“We’re in no rush,” Boasnovas said. “We’re trapped on this boat for days, with nothing to do but watch our toenails grow. The boy’s right! Perhaps in this book are the clues to find the many treasures Krane won!”
“What he’s saying is not all foolishness,” Nuño said, rubbing his goatee. “Maybe we really did find a treasure in Kopra . . . I want to learn how to read with you, Sparks!”
“Me, too!” Jack and Boasnovas said, almost at the same time.
“I don’t think I could,” John the Whale sighed beside us. “I’ve been banged on the head so often that I wouldn’t know how to learn . . . ”
“That doesn’t matter,” I said to encourage him. “You’ve got a really hard skull; I’m sure your brain is safe.”
“Then it’s decided,” Nuño said, standing up. “We’ll meet here every night at eight, before dinner. And we’ll have a lesson in reading.”
“My goodness!” Erik the Belgian exclaimed. “I’ve never gone to a class in my life! But I am not going to be left out of this. If it says something important there, I want to read it with my own eyes.”
“But . . . But I . . . ” Two Molars blubbered, his eyes as round as saucers. “I don’t know if . . . ”
“You’ll do it very well,” Nuño decided. “And we will all pay attention to you, I promise. But be careful.” His tone became serious. “Don’t even think of teaching us badly on purpose, so we understand things backward, you understand?”
“I swear I wouldn’t know how to do that, Nuño. I’ll do . . . I’ll do what I can, my comrades,” said Two Molars solemnly.
He didn’t yet know it, but this was going to be one of the most difficult things he’d ever have to do in his life. On the first day, we were six students; on the second day, nine; and by the fourth day, the news had spread like a match in a powder keg, and then the entire crew was sitting on the pantry floor at eight on the dot. Everyone except Barracuda, who watched his crew disappear as soon as the sun began to set. But he didn’t ask anything; it wouldn’t do for it to look like he cared about the private lives of his men. He wasn’t that kind of captain.
I have never gone to school—not one single day—but I know that no professor has endured students like these: pirates with scars and tattoos, blackened teeth, wearing torn and stinking clothes, and armed with knives in their belts. No one, I can assure you, has ever attended a class like ours. We pirates were all seated in the pantry of the Southern Cross, making more grimaces than a troop of monkeys. Between the ones who couldn’t see very well, those who couldn’t speak well, and those who didn’t hear well, Two Molars had the most difficult job in the world. It was like trying to teach a flock of ducks how to sew.
And Two Molars wasn’t what one would call a good teacher although the poor man did the best he could. Sometimes he would grab his head as if he were afraid it might come unscrewed from his neck and fly up into the air. We asked him everything at the same time, and he tried to remember what little he knew. I think that sometimes he even invented things, just so we would leave him in peace.
He began by teaching us the letters, and it seemed incredible to us that there were so many of them. John the Whale insisted that he didn’t use more than half of them when he talked, and it didn’t matter that we tried to convince him otherwise; he was as stubborn as a mule. Of course, that was nothing compared to when we began to put letters together to make words. That was interminable. Because if it was difficult to know how they sounded two by two, as soon as we made bundles of three letters, that really put a spanner in the works! There we all were, opening our mouths, sticking our tongues out, making pouting faces, and rubbing our eyes. And, of course, sooner or later someone started to laugh and then you had a whole rumpus going on. What with “What are you laughing at?” and “Me? Nothing.” and “I’ll give you something to laugh about.“ . . . And then: a full-on brawl.
And on top of everything, Two Molars, as I’ve already mentioned, had an extremely limited knowledge of reading. Often, he got letters all mixed up, especially the lowercase “b” and “d” which look so similar. So instead of saying “drown” he read “brown.”
That’s why nobody understood what Erik the Belgian meant when, after much effort and turning blue from nerves, he read: “They made him walk the plank and watched him ’brown.’” He got really mad when One-Legged Jack asked him, “What are you talking about, you oaf? What does it matter if he got a tan?”
