Inquisition

by David Gibbins

  Jack peered closely at the chart. He had brought it down to look at not only because of the Schiedam but also because of another extraordinary story of the same period, one that Mike had brought up before their dive yesterday. One of those men who had crossed the line between serving the King and serving himself, and then gone even further, was Henry Avery, an officer on board Shovel’s ship HMS James Galley when the Schiedam had been captured from the Barbary corsairs, and later to become a notorious pirate. Quite what Avery was doing while the Schiedam was making her fateful final voyage was unknown, but he did not yet appear to have taken his decisive step over to the dark side.

  During the evacuation from Tangier, a number of junior officers were seconded from naval ships to be temporary captains of transports and supply ships, especially those like Schiedam that were captured prizes with only skeleton crews. The man appointed captain of Schiedam was a master attendant of the naval stores named Gregory Fish, whose inexperience and incompetence probably led directly to the wrecking; he had imagined that the ship was off the coast of France, and he went to pieces when he was hauled from the wreck afterward. But his appointment appeared to have been an aberration, probably forced on the authorities as the number of available commanders dwindled, and more capable and experienced officers such as Avery may well have been given other vessels to command, perhaps those with more challenging itineraries taking merchants and their goods off to diverse destinations in the Mediterranean and even across the Atlantic. Avery’s possible involvement was something that Jack had asked Jeremy to look out for in the Admiralty papers, a small piece of the jigsaw puzzle that would help to fill out the historical backdrop.

  He looked back through the doorway at another old framed document above the fireplace behind his desk, something that he still knew virtually by heart from when he had pored over it as a boy: a proclamation for apprehending Henry Avery and sundry other pirates, “who may be probably known and discovered by the great quantities of Persian and Indian gold and silver which they have with them … Out of detestation to such a horrid villainy, and to the effect the same may not go unpunished … we do make offer and assure the payment of the sum of five hundred pounds sterling for the said Henry Avery.” The proclamation had been issued under William III in 1696, twelve years after the sinking of the Schiedam, by which time Avery had long been out of navy service and had transformed himself into the feared Long Ben, King of the Pirates.

  Jack remembered what Mike had said about how everything they were dealing with from that period seemed to be interconnected, and another one of those links was between the Avery and Howard families. All the great seafaring families of this coast were closely tied, serving apprenticeships on each other’s vessels, going into business together and intermarrying. The Averys were from nearby Plymouth, and as a boy, Henry had been taken on board the Howard ship Seafire to learn the Americas trade before service in the Royal Navy. Later he had embarked on a joint trading venture for American tobacco with Jack’s ancestor John Howard, though his true intention had been to use the money to underwrite a slaving expedition to West Africa, a trade that the Howards abhorred.

  That proclamation had been on the wall of this room since then, a reminder of unfinished business and a debt that had been remembered through the generations. If Mike was right and Avery’s treasure ship really did lie beyond the Devil’s Bellows in Kynance Cove, then some of that treasure would be payback that would go nicely into Jack’s own charitable foundation, something he had used to fund humanitarian aid in Ghana and Sierra Leone since he and Costas had been involved in the salvage of a Second World War wreck off that coast the year before. The story that Mike had unearthed might be no more than a local vicar’s pipe dream, but a trip to the cove when the weather allowed was now firmly on Jack’s agenda.

  He peered again at the chart, tracing the coast down from the site of the church headland and the wreck of the Schiedam to Kynance Cove, some four miles distant. The coastline was marked with numerous crosses that had been thought simply to be embellishments by the illustrator, but that might mark shipwrecks. Jack had wanted to look at the stretch of coast near the cove again, and he could see that there were several crosses in the right area. It was another wreck graveyard, like the church cove, and there was no telling which ships might be represented. But it was the nearest thing to a treasure map they had, and X might just mark the spot.

  He took a picture with his phone and messaged it to Mike, then picked up the chart and replaced it on the wall beside the proclamation. Rebecca and Jeremy were due within the hour, and he needed to focus on another thread in his family history that might have a bearing on the wreck of the Schiedam, something that had arisen because of the Star of David symbol on the bronze chest and the coin. He turned to the mass of papers spread out on the old mahogany desk in front of him, quickly finished his coffee, and began to read.

  * * *

  Half an hour later, Jack sat back in his chair with his hands folded behind his head, thought for a few moments, then leaned forward again. It was an incredible story, one that opened up the darkest chapter in European history prior to modern times. The wreck of the Schiedam, and the backstory of the evacuation of Tangier by the English, was more than just an archaeological fascination for him. It tied in to a thread in his own family history that had been passed down through generations, and that he had researched extensively himself the previous year. An ancestor of his, Rebecca Brandon, also known as Rebecca Rodrigues Brandão, had been from a Sephardic Jewish family who had fled Portugal and settled in London in the eighteenth century. She married an English officer of the East India Company army and spent the rest of her life in far-off Purnea, in the foothills of the Himalayas, her Jewish faith remembered but not practiced by her children and their descendants. But her own family had a rich Jewish history that went back to the period when the Jews of Iberia were persecuted by the Inquisition, a time of unimaginable horror and fear. Those who escaped had spread far and wide throughout the known world, from London and Amsterdam and France to the port cities of the Mediterranean and the New World. And one of them, João Rodrigues Brandão, had been a merchant in Tangier at the time of the English colony and the evacuation, before he too was caught up by the Inquisition.

