,’ Col said.

  Pat grinned. See? But when he looked at Col’s face there was no expression at all.

  The pen on the sonar’s printer had begun to sketch a dark image on the rolling paper. To Pat it was another rock, but it had a straight edge.

  Matt stepped across to the rail and threw out another marker with line and weight.

  Col pressed the roaring earphones against Pat’s head. ‘It’s metal.’ But his voice was flat.

  Pat watched the image grow on the paper. Now it was like a thick fishhook, but he couldn’t work out how big it was; small enough to catch a sardine or big enough to snag a whale. ‘Aren’t we going down to see it?’ he said in exasperation.

  ‘Later,’ Matt said in the same flat voice as Col.

  What are they doing? Pat thought. Oh, oh, you know. It’s like fishing with Robbie. When there is a slight touch on the line you don’t do anything. Say nothing, ignore it. You don’t frighten the fish away. They don’t want to frighten the ship.

  Col marked the position of the fishhook on the chart. Pat could see the leaping tiger, the fishhook and the pennant marking the place where the ship had hit, but he could see more vividly by raising his eyes to the real objects: the glinting mountain peak, the yellow marker above the fishhook, the bright red pennant. One, two, three ’

  Pat breathed. ‘It looks like a line, doesn’t it?’