Peter Benchley - The Deep

“They’re not armed, are they?”

“Doesn’t matter. Brass corrodes. Primers may be weak. And the cordite in those shells is still good as new. Bang ’em together, or drop one on a rock-let alone use a torch comand we’ll be playing harp duets for Saint Peter.”

“Can we get the government to help?”

“The Bermuda Government?” Treece laughed.

“Aye. They’ll have the royal scroll-maker draw up a fancy scroll commissioning me to get rid of the nuisance. If it weren’t for one thing, I’d be tempted to put a charge down there and blow the whole mess to dust.”

Treece fished inside his wet-suit jacket, found what he was looking for, and handed it to Sanders. It was a coin, irregular-shaped and green with tarnish.

It looked as if the design on the coin had been impressed off-center, for only about three quarters of the surface of the metal carried any marks at all. Around the rim of the coin Sanders could make out the letters “El,” then a period, then the letter “G,” another period and the numerals “170.” Closer to the center of the coin was an “M,” and in the center was an intricate crest that included two castles, a lion, and a number of bars.

“So?” Sanders said. “You said yourself that one coin doesn’t make a treasure.”

“True. But coin might.”

“Why?”

“After I sent you up, I went along the reef a way and fanned a few pockets around the rocks.

I found that coin about six inches under the sand. It was lying up against a piece of iron, which is why it survived and wasn’t all oxidized like the one you found.”

“Why is it green?”

“That’s nothing, it cleans right off. The iron it was lying up against looked to me like the hasp of a padlock. It didn’t come loose right away, and I didn’t want to spend the time wrestling with it.”

“You mean there’s a chest down there?”

“Not the way you’d imagine. The wood would have rotted away long since. The coins’d be all clotted together, and a lot of them would be no damn good. There’s a clump of them down there, under a rock. I tried to pry one loose, but it wouldn’t come. I figure it’s stuck to some others.”

“There could be more, then. Gold, I mean.”

“It’s beginning to look like it.” Treece held the coin to the light. “Here. The ‘More” means it was minted in Mexico City. What does that tell you?”

“That the ship was going east, back to Spain.”

“Aye. It was leaving the New World. About a third of the ships that wrecked were on their way to the New World, and they didn’t carry treasure.

They were burdened with wine and cheese and clothing and mining equipment. The numbers are the first three numbers of the date the coin was minted-sometime in the first ten years of the eighteenth century. That jibes with the crest. It’s Philip the Fifth’s. He took the throne in 1700.”

“What do the letters mean?”

“By the grace of God,” Treece said.

“They’re the end of the legend on the obverse of all the coins: Philippus V , then Dei G. , for gratia .”

Treece turned the coin over. “That’s a Jerusalem cross. I can’t read the letters, except for that “M” there, and the “R,” but it said Hispaniarwn et Indiarum Rex —King of Spain and the Indies.”

“So?”

“In 1715 a big fleet, one of Philip’s biggest, went down on the way home.”

“I’ve heard of that fleet. But somebody found it, didn’t they?”

“Aye, a diver named Kip Wagner. Ten ships went down, carrying God knows how much in gold and silver, and in the early 1960’s Wagner found what he figured was eight of them. He pulled up something like eight million dollars’ worth of gold.”

Sanders felt excitement surge through his stomach.

“And this stuff is from one of the other two ships?”

Treece smiled and shook his head. “Not a chance. Something ’s down there, for sure, but it can’t be one of Philip’s ten. They all went down off Florida, every one of them. It’s been documented over and over again-survivors, eyewitness reports, logs, salvors’ records, everything-and no ship’s going to move a thousand miles on the bottom of the ocean. No, what we know’s no problem; it’s what we don’t know that’s bothersome.”

“Like?”

“It’s a healthy bet that if there is a ship beneath Goliath , it sank between 1710 and 1720. If it was later than that, the coins we’ve found would have later dates. New World coins didn’t stay long in the New World. The Spaniards needed every one of them to keep their country afloat. But there’s no record of a Spanish ship sinking on this end of Bermuda between 1710 and 1720.”

“It doesn’t have to be a Spanish ship, does it, just because it carried Spanish coins?”

“No. Pieces of eight were international currency. Everybody used them. But there’s no record of any ship sinking off this stretch of beach in the early 1700’s.”

Sanders said, “That could be good, couldn’t it? It means the ship was never salvaged.”

“Good and bad. It means we have to start from scratch. Odds are, she went down at night. If there were survivors comand I doubt there were—they’d have no misty notion of where they pranged up. They’d be too concerned with saving their own pelts. So whatever cargo went down with her is probably still there.”

“And that could be—was.”

“No telling. According to the records, between 1520 and 1800 the Spaniards hauled about twelve billion dollars’ worth of goodies out of the New World-that’s twelve billion dollars’ worth in those days. About five per cent of that was lost, and about half of what was lost was recovered, which leaves roughly three hundred million dollars on the bottom. Figure a couple of hundred years’ inflation of that value, you’re well over a billion dollars. That would be nice and neat—if it were true. The trouble is, everybody was corrupt, and for every dollar’s worth of registered treasure on a ship, there was probably another dollar smuggled aboard.”

“To avoid taxes?”

“A special tax. By law, the King of Spain got twenty per cent of every treasure, no matter who collected it. A businessman who traded European goods for New World gold still had to pony up the so-called King’s Quinto. It was much cheaper to bribe some fellow to overlook a few things than it was to give twenty per cent to the crown.”

“That explains the anchor caper,” Sanders said. “I ran across something at the Geographic about a captain who had his anchor cast in gold and painted black.”

“Aye. He was hanged. The point is, there’s no way to tell what could be on a ship. There’ve been a dozen cases of ships sinking and being half-salvaged-and the half that was salvaged toting up to more than was listed for the whole ship. The lead ship of a fleet, the capitana , might have had three million dollars in registered treasure on her. But this is no capitana : there’s no fleet to go with her. It’s possible that this ship was taking home some of the survivors of the 1715 fleet. And maybe some of the salvaged treasure.

But then there’d be some record-if not here, then in Cadiz or Seville-of the survivors leaving Havana and ending up here. There’s nothing.”

Treece reached inside his wet suit and pulled out an oval of gold. “Here’s another bit to the mystery.”

“A coin?”

“No.” Treece passed it to Sanders. “A medallion.”

There was a raised head of a woman on the medallion, and the letters “S.c.o.p.n.”

“I think it’s Santa Clara,” Treece said.

“The “O.p.n.” stands for ora pro nobis — Santa Clara, pray for us. Look on the back.”