  Jack sifted through the papers, finding a facsimile of a letter to the court of the Inquisition signed by João himself; amazingly, many of the processo documents detailing the tribunals of the Inquisition survived in the Portuguese National Archives. The decree expelling Jews from Portugal in 1496 had obliged those who wished to remain to reject their Jewish identity and adopt Christian practices and names. Many of those so-called “New Christians,” or conversos—among them João’s ancestors—had secretly maintained their Jewish faith, and those suspected of doing so over the next generations were brought before the Inquisition to test the truth of their conversion. The persecution was fueled by the same kind of resentment of Jewish wealth and success that led to their victimization elsewhere in Europe; in the case of João and his family, they lived in Viseu, an inland town in northern Portugal, but he had his office and warehouses in the coastal city of Porto, where he exported tools and wine to the Portuguese colonists of Brazil and imported tobacco and other raw materials in return.

  He picked up the copy of João’s processo document. Like everything else about the Inquisition, it made chilling reading. João was accused of Judaism, heresy, and apostasy, and was brought before the tribunal of the Inquisition a mere two weeks after his arrest. From one viewpoint, he was lucky: most of those accused in Coimbra, the city where he was tried, languished in the cells for months or even years before they were brought to trial. There must have been some reason for the speed of his case, something that Jack would like to investigate further. João would have gone from the tribunal straight to his auto-da-fé, his act of penance, but whether that was a simple confession and promise of renewed Christian faith or something much worse was never recorded in the processo document, the decis
ion usually only being read out to the condemned when they were standing in front of the pyres in the town square. The prospects would not have been good: the Inquisition had come back with a vengeance in Portugal after having been banned for several years by the Pope for its excesses, and in Coimbra alone more than three hundred Jews were burned at the stake; men, women, and children, sometimes entire families together. It was a hideous outcome that even the priests watching must have viewed as a travesty of the teachings of Jesus, as if the Church were being pulled under by dark forces that wished to sever its connection entirely from the morality and humanity that had been its foundation.

  It was Jack’s friend Maria de Montijo who had collected together most of the documents that he had in front of him now, during a day in the archives in Lisbon when she was visiting family in her native Spain. She herself had said that there were loose ends still to follow up, and that more delving was needed to get the full story on João. His processo document seemed less complete than many of the others, more perfunctory, at odds with his wealth as a merchant and the interest that the Inquisition would normally have had in detailing his business and financial arrangements. Jack glanced again at the page of notes that Maria had given him along with the copy of the processo. The only financial detail was that João had sent 250 gold ducats to London; it had been the basis of one of the accusations leveled against him, as Jews were forbidden to send money abroad except strictly for business purposes. It was a substantial sum, the equivalent of about 4,500 Spanish reales, but that was a drop in the ocean of the Brandão family fortune.

  Another document that Maria had found, listing property confiscated by the Inquisition, showed that João and his brothers had owned a tobacco mill in Lisbon valued at nearly 750,000 reales. Property in Portugal would always have been vulnerable to confiscation, and there was little they could have done about that; but liquid assets could easily have been secreted abroad—despite the ban—and a merchant such as João would have been doing that all his life, knowing that to fall foul of the Inquisition would mean losing his entire wealth if he had not already dispersed it elsewhere. With family and business partners not only in London but also in France and Holland and across the sea in the Caribbean, he would have had plenty of secure places to bank his money outside the reach of the Inquisition, providing the basis for his descendants to carry on the family business even if he himself failed to make it out of Portugal alive.

  Jack knew that Maria was in Spain again this week. He wanted to know if there was any further evidence, perhaps in other sources, for João in Tangier, and to discover more about the family connections that would have led him to send his money abroad. The possibility that it was João who was represented by the Star of David on the coin from the wreck was tenuous at best, but it was a possibility that he had to explore as long as there was no evidence of other Jewish merchants dispatching goods from Tangier. With the wreck excavation almost certainly wrapped up for this season, he might even take a few days and see if he could meet up with Maria in Portugal himself, and they could visit the archives together.

  He picked up his phone, scrolling for her number. Then he remembered the last time they had spoken, several months earlier, an awkward conversation when he had canceled a dinner because he and Costas had had to fly off unexpectedly to Somalia. He had known Maria for ten years and had first gone out with her five years ago, but their projects always seemed to get in the way when they thought of spending more time together. Most recently the ball had been in his court, and promises had been made. He paused, and then put down the phone. This might take a bit more thought.