“What do you want from me?” Erik replied. “I didn’t write it! I just read what’s there!”
“He reads it, he says! You’re inventing it!” yelled Jack.
“Listen, Jack, don’t mess with me, or you’re going to have to read without teeth! Let’s see then how you’ll manage to say ’skirmish’ or ’weigh anchors’!”
There were thousands of arguments like that. Every day we had more questions than Two Molars had answers, even when he invented the answers. As soon as we picked up some momentum with our learning, something else hit us: capital and lowercase letters and accents. And just as things seemed clearer, here came the B and the V, the G and the H.
“Well, that’s about enough!” Boasnovas declared one day, knocking the book off the table with a huge swipe of his hands. “You’re mocking us! Why the devil are ’said’ and ’paid’ pronounced differently if they’re spelled the same? You’re fooling us, you crazed Corsican!”
“Do you want us to look like idiots?” John the Whale asked.
“Yeah! What he said!” the Belgian joined the protest. “You want to be the only one who reads well so that you don’t have to share the secrets of Phineas’ book with us!”
“That’s right!” the rest chorused in protest.
Anton the Corsican, now known on the Southern Cross as Two Molars, was about to cause a mutiny of students on board. You had to have lived it to believe it! So he stood up, took the book, and climbed the steps two by two. Before he closed the trapdoor of the deck, he said, “That’s it! I told you I didn’t know how to teach anyone how to read! I don’t have to stand for this! Find yourselves some other fool who’ll put up with you!”
And he slammed the trapdoor shut.
First, we all got mad, of course. And then we didn’t know what to do.
The next day, the crew was in a foul mood, Two Molars worse than everyone. He spent all day at his watch station atop the highest mast, even though we were sailing on the open sea with nothing to see but water, more water, and yet more water. He was as mad as a wet hen.
Days passed with many glances exchanged but few words spoken. Our professor stayed angry. But something else began to happen to the rest of us. Suddenly, we realized that above the door to Barracuda’s chambers, someone had written “Captain;” that on the barrels of rum it really did say “Rum;” and not just that, but someone had also written “from Puerto Rico.” And, most importantly, we could put the barrels together in the hold because now we could distinguish barrels that contained rum from those that held gunpowder because those barrels read “Gunpowder”!
Of course, not all of the news was good news. Let One-Legged Jack tell you: he’d been convinced that an Amazonian shaman had tattooed on his right arm, under a drawing of a jaguar, the words “Strength and Fierceness,” until he could read for himself that it read “Pretty Kitty.” You don’t want to know the jokes that were made after that. He even thought of cutting his arm off, but we convinced him that he was already missing one leg, and to cut off an arm now would be losing too many body parts for a single lifetime.
And that’s how things were when we reached Española. And, you have to believe me, it was as if we were visiting it for the first time. We walked through the streets open-mouthed and overwhelmed. We realized that so many words were all over the place—so many things to read and so much information we were unaware of before. The street names were curious to us. We didn’t know that the jail was on �
�Calvary Street” or that the livestock market was on “The Street of the Portuguese.” You can’t believe how proud Boasnovas was about that! I knew it wasn’t named for him, but what did it matter? Who wanted to take away his joy for no reason?
And so we wandered, like children in a candy store, elbowing one another and competing to see which of us could read the signs of the stores or the names of the bottles first. And we were astonished when John the Whale pointed out a poster which read “Vorbidden” spelled just like that. “With a V instead of an F!” he shouted. We could have never appreciated a joke like this before. The big lunk stood there, crying tears of laughter before the incredulous gaze of the poor shopkeeper who didn’t know the difference between a V and an F. So John asked the shopkeeper for a piece of chalk and corrected the spelling, under the gaze of a proud Two Molars.
That’s the good thing about reading: once you start, there’s no stopping you! Words, once you reach that pivotal moment, seem to come together and everything appears to be clear and simple. You might suddenly see a word whose meaning you don’t know, but, incredibly, you’re still able to read it. You see the word “medic” written and, of course, you don’t know what it means. But now you can ask: “Hey, what’s a medic?” And thus, you learn that it’s another way of saying doctor. At first, it seems like magic.
