by Matthew Rief
What are you up to now? he thought, a smile appearing across his face.
He opened the message, glanced at the pictures on the screen, and for the second time in just a few days looked at a piece of history that was both remarkable and unexpected.
EIGHT
Even as the rubber tires of the Boeing 747 screeched down on the tarmac, Frank kept his eyes glued to the screen of his phone, admiring the picture of the old dagger and wondering what its story was. From the moment he’d first laid eyes on it back in Switzerland, he had been filled with a strong desire to find answers, and that desire had led him to take a detour on his trip back to the States, stopping over for a day in London.
He caught a ride on a classic black hackney carriage, telling the driver to take him to the Maritime Museum. It was a dark overcast afternoon with a slight drizzle of rain slapping against the window as Frank looked out at the city. He watched as the taxi drove down Woolrich Road, over the Lower Lea Crossing and eventually into the old Blackwall Tunnel, cruising under the Thames and popping out in North Greenwich.
The National Maritime Museum in Greenwich is the oldest and largest maritime museum in the world. Its massive grounds are situated between Greenwich Park to the south and the University of Greenwich to the north.
The driver pulled up alongside the curb directly in front of the main building, then put the engine in neutral, opened his door and slid out. Frank stepped out of the cab under the cover of the driver’s black umbrella, then unraveled his own and headed toward the side entrance of the main building of the Museum. It was a massive structure with a tall whitewashed exterior complete with pillars, palisades, and a Union Jack waving lazily high above its tallest point.
Pushing through a large glass door, Frank headed towards a counter where two women sat beside a cluster of security personnel and a walkthrough metal detector.
“How can we help you, sir?” a dark-haired woman in her forties and wearing a museum staff uniform said. “Are you here for research?”
Frank smiled and stepped towards the counter.
“Yes,” he said, reaching for his leather wallet lodged into the back pocket of his tan slacks. He pulled out his Harvard staff identification card and handed it to the woman. “I’d just like to check out a few sources. Should take only a few hours.”
The woman nodded and handed the card back to him.
“Do you know how to get there?”
“Blindfolded,” he replied with a grin, then slid the card back into his wallet. He hadn’t worked at Harvard for years, but he still utilized a few of the perks.
After passing through security, Frank moved along the side of a massive room, filled with various maritime artifacts and people admiring them near the center. The museum housed some of the most extraordinary maritime pieces in all of history, but Frank had been there many times before, so he barely glanced at some of the ship models in the distance before heading towards an elevator at the side of the room.
When he reached the elevator, he stepped inside, the doors closing behind him as he pressed a button. When they opened again, he found himself two levels down and was greeted by a woman sitting behind a large wooden desk.
“Welcome, Dr. Murchison,” the woman said before he’d even fully exited the elevator.
Frank greeted the woman, who’d been working down there for the past twenty years, then headed past her desk. The bowels of the museum were a massive underground labyrinth that connected the main building to the other buildings surrounding it. It was tens of thousands of square feet of archives, rows and rows of storage facilities containing original maritime texts dating back to the fourth century AD. In other words, it was a history nerd’s dream come true.
Frank sat down at a computer, typed in a few keywords and a date range, then began his investigation. As he usually did when searching for information in the massive database, he began the search by being specific, searching the keywords Beatrice Taylor and the date of 1665. When no results popped up, he tried another search. He repeated the action a few times, scanning over page after page of search results, hoping for something to catch his eye.
After three hours and two cups of coffee, his dreary eyes skimmed over a few lines of text, then he had to stop himself from instinctively clicking to the next page.
Very interesting, he thought as he spotted what he thought might be a lead, then dug deeper into the research. A few hours later, he headed away from the computer and into the actual archives in order to look over a few of the documents firsthand. After a few minutes of walking, he pulled out a drawer, skimmed over an organized group of folders, and pulled one out near the middle. After seeing that what he’d found wouldn’t be useful, he carefully set it back and pushed the drawer back in.
A few rows down, he pulled out another drawer of documents. Grabbing a folder, he pulled it out carefully and found the page he was looking for. There, in the old ink and coarse paper it had been handwritten on hundreds of years earlier, he read the following lines of text written by the governor of Jamaica, Sir Thomas Modyford, to the crown of England.
On the fourteenth of February, 1667, I received a report that the sailing master aboard the Crescent, John Taylor, overtook command of the ship through an act of mutiny along with much of the crew. The status of Captain Adley and his fellow officers remains a mystery. As for the mutineers’ intention, I have good reason to believe that they have turned to piracy and will be a threat to British transport in the Americas if not dealt with properly.
Frank knew as well as many who studied piracy in the Caribbean that much of it was founded on corruption and hypocritical actions. Though the English crown’s official stance on piracy was that it threatened global trade, they financed and supported many pirates, including Henry Morgan, in exchange for the buccaneers only attacking Spanish ships. But since this Taylor had stolen an English ship, he’d thrown any possibility of working with the English crown aside.
