Inquisition

by David Gibbins

  “Oh oh,” Jack said, straining to bend down and pick up his hood. “That happens every time you sit in front of your shipwreck database.”

  “It was your coin. It made me think about Captain Avery’s treasure.”

  Jack peered at him. “Pretty tired old ground, isn’t it? A bit like the search for the Holy Grail. But like you, I’m one of life’s optimists. And you do seem to have the Midas touch when it comes to finding new sites.”

  “You just can’t ignore it. There are so many references to that treasure around here that there must be a grain of truth in it. Avery was the King of Pirates, with seven chests of silver and one of gold, supposedly buried somewhere around here and never found. It’s the same period, isn’t it, the late seventeenth century. The evacuation of Tangier, the wreck of the Schiedam, the Spanish Main, and the pirates of Port Royal; it’s all interconnected.”

  “You’re looking at the bigger picture.”

  “Well, one thing I don’t buy is the burial story. About Avery’s treasure, I mean. You’re the most successful pirate ever, right? The only pirate ever really to hit the jackpot, scoring a treasure fleet in the Indian Ocean and then another one in the Caribbean, and virtually the only big-time pirate to escape capture. You retire to England, and then you spend the rest of your life in misery and obscurity. That’s what the stories tell us. I just don’t buy it.”

  “Go on.”

  “You don’t bury treasure and then live in poverty. You spend it. He didn’t bury it. He lost it in a shipwreck.”

  Jack thought for a moment. “That would certainly explain the misery and obscurity.”

  “I dug up some notes that John took when he went to the county archives looking for unpublished parish accounts that might mention shipwrecks. You know, the Victorian craze among priests to write up the history of their parish and list all the wreck fatalities they knew about.”

  “I think it was a bit of a guilt trip,” Jack said. “A lot of those accounts came soon after the Act obliging the Church to bury unclaimed bodies from the sea in consecrated ground, and it always seems to me as if the priests were casting last rites over all who had gone before, all those buried along these cliffs.”

  “Well, John did find the scrappy remains of a notebook written by one of those priests, for the parish at the southern tip of the peninsula, covering Kynance Cove. There’s the usual ghoulish stuff, listing unclothed torsos and heads and other body parts—maybe, as you say, the guilt trip, to try to exonerate the Church for not having treated these remains as somehow fully human. Then there are a couple of pages of local legends, the usual monsters in caves and smuggling stories, and hints of treasure ships having foundered nearby. Nothing new in that, of course—you hear it everywhere along this coast—but I’d never heard the story that Henry Avery’s treasure was lost in a wreck on the other side of the Devil’s Bellows.”

  “Bloody hell.”

  “Could just be another Avery story. One of dozens.”

  “Could be.” Jack thought for a moment, still holding his hood. “Ever been through the Bellows?”

  “Never. The old divers say it’s a dangerous place at the best of times, that it can lure you in but then you get trapped by the alternating surge and current.”

  “Sounds like our kind of place. Costas’s, too.”

  “One for the list.”

  “Defo.”

  Jack pulled on his hood and then his mask, ran his finger around the edge of the hood to ensure that the mask was sealed against his face, and then picked up his fins and headed into the waves. Ten meters out, with the water at waist level, he put his snorkel in his mouth and dropped down to pull on his fins. He looked around to see Mike doing the same, then rolled over on his front and kicked out, at the same time pressing the button on his BC inflator to inject air into his jacket to keep himself afloat. Below him the sand was shimmering, the upper layer swept into suspension with the ebb and flow of the water, but farther out it was more settled and he could see the ripples running out to the edge of his visibility, fifteen meters or more away. The reef to his right was smooth and free of marine growth in the turbulent waters of the inter-tidal zone, but below him was covered by patches of kelp that obscured much of the rock. A few minutes farther out, he stopped and got his bearings, seeing the Zodiac less than fifty meters away near the edge of the cove. Below him, Mike was already swimming along the seabed, and Jack pulled out his trusty old Poseidon regulator from where he had wedged it under his BC hose, putting it in his mouth and hearing the satisfying hiss of the intake and flow of the exhaust as he took his first few breaths. He pulled the dump valve of his BC to empty it, then held the inflator valve ready to inject small bursts of air back in to bring him back to neutral buoyancy as he neared the seabed. He felt a rush of pleasure as he dropped beneath the surface: the joy of being underwater and on his way to a wreck site. He could hardly wait to get there.

