by Dean, Warren
THE TREASURE HUNTERS
WARREN DEAN
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Lucania Publishing House
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Edited by Jennifer Blaine
Copyright © 2014; All Rights Reserved.
Warren Dean asserts all rights to be identified as the author of this work; no part of it may be copied or distributed in any way without the prior written permission of the author. The events, names, and characters depicted in this story are fictional and any resemblance to any event, person, or alien living or dead is purely coincidental and unintended.
Cover incorporates a modified excerpt from Geographica restituta per globi trientes by Franciscus Verhaer,
Source http://maps.bpl.org/id/m8797
License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/
For Luke
PRESENT DAY
(PART ONE)
Patrick stared at the sixteenth century cannon perched on top of the sand dune.
Although thickened by rust and encrusted with barnacles, the lengthy iron cylinder was too distinctive to mistake. He had seen enough Demi-Culverin at shipwreck sites in the Caribbean to recognise it instantly. With its bulbous firing mechanism at one end and flat-ended circular mouth at the other, it was shaped like a Havana cigar with one end sliced off.
What had prompted him to travel to the little island off the coast of Brazil to view the relic, he couldn't say. He had seen photographs of it, so he already knew what it was. He had also read the comments of various local experts who all agreed that it must have come from one of the many Portuguese wrecks in the area.
Perhaps it was the strange story of how it had ended up in the middle of an island. Picked up by a tsunami a few years ago, it had been deposited there by the massive wave. When it was first found in the aftermath of the disaster, the nearby Ayuntamiento on the Brazilian mainland had pondered moving it to a museum. But cannon of that vintage were so common, it was decided that it would be more of a curiosity to leave it where it was. They weren't wrong, he thought, glancing at the tourists milling around.
Perhaps it was because he was completely out of ideas and thought that maybe, just maybe, this was the clue that had evaded him for so long. The clue to the final resting place of the Spanish galleon he had spent the last seven years hunting for. He didn't really think so, if truth be told. He was clutching at straws; no Spanish wrecks had ever been found around here. Logic dictated that the experts were right; the cannon must be from a Portuguese wreck.
But no-one had bothered to identify which wreck it came from and his obtuse Irish psyche prompted him to speculate that there could be an undiscovered Spanish wreck in the vicinity. Cannon like the one on the dune had been carried by both Spanish and Portuguese galleons and there was nothing to identify its country of origin. The rust and barnacles had seen to that.
His theory was highly unlikely, of course. After the treaty of Tordesillas was signed by Spain and Portugal in 1494, not many Spanish galleons had cause to sail along the coast of Brazil. The treaty allocated the newly discovered lands of the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico to Spain, while Brazil was assigned to Portugal. Any exploration by the Spanish off the coast of Brazil would have been a flagrant contravention of the treaty.
Perhaps he just needed a holiday and this was his way of justifying it to himself. A real holiday, not just another energy sapping, money guzzling treasure hunt for something nobody else believed existed. He decided that he would spend no more than a few days tracking the path the cannon must have taken. It couldn't have been carried for more than a few miles and, using satellite imagery of the tsunami, the task shouldn't be too difficult. At worst, he should be able to identify which Portuguese wreck it had come from. That would at least earn him a footnote in the story. And if he didn't find anything within a couple of days, he would pack it in and spend a few weeks enjoying the mainland's numerous sandy beaches and seaside taverns.
Perhaps the relaxation and time away from his obsessive search would give him a new perspective. He needed one after seven years of disappointment. Despite all of the leads he had followed and the many possibilities he had explored, he had drawn a complete blank. Lately, he had begun to doubt that the wreck was out there at all. Perhaps he was searching for a phantom as everyone else seemed to think. His belief had been draining away for some time now, and he needed it back. His quest for the wreck of the Christina de la Fuego had become his life, and he couldn't imagine doing anything else.
Thank heavens for his grandfather's trust fund. Otto Stahl, his mother's father, had moved to Ireland from Germany early in his life. Returning only to study at the Humboldt University of Berlin during the period between the World Wars, he had met and married Patrick's grandmother and lived in Dublin for the rest of his life. By the time he died in the late nineteen nineties, he had built up a sizable estate through shrewd investments in property developments and the stock market. In his will, he left his assets to a trust fund for the benefit of his grandchildren. Fortunately for the latter, there were only three of them. To the disgust of his cousins, Patrick had ploughed his share of the sizable annual income into what they considered to be the ruinous and disreputable occupation of treasure hunting.
His grandfather was also unwittingly responsible for Patrick's discovery of the somewhat odd piece of information which had triggered his obsession. One of the conditions of the trust fund was that each beneficiary must successfully complete a degree at the old man's erstwhile university in Berlin. No funds were payable until the condition was fulfilled, so Patrick had swallowed his indignation at being compelled to leave home for a foreign country and spent four years studying archaeology there.
Although he wouldn't admit it to anyone, he quite enjoyed his sojourn. University life was intellectually stimulating and pleasantly Bohemian, which was in stark contrast to the stilted schools he had attended in Dublin. He also found German girls to be less emotionally complicated than their Irish counterparts and was motivated to quickly learn the language.
