“In the late seventeenth century they extorted the Jewish merchants of Port Royal, promising them immunity from the Inquisition if they agreed to pay over a portion of the earnings they had made by acting as brokers for the pirates. The Altamanus had a symbiotic relationship with the pirates, feeding them information about Spanish treasure ships in return for a cut, and then creaming further profits from brokerage when the captured ships were brought in. And they employed the pirates for their dirty work, just as today they call on the low-life fallout from drugs crime across South America and the Caribbean.
“By 1680, only twenty-five years after the rise of Port Royal, the Altamanus had enough money to build a stronghold of their own on an island they called Santo Cristo del Tesoro, Christ of the Treasure. It was meant to be where they would house the greatest treasures of Christendom when they found them, with the Holy Chalice as the centerpiece. But it was more than just a stronghold and a repository. It also included a scaled-down replica of the audience chamber next door to us now, and a torture chamber. The island was under no jurisdiction, and they could operate with impunity, under the aegis of the Inquisition but in reality acting on their own. It was another dark chapter in the history of the Caribbean at that period, alongside piracy and slavery and all the cruelties of colonization. Countless people disappeared on that island, some who had been branded as heretics and others people whom the Inquisition wanted disposed of for other reasons but could not arrest because they were on foreign soil. Even after the Inquisition officially ended in 1821, those in power where the Inquisition had once held sway continued to employ the Altamanus to snatch people and take them to the island, never to be heard of again.”
“It all sounds horribly familiar,” Rebecca said. “Like a seventeenth-century version of the CIA’s secret offshore torture sites.”
“Do we know where this island is?” Jack said.
Maria shook her head. “It’s tiny, a dot in the ocean. Nobody has ever been able to get near it, or wanted to.”
“Could be something to ask Jason da Silva about,” Jeremy said, looking at Jack.
“I’m going to have to get him up to speed on all of this.” Jack’s phone vibrated, and he looked at it. “Excuse me. I have to take this.”
He got up and went outside for better reception, returning after a brief conversation. “That was Captain Macalister. The site of the Schiedam is shut down for the duration, with twenty-foot waves forecast this evening. He’s just driven Costas and Lanowski with Little Joey to RNAS Culdrose, where the Embraer is waiting, having returned to pick them up. It’s due in Porto in three hours, and after refueling will go on with us to Jamaica. The pilot doesn’t want to delay because the same weather system that’s battering Cornwall is stoking up hurricane-force winds in the west Atlantic. We should pack up here and get to Porto to wait for them.”
Jeremy turned to him. “With what we’ve got now, we could always call a rain-check on Port Royal and head directly to Potosi. We might not find any better clues than we’ve got already. And time is not on our side.”
“Dad would never do that,” Rebecca said. “No way.”
Jack gave Jeremy a steely look. “There’s a whole team out there waiting for us, wanting to show us what they’ve found. In my philosophy, it’s one for all, not all for one. It’s the team that drives the exploration forward, not just Jack Howard.”
“There’s that other thing too, isn’t there, Dad?” Rebecca said, collecting her things together. “About the voyage being as rewarding as the destination.”
Jack slipped his phone into his pocket and slung his bag on his shoulder. “Sometimes the strands all tie together and point in one direction early on, and other times they lead to different places, all equally fascinating. I know that by the time I get off the plane at Potosi on our next leg, my mind will be focused completely on that quest, and everything else will be stripped away. But I’m not there yet, and there’s another equally powerful strand of this story that’s leading straight to Port Royal. I want to see in my mind’s eye what that place was like when the Black Swan arrived there that day in 1684, and I want to really touch that history.”
“You’re saying you want a Jack Howard moment,” Rebecca said.
“And you want to get back in the water,” Jeremy added.
Jack smiled and put a hand on his shoulder. “You’ve seen through me. Truth is, I can’t wait to meet up with Jason and for the two of you to see the site. It’s an incredible place.”
“And you’re looking forward to seeing your old friend Maurice.”
