Mender stared around at the desolation and shook his head as if bewildered. “Amazing that her hull wasn’t crushed by the ice.”
“I never thought I’d be standing on the deck of an English East Indiaman,” one of the crewmen muttered, his eyes reflecting apprehension. “Certainly not one built before my grandfather was born.”
“She’s a good-sized ship,” said Mender slowly. “About nine hundred tons, I’d guess. A hundred and fifty feet long with a forty-foot beam.”
Laid and fitted out in a Thames River shipyard, the work-horse of the late-eighteenth-century British merchant fleet, the Indiaman was a crossbreed among ships. She was built mainly as a cargo carrier, but those were still the days of pirates and marauding warships from England’s enemies, so she was armed with twenty-eight eighteen-pound cannon. Besides being built to transport goods and merchandise, she was also fitted out with cabins to carry passengers. Everything on the deck was standing, encased in ice, as if awaiting a phantom crew. The guns sat silently at their ports, the lifeboats were still lashed atop the spare spars, and all hatches were neatly in place.
There was an eerie and dreadful strangeness about the old ship, a curious grimness that belonged not of earth but of another world. A mindless fear gripped the crewmen who stood on the deck that some hoary, gruesome creature was waiting to receive them. Sailors are a superstitious lot, and there were none, except for Roxanna, who was in the innocent throes of almost girlish enthusiasm, who did not feel a deep sense of apprehension.
“Odd,” said Bigelow. “It’s as if the crew abandoned the ship before it became trapped in the ice.”
“I doubt that,” said Mender grimly. “The lifeboats are still stowed.”
“God only knows what we’ll find belowdecks.”
“Then let’s go see,” Roxanna said excitedly.
“Not you, my dear. I think it best if you remain here.”
She gave her husband a proud look and slowly shook her head. “I’ll not wait alone while there are ghosts walking about.”
“If there are any ghosts,” said Bigelow, “they’d have frozen solid by now.”
Mender gave orders to his men. “We’ll divide into two search parties. Mr. Bigelow, take three men and look about the crew’s quarters and the cargo hold. The rest of us will go aft and search the passenger and officers’ quarters.”
Bigelow nodded. “Aye, Captain.”
Snow and ice had built up into a small mountain around the door leading into the stern cabins, so Mender led Roxanna and his men up and onto the poop deck, where they put their muscles to work and lifted the after hatch cover over a companionway that had frozen closed. Casting it aside, they cautiously dropped down the stair inside. Roxanna was directly behind Mender, clutching the belt around his heavy coat. The normally white complexion of her face was flushed red with a mixture of excitement and suspense.
She did not suspect that she was about to enter a frozen nightmare.
At the door to the captain’s cabin, they found a huge German shepherd dog, curled upon a small rug. To Roxanna, the dog appeared to be asleep. But Mender nudged it with the toe of his boot, and the slight thud told them that the dog was frozen solid.
“Literally hard as a rock,” said Mender.
“Poor thing,” Roxanna murmured sadly.
Mender nodded at a closed door toward the aft end of the passageway. “The captain’s cabin. I shudder to think what we may find in there.”
“Maybe nothing,” said one of the crewmen nervously. “Everybody probably fled the ship and trekked off along the coast northward.”
Roxanna shook her head. “I can’t imagine anyone leaving such a beautiful animal to die on board alone.”
The men forced open the door to the captain’s cabin and entered, to a gruesome sight. A woman dressed in clothing from the mid to late seventeen hundreds sat in a chair, her dark eyes open and staring with great sadness at the form of a small child lying in a crib. She had frozen to death while in deep sorrow at losing what appeared to be her young daughter. In her lap was an open Bible turned to the Psalms.
The tragic sight numbed Roxanna and the crew of the Paloverde. Her enthusiasm at exploring the unknown had suddenly evaporated into a feeling of anguish. She stood there with the others in silence, their hushed breath misting in that crypt of a cabin.
