by Alex Archer
“I don’t know, Marcos,” Claire said, stepping in. “Maybe Annja’s right. It appears that some of the crew survived. Maybe there was something they saw or experienced that might have some bearing on what happened to Dr. Knowles and his team.”
She looked at Annja. “See what you can find. Since we don’t know where we’re headed after this, we might as well camp here for the night and come up with a working plan for tomorrow.”
Claire faced the group. “Tents first and then we’ll see about dressing that pig,” she told them, then hustled them out of the cabin.
Thankful that Claire had seen things her way, Annja settled into a nearby chair and began to read.
She started with the earlier pages in the journal, which were largely intact. Captain Jeffries had a fine, spidery script that made it easy to read, as well.
The journal told the whole sorry tale.
Captain Jeffries had sighted the Mary Dear off the coast of Panama and had given chase, eventually engaging in a running gun battle that ended only when Jeffries utilized the marines he had at his disposal to board the other vessel and take her by force. The charges against Thompson had been simple, straightforward and beyond much doubt. A trial presided over by Jeffries found Thompson and his crew guilty of murder and piracy. The crew members were hung from the mizzenmast in sets of three, until only Thompson and his first mate were left.
Thompson pleaded for Jeffries to spare his life, one captain to another, and the British commander had agreed to do so, provided Thompson led them to the location where he’d buried the treasure.
With little choice before him, Thompson agreed.
Annja had assumed all of that; the story as outlined by Captain Jeffries was the same as that which had come down through history.
She flipped ahead, seeking something more relevant. She found it several pages later.
October 2
I am astounded that I am alive to write this, for the events of the past forty-eight hours have been a nightmare unlike any I have ever experienced. Only by the Lord’s grace and blessing did we make it through at all, though the cost has been considerable.
The morning of September 30 dawned calm and clear. Having retrieved the treasure from Cocos Island the night before, we rendezvoused with the Mary Dear off the leeward side of the island and spent most of the morning transferring half of the treasure to her holds. I told Lieutenant Johann that it was to protect the Crown’s investment should one of our ships run into difficulty on the return voyage; at the time I had no idea just how prophetic I was being.
When the loading was finished, a full complement of crew members, along with dispatches I’d prepared for the admiralty, were sent over to the other ship with orders for Johann to make for Bristol at the best possible speed. His was the lighter, faster ship and I expected him to arrive at least three days before I would.
We saw them off with a six-gun salute and then returned to work repairing the last of the damage Reliant had sustained during her confrontation with the Mary Dear when she was under Captain Thompson’s command.
The storm began about midway through the afternoon watch and grew worse by the hour. The nearness of the island began to make me nervous, and as the swells increased in size, so, too, did my anxiety. As the first dogwatch dawned, I had the men haul anchor and pointed the Reliant toward the open ocean.
Better to ride out the storm in deep water than get battered about on the reef, I thought.
No sooner had we turned for open water than I heard the lookout in the main-mast crow’s nest give a shout. He was hard to see in the rain, but after a moment I realized that he was pointing frantically toward the horizon. I dug out my spyglass and stared hard into the night, searching for whatever it was that had gotten him so worked up. Lightning flashed and what I saw in its light has been carved indelibly onto the inside of my eyelids for all time.
The largest wave I have ever seen filled the horizon and was looming down upon us.
We had one chance and I took it. There was no time to turn about for we’d be caught halfway through the maneuver and swamped by the force of the wave. Same held true for trying to outrun it. The Reliant was a 2100-ton vessel without the treasure aboard her. She could lumber about like a behemoth but that was about it. No way did she have the guts to outrun it.
Our only chance was to climb straight up it.
There was no time to furl the sails, so I gave the order to have them cut away. We had more in the hold, so replacing them wouldn’t be difficult. The crew jumped to carry out the order without hesitation—they were good men and had been trained well—but even so, by the time the last rope had been severed, the wave had gained on us considerably.
The helmsmen and his crew had just enough time to carry out my orders to bring the boat about, aiming the bow right for the heart of the oncoming wave, before the wave reached our location.
It towered above us, a veritable wall of water that had to be at least a thousand feet high. Up, up, up the face of the wave we went until we were all but vertical on the face of it. At that moment the lowest part of the wave struck the reefs surrounding Cocos and the wave crested, smashing down upon us and sending us flipping away from it like a cork from a bottle lost on the high seas.
Somewhere in the midst of all the bouncing and battering I lost consciousness.
I awoke to the silence of the dead.