Moving along onto other documents pertaining to John Taylor and the Crescent, he was surprised to learn that the man had changed his name and had become one of the most notorious pirates of his time. What amazed Frank the most was that he’d never heard about the story before. As he continued reading, his eyes grew wide as he read the text over and over. The chilling realization settled upon him that in all likelihood, the dagger had come from a lost pirate ship.
Moving along to his final stack of documents, he read about a young woman whom John Taylor had known back in London. His dreary eyes lit up with excitement as he scanned over her name, read a few more pages, and then smiled. He removed his glasses, set them on the stack of old texts in front of him, and let out a long sigh.
“This is her,” he said to himself, his voice the only sound to be heard in the bowels of the archives. He held up one of the images Logan had sent him of the dagger. It was zoomed in to allow Frank to read the name and date inscribed into the hilt. “This has to be her.”
NINE
We continued to drag the magnetometer through the crystal-clear water, marking locations on the survey we’d created of the seafloor as we went along. Most of the hits were relatively small, similar in size to the first one, which had ended up being an old crab pot. But occasionally we’d stumble upon a substantial amount of metal and hop into the water to take a look.
Fortunately, since most of our search area was in shallow water, we didn’t have to don scuba gear to investigate. At one uncommonly large hit, I idled the engine and decided to take a peek. Though the peak heat of the day had passed and the sun was beginning its descent towards the horizon, I was hot and wanted to cool off.
Usually when we’re out on the water, we cruise much faster than ten knots, creating gusts of much-appreciated wind. Cruising so slowly had caused a few patches of sweat to bleed through my tee shirt, and nothing sounded better than a dip in the water.
I grabbed my Cressi frameless dive mask along with my freediving fins, then slid out of my tee shirt, stepped down onto the
swim platform, and dove into the ocean. The water felt amazingly refreshing as I cut through it, kicking smoothly towards the seafloor, which my depth gauge on the Baia had told me would be just over thirty feet down.
As I swam down, I spotted a large patch of rock covered in coral, anemones, and seagrass. It was teeming with colorful life, from a large red snapper and a spotted drum to a few beautiful parrotfish. It had always intrigued and amazed me that the parrotfish was able to change its sex and color multiple times throughout its life. These particular ones were both light shades of silvery-tinted turquoise.
Positioning my body right over the rock face, I took a look around, searching the area where the magnetometer had detected the large amount of metal. As I finned over the back side of the rock, I saw something strange about part of its shape. It had a nearly flat edge covered in barnacles and other sea growth but still managed to look foreign to its marine environment.
My mind instantly played back to my first time searching for the lost U-boat south of Islamorada that my dad had found. After years of being submerged beneath the ocean, I had to practically swim into its hull before realizing what it was, and that was an entire German submarine. What we were searching for now wasn’t made of solid metal, and it had been lost beneath the waves hundreds of years longer than the U-boat, making finding anything pertaining to the wreck extremely difficult.
I wrapped my hands around the edge of the unusual surface, then cleared my mask and blinked a few times as I examined it closely. My eyes grew wide and I shook my head. It was a large sheet of metal that looked like either the hood of someone’s car or maybe the side panel of an old trawler that had been washed overboard during a storm. Either way, it sure as hell wasn’t part of an old wreck.
Before heading back up towards the surface, I took a look around and spotted a good-sized hogfish hanging out close to the rock formation and sheet of metal. Finning back to the surface, I broke up into the open air and called Ange, asking her to grab my speargun from the salon. She came back a few seconds later, holding the top-of-the-line speargun in her hands and extending it to me as I treaded water.
She grinned and said, “I’m guessing you didn’t find an old wreck either?”
I laughed and replied, “Strike two. But I won’t let the disappointment keep me from getting my woman the meal she deserves.”
I relaxed for a few seconds on the surface to catch my breath and to load up a two-pronged spear. Placing the metal spear into the grooved wooden track, I pulled back on the rubber tubing, then locked it into place. This particular speargun had a draw strength of eighty pounds, enough to send just about any regulation fish to a swift end.
With the speargun in my hands, I smiled and nodded to Ange before taking in a breath, bending my upper body downward and dropping beneath the waves. Spearfishing had been one of my favorite activities ever since I was young. It combines so many things that I love into one activity; the feeling of weightlessness as you glide underwater, the beautiful scenery of marine life, and the thrill of the hunt as you strategically locate and take down your prey. It also usually results in a feast of the freshest seafood you can eat, from the ocean to the grill in just a few minutes.
I finned almost effortlessly to the bottom, pressed my chest against a small clearing of fine sand surrounded by seagrass, and waited. I waited patiently as the world beneath the waves came alive, with various fish swimming just inches away from me. After being down for a minute, I spotted the large hogfish I’d seen moments earlier, its pig-like snout rummaging for crustaceans buried in the sand on the other side of the rock formation.
Pressing my hands softly against the sand, I gave a few slow kicks, closing in on the unsuspecting fish. When I was within ten feet, I aimed the tip of the speargun below the front half of the hogfish and pulled the trigger. The spear rocketed through the water and struck the large fish right through its vital organs. The spear was large enough, and hit the hogfish with enough force, that it was dead almost instantly.