Mender turned and walked into an adjoining cabin and found the captain of the ship, who he rightly assumed was the dead woman’s husband. The man was seated at a desk, slumped in a chair. His red hair was coated by ice and his face was dead white. One hand was still clutching a quill pen. A sheet of paper lay before him on the desk. Mender brushed away the frost and read the wording.
August 26, 1779
It has been five months since we were trapped in this accursed place after that storm drove us far off our course to the south. Food gone. No one has eaten for ten days. Most of the crew and passengers dead. My little daughter died yesterday, my poor wife only an hour ago. Whoever should find our bodies, please notify the directors of the Skylar Croft Trading Company of Liverpool of our fate. All is at an end. I shall soon join my beloved wife and daughter.
Leigh Hunt
Master of the Madras
The leather-bound logbook of the Madras lay to one side of Captain Hunt on the desk. Mender carefully dislodged it from the ice that froze the rear cover to the wooden desktop and placed the book inside his heavy coat. Then he stepped from the cabin and closed the door.
“What did you find?” asked Roxanna.
“The body of the captain.”
“It’s all so terrible.”
“I imagine there is worse to see.”
The words were prophetic. They divided up and went from cabin to cabin. The more exquisite passengers’ accommodations were in the roundhouse, an expansive space with quarter galleries and windows partitioned into various-sized cabins in the stern below the poop deck. Passengers booked empty space. They had to furnish their cabin themselves, providing couches, beds, and chairs, all lashed down in anticipation of heavy weather. Wealthy passengers often brought such personal possessions as bureaus, bookshelves, and musical instruments, including pianos and harps. Here the searchers found nearly thirty bodies in various positions of death. Some died sitting upright, some lay in bed, while others were sprawled on the deck. All looked as if they had peacefully dozed off.
Roxanna was unsettled by those whose eyes were open. The color of their irises seemed enhanced by the pure white faces surrounding them. She cringed when one of the Paloverde’s crewmen reached out and touched the hair of one of the ladies. The frozen hair made a strange crackling noise and broke off in the crewman’s hand.
The great cabin on the deck below the more elegant roundhouse staterooms looked like a morgue after a disaster. Mender saw any number of dead, mostly men, many of them British military officers in uniform. Forward was the steerage cabin, which was also filled with frozen corpses in hammocks slung over ship’s supplies and luggage in the steerage compartment.
Everyone aboard the Madras had died peacefully. There was no sign of chaos. Nothing was in disarray. All articles and goods were stowed neatly. But for the final narrative by Captain Hunt, it seemed that time had stopped and they had all peacefully died as they lived. What Roxanna and Mender saw was not grotesque or terrifying but simply an overwhelming misfortune. These people had been dead for seventy-nine years and been forgotten by the passing world. Even those who had wondered about and mourned their disappearance were long since gone.
“I don’t understand,” said Roxanna. “How did they all die?”
“Those who didn’t starve, froze,” answered her husband.
“But they could have fished through the ice and shot penguin the same as we did, and burned parts of the ship to stay warm.”
“The captain’s last words say his ship was driven far off their course to the south. My guess is they were trapped in the ice much farther from shore than we were, and the captain, believing
they would eventually drift free, followed the rules of good seamanship and forbid fires on board his ship for fear of an accidental conflagration, until it was too late.”
“So, one by one, they died.”
“Then, when spring came and the ice melted, instead of being carried by the current out into the South Pacific as a derelict, contrary winds drove the ship ashore, where it has lain since the last century.”
“I think you’re right, Captain,” said first mate Bigelow, approaching from the forward part of the ship. “Judging from the clothing on the bodies, the poor devils did not expect a voyage that would take them into frigid waters. Most all appear better dressed for a tropical climate. They must have been sailing from India to England.”
“A great tragedy,” Roxanna sighed, “that nothing could have saved these unfortunate people.”
“Only God,” muttered Mender, “only God.” He turned to Bigelow. “What cargo was she carrying?”
“No gold or silver that I could find, but a general cargo of tea, Chinese porcelain in tightly packed wooden crates, and bales of silk, along with a variety of rattan, spices, and camphor. And, oh yes, I found a small storeroom, locked with heavy chains, directly below the captain’s cabin.”