The rogue wave carried us several miles inland before depositing us like so much rejected flotsam in the middle of a stretch of decimated jungle. We are sitting more or less upright, the hull wedged between what is left of a dozen trees. A ten-foot hole on the aft section of the port-side hull will need to be repaired before we can even think about being seaworthy again, but I am not in a rush to assign a detail to repair it. It seems futile; there is no way to get the ship back to the coast even if we could fix the damage to the hull.
The loss of life in the storm was significant. Of all the souls that were aboard the Reliant when we bid goodbye to the Mary Dear, only forty-five remain. Of those forty-five, only eleven, counting myself, are actually fit for duty. The damage to our company is staggering and the men wander about like punch-drunk fighters, waiting for the next blow to fall....
That’s one question answered, Annja thought. They had all been wondering how the Reliant had ended up in the middle of the jungle and now they knew. The tsunami that had brought the ship here certainly must have been an impressive sight, if Captain Jeffries’s guess regarding its size was correct. It might not be the largest on record—that belonged to a 1,720 foot wave in Lituya Bay, Alaska—but it was astounding just the same. Annja had been through a tsunami herself, albeit a much smaller one, and knew the devastation it could bring. She had no trouble believing that the crew of the Reliant had encountered something so big that their only choice had been to buckle down the hatches and ride it out.
She started reading ahead in the journal, only to discover a few pages later that it hadn’t taken long for that “next blow,” as Jeffries had called it, to fall on the crew of the Reliant. The beginning of the entry was washed out, but she was still able to understand the gist of it.
The natives returned during the night and this time they were not content to just observe. The men of the watch were slain instantly with arrows through the eyes. The brigands then scaled the hull of the ship and entered the lower gun deck through the open sally ports. Four additional men died before the noise woke the others. The gener
al melee that followed was swift and bloody.
In the end, we were able to repulse the attackers with the judicious use of the ship’s firearms but it was close just the same. If they come back with a larger party, we are going to be in trouble. I needed all hands on deck. I informed Mr. Thompson that, given our present circumstances, I was granting him a temporary pardon and releasing him from confinement, provided that I had his word as an officer and gentleman that he would not seek to act against myself or my crew in any fashion.
Thompson agreed.
Additional guards were posted and several of the cannons were moved into the sally ports and primed for use. If the natives returned, it was my intention to blow them out of the jungle before they could attempt to storm the ship a second time.
I needn’t have worried. The natives weren’t coming back. They had already beaten us; we just didn’t know it yet.
Eighteen men had sustained serious injury in the attack, so we converted one side of the lower gun deck to an infirmary to allow the ship’s doctor to treat them all in one location. Thankfully, the need for amputations and other major surgical procedures was limited as the natives didn’t have firearms or cannons to cause injuries deserving of such treatment.
Three hours after the doctor had finished treating all of their wounds, the first of the injured men grew sick. By dawn the next day, all of the injured men had come down with the same illness. Concerned, I had the lower gun deck declared off-limits to the rest of the crew and restricted access to the doctor and his staff only. It didn’t do any good.
Less than forty-eight hours later, the first of the uninjured men became sick.
After that, it was just a matter of time.
There were several pages after that point that were illegible due to weather damage, the pages having stuck together and, on those that weren’t, the ink so faded and overgrown with mold that Annja couldn’t even tell where one sentence began and another ended.
Then, on October 18, an entry with just a single sentence.
Thompson has fled.
The last entry in the log was written on the very next day, October 19, and within its stark phrases Annja found the answer she was seeking. She knew what had happened to Dr. Knowles and, more importantly, what to do to get him back.
She closed the journal and, taking it with her, went to find the others.
26
The day had grown late while Annja read and reread the captain’s journal. By the time she stepped out of the wardroom and onto the upper gun deck, she discovered that the sun had all but set.
The smell of cooked meat wafted up over the side of the ship, causing Annja’s stomach to grumble; her body had already grown tired of rehydrated rations, it seemed. She walked to the edge and found her three companions sitting around a large fire, the carcass of the boar they’d killed earlier roasting within the flames. Their voices drifted up to her, but she couldn’t make sense of what they were talking about from the few isolated words that reached her.
She turned and made her way back down through the ship to exit exactly as they had entered.
Marcos saw her first.
“Well? Did you find all of the answers we need?”
Annja kept her face even but inside she was frowning. Marcos seemed to be getting more belligerent the farther away from civilization they got. She needed to watch him a bit more carefully, she decided.
To the others, she said, “As a matter of fact, yes. I think I know what happened to Dr. Knowles and his team.”
“Really?” Claire said, her voice full of surprise and excitement.
Annja accepted a plate of food from Hugo and sat down at the fire with the rest of them. She tore off a piece of meat and began to eat while telling her story.