In the Tavern of the Golden Hand, for the first time ever, we asked to see the menu so that we could choose what we wanted to eat. We discovered that chicken could be cooked eight different ways and pork, on the other hand, in only five; that almost everything came with potatoes; and that fish was much cheaper than meat. With so much information on the menu, it took us over one hour to order our meal! So many decisions!
We were oblivious that we were attracting attention, but we should have known better. Here we were, a group of pirates passing the menu to one another and reading aloud what it said: “No spitting at the tables;” “Weapons must be left with the tavern keeper during the meal;” or “Don’t trust, now or ever.” Barracuda, seated with Nuño on the other side of the tavern’s enormous room, watched us with his famous blank-face stare. Nuño, as he later told us, neither could nor wished to lie to him, so, when Barracuda asked him, he told the captain about the reading lessons and Phineas Krane’s book. If the captain was surprised, he didn’t say, and nobody noticed anything. He merely told Nuño to order another pitcher of beer and dove back into his dark thoughts, a place from which no one could budge him—not even with a shot from a cannon!
After eating our fill, we ordered jugs of rum and grog as if we were at a wedding. We kept filling Two Molars’ glass to see if we could get him to forget about our complaints and to forgive us. The thing is, in case you didn’t know, pirates never ask for forgiveness, even if they accidentally fall to their knees with their hands clasped together. At most, they’ll give you a knock on the skull or an elbow to the ribs, although most common is for them to offer you something to drink, for nobody to say anything, and for the matter to be forgotten.
Of course (let me say this so that everything is clear), I didn’t drink anything other than water. I was eleven-years-old, and my crewmates would have shaved my head bald if they’d caught me sticking my jaw near a jug of alcohol of any kind. “Children don’t drink, or they’ll not grow,” they told me all the time; although it would never have even occurred to me to try those foul-smelling concoctions. That night, no one drank much, incredibly. They were occupied enough reading the bottles and debating whether the beers from the continent were better than those from the islands, or if the drinks that said “spirits” on the bottles had a ghost inside.
Back on the Southern Cross, we found ourselves with the problem of how fifty-two pirates were going to read a single book. First, we thought we’d read it aloud by turns, but that didn’t work. Between “You read too slowly” and “I can’t understand you with that thick Belgian accent,” not to mention “We can’t hear if you read without teeth” or “I’m too embarrassed . . . .” You guessed it: more fights, more heads bashed, more ruckus. So we decided to pass the book from person to person in turns. There were a lot of us; by the time it was your turn again, you couldn’t recall what you had already read, but it was the only way for us to have peace on board.
With this agreement in place, and controlling the times with a small hourglass, the following days passed calmly. Barracuda watched us from time to time and seemed to be making mental notes about something. That made me feel uneasy; the captain was unpredictable, and his surprises could be good . . . or the exact opposite.
After two, or perhaps three, days of sailing, we were very close to Martinique, but we needed to shelter from a terrible spring storm, so we decided to approach a little island. The waves rose five meters in height, and the wind threatened to tear away our sails, so despite how dangerous the maneuver was, it was our only possible option.
Barracuda shouted orders to the men and rushed to help secure the ropes. He also pitched in where needed. The truth is, he was an extraordinary captain. As we approached the small island, the crew fell into despair. The entire coast was rocky, and it seemed likely that the waves would slam the ship onto the rocks and destroy the keel.
It was then while the water of the sea and the heavens drenched us and the wind buffeted us, that Malik the Malian climbed onto the bridge and, pointing at the island, shouted as loud as he could, “I know this place! I recognize it! It’s the Cliffs of the Condemned!”
“What are you talking about, Malik?” Erik yelled. “Are you crazy? This is just some miserable little rock in the middle of the sea. I doubt that anyone has even bothered to give it a name!”