  The door opened and Rebecca and Jeremy came in, Jeremy carrying his briefcase and a coffee and Rebecca with two mugs in one hand and a sheaf of papers in the other. “Hi, Dad. I’m guessing you’ve been at it for a while. I thought this might be a two-coffee morning.”

  “Just getting up to speed on our family history.”

  “It’s amazing how it feeds into your projects.”

  “It’s like an ever-expanding web, catching all kinds of episodes in history, endlessly intriguing. It’s because we’ve got such a wealth of material about it, and because we come from a family with such a strong tradition of seafaring and exploration.”

  “Which of course is why you’re fascinated by the sea too, and why you do what you do. It’s in the blood.”

  “The circle of life.”

  She leaned over and looked at the papers. “You been researching my namesake again? You never did tell me whether you and Mama named me after her.”

  “It was your mother who named you, remember? I didn’t even know you were on the way when she left me to go back to Naples.” Jack paused, looking at the floor. Elizabeth had been on his mind again, and he had wanted to talk about her to Rebecca. Now was as good a time as any, even with Jeremy there, and he looked up at her. “I just had no idea that her family were Camorra and had such a hold over her. All she ever wanted was to come to England to train as an archaeologist, and then go back to Naples to try to resolve the corruption in the archaeological service there. That turned out to be her undoing. I still can’t believe that it was rogue elements in her own family—your family in Naples—that sealed her fate. I just wish she’d got back in touch and told me about you before it was too late. Maybe I could have intervened and brought her out of that mess. We never really split up, you know; she just left. That’s why it’s difficult for me with Maria, and before that with Katya.”

  Rebecca reached out and touched his hand. “I know, Dad. But don’t worry about it. I was sent away to America for my own protection before I was old enough to know what was really going on, but I knew my mother well enough to know that she would never have walked away from her job. That place, Pompeii, Herculaneum, was her life, just like all of this here is yours. And she didn’t want you involved in what was going on there in any way. There was nothing you could have done.”

  Jack nodded. “I know. But I just wanted you to hear it from me again. Anyway, enough of that. Back to your name. When your mother and I saw each other that final time in Herculaneum, just before she was taken, we talked about you, and she admitted that yes, she did name you after Rebecca Brandon, because she liked the name and knew how intrigued I was with her life story. So there’s your answer.”

  Rebecca settled back in her chair, looking round at the paintings of Howards on the walls. “You don’t have a portrait of her, do you?”

  “I’ve never been able to find one. But she was said to have brought great beauty into the family at the period.”

  “I find it very moving, actually,” Rebecca said. “To think of her surviving and bringing up a family without fear of the Inquisition, after all those generations before her who had to endure torment and terror. I feel the same way when I see Jewish women in New York or Tel Aviv or Toronto: that they stand for all those girls and women who didn’t make it through the Holocaust, showing that darkness can be overcome.”

  “Yet that darkness is still lurking just beneath the surface,” Jeremy said. “The Inquisition may be long gone, but there are still secret societies sworn to perpetuate its goals who are just as fanatical about stamping their authority on those who stand in their way. They are still thought to hold a lot of influence in church appointments and policy. Some of them are said to go back to the earliest days of the persecution of the Church in the Roman period.”

  “We encountered some of that when we searched for the Jewish menorah,” Jack said. “A fixation on holy relics shared only by the Nazis. A belief that to control the oldest relics of Christendom will somehow guarantee them ascendancy in the Church.”

  “The horrible truth is, it probably would,” Jeremy said. “The power of artifacts. You know all about that, Jack.”

  “Indeed.”

  Rebecca pushed Jack’s coffee across the table toward him. He took it gratefully, drank half, and then put it down while she and Jeremy drew their chairs up to the other side of the desk, Jeremy taki
ng his laptop out as he did so. As he opened it up, Jack gave him a piercing look. “Okay, down to business. Samuel Pepys and the wreck of the Schiedam. What have you got?”

  5

  Jack’s phone flashed up a new message, and he picked it up, tapped the screen, and opened the attached image. He looked at it for a moment, then passed it over the table. “Excellent news from Macalister. They’ve just finished processing the magnetometer results and it looks as if they’ve come up trumps. In the image you can see the cannon that you guys found, and then another very similar pattern in the readings about five meters farther out, under the sand. My guess is that the second reading is the missing four-pounder from the ship’s armament, and that when we begin excavating there next season, we’ll find other material from the ship’s stern, the kind of artifacts that have been absent so far from the main excavation, such as personal belongings from the captain’s and officers’ quarters. Everything seems to point to a scenario where the ship hit the reef where the main site lies and sank rapidly from the weight of the cannons in the cargo hold, but the stern section broke away and was blown inshore against that headland a few hundred meters to the south.”

  Rebecca took a plastic finds bag out of her pocket and put it on the table. She opened it and carefully slipped out a blackened metal disc, which she passed over to Jack. “Speaking of which, this is on its way to the conservation lab after we leave here. Costas and I found it in a fissure in the cliff face just outside your cleft, wedged in with a clump of at least three others that we couldn’t get out. You remember what you told me to find?”