  * * *

  Twenty minutes later, Jack was eight meters deep on the wreck, planning his next hour on the seabed. From below he had watched the two divers in the shift before him rise to the surface, check with the safety diver in the Zodiac, and then drop down again to help Mike in his part of the site some fifteen meters away. He picked up the dredge that had been left for him and pulled it over to the edge of the rocky reef where he was due to excavate, making sure that the hose was floating well above the cannons that were exposed in the sand behind him. Then he let air out of his buoyancy compensator until he was floating just above the sand.

  To his left lay the cannon that he had first seen when he had discovered the site the year before, its massive breech resting on the reef and the muzzle buried in the sand; seeing it again brought back the same rush of excitement he had experienced that day. He had known then that the few meters of reef next to the cannon contained other artifacts, some of them locked in concretion and others buried in fissures, and his task today was to uncover and record as many of them as possible. He had decided to begin next to the cannon and work his way along the edge of the reef to the right, dredging away the sand where it overlapped the patches of concretion and clearing any fissures that still contained sediment. He shifted the dredge into position and used the hammer hanging from it by a chain to tap the signal on the metal tube for the operator in the boat above to start up the pump. Moments later he heard a muffled chugging, and saw the sand around the nozzle of the dredge begin to disappear down the tube.

  He lifted the tube so that the nozzle was just above the seabed, wedged it under his right arm, and checked behind to make sure that the exhaust was not dropping sediment on the cannons in the gully. Then he aimed the dredge at the reef and began to work at the sand with his left hand, vigorously wafting deep patches until they were gone, and more sensitively working his way around features where the sediment was only a thin sheen. The concretion had spread over the reef like a solidified mass of tar, a result of the oxidization of masses of iron objects that had fallen together on the seabed. Most of the lumps were unidentifiable, but he knew that inside them would be hollow casts left where tools and other objects had disintegrated, something that might only be revealed by breaking open the concretions or taking them to the lab to X-ray.

  There were some objects, however, that were more clearly recognizable. An eroded fragment of shaped marble lay wedged into a cleft at the top of the concretion. It was the end of a small column, originally about ten centimeters across and a meter in length. Jack swam closer and peered at a fracture line, where he could see the grain of the stone. His suspicions were confirmed. It was giallo antico, “ancient yellow,” the distinctive honey-colored marble from Tunisia that was quarried by the Romans. They had found other fragments on the wreck, part of the surrounds of an elaborate fireplace, but were certain that the stone had been reused from a Roman site somewhere near Tangier; giallo antico was not quarried after the Roman period, and the only source in the seventeenth century would have been one of the numerous ruins of ancient cities and bu
ildings that dotted the north coast of Africa. He put his hand on the stone, feeling a wave of satisfaction course through him. He had dreamed for years of finding Roman artifacts off Cornwall, but never imagined that it might happen in this most unlikely of ways.

  Below the stone, a well-preserved cannonball poked out of a mass of concretion that partly enveloped it, like the yolk of a fried egg. Farther on were two long forms that he knew were musket barrels, the wooden stocks long gone but the brass trigger guard of one of them just visible. Andrew Cunningham had taken a group of them to test-fire a replica English musket of the period at the IMU campus the day before, and the lingering smell of black-powder smoke had given an immediacy to the siege of Tangier—something that helped Jack to see the concretions in front of him for what they had once been: well-polished weapons in the hands of English soldiers desperately trying to hold off a besieging enemy more than three hundred years before.