In his final year, he was tasked with writing a dissertation on any aspect of German archaeology he wished. On a whim, he decided that it would be interesting to contrast the rather dubious findings of the Nazi-inspired archaeologists of the nineteen thirties and forties, with those of their rather more respected successors later in the century. To do so, he had to delve into the extensive collection of Nazi-era books and documents housed in the massive university library.
Unfortunately, after the novelty of what he was studying had worn off, he found the twisted ideology tedious, and began to regret his choice. But it was too late in the year to start something new, so he persevered and eventually bashed out a paper which earned him a pass, although only just.
The only saving grace of the episode came late one evening when he was about to finish up for the day and go home. Ensconced in the beautifully furnished and well-heated library building, he was in no hurry to return to his chilly dormitory room. Flipping idly through the old text he had been studying, a handwritten note in the margin of one of the pages caught his eye. Most of the old books in the library were immaculately kept and it was unusual to see them defaced in any way.
The writing was on the first page of a lengthy chapter about ships of the Spanish treasure fleet; an annual convoy which had carried the riches of South and Central America to Spain during the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It seemed that the author of the book, one of the leading German archaeologists of the day, had made a detailed study of Spanish naval archives. In the book, he recorded the name, description and eventual fate of many of the galleons which had been part of the fleet over the years. He concentrated mainly on those which were known to have been sunk at sea, and described the whereabouts of wrecks which had been found. He also speculated at length about the possible whereabouts of wrecks yet to be discovered.
Curious, Patrick examined the handwriting more closely. There were two di
stinct notes, each written by a different hand. Both appeared to be in blue fountain-pen ink and the second note was even signed. The first note was the shorter of the two and he typed it into the English-German translator on his tablet. What the translation said was terse, but intriguing;
Since the publication of this work, I must add the Christina de la Fuego, a galleon which disappeared in 1603. Sources indicate that this ship was carrying a treasure of the utmost value. Include in next edition.
Patrick, by then engrossed in the mystery, translated the second note. It was less dramatic, but no less interesting; a commentary on the contents of the first note. It said;
This annotation has been verified to be that of the author, believed to have been made during 1943. His sources are unknown, but he appears to have been convinced of their reliability. In 1944 he met twice with Bormann in an attempt to convince him to send an expedition to find the ship. Unfortunately the author, who died in 1946, did not publish any further editions of this work, so nothing more is known of this matter.
Patrick squinted at the scribbled signature at the end of the second note and tried to make out the name. He entered it into the internet search engine of his tablet and, after trying two or three variations, came up with the name of the senior librarian of the university during the late forties and early fifties. That raised his eyebrows. It meant that the second note was an authoritative verification that the first note was the work of the author himself.
The significance of the second note went further than that. If the Bormann referred to by the librarian was Martin Bormann, Adolf Hitler's private secretary and right-hand man, it revealed how reliable the author had believed his information to be. Bormann was the second most powerful man in Nazi Germany. No archaeologist, no matter how eminent, would have dared approach him with information which had not been fully authenticated.
Proud of his own intuitive reasoning, Patrick showed the entries to one of his professors, who scoffed at them. None of the Nazi-inspired archaeologists could be taken seriously, he said, and the author's account of a long lost treasure ship had long ago been dismissed as the ramblings of a deluded old man.
"So, no-one has ever looked for this ship?" Patrick asked incredulously.
The professor shook his head. "I didn't say that. Many have searched, but no one has ever found any trace of her."
Although disillusioned by the professor's reaction, Patrick couldn't get the peculiar conundrum out of his mind. An internet search for the ship's name yielded no results so, the following year, he took a trip to Seville to research old naval records. There he found that there had indeed been a galleon by the name of Christina de la Fuego, and that she had joined the Spanish treasure fleet in 1599. On its expedition to the Spanish Main in 1603, the fleet put in at the South American port of Cartagena. The Christina left the fleet to explore the coast of Venezuela, and was never seen again.
Gazing at the cannon on the dune, Patrick imagined the vessel heading east from Cartagena in what was now Columbia, sailing along the Venezuelan coastline, and then turning south-east to follow the coast of Brazil. But why would she have done that? She would have risked discovery by the Portuguese who would have had little hesitation in sinking her. There was only one answer, of course; she was looking for treasure. Maybe even treasure of the utmost value, as the German archaeologist had described it. It would also explain why Patrick, and many treasure hunters before him, had never found any trace of the galleon. Maybe they had not been looking in the right place.
"Patrick, stop day-dreaming and have an ice-cream."
Molly trudged up the side of the dune behind him, carrying two large ice-cream cones she had bought at a kiosk they had passed earlier. He turned and gave her a grin, registering suddenly how hot, hungry, and thirsty he was. It had been a long trip from the mainland to the island and, on arrival, he had wanted to see the cannon straight away. Taking no time to rest or freshen up, he had insisted on marching the mile and a half from the landing jetty to the cannon site in the hot midday sun.