“According to the logbook, Thompson revealed the location of the treasure to Captain Jeffries of the Reliant in exchange for his life. Jeffries promptly ordered the treasure dug up again and put half aboard the Mary Dear and half aboard the Reliant. The Mary Dear left for England while the Reliant remained to finish up a few repairs.”
She paused to gulp down a few more bites; the food was terrific.
“Before the Reliant could leave the area, however, she was caught in a massive storm. In the midst of the storm, the Reliant was struck by a tsunami of incredible size that carried the ship halfway across the island to where you see it now.
“Here’s where it gets interesting. Most of the crew was lost in the storm, but Captain Jeffries managed to get the others organized and working as a team. They buried their dead—” Annja pointed over her shoulder at the graveyard several yards behind her “—and buried the treasure in the cave.”
“Wait a minute,” Marcos said. “If they were all marooned here, how did word of the treasure’s location get out? How did Dr. Knowles know to look along the ridge instead of down by the coast, where it would have made sense for the pirates to bury it?”
Claire beat her to the answer. “Thompson escaped.”
Annja nodded. “Jeffries refused to keep him locked up, said they needed every spare hand they could get. Thompson bided his time and then hightailed it out of camp one night when Jeffries wasn’t paying attention. Somehow, someway, he made it off the island.”
“So Keating wasn’t lying—the directions he’d been given to the treasure had actually come from Thompson, just as he claimed!” Claire exclaimed.
“Your husband must have recognized the truth, as they brought him to this place, as well.”
“So what?” Marcos said, his irritation plain. “All that ancient history doesn’t do a thing to tell us what happened to Knowles. Or the treasure.”
Annja didn’t agree. “On the contrary, I think it does. Listen to this.”
She opened up the logbook and, with the help of the light from the fire, read out loud Jeffries’s comments about the attack by the natives.
“Like I said before. So what?”
Annja ignored Marcos, focusing her attention on Claire, for it would be up to Claire where the team went next.
“No one knew there were natives on the island in 1821. In fact, this logbook is the only mention of them that I’ve ever come across. More than two dozen expeditions have been to this place, looking for the gold, and not a single one of them have encountered them?”
“Because they’re all dead! It was hundreds of years ago.”
Annja’s gaze never left Claire’s face. “We know at least one of them who is not. And where there is one, there are probably a lot more.”
“Do you believe that?” Claire asked. “That it was an actual native and not someone trying to horn in on the treasure? Perhaps even one of Richard’s men?”
“I do. Listen to this.... ‘The morning brings with it a shocking revelation,’” Annja quoted, reading the final entry from the logbook aloud. “‘The last of my crew disappeared in the night. Eighteen healthy men vanished without a trace.’
“‘At first I thought they had decided en masse to reject my leadership. That they had headed for the coast despite my fears that the island would be struck by a secondary wave. But when I checked on the men in the infirmary, I discovered that they had, to a man, been murdered in their beds. Standing in the midst of their lifeless bodies was another of those monkey-faced idols we’d discovered before.’
“‘The natives had returned and, for whatever reason, had slain the sick and taken the healthy men of my crew with them when they’d left.’”
; Annja glanced up from the logbook and knew from the expression on Claire’s face that she’d put two and two together.
But Annja wasn’t finished reading. Not yet.
She went on. “‘Knowing I couldn’t live with myself if I left my crew at the mercy of the natives,’” she read, “‘I’ve decided to go after them. I have several days of food and plenty of water, so when I am done writing this, I will set out in pursuit. I will leave the logbook behind so that there will be a record if I fail in my task. I will also mark the trail in my wake in the rare case that someone finds this logbook and attempts to come after me.’
“‘Written this twenty-third day of October, in the year of our Lord Eighteen Twenty-One.’
“‘Captain Martin Jeffries.’”
Even Marcos understood the similarities now. Two hundred years, give or take a decade or two, separated them from Captain Jeffries and his crew, but what they had experienced was almost identical to that of the British commander.
“Are you suggesting that not only Dr. Knowles and his team but also the crew of the Sea Dancer were taken captive by these so-called natives?” Claire asked.
Annja nodded, her gaze locked with that of Claire. “I am.”
“And what are you proposing we do about it?”
“I would think that would be obvious,” Annja said with a smile. “Go after them, of course.”
From the look on Marcos’s face, he agreed with her for a change.
It wasn’t long before they decided to investigate the area around the ship for the marker Captain Jeffries claimed to have left. If they found it, they would continue in that direction. If they did not, they would discuss the issue a bit further and, hopefully, come to some consensus as to the direction they should take.