“That too.”
“All right,” Maria said, leaning up and kissing Jack on the cheek. “Just don’t spend too long over it. A day at the most. Father Pereira is going to feel vulnerable as soon as I tell him what you know, and I’m worried that the Altamanus will already suspect where you’re heading. And this time, when it’s all over, come back to me and let’s do dinner, right? Be careful, all of you.”
14
The following morning Jack sat in the front cabin of the IMU Embraer, having left Portugal at dawn, with Rebecca, Jeremy, Costas, and Lanowski as the only other passengers. They had been scheduled to arrive in Jamaica by now, but had been advised to divert around the leading edge of a cyclonic system that was building up in the mid-Atlantic and pushing hurricane-force winds toward the Caribbean. Jack himself had been taking a spell piloting the aircraft when the call came through, and had skirted the mountainous wall of black clouds shot through with flashes of lightning, as awesome a display of the power of nature as he had ever seen. The course predicted for the storm took it to the south of Jamaica and over the basin to the west of Panama, but even so he knew that Jason and the others at Port Royal would be anxiously watching the weather reports. The divers could easily get out of the water in advance of bad weather, but it was the site itself that was at risk, in shallow depths where storm winds could rip up and destroy the fragile archaeological remains exposed by the earthquake three months earlier. He knew that a hurricane was Jason’s worst nightmare, and that was one reason why IMU had agreed to provide emergency funding for a rescue excavation within days of his call to Jack with a plea for more equipment and specialized personnel.
Jack looked once again at the papers and charts that had preoccupied him for most of the flight, then at his laptop screen. He had used the time to get up to speed on the archaeology of Port Royal, and had spent the last four hours immersed in the minutiae of day-to-day life in the late seventeenth century, at a place that represented much that was beguiling and much that was bad about the first period of European settlement in the Caribbean. There were some remarkable similarities with Tangier, a matter of coincidence that he had reflected on a good deal as he also cast his mind back to the wreck of the Schiedam and her incredible backstory. Both cities were taken over by the English from the Spanish or the Portuguese, and both were gateways, one to Africa and the East, the other to the Caribbean and the mainland of the Americas. Both had sunk into vice and debauchery, and both had come to abrupt ends within a decade of each other, the one through abandonment and the other through natural calamity. Where they differed was in their nature as archaeological sites; almost all evidence of English Tangier had been subsumed beneath the modern city, whereas Port Royal remained largely abandoned, the archaeology just beneath the surface and still astonishingly rich.
He felt the aircraft descending, and looked out of the window to see the south coast of Jamaica coming into focus, with the spit of land that defined Kingston Harbor just visible in the foreground. Viewed from here, the spit seemed a mere tendril of sand, hanging in the haze like a mirage, a ripple in the fabric of reality that would surely close up and disappear as they came closer. That thought made him sense the fragility of Port Royal in space and time, a town built on land that could turn to quicksand in the blink of an eye, where the bustle and energy of those few short years in the seventeenth century, the brick and masonry houses and the conspicuous consumption, s
eemed almost in defiance of its tenuous foundations. It was a place that had been on the edge in many ways, where the only sensible lifestyle was to live for the day, entirely in keeping with the nature of the people who were drawn to it. For the English who had come to colonize these lands it was their first port of call, and yet for many it would have seemed the antithesis of the Celestial City that had attracted the more pious of them to the New World, as if to get there they were first to be tested by temptation in a place where the devil so clearly held sway.