Molly, as always, had shrugged her shoulders and followed him. Unflappable and uncomplaining, she was the perfect foil for the moody, obsessive Dubliner. He had met the tall, dark-haired girl from County Cork on his third trip to the Caribbean. His first two trips were diving tours of some of the more accessible, and well-trampled, wreck sites in the area. His goal had been two-fold; to learn to dive and to see what a real wreck site looked like. The third trip was to buy his first boat; a dilapidated thirty-foot cabin cruiser. The ominously named 'Hurricane' had leaked like a sieve, both above and below deck. A year later, a rather scary brush with one of the cruiser's namesakes persuaded him to splash out on a much newer, forty-five footer. The new cruiser he named 'Honey', a name she lived up to unfailingly.
When he met her, Molly was working in a pub in the Bahamas. He had just bought Hurricane and stopped in at the crowded establishment for a celebratory drink or two. Not having any friends to drink with, he gravitated towards the friendly young Irish girl serving behind the bar. As the evening wore on, he found himself telling her his tale of shipwrecked galleons, mysterious clues, and sunken treasure. Walking out of the pub that night, he spent a few minutes mentally smacking himself on the back of the head. Molly must have heard similar stories from assorted drunks and dreamers hundreds of times. She probably thought him a complete idiot.
That didn't stop him from going back every night for the rest of his week-long stay. Throttling back on the tales of lost treasure, he made more of an effort to get to know her. She had trained as a schoolteacher, and then taken a gap year to see the world. Believing that the Caribbean was a good place to start, she used what she had saved to make it as far as the Bahamas. Then she had taken the pub job so that she could pay for a trip to South America, but never seemed to be able to build up enough funds. Her father had been laid off during the economic recession and she found herself having to send money home. Four years later she was still in the Bahamas, and although she told the story in a cheerful and self-deprecating way, he thought he detected an undercurrent of quiet desperation.
The night before he was due to sail, he was disappointed to find that she had taken the evening off. Stupidly, he hadn't asked her for her phone number, and the bar owner refused to give it to him. Saddened by not having had a chance to say goodbye, he awoke early the next morning and trudged down to the dock. He spent an hour and a half readying his old cruiser for launch. He had thrown his meagre provisions aboard and was untying the forward line, when he looked up to see a pair of slender white legs in denim shorts standing above him on the quay. Startled, he looked up into Molly's pensive face.
"Is there room for a crewmember on that tub?" she asked. Before he could reply, she threw him one and then the other of the two duffel bags she was carrying. He caught them, gaped in astonishment for a few seconds, and then threw them into the cockpit.
"Welcome aboard," he said with a grin and a flourish, and she stepped over the gunwale. He finished throwing off the lines and started the engine.
"Are you sure?" he asked her.
"I can't face another year here," she said.
"Do you have anything else to collect before we go?"
She shrugged. "Nothing I need."
And that was it; they had been together for seven years so far. They had even established a home of sorts, a dusty rented chalet on Saint Kitts which they returned to from time to time. The rest of the time they spent treasure hunting. Molly was not obsessed with it, as Patrick was, but she loved diving and was happy to be travelling, constantly visiting new places.
During their first few years in the area they joined sponsored hunts for various wrecks, earning some pocket money and enjoying a measure of success when they found an old passenger steamer off the Florida Keys. There was no treasure, but they earned a finder's fee and were regarded by some of the professionals as having climbed one rung of the treasure hunters' ladder.
Patrick used the money they ha
d earned to buy a remote controlled submersible, and began his search for the Christina in earnest. He was able to cover much more ground using the sub; it could search potential sites in a few days rather than the weeks or months it had taken before. He began searching the deep waters south of Haiti, and then moved on to the Venezuelan coast. Unfortunately, there were few European settlements on that coast at the time, so there were no written records to consult.
After a fruitless search which took two years, he tried the coasts of Colombia, Central America, the Cayman Islands, Cuba, and Jamaica; anywhere he thought the Christina may have gone in an effort to find riches or to re-join the fleet. Eventually, he gave up on the Caribbean and tried the Gulf of Mexico, thinking that she may have found what she was looking for and tried to hook up with the fleet at Veracruz. But there was no sign of his quarry.
It never occurred to him to search Brazilian waters; there was just no reason for her to have gone that way. Or so he had always assumed. Perhaps there was a reason that he just didn't know about. Still, it was a long shot and, for once, he had no great hopes of success.
He and Molly sought the shade of a nearby tree and finished their cones while he told her what he planned to do. She never greeted any of his schemes with anything less than enthusiasm, but this time she looked quite excited. She would appreciate a holiday, he realised and, in a rare moment of introspection, he wondered whether his relentless search had been worth it. Although she never complained, she might be secretly sick of the whole thing.
He should have asked her to marry him by now, he knew, but the time never seemed to be right. There was always one more clue, one more lead to follow. Well, perhaps this was the last one and then it was time to let it go. Maybe they should go back home, buy a pub, and live like normal people for a while.