I moved towards my dinner, pulling it in until I could grab it, and finned back up towards the surface. When I broke free, I held the hogfish up as best as I could, showing it off to Ange and Jack, who were both looking over the transom.
“Damn,” Jack said. “That looks like it’s at least twenty pounds.”
“And it feels even heavier,” I said, lowering the fish so it was more neutrally buoyant in the water.
I handed it to them, then removed my fins, climbed out, and toweled off. Within ten minutes, Jack and I had the entire fish gutted, cleaned, and sliced into delicious slabs of meat. We chose the best filets to grill up for dinner, then I put some in the fridge and stowed most of it away in vacuum-sealed bags in my freezer. I’d have hogfish for a week, one of the many perks of living in the Florida Keys.
We doused them in Swamp Sauce, a local sauce from up north in the Everglades, then fired up the grill, cooking the fresh fish right on the deck along with a pile of golden potatoes and some of the leftover lobster. Once cooked, we sat around the dinette, enjoying the tantalizing fish that seemed to melt in our mouths and turning the Baia around so we could watch the beautiful sunset over the horizon. Ange had whipped up a few mojitos, and I leaned back into the cushioned seat, joking around with them and enjoying the meal as we watched the sky come to life with bright streaks of color.
Just as we finished eating, our stomachs full from the all-you-can-eat fresh seafood, I received a phone call from Professor Murchison. It caught me off guard, as I hadn’t heard a word from him since I’d sent him my questions regarding the old dagger a few days earlier.
Sliding my iPhone out of my cargo shorts pocket, I pressed the answer button and held it up to the side of my face.
“Boy, am I glad to hear from you,” I said. “How are the Alps?”
“Cold and fascinating, as usual,” he replied. “And if you’re glad now, wait until I tell you what I found out about that piece of yours.”
I could hear the excitement in his voice. From the first moment I’d met Professor Murchison, I could feel his passion for history, and it was so contagious that it spread like wildfire among whoever he was in contact with.
I smiled and said, “Well, any information would be better than what we’ve learned so far.”
“Are you sitting down?” he asked. “It’s kind of a lot.”
I switched to speakerphone and leaned back.
“Yeah, and I’ve got you on speaker with Ange and Jack.”
The two of them each said a quick hello, and then Frank got straight to it.
“Sorry I haven’t gotten back to you sooner,” he said through the speaker, which was booming loud enough for all three of us to hear him easily. “When I first saw your message and the pictures of the dagger, I knew instantly that it was an old knight dagger. But offhand, the name inscribed on the hilt didn’t ring any bells, so I decided to do some investigative work.” He cleared his throat and continued, “I stopped by the Maritime Museum in London, which contains massive rooms filled with everything from ship journals to crew pay records, and tens of thousands of letters. It was deep within the archives, after an entire evening of searching, that I found something.”
He paused for a moment and I knew what he was doing. Frank seemed to have a flair for the dramatic and liked to keep people, especially his students, on edge.
Ange couldn’t take it anymore and said, “Well? What did you find?”
His smooth and energetic voice came over the speaker. “I figured out who she is. It took quite a bit of digging and piecing together. It was especially difficult, since her name was never legally changed to Taylor.” The three of us looked at each other, filled with both confusion and curiosity. A few seconds later, Frank added, “The story begins back in 1649, when a twelve-year-old English orphan named John Taylor became a cabin boy on a ship called the Lady Margaret. For fifteen years, Taylor sailed all over the Atlantic, from the Bahamas to Halifax, and all over Europe, working aboard various ships.
He worked hard, learned everything he could about sailing, and rose fast, developing a good reputation amongst his peers. I don’t have an exact time frame here, but it was somewhere around 1664 that he met the beautiful daughter of one of his ship’s financiers. Her name was Beatrice Littleton, and the two fell madly in love with each other. They wanted to get married, but of course, her father disapproved of it.
“You see, Taylor had sailed all over the world. He’d proved his salt and his courageousness countless times through heavy storms, damaged hulls, and months of working from sunup till sundown on shipwide half rations. But no matter what he did, Taylor couldn’t escape his past. It held him back like a metal noose around his neck, keeping him from many well-deserved promotions, as they were instead handed to sailors of greater hereditary importance in English society. Beatrice’s father refused to let the marriage take place, and as far as I can tell, the two decided to elope but weren’t able to.”
As Frank paused for a moment, I realized that all three of us were sitting on the very edge of the cushioned seats, our bodies hunched over my smartphone.
“What do you mean they weren’t able to?” I asked. “What happened?”
Frank cleared his throat and said, “Seeing the romance building between them, Beatrice’s father talked to the captain of Taylor’s ship. Taylor was then forced to go on an unexpected voyage to Jamaica and back. It was scheduled to last nine months but ended up taking even longer. It was when he returned to London in April of 1665 that he learned the horrible news. Beatrice had gotten sick during the Great Plague of London and had died two months earlier.”
Frank said the last words slowly and paused for a few seconds. I glanced over at Jack, then at Ange, whose mouth was wide open and her eyes unblinking.
“How terrible,” Ange said. “What did Taylor do?”