He glanced back at the others. Rebecca and Jeremy were also glued to the view, each occupying a separate window seat. He was glad that Rebecca had come along; for some time she had expressed an interest in the archaeology of the New World, and this would be a fascinating toehold for her. Jeremy had become her inseparable companion over the two years since she had finished school, and it was hard to imagine them without each other. Jack thought again of her mother Elizabeth, of the last time he had seen her, when she had explained to him why she had left England all those years before without telling him that she was pregnant, of the life she had been forced to lead under the control of her Mafia family in Naples; and then he remembered first meeting Rebecca after Elizabeth’s murder, when her guardians in New York had brought her to see him. It all seemed so long ago now, almost ten years. He felt a wave of regret, a stab of sadness. He hoped he had done right by Elizabeth, that he had brought Rebecca up to be a reflection of her mother as well as her father, that all the care and love she had received from Jack’s friends had gone some way to making up for the loss that she had experienced so early in her life.
He looked across at the other two occupants of the cabin, Costas and Lanowski, leaning toward each other fast asleep and snoring, with the case containing Little Joey strapped into the seat between them. They were like proud parents, exhausted after a first flight with their new offspring. He smiled and turned back to the view. He remembered Maria’s warning to be on his guard in the days ahead, but he tried for these final minutes of the flight to put that from his mind. He was looking forward to seeing Maurice Hiebermeyer, his close friend since they had been boys together at boarding school; they fueled each other as archaeologists just as he and Costas did as divers. And he was looking forward to getting his teeth into some archaeology again. He had received a message from Jason before they had taken off suggesting a breakthrough in the search for parallels for the Star of David symbol. He watched the Embraer line up for its final approach, the landing lights of the runway flickering ahead. It was going to be an exciting afternoon.
* * *
Less than an hour after landing at Norman Manley airport at Kingston, they were in an SUV racing toward the site of Port Royal along the Palisadoes, the old Portuguese name for the spit of sand that formed the southern reach of Kingston Harbor and was also the site of the airport. Jason da Silva had met them off the plane, and had facilitated the clearance of their equipment through customs; Little Joey had raised a few eyebrows but fortunately was dormant, and the equipment they would need for the dive that afternoon was already on site, part of the store that had been shipped over from IMU after the earthquake in July. Jack was in the front, sitting next to Jason, a fit, serious man of mixed Jamaican background in his early thirties, and a distant cousin of Jack’s through their shared strand of Portuguese Jewish ancestry; it was the first time Jack had seen him since examining Jason’s doctoral dissertation almost two years before.
“So, Jason, how have you been getting on with my old friend Maurice?”
“He’s a dude. Best land archaeologist I’ve ever worked with.”
“That would be the first time anyone has called him a dude,” Rebecca said. “He’d probably secretly love it.”
“And his shorts?” Jeremy said.
“Somehow always flying at half-mast. Don’t know how, but they always stay up.”
“That’s Uncle Hiemy,” Rebecca said. “If he’s got those shorts on and a trowel in his hand, then you know he’s happy.”
Lanowski was sitting in the rear cargo compartment, tinkering with Little Joey and seemingly oblivious to the world around him, but Costas was between Rebecca and Jeremy in the backseat, and he leaned forward. “So, can someone give me the lowdown on this place? Port Royal for dummies, in five minutes?”
“You got it,” Jason said, pulling the vehicle up by the foreshore. “Now’s as good a time as any. The site’s only a mile away from the airport, and we’re pretty well there already.”
“I think I can see what must be the former Royal Navy Dockyard buildings ahead of us,” Jeremy said.
“Correct,” Jason replied. “The buildings included a careening wharf for cleaning hulls, a victualling store, a hospital, and in the nineteenth century a coaling station. But that was Port Royal’s second guise, well after the period we’re interested in. A naval presence continues with the Jamaica Defense Force base at the very end of the spit, but the town today is just a sleepy fishing village. It’s what lies under it that we’re after, the most important English settlement in the Caribbean in the seventeenth century.”
“‘The wickedest city in the world,’” Costas said, reading from a tourist brochure he had picked up in the airport. “‘A latter-day Sodom, struck down for its debauchery and vice.’”