  Above one of the muskets a trickle of sand spilled from a fissure that ran down from the top of the reef, the lower meter or so still packed with sediment. He expected to find little in such a high-energy environment, on top of the reef where the sand and shingle might come and go with the storms, but he repositioned himself over the fissure and wafted the sediment into the nozzle of the dredge. To his amazement, he revealed a cluster of lead musket balls sitting on the smoothed surface of the bedrock below. He picked one of them up, weighing it in his hand, noticing the wear on its surface from centuries of movement underwater. In his mind’s eye he saw the site as it must have looked just after the wrecking, a seething, tumultuous mass of smashed timber, sails, and cordage, the cannons already having crashed to the seabed where they now lay, the smaller artifacts falling into gullies and fissures and working their way down in the sediment according to weight and density, a process of sorting and decay of which these musket balls were the final poignant residue.

  He carefully put the musket ball back where he had found it, pushed off from the fissure, and tapped the dredge with the hammer again, this time to signal for the pump to be switched off. As the chugging sound ceased, he surveyed the patch of concretion that he had cleared. It only amounted to a few square meters, but he had found far more than he had bargained for, and the rest of the dive would have to be devoted to the tasks that made this archaeology rather than salvage: photographing and sketching the finds, surveying them into the site grid using the innovative IMU sonic high-accuracy positioning system—something that only required a tap of the acoustic “pencil” on the finds—and bagging and raising the musket balls, essential at this site, because to leave loose finds exposed for even one change of the tide could result in them being lost irretrievably in the ever-shifting sands.

  He released his camera and took out a ten-centimeter scale from his BC pocket, ready to photograph the musket balls, but then he saw something else that his wafting had exposed at the far end of the fissure. He tucked the camera back under the strap and dropped down again. A corroded iron sphere not much bigger than his fist was wedged into the rock. At first he thought it was a small cannonball, perhaps for one of the swivel guns that they knew had been mounted on the walls of Tangier, but then to his amazement he saw an accreted wooden plug sticking out of one end. It was a grenade. Andrew Cunningham in his prep talk on the ordnance had told them what to expect and what would be most exciting, and grenades were at the top of the list. He had explained that grenades had only become regular equipment among English regiments a few years before the siege, and that no examples had been found in archaeological sites dated as early as the Schiedam. Jack was thrilled to have made the discovery, something that would really help to put the wreck on the map for more than just its historical backstory.

  He extracted his camera again, and the scale, and quickly took a series of photos, then put one hand on the grenade. This time it was not the turmoil of the wrecking that opened up before his eyes, but rather the final years of fighting by the English at Tangier as the Moors threatened to overwhelm them. Among the first-hand accounts he had read was one from 1680 of the English garrison in one of the towers holding out to the last man against the besieging force, using muskets and pikes and grenades, fighting at the end with their bare hands. In the blood-soaked arsenal of the tower the Moors had found boxes of unused grenades, a boost to their own armaments that gave them a greater tactical edge and eventually helped to persuade the English to abandon the colony rather than fight on. The grenade Jack had just found was thus a touchstone of history, an artifact that signified a shift in the course of events that had a profound effect on everything that followed. Had the English decided to retain Tangier, had they not instead transferred their focus and energies to India, the whole course of European and world history would have been different. For Jack, the artifacts he had found suddenly coalesced into something bigger, into a picture in his mind’s eye that linked a single object to the wider flow of events. When that happened, when he felt that surge of adrenaline and insight, he was no longer just a dirt archaeologist; he was an explorer of history, and he was in his element.

  He felt a tap on his shoulder, and turned to see the next pair of divers beside him with the acoustic pencil and a sketching slate. He gestured at the grenade and the musket balls, and they both made enthusiastic okay signs. The nearer diver then pointed at Jack, made a thumbs-up sign, and opened her arms questioningly. Jack checked his air; he still had at least half an hour left. He pushed back, looking up at the underside of the boat and then back at the divers, and made an emphatic negative signal, sweeping his hands from side to side, then pointing at himself and the artifacts around him. He could have let them take over the recording, but that was not his way. He was diving on a shipwreck, immersed in the archaeology and the thrill of discovery, fulfilling the dream he had first had as a boy exploring these very waters. Right now, he could not have wished to be in a better place.

