Peter Benchley - The Deep

“Wouldn’t have to follow you. A phone call’d suffice. He’s a vengeful bugger and well connected. But no question, you’d be safer there.”

Gail said, “It seems like we’re safer here-at least as long as he thinks we’ll help.” She turned to Sanders. “You were right. I should have lied.”

“Sounds to me like you haven’t made up your minds yet,” said Treece. “Before you do, you might want to hear what I found out last night, or I should say this morning. I think I know-now hear me; I say I think—what ship is under Goliath .”

“You found E.f.,” Sanders said.

“No.” Treece pointed to the papers on the table.

“These are just the beginning, but they’ve got a couple of clues in ’em. You remember we talked about that 1715 fleet?”

“Sure.”

“This may have something to do with that fleet. Try to follow.” He picked up a piece of paper.

“The 1715 fleet was commanded by a general named Don Juan Esteban de Ubilla. He had wanted to set sail for Spain in late 1714, but there were delays, as there always were. Ships were late coming from the Far East, the Manila galleons that carried K’ang Hsi porcelain, ivory, jade, silk, spices, all manner of stuff. He waited in Vera Cruz for over a year for the cargo to arrive, be lugged across the jungle, and loaded onto his ships.

He set off for Havana, where all fleets gathered for last-minute preparations. There were more delays in Havana: ships had to be repaired, more cargo loaded, manifests made up. The early spring of 1715 slipped by, then late spring, then early summer. Pretty soon, it was the middle of July. Ubilla must have been going berserk.”

“Why?” Gail asked.

“Hurricanes. There’s a West Indian jingle that goes, ‘June, too soon; July, stand by; August, come they must; September, remember; October, all over.” A hurricane was the worst thing that could happen to one of those fleets. The ships were pigs. They couldn’t point closer than about ninety degrees to the wind, so in a big breeze they were helpless. They were always overloaded, wormy, and rotten. They leaked all day every day.

“Anyway, while Ubilla was waiting, he was approached by a fellow named Dare, master of a vessel that had once been French but now flew the Spanish flag and carried a Spanish name— El Grifon . Dare wanted to join Ubilla’s fleet, and with bloody good reason: His manifest listed more than fifty thousand dollars in gold and silver, and if he sailed alone there wasn’t a chance he’d get by the Straits of Florida. Jamaican pirates would get him. They had spies everywhere, and they’d know exactly when he left Havana. But Ubilla said no. He was all hot about the delays and the weather, and he didn’t want the headache of shepherding another vessel; ten ships was plenty to keep tabs on. Dare pressed; he hinted that there was something special about his cargo, something other than what the manifest said. Ubilla wouldn’t budge.”

“All that’s in there?” Gail said, indicating the papers on the table.

“Most of it. Everybody kept diaries in those days, and Spanish bureaucrats were fanatics about keeