by Dave Gerard
“The records.”
“Huh. I was expecting they’d be out there,” I said, gesturing toward the shelves.
“They’re on microfiche,” she explained. “The documents are too old to flip through by hand. They’d probably turn to dust. The Archives scanned them, basically taking snapshots of each page and putting them in a repository here.”
“Microfiche?” I said. “What is this, the eighties?” She shrugged.
“Why didn’t they just digitize them? That way they could have put them online too.”
“I asked. The librarian seemed offended. She said something about Portugal’s national heritage not being available to any Juan, Dick, or Harry with an internet connection.” I imagined what Schnizzel would have to say about that.
We pulled up the chairs and sat down in front of the projector. Ashley read the instructions and turned it on. The screen warmed up slowly, and I watched as Ashley adjusted some knobs and made it come into focus. The display showed some kind of index. It was all in Portuguese, and illegible to me. I sat quietly while Ashley looked through the index and pulled up various documents.
After a while, she stopped and turned to me, looking frustrated. “There are tens of thousands of pages here. At least. I don’t know how we’re going to do this.”
I pursed my lips thoughtfully. I didn’t know Portuguese. But I did know how to wade through thousands of pages of documents. If that was the challenge, I was the man of the hour. “What kind of records are they?” I asked.
“They vary. I see bills of sale for old merchant expeditions. Property deeds from the 1600s. A book about topography in ancient Brazil. It seems random. It’s going to take a long time to go through all of it.”
“Are they in any particular order?”
“They seem to be ordered by date. I think whoever compiled these in the first place did that.” I imagined some ancient librarian going through these records in centuries past, sorting them by the light of a candle.
“Why don’t you start with records soon after the Flor de la Mar sank in 1511?” I suggested. “If there’s something useful, it would probably be from that time.”
“Yes! That’s a good idea. I’ll do it.” She leaned forward and got to it.
I wasn’t much use on this project, so I left Ashley and got up to wander the Archives. The quiet was a relief, and I savored the feeling of being far away from everything going on Stateside. The last several months had been a blur of work. I was bone tired. I had promised to log on remotely and do what I could to help Harder, Cindy, and Vijay with the case. But first, I needed some time to myself. I roamed the Archives, taking in the paintings and books and statues and busts, admiring strange artifacts and works from centuries ago.
After sundown, when the Archives closed for the day, we left to check into a hotel. I hadn’t expected to find anything on the first day, so I wasn’t disappointed. Neither was Ashley. If anything, she looked energized as we walked out of the building. There was an electricity in the air that we both felt. We were sure that we would find something at the Archives. We ate some dinner at the hotel and discussed the records Ashley had seen. Then we went to sleep. The next morning, we were back at the Archives as soon as they opened.
We repeated this routine the next day. We arrived at the Archives early. Ashley studied the records while I sat nearby and worked on the case. Our only company down there was the white-bearded old man and a few visitors who meandered through now and then. When the library closed, we had an early dinner, went back to the hotel, and slept.
It was on the third day that she found it.
I was working on a legal brief when I saw Ashley walking over to me. She looked dazed. As if she couldn’t quite believe what she had seen. I knew immediately that she had found something. I slammed my laptop shut and jumped to my feet. “What is it?” I said urgently.
She just shook her head at me, seemingly unable to answer. She glanced over at the white-bearded old man who was reading a couple of tables down. Then she gestured with her chin toward the new materials room. Once inside, she sat me down and pointed at the screen.
“This,” she said. I looked at it blankly. It was a document written in Portuguese, which to me looked the same as all the others.
“What is it?”
“A confession.”
“A confession?” I said, confused. “Like to a priest?”
“Sort of. It was given by a Portuguese sailor.”
“Who?”
“His name was Manuel Roberto. He sailed with Alfonso de Albuquerque aboard the Flor de la Mar.”
I felt goosebumps prickle all over my body, and my hair stood on end. “What?” I whispered.
“I found it in a set of church records,” she continued. “It was recorded by a priest, who doesn’t leave his name. I don’t think it was an actual confession. A priest wouldn’t have broken the seal. It seems like something that the man needed to get out before he died. To atone.”
“To atone for what?” I asked. Ashley just shook her head, unable to come up with the words. “What does it say?” I asked breathlessly. “Does it say where the Flor de la Mar sank? Does it have more information? Is this what your brother found?”
She nodded absently. “This is definitely what he found.” Then she took a deep breath, steadied herself, and then translated the confession for me in full. This is what it said:
My name is Manuel Roberto. I served Afonso Dalboquerque the Great, Captain-Major of the Seas of Arabia, Governor of Portuguese India, aboard the ship Flor de la Mar. In 1511 A.D., we set sail from Malacca, to return to King Manuel, and to present him with the treasures of Malacca, the greatest that had ever been taken in all the history of the Empire.
It is known that the Flor de la Mar sunk in a storm, on some shoals near the Kingdom of Daru in Sumatra. It is known that the bold and intrepid Afonso Dalboquerque and some others escaped on a raft, and that they barely missed drowning in the sea, and that the rest of the ship, and the six hundred souls aboard, sank to the bottom of the seas, never to be heard from again.
By my name, this is not true.
Before the voyage from Malacca, Dalboquerque the Great gathered me and the other trusted captains, and told us that the Flor de la Mar was not to be taken to King Manuel, but was to be sailed to Goa, the Indian province which Dalboquerque the Great was to rule. Dalboquerque said that this was on the orders of the King.
We knew it was not, as we were not fools; but we loved him, this conqueror who had led us through the nations of the East, who had given us great victories and treasures, and who had promised us undreamed of rewards if we obeyed. Who was the King but a man in a faraway land, who would never know our Christian names?
In the storm of November 1511, the ships of the fleet became separated, and Dalboquerque the Great seized the moment. He abandoned Flor de la Mar on a raft with some few trusted men. But the greatest trust he placed in those of us that remained, and we, hidden by the storm, steered a course toward Goa. We killed the natives, so that they would not talk, and kept only a skeleton crew to sail the ship. Anyone whose loyalty we felt doubtful were put overboard.
But the hand of providence was against us. We never reached Goa. Although we escaped unscathed the great storm of November 1511, days later, another, greater storm caught us at sea, in sight of some uncharted land. There the Flor de la Mar foundered and sank. Most everyone was lost. I and some others managed to swim to nearby rocks, where we clung to life as waves washed over us ceaselessly. Death seemed assured. But miraculously, we were able to swim to a small vegetated island of less than a mile, to the east of the wreck, and took shelter among the trees.
In time, the storm passed, and some days later, by the grace of God, we were found by some native fishermen and taken to a bigger island nearby. They tended and fed us, and I am eternally grateful to these peoples, and wish upon their descen
dants the blessings of Christ. After we were well, and with the help of the natives, we made our way back to Sumatra, and then to Malacca, there to return to the Portuguese garrison. We vowed never to speak a word of the treason of Dalboquerque the Great, and what transpired on the Flor de la Mar.
I have the sickness now. I make this confession on my deathbed. It has hung over me these last years. I pray to God for forgiveness of our sins. I go with God now, may he save my soul.
Manuel Roberto, 1513 A.D.
We sat in silence for a while after she finished. Reading it had exhausted her. And hearing it had exhausted me. I didn’t know what to make of this fantastic tale.
“This is from 1513,” I said absently. “Two years after the Flor de la Mar sank. And two years before Albuquerque died.” Ashley nodded.
At first, the whole idea seemed insane to me. The notion that Alfonso de Albuquerque had betrayed the King, diverted the greatest treasure ship in history for his own ends, and lost it far from the place that everyone believed—I could scarcely conceive of it. It seemed impossible that a piece of history writ so large could have been subverted in this way, and happened so differently than anyone had imagined. There was no inkling of this in any of the other accounts. I wasn’t a big believer in conspiracy theories. The idea that such a one as this could have happened five hundred years ago, and never been discovered, seemed impossible.
But the more I thought about it, the more plausible it seemed. I remembered what I had learned about Albuquerque. There was no doubt that he was a tremendously ambitious man. In life, he had been one of the great explorers and conquerors of the age. He had attained the rank of Viceroy, a step below the King himself. He had styled himself “the Great,” after Alexander, and his Commentaries were modeled on Caesar’s.
Was it so far-fetched that Albuquerque had been megalomaniacal enough to try and seize power in Asia for himself? Or that he had diverted the Flor de la Mar for that purpose? Wasn’t that what Caesar and Alexander had done? Albuquerque’s enemies at court had been whispering just these accusations in the King’s ear in the years before Albuquerque’s death, which caused his fall from grace. What if they were true?
The thoughts raced through my mind, one after the other. Wasn’t it true, after all, that there were only a handful of supposed eyewitnesses to the sinking of the Flor de la Mar? That it had happened five hundred years ago, long outside of living memory? That there were no accurate records of where it had gone down, and that the wreck of the Flor de la Mar had never been definitively found, even though it supposedly sank in the shallows of one of the most well-trafficked waterways in the world?
What if that was because it never sank there in the first place?
“What are you thinking?” Ashley said at last.
“I think it fits,” I said slowly.
But she looked doubtful. “How do we know this document is real?” she asked.
“Real?” I said, puzzled. “It’s a five-hundred-year-old record in the Portuguese Archives.”
“Yeah. But just because it’s old doesn’t mean it’s authentic.”
“What do you mean?”
Ashely ran a hand through her hair, looking frustrated. “I don’t know. It just feels off somehow. Who is this guy, Manuel Roberto? Who took this confession? Why is it in Portugal, instead of Malacca? Why have we never heard any of this before? I just…how can you keep a secret this big for this long? Is it even possible?”
We decided to call Schnizzel to help us puzzle through it. He might have a good idea of whether it could be true, and what to do with the information. I opened up the Signal app on my phone and dialed him.
We had all downloaded Signal, as well as another messaging app called Telegram. Remington had instructed us not to talk or text about the case on the phone. There was too much at stake, and there were too many big players involved, to risk talking on an unencrypted line. Unless we were at the office, all of our communications went through these apps. Just like David Marcum had done.
When I told Schnizzel what we’d found, I had to turn him down to the lowest volume setting to avoid alerting the entire Portuguese Archives about the discovery. Then I had to spend about ten minutes calming him down before we could get anything out of him. He was so jubilant that I thought he might choke up and die right there on the phone.
“It’s incredible,” he said over and over. “Incredible. To think that a treasure of that magnitude, a twist of history like that…it’s unbelievable.”
“Isn’t it?” Ashley asked. The skepticism in her voice was plain.
“Ashley has doubts,” I explained. “About whether the source is authentic.”
“Well. That’s only natural,” said Schnizzel.
“Why would it not be authentic?” I interjected. “I mean, this is a centuries-old document in the Portuguese Archives. Isn’t it?”
“Yes. But it could be wrong. Or it could be something else. A forgery, for instance.”
“A forgery?” I said, startled by the idea. The possibility hadn’t occurred to me. Ashley nodded. This was the type of thing she’d been thinking about. “But why would someone forge a confession like that?” I asked. “And how could they even do it?”
I could almost hear Schnizzel shrug over the phone. “Who knows. People forge records for all sorts of reasons. Albuquerque had a lot of enemies in Portugal. Enemies who tried to discredit him with the King. Maybe this was a false confession. Placed in the historical record to do just that. Forged confessions are not unheard of.”
“That seems a little far-fetched, doesn’t it?”
“Perhaps. But so does what you’ve found.” That was true enough.
“However,” Schnizzel said, “I think there is a logical proof here.” There was an undercurrent of excitement in his voice.
“How so?”
“Think about it,” Schnizzel said. “We know that Rockweiller found Flor de la Mar, right?”
“Right.”
“And we know David Marcum led them to it.”
“Right.”
“And we suspect that Marcum found his information there, at the Archives. This is what led him there. Right?”
“Yes,” Ashley said. “This must be what my brother found.”
“Then don’t you see?” Schnizzel said triumphantly. “The proof is in the pudding. If David Marcum gave this information to Rockweiller, and Rockweiller used it to find the ship, then it follows that the information must be true!”
“Of course,” I breathed. I should have seen it immediately. I was supposed to be the logical lawyer, after all. I saw Ashley turn the concept over in her mind. “I can’t say that it doesn’t make sense,” she said finally, unable to find fault with Schnizzel’s logic. “But it just feels off, somehow.”
But I ignored her, because something else had just occurred to me. A flash of inspiration. Perhaps the strongest one I’d ever had. “I’ll tell you what else, Professor,” I said. “Now we know where the ship is.”
“What?” Ashley exclaimed.
“What?” Schnizzel yelled.
I ran outside of the room, grabbed my laptop, and dashed back in. Breathlessly, I opened the laptop and pulled up Google Earth. The internet was slow, and it took forever for Google to load its 3D rendering of the world. I tapped my foot nervously, ignoring repeated questions from Ashley and Schnizzel. Once the image loaded, I clicked the globe and zoomed in toward Malaysia.
“Everyone believes that the Flor de la Mar sank somewhere around here,” I said, indicating the Strait of Malacca. “That’s where Albuquerque escaped the ship, and where all the other witnesses said it went down.”
“Right.”
“Now. Let’s extrapolate from Manuel Roberto’s account. He said they were making for Goa.” I zoomed out and traced my finger northwest, up through the Strait of Malacca, across the Bay of Bengal, and to the
far side of the Indian subcontinent, where the province of Goa was located.
“Yes.”
“But they never made it to Goa. Roberto says that they wrecked in a storm not long after departure, in sight of some uncharted land. After that, they were rescued by natives, and convalesced at a nearby tropical island. Right?”
“Right. That’s all in the account.”
“Okay. Now. What place matches that description?”
I leaned forward and looked at the empty blue ocean north of Indonesia, northwest of Sumatra. I was almost feverish with anticipation, hoping against hope that I would find what I was looking for. I checked the map scale, and thought about how fast ships travelled in those days. I zoomed closer and closer, deeper into the image, deeper into the ocean.
And then, at nearly the maximum zoom range, in just the right place, at exactly the right distance, I saw a small flash of green appear, northwest of Indonesia. Just where I knew it had to be.
“Look,” I whispered to Ashley, pointing at it.
“What is it?” Schnizzel veritably screamed, unable to contain himself anymore. “I can’t see!”
“I’ll call you back,” I said, hanging up amidst his shrieks of anguish.
I was looking at a small chain of islands, just a few hundred kilometers northwest of Sumatra. The islands were barely visible against the great expanse of the ocean. The southernmost island was the biggest, and then they dropped off in size as they went up the chain. They looked almost like an inverted version of the Florida Keys, on the other side of the world. The legend on the map named them the Nicobar Islands.
“Here,” I breathed. Ashley looked over my shoulder, spellbound. We looked up the islands online and read about them in more detail. The Nicobar Islands were a tiny archipelagic chain in the Indian Ocean. According to Wikipedia, the larger ones were sparsely inhabited, and drew some tourists for scuba diving and other watersports. The smaller ones were mostly empty.
I quickly skimmed through the history of the islands. There was no Western presence on the Nicobar Islands until the later colonial period, when the Danish East India Company occupied them in the late 18th century. The Dutch then sold the rights to the British in the 19th century. Eventually, after World War Two, the islands became union territories of India. But in the sixteenth century, the islands would have been virtually unknown.