  4

  Early the following morning, Jack sat on the doorstep of his study in the old Howard house above the IMU campus, sipping his coffee and watching the sun rise over the broad expanse of the estuary to the east. He checked his phone, making sure the message he had just written had been sent. Late the previous evening he had received a phone call from a man with a Spanish or Portuguese accent who had asked whether he had found any parallels for the Star of David symbol on the coin. His credentials had sounded plausible—a seminary in Lisbon—and Jack had assumed that he was one of the colleagues Jeremy had contacted at the National Archives, but he had looked him up as they were talking and had found no reference to the place or the man. When he had confronted him with it, the man had warned him to steer clear of researching the symbol and hung up. It was probably just a crank call, but Jack had messaged their security chief Ben Kershaw to put him on alert. They had experienced the less pleasant end of this type of problem in the past, and it was always best to err on the side of caution.

  He put the call from his mind and focused on the view. Leading down to the water’s edge, he could see the engineering block where Costas and Lanowski would already be hard at work, and beyond that the dock that led to Carrick Roads and the open sea beyond. Several of IMU’s research vessels were currently absent on projects, as well as one of the larger Zodiacs that Macalister had driven round to the site for the magnetometer survey the day before. The campus was in the grounds of the estate, land that had been in the Howard family for almost a millenium, and had begun to look less of an imposition on the landscape, with the architecture melding into the brick and stone of the old buildings and the newly planted trees beginning to reach the heights of those established more than two hundred years before.

  He had to remind himself that IMU had been little more than a dream only twenty years ago, when he had inherited the estate and the mountainous debts that went with it. He had been working on a classical shipwreck off Turkey, contemplating the best course of action with his inheritance, when he had first met Costas, at that time on a short-service commission as an eng
ineering officer with the US Navy at their Izmir base. Diving together on a shoestring budget, they had hatched the plan for IMU, and Jack had presented it to his old dive buddy Efram Jacobovich, by then a software tycoon with money to spare. The dream had become a reality, and within a few years the campus had departments ranging across the marine sciences, as well as one of the world’s foremost centers for research on maritime and naval history. Efram’s endowment gave IMU total financial independence and meant they could focus entirely on research and fieldwork rather than fund-raising. With a board of directors and a full academic faculty established, Jack had been able to take a back seat and concentrate on his role as archaeological director. It was a job that gave him a strong sense of continuity with his ancestors, at this place where generations of Howards had set off down the path to the sea, serving the Crown in war and conquest as well as embarking on their own ventures for exploration and profit.

  He thought of the fine line between those motivations for seafaring as he drank his coffee and stared at the beautiful framed chart of west Cornwall that he had taken down from his study wall and propped in the sunlight for a better view. The chart dated from the 1680s, the time of the wreck of the Schiedam, and was by van Keulen, a famous Amsterdam cartographer who supplied charts to the Dutch East India Company. It was the nearest thing to a nautical chart that had existed for these waters at the time, with rhumb lines and compass roses out at sea, and a fair approximation of the coastline, though little detail inland.

  Everything about navigation and seafaring that would be taken for granted in the following century—the professional Royal Navy, the scrupulous survey of coastlines that was to be its greatest achievement—was still a good way off in the seventeenth century. To be sure, there were naval captains who would have ranked in skill and daring alongside the frigate captains of the Napoleonic Wars, men such as Sir Cloudesley Shovel, but even for those men the lure of private venture might be greater. Pay was poor, the ethos of loyalty to the service not yet established, and to follow a letter of marque as a privateer was to some men as honorable a career as taking a King’s commission, especially when the monarch had little knowledge of nautical affairs and the endless wars of the period were of dubious benefit to the navy or the nation.