The Deep

by Peter Benchley

  “What happened?”

  Treece strode aft, swung down into the cockpit, and snapped on an overhead light. In his hand was a two-inch-long dart shaped like a feather. “What the Christ do they think they’re doing?”

  Sanders looked at the dart and said, “Cloche.”

  “What?”

  “Cloche wears a feather exactly like that, only smaller. It must be his calling card. He’s already worked on Gail and me. Now he probably wants to force you to deal with him.”

  “Idiot,” Treece said. “Just because he hired some toady to row out here and shoot my dog? That’s supposed to make me fall to my knees?” He spat on the deck. “All that does is piss me off.”

  He looked up and saw the dog hobbling along the gunwale. “Get me the first-aid kit,” he said, pointing to a locker on the starboard side. “Got to patch up the old lady.”

  He lifted the dog off the gunwale and set her on the deck. Gently, he forced her to lie on her good side.

  Treece clipped the matted hairs from around the ragged wound, cleaned it with an antiseptic, and poured sulfa powder onto it. As he worked, he cooed lovingly to the dog, soothing, reassuring, treating her, it seemed to Sanders, with paternal tenderness and affection.

  The dog responded: she made no sound and did not move.

  When he had finished, Treece scratched the dog’s ears and said, “I suppose I better bandage you.” He reached for a gauze pad and adhesive tape. “Knowing you, you’ve already got a taste for yourself, and you’ll eat yourself right up to the bloody neck.” He helped the dog to her feet, and, tail wagging feebly, she tottered to a corner and lay down.

  “What do you think they’ll do now?” Sanders asked.

  “Cloche? No telling. I covered up those ampules, so he’ll not be dead sure we found anything. But that just buys us a day or two.” Treece shook his head. “Lord, but there’s a Christ load of stuff down there.”

  “More than we saw?”

  “Aye. That box was just the tip. It looks to me like the number three hold hit the rocks and spilled a little bit. Then maybe she slid backward and busted her guts.” Treece made an upside-down V with his hands. “What we saw was up at the top here. The farther down away from the cave I looked, the wider the pattern was, with some of those explosives mixed in.”

  “Can we get it all up?”

  “Not with a Ping-Pong paddle. We’ll need the air lift.” He pointed to the aluminum tube lashed to the gunwale. “And we’ll have to dive with Desco gear, not air tanks. Can’t be coming up every hour for new tanks. That means firing up the compressor, and that means noise. It’s going to be bad.”

  “Why?”

  “The deep stuff must be all mixed in with the artillery shells.”

  “They’re not armed, are they?”

  “Doesn’t matter. Brass corrodes. Primers may be weak. And the cordite in those shells is still good as new. Bang ’em together, or drop one on a rock—let alone use a torch—and we’ll be playing harp duets for Saint Peter.”

  “Can we get the government to help?”

  “The Bermuda Government?” Treece laughed. “Aye. They’ll have the royal scroll-maker draw up a fancy scroll commissioning me to get rid of the nuisance. If it weren’t for one thing, I’d be tempted to put a charge down there and blow the whole mess to dust.”

  Treece fished inside his wet-suit jacket, found what he was looking for, and handed it to Sanders. It was a coin, irregular-shaped and green with tarnish. It looked as if the design on the coin had been impressed off-center, for only about three quarters of the surface of the metal carried any marks at all. Around the rim of the coin Sanders could make out the letters “EI,” then a period, then the letter “G,” another period and the numerals “170.” Closer to the center of the coin was an “M,” and in the center was an intricate crest that included two castles, a lion, and a number of bars.

  “So?” Sanders said. “You said yourself that one coin doesn’t make a treasure.”

  “True. But that coin might.”

  “Why?”

  “After I sent you up, I went along the reef a way and fanned a few pockets around the rocks. I found that coin about six inches under the sand. It was lying up against a piece of iron, which is why it survived and wasn’t all oxidized like the one you found.”

  “Why is it green?”

  “That’s nothing, it cleans right off. The iron it was lying up against looked to me like the hasp of a padlock. It didn’t come loose right away, and I didn’t want to spend the time wrestling with it.”

  “You mean there’s a chest down there?”

  “Not the way you’d imagine. The wood would have rotted away long since. The coins’d be all clotted together, and a lot of them would be no damn good. There’s a clump of them down there, under a rock. I tried to pry one loose, but it wouldn’t come. I figure it’s stuck to some others.”

  “There could be more, then. Gold, I mean.”

  “It’s beginning to look like it.” Treece held the coin to the fight. “Here. The ‘M’ means it was minted in Mexico City. What does that tell you?”

  “That the ship was going east, back to Spain.”

  “Aye. It was leaving the New World. About a third of the ships that wrecked were on their way to the New World, and they didn’t carry treasure. They were burdened with wine and cheese and clothing and mining equipment. The numbers are the first three numbers of the date the coin was minted—sometime in the first ten years of the eighteenth century. That jibes with the crest. It’s Philip the Fifth’s. He took the throne in 1700.”

  “What do the letters mean?”

  “ ‘By the grace of God,’ ” Treece said. “They’re the end of the legend on the obverse of all the coins: Philippus V, then Dei G., for gratia.” Treece turned the coin over. “That’s a Jerusalem cross. I can’t read the letters, except for that ‘M’ there, and the ‘R,’ but it said Hispaniarum et Indiarum Rex—King of Spain and the Indies.”

  “So?”

  “In 1715 a big fleet, one of Philip’s biggest, went down on the way home.”

  “I’ve heard of that fleet. But somebody found it, didn’t they?”

  “Aye, a diver named Kip Wagner. Ten ships went down, carrying God knows how much in gold and silver, and in the early 1960s Wagner found what he figured was eight of them. He pulled up something like eight million dollars’ worth of gold.”

  Sanders felt excitement surge through his stomach. “And this stuff is from one of the other two ships?”

  Treece smiled and shook his head. “Not a chance. Something’s down there, for sure, but it can’t be one of Philip’s ten. They all went down off Florida, every one of them. It’s been documented over and over again—survivors, eyewitness reports, logs, salvors’ records, everything—and no ship’s going to move a thousand miles on the bottom of the ocean. No, what we know’s so problem; it’s what we don’t know that’s bothersome.”

  “Like?”

  “It’s a healthy bet that if there is a ship beneath Goliath, it sank between 1710 and 1720. If it was later than that, the coins we’ve found would have later dates. New World coins didn’t stay long in the New World. The Spaniards needed every one of them to keep their country afloat. But there’s no record of a Spanish ship sinking on this end of Bermuda between 1710 and 1720.”

  “It doesn’t have to be a Spanish ship, does it, Just because it carried Spanish coins?”

  “No. Pieces of eight were international currency. Everybody used them. But there’s no record of any ship sinking off this stretch of beach in the early 1700s.”

  Sanders said, “That could be good, couldn’t it? It means the ship was never salvaged.”

  “Good and bad. It means we have to start from scratch. Odds are, she went down at night. If there were survivors—and I doubt there were—they’d have no misty notion of where they pranged up. They’d be too concerned with saving their own pelts. So whatever cargo went down with her is probably still there.”
/>   “And that could be—”

  “No telling. According to the records, between 1520 and 1800 the Spaniards hauled about twelve billion dollars’ worth of goodies out of the New World—that’s twelve billion dollars’ worth in those days. About five per cent of that was lost, and about half of what was lost was recovered, which leaves roughly three hundred million dollars on the bottom. Figure a couple of hundred years’ inflation of that value, you’re well over a billion dollars. That would be nice and neat—if it were true. The trouble is, everybody was corrupt, and for every dollar’s worth of registered treasure on a ship, there was probably another dollar smuggled aboard.”

  “To avoid taxes?”

  “A special tax. By law, the King of Spain got twenty per cent of every treasure, no matter who collected it. A businessman who traded European goods for New World gold still had to pony up the so-called King’s Quinto. It was much cheaper to bribe some fellow to overlook a few things than it was to give twenty per cent to the crown.”