“Did you search it?” asked Mender.
Bigelow shook his head. “No, sir. I thought it only proper that you should be present. I left my men to work at breaking the chains.”
“Maybe the room contains treasure,” said Roxanna, a tinge of red returning to her cheeks.
“We’ll soon find out.” Mender nodded at Bigelow. “Mr. Bigelow, will you lead the way?”
The first mate led them down a ladder into the aft main steerage hold. The storeroom stood opposite an eighteen-pound cannon whose port was frozen shut. Two of the Paloverde’s crew were attacking the heavy padlock securing the chains that were bolted into the door. Using a sledgehammer and chisel found in the carpenters’ workshop, they furiously hammered away at the lock’s shackle until it snapped apart. Then they twisted the heavy door latch until it sprang free and the door could be pushed inward.
The interior was dimly lit by a small port in the bulwarks. Wooden crates were stacked from bulkhead to bulkhead, but the contents appeared to have been packed haphazardly. Mender stepped over to a large crate and easily lifted one end of the lid.
“These chests were not carefully packed and loaded aboard in port by commercial traders,” he said quietly. “It looks to me like they were sloppily crated by the crew sometime during the voyage and placed under lock and key by the captain.”
“Don’t just stand there, husband,” ordered Roxanna, mesmerized by curiosity. “Open them.”
While the crew stood outside the storage room, Mender and Bigelow began prying open the wooden chests. No one seemed to notice the bitter cold. They were spellbound in anticipation of finding some great treasure in gold and gemstones. But when Mender held up one of the pieces of the contents from a chest, their hopes were quickly shattered.
“A copper urn,” he said, passing it to Roxanna, who held it up in the brighter light of the steerage compartment. “Beautifully sculpted. Greek or Roman, if I’m any judge of antiquity.”
Bigelow removed and passed several more artifacts through the open door. Most of them were small copper sculptures of strange-looking animals with black opal eyes. “They’re beautiful,” whispered Roxanna, admiring the designs that had been sculpted and etched into the copper. “They’re nothing like anything I’ve seen in books.”
“They do look unusual,” agreed Mender.
“Are they of any value?” asked Bigelow.
“To a collector of antiquities or a museum maybe,” answered Mender. “But I seriously doubt any of us could get rich off them. . . .” He paused as he held up a life-size human skull that gleamed black in the veiled light. “Good Lord, will you look at this?”
“It’s frightening,” muttered Bigelow.
“Looks like it was carved by Satan himself,” murmured a crewman in awe.
Totally unintimidated, Roxanna held it up and stared into the empty eye sockets. “It has the appearance of ebony glass. And see the dragon coming out between its teeth.”
“My guess, it’s obsidian,” observed Mender, “but I couldn’t begin to presume how it was carved—” Mender was interrupted by a loud crackling sound, as the ice around the stern of the ship heaved and grumbled.
One of the crew dropped down the stairway from the upper deck, shouting, his voice high-pitched and harsh. “Captain, we must leave quickly! A great crack is spreading across the ice and pools of water are forming! I fear if we don’t hurry, we’ll be trapped here!”
Mender wasted no time in questions. “Get back to the ship!” he ordered. “Quickly!”
Roxanna wrapped the skull in her scarf and tucked it under one arm.
“No time for souvenirs,” Mender snapped at her. But she ignored him and refused to let go of the skull.
Pushing Roxanna ahead of them, the men hurried up the stairway to the main deck and dropped down onto the ice. They were horrified to see that what had been a solid field of ice was now buckling and breaking up into ponds. Cracks turned into meandering streams and rivers as the seawater poured up through the ice onto the floe. None of them had any idea the floe could melt so fast.
Skirting the upheaved masses, some of them forty feet high, and leaping across the cracks before they widened and made crossing impossible, the crew and Roxanna ran as if all the banshees of hell were after them. The macabre, indescribable sounds of the ice grinding against itself struck terror in their minds. The going was exhausting; at every step their feet sank six inches into the blanket of snow that had accumulated on the level stretches of the floe.
The wind began to pick up again, and incredibly it felt warm, the warmest air they had felt since the ship had become jammed in the ice. After running a mile and a half, everyone was ready to collapse from exhaustion. The shouts of their shipmates on the Paloverde, begging them to hurry, urged them to greater efforts. Then, abruptly, it seemed that their struggle to gain the ship had ended in vain. The last crack in the ice before they could reach the safety of the Paloverde nearly defeated them. It had widened to twenty feet, too far for them to leap over, and was spreading at a rate of a foot every thirty seconds.
Seeing their predicament, the Paloverde’s second mate, Asa Knight, ordered the men on board to lower a whaleboat over the side, and they manhandled it across the ice to the fissure, which had now increased to nearly thirty feet. Heaving and pulling the heavy boat, the crew struggled to save the captain and his wife and their shipmates before it was too late. After a herculean effort, they reached the opposite edge of the fissure. By then, Mender, Roxanna, and the others were standing knee-deep in water that was coming up through the ice.
The boat was quickly pushed into the freezing water, and the men rowed it across the rapidly expanding river in the ice, to the vast relief of those minutes away from death on the other side. Roxanna was lifted over the side first, followed by the rest of the crew and Mender.
“We owe you a great debt, Mr. Knight,” said Mender, shaking his second mate’s hand. “Your daring initiative saved our lives. I especially thank you on behalf of my wife.”
“And child,” Roxanna added, as two crewmen wrapped her in blankets.
He looked at her. “Our child is safe on the ship.”
“I wasn’t talking about Samuel,” she said, through chattering teeth.
Mender stared at her. “Are you telling me you’re with child again, woman?”
“I think about two months.”
Mender was appalled. “You went out on the ice in a storm knowing you were pregnant?”
“There was no storm when I set out,” she said with a weak grin.
“Good Lord,” he sighed, “what am I to do with you?”
“If you don’t want her, Captain,” said Bigelow jovially, “I’ll be happy to have her.”
Despite the fact that he wa
s chilled to the bone, Mender laughed as he hugged his wife, nearly crushing the breath out of her. “Do not tempt me, Mr. Bigelow, do not tempt me.”
HALF an hour later, Roxanna was back on board the Paloverde, changed into dry clothing and warming her body around the big brick-and-cast-iron stove used to melt whale blubber. Her husband and crew did not spare any time for creature comforts. The sails were hurriedly removed from the hold where they had been stowed, and were carried into the rigging. Soon they were unfurled, the anchors were pulled off the bottom, and, with Mender at the helm, the Paloverde began to thread her way through the melting water between huge icebergs toward the open sea again.
After enduring six months of cold and near starvation, the captain and crew were free of the ice and headed home, but not before they had filled her casks with seventeen hundred barrels of sperm oil.
The strange obsidian skull that Roxanna had taken from the frozen Madras went on the family mantel of their home in San Francisco. Mender dutifully corresponded with the current owners of the Skylar Croft Trade Company of Liverpool, who were operating under a new name, and sent off the logbook, giving the position where they had found the derelict ship on the shore of the Bellingshausen Sea.
The sinister and dead relic of the past remained in frigid isolation. An expedition consisting of two ships was mounted from Liverpool in 1862 to recover the Madras’s cargo, but neither ship was ever seen again and were presumed lost in the great ice floe around Antarctica.
Another 144 years would pass before men were to rediscover and set foot on the decks of the Madras again.
PART ONE
AS CLOSE TO HELL AS YOU CAN GET
1
MARCH 22, 2001
PANDORA, COLORADO
THE WANING STARS IN the early-morning sky blazed like a theater marquee when seen from 9,000 feet above sea level. But it was the moon that had a ghostly look about it as Luis Marquez stepped from his little wooden frame house. It wore a curious orange halo that he had never seen before. He peered at the odd phenomenon for a few moments before walking across the yard to his 1973 Chevy Cheyenne 4×4 pickup truck.
Atlantis Found (A Dirk Pitt Novel) Page 3