Jason smiled. “The tourists are a little disappointed when they come here and all they see is the old fortifications and cannons and a few bumps in the ground. But there’s certainly an element of truth to that image. After the English captured Jamaica from the Spanish in 1655, this place grew so rapidly that by the time of its destruction in 1692 it covered at least fifty acres and had seven thousand inhabitants, a large town for the time. Everyone knows the story of the pirates and how they ruled this place, but what’s of more interest to me is the merchants. You remember my dissertation, Jack? I called Port Royal an emporium, one of those places where cultures interface, where trade between the nations on either side flows in and out but neither side holds sway, so the only law is made up by the merchants themselves.”
“But this was an emporium with a catch,” Jack said. “Instead of an interface between two nations, on the one side you’ve got civilization, and on the other side piracy.”
“Exactly,” Jason said. “That’s where the vice and debauchery comes in. The English Crown notionally held the strings, but they didn’t have enough troops to protect the place from the Spanish, so they ended up employing the pirates to police themselves. Not hard to see where that might lead.”
“But it was the merchants who really ruled the roost,” Jeremy said. “I remember your seminar at IMU when you said that all the imports to the Caribbean from England had to come through this place, and that all the pirate loot ended up being brokered here too. Any halfway-competent merchant who set himself up here had it made.”
“Not only that, but nearly all the gold and silver bullion that made it to England and on to English ships came through here, almost certainly including those coins from the Mexico and Potosi mints that you found on the wreck of the Schiedam. And there’s another, less savory fact, given the state of undeclared war between the English and the Spanish at the time: the merchants were also covertly supplying goods to the Spanish, who were short of many commodities because of piracy and the English blockade. Maurice has been finding out about one aspect of that trade in his excavation, something that’s difficult for me with my African roots to confront, but that is part of the reality of this place.”
“I think I can guess what it is,” Jack said.
“I’ll let Maurice fill you in. We’ll be seeing him in a few minutes.”
Costas pulled out an apple and began munching. “So what about Port Royal sinking under the sea?”
Jason nodded. “Eleven forty-three a.m. on 7 June 1692. We know the exact time of day from a pocket watch that was found underwater. A massive earthquake hit the place, followed by a tsunami. Everything here is built on sand, in places more than twenty meters thick,
all of it waterlogged below sea level. The earthquake liquefied the sand, causing buildings to be swallowed up and the northern and eastern parts of the town to slide under the sea. More than thirty acres were inundated, hundreds of buildings gone, over a thousand people dead, to be joined by several thousand more over the following weeks and months, succumbing to disease as they tried to exist in a wasteland of corpses and ruins and decay. Every attempt to resurrect the town to its former glory basically failed. Fire, hurricane, cholera, more earthquakes … it’s as if the place was cursed.”
“But the most recent earthquake has been a boon for you,” Jack said.
Jason turned to him, his look intense. “This place is truly incredible. It’s an underwater Pompeii. You won’t believe what we’ve found. But now we’ve got a hell of a lot to do in a very short space of time, because the hurricane is due to hit within the next twenty-four hours. I hope you’re all ready to pitch in.”
“You bet,” Jeremy said, and the others murmured in agreement.
Jason gunned the vehicle forward, and a few moments later they came to a halt beside a large excavation on one side of a fortification wall. Jason directed Costas and Lanowski into a low building where they could get Little Joey ready for the dive, and then he took Jack and the other two across a planked boardwalk to a familiar figure lying completely prostrate on the ground, excavating something with minute precision inches from his face, apparently oblivious to their arrival.
Rebecca turned to Jack, whispering, “Dad, it seems a shame to disturb him.”
Jack had seen Hiebermeyer like this before, often, and he knew that the best thing was to give him a few moments, not to break his concentration. They carried on watching, and then Hiebermeyer got up on his knees and bent forward, his shirt barely covering his posterior. After a few muttered words in German, he suddenly said, “Eureka!” and raised an exquisite miniature glass inkpot into the air, letting the light shine through it and dance on his face. He turned, spotted them, and scrambled to his feet, his trowel sticking out of his back pocket. “Jack. Rebecca. Jeremy. How delightful to see you.”
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