  “That explains the anchor caper,” Sanders said. “I ran across something at the Geographic about a captain who had his anchor cast in gold and painted black.”

  “Aye. He was hanged. The point is, there’s no way to tell what could be on a ship. There’ve been a dozen cases of ships sinking and being half-salvaged—and the half that was salvaged toting up to more than was listed for the whole ship. The lead ship of a fleet, the capitana, might have had three million dollars in registered treasure on her. But this is no capitana: there’s no fleet to go with her. It’s possible that this ship was taking home some of the survivors of the 1715 fleet. And maybe some of the salvaged treasure. But then there’d be some record—if not here, then in Cádiz or Seville—of the survivors leaving Havana and ending up here. There’s nothing.” Treece reached inside his wet suit and pulled out an oval of gold. “Here’s another bit to the mystery.”

  “A coin?”

  “No.” Treece passed it to Sanders. “A medallion.”

  There was a raised head of a woman on the medallion, and the letters “S.C.O.P.N.”

  “I think it’s Santa Clara,” Treece said. “The ‘O.P.N.’ stands for ora pro nobis—Santa Clara, pray for us. Look on the back.”

  Sanders flipped the medallion. The back was clear, except for the letters “E.F.”

  “Those same initials!”

  “Aye. This morning I wasn’t able to find any officer or noble or captain with those initials, and I’ve looked through mounds of papers.”

  Sanders returned the medallion to Treece. “Maybe it was a present for somebody.”

  “Not bloody likely. Nobody gave stuff like this away.” Treece dropped the medallion and the coin into his wet suit, turned off the overhead light, and started the engine. He sent Sanders forward to raise the anchor, and when he heard the clank of iron on the deck, he swung the wheel hard left and headed seaward.

  Sanders returned to the cockpit and said, “What do we do now?”

  “We stay away from this place for a couple of days while I try to figure out what the hell’s underneath Goliath.”

  “Cloche . . .”

  “I know. Now he knows I’m interested, he’s bound to raise a ruckus before long. Best thing for you two might be to pack up and go home. Take the risk he’ll leave you be.”

  Sanders didn’t reply; Treece was probably right. Maybe he should try to take Gail home on the first plane out in the morning. But if he left, it would mean he had been lying to himself all his life. His dreams and ambitions—of working with Cousteau, of journeying around the world for the Geographic—would be stamped as the idle fancies of an armchair buccaneer. Here was a chance to do something he had never done before, a chance to live on the edge rather than slip through existence as an observer. The risks involved were genuine, not gratuitous or self-imposed, and that made them seem somehow more worthwhile.

  He looked at Treece, then at the deck, trying to phrase a question. Finally, he said, “What if there is a lot of gold down there?”

  “We’ll have a royal rumpus getting it up, around those explosives.”

  “No . . . I mean, what if we do get it up?”

  “Why, then . . .” Treece stopped. He grinned at Sanders. “I see the wheels a-whirrin’ in the brain. Okay. I’m tempted to lie to you, to convince you to leave, but that’s not my way. I figure, if a man wants to put his ass on the line, it’s not my place to stop him. So here it is: We go to the Receiver of Wrecks and apply for a license.”

  “You need a license?”

  “Aye, to dive on any wreck. The license is good for a year. We could say we’re working Goliath, which is an open wreck, and not bother with a license. But I’ll apply, to keep things tidy. They’ve never turned me down yet. The license’ll list you and me as equal partners. Normally, the boat counts as a person.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “The boat counts as a shareholder, to take care of wear and tear and depreciation and expense. All that. But we won’t worry about that this time. We’ll make some arrangement for expenses. So you and your wife will split half, or however you settle it with her. Whatever we find belongs to Bermuda, technically, but unless they think we’re brigands, they’ll be reasonable. The stuff the Bermuda Historical Wrecks Authority wants, it’ll make us an offer on. If there’s something they’re really hot to get, we’ll have to accept their offer, which is figured out by an arbitrator appointed by—who bloody else?—the government. Whatever they don’t want to pay for they’ll return to us, and we can do as we damn please with it.”

  “Sell it?”

  “Perhaps.” Treece paused. “But I’ll tell you now, even though we’re daydreaming, that’s where we may come to blows.”

  Sanders was startled. “About selling it?”

  “Aye. We’ve our differences. I don’t need money; I imagine you do. I care about preserving finds intact. You don’t know enough about wrecks to care.”

  The remark stung. “I’ll learn.”

  “Maybe.” Treece smiled. “Anyway, the way the market is, we probably couldn’t sell it. Buggers.”

  “Who?”

  “Back in the late fifties and early sixties, people found a lot of goodies. That’s when I found my first, and Wagner found the eight 1715 ships. Everybody wanted Spanish gold, so a few sonsofbitches got cute and started dummying it. It’s easy to do and hard to detect. You can’t carbon-date gold, and with the technology what it is, a crook can make a right-perfect Spanish coin.”

  “Can’t you spot a phony?”

  “Sometimes, but it’s hard. Last year, I got a call from the Forrester Museum. A Professor Peabody wanted me to come look at some stuff. He didn’t tell me why, but I figured he smelled a rat or he wouldn’t be paying me to go all the way to Delaware. I looked at the coins, and I was goddamned if I could find anything wrong. But I knew there had to be something. I sat in a room staring at the bloody things for a week. They were perfect! I started talking to myself, arguing with myself about every mark on every coin. I argued right into the answer. The coins all carried a ‘P.’ It was the mint mark, meaning that they were minted at the Potosí mint in Peru. It’s Bolivia now. Then I looked at the date on one of the coins: 1627. There it was.”

  “There what was?”

  “The Potosí mint didn’t put out any gold coins until the late 1650s. We had the bastard cold. It turned out he’d spent thousands of dollars buying gold in Europe and having coins made.”

  “What for?”

  “Some folks do it for the premium on authentic Spanish gold. You used to be able to get five thousand dollars for a good royal doubloon. I have a bar with only forty-eight ounces of gold on it—even at two hundred an ounce that’s less than ten thousand—and I’ve been offered forty thousand for it. But this lad had a grander scheme. He dummied the coins to convince people he had found a wreck he’d been looking for: the San Diego, went down in the 1580s. He convinced a few, too, and suckered them into investing money in his corporation.
He called it Doubloons, Inc. I believe they got him on some fraud charge.”

  “Did his coins get into circulation?”

  “That’s the bitch of it. Nobody can be sure. But even if his didn’t, someone else will come up with even better coins. You can’t hope to sell a coin or a gold bar these days unless you’ve got papers on it from the Smithsonian and every Christ agency in the world. I’ve seen coins up for auction that couldn’t have cost more than fifteen dollars. Made in the Philippines. Squeeze ’em too hard, you’ll rub the date off. It’s gotten so bad that some blokes—upright, honest chaps who’ve got the real thing—are being forced to sell Spanish coins to dentists, who melt them down for fillings. Coins three and four hundred years old, rich with the stink of history. And they’re goin’ into a hole in some old lady’s mouth.”

  “What can we do with what we find?”

  Treece laughed. “If,” he said. “God knows. One good thing, though: It does look like there’s more than coins on this one. Jewelry, too, at least some. There hasn’t been too much faking of jewelry yet.” He took the medallion from his wet suit and held it in the dim light from the binnacle. “The Indians used to say, ‘Gold is the god of the Spaniards.’ It buggered up the Indians, buggered up the Spaniards, and it looks like it’s going to keep buggering up people till the end of time.”

  It was after eleven when Treece throttled back and turned Corsair into the cove beneath St. David’s fight. By the glow of the descending moon, Sanders could see that the rickety pier was deserted. Treece’s two other boats, a dory and a Boston Whaler, hung limply at their moorings.

  They made fast Corsair’s lines, put their diving gear away, and walked to the end of the pier. The first few yards of the dirt path leading up the hill were visible in the moonlight. Then the path turned left and vanished in the dark underbrush.

  “This’d be a hell of a place to jump somebody,” Sanders said, walking with his arms before his face to ward off slapping branches.