“Phineas did!” Malik shouted. “It’s in the book! Didn’t anyone else reach Chapter Seven?” Then he pointed at the island again. “Look there! Those are the Two Brothers!”
We looked to where he was pointing, and we saw, up high and silhouetted against the gray sky, two enormous pointy rocks towering above the treeline.
“The book describes this very place,” Malik explained. “We need to go around the island to reach the north face.”
“And why would we need to do that?” Barracuda spat. “This place is a wretched ship trap! We should pull away now and try to find some other port!”
“Captain, the storm is growing by the minute,” Nuño interrupted. “I don’t think we can reach Barbados.”
“That won’t be necessary, Nuño!” Malik insisted. “Captain, trust me! I know that to the north, there is a cove that’s deep enough for this ship. Krane’s book describes it in full detail!”
Barracuda stared at Malik as if he were trying to count the hairs in his eyebrows. Two enormous thunderclaps shook the ship, and lightning bolts streaked across the sky from west to east and then back again. Then, the captain’s voice rang out above the storm: “Nuño, full to port! Change course to the north!”
Barracuda grabbed Malik by the shirt and yanked him forward until Malik’s nose was almost touching the captain’s scruffy beard. “And you, you better pray that that blasted book is correct! If I lose this ship, you’ll never find a hole deep enough to hide in from me, you water rat!”
“You won’t lose it, Captain!” Malik assured him and then ran toward Nuño to indicate the course.
As we turned north, with the Southern Cross creaking and popping like an old bed, the gale winds grew even stronger.
“There!” Malik shouted. “It’s there! Between those two little inlets! My God, it’s just as the book describes!”
Nobody saw an opening in the coastline, but, without time to doubt any further, we hurried to steer the ship to where he indicated. And to the relief and surprise of everyone . . . there it was! The ship, little by little, made its way through a narrow canal and suddenly entered a broad and deep cove. It was as if we had entered inside the little island itself. The wind abated, and the waters grew calm.
The pirates remained as open-mo
uthed as they were relieved. They had sailed by this island hundreds of times and had never suspected that this refuge existed. We dropped anchor in the middle of that marina, and everything was calm.
“Well blow me over!” Erik the Belgian said. “It’s a miracle! But what is this place? I’ve never heard a peep about it . . . It’s completely hidden from the sea.”
“Phineas knew about it,” Jack said with sincere admiration. “That’s why he often said he was able to disappear on the sea. I don’t think anyone else knew about this little hideaway. Did you?” he asked Two Molars, who answered back, “Of course not! He must have found it after I left his crew.”
We spent all night talking nonstop about Krane. We were thrilled to imagine what awaited us in his book.
We arrived in Barbados the next day. Before we disembarked, Barracuda admonished us to not breathe a word about the hidden cove. The captain had a business meeting with an Italian fabrics merchant named Bruno. Many of the ships we captured had expensive-looking pearly fabrics and metallic-colored brocades, and Barracuda almost always sold them to Bruno.
After Malik’s success with the refuge in the Cliffs of the Condemned, we decided to carry the book with us. This time, there were no tavern visits, no fistfights, no staying out celebrating until dawn. We spent the entire time reading by turns and taking notes on things that Phineas talked about in his book. Perhaps something else might be of use at some other moment, like what had happened with the hidden cove that had saved the Southern Cross and, as a consequence, all of us.
Everyone stared at us, but that was to be expected; no one had ever seen a group of pirates sitting on a beach, quiet as a tomb, passing a book from one to the other every ten minutes. We sat there, looking at the sea like happy shipwrecks. And when the pirate who was reading suddenly laughed or was surprised by something, others asked what it was and yet others said, “Don’t say anything, I want to read it myself!” When we got hungry, we even decided that someone should go and buy provisions and bring them back for us to eat right there. Well, as you might imagine, that fell to me, although the Whale offered to help me. Don’t ridicule me! You couldn’t carry enough food for all those hungry pirates by yourself either.
The Treasure of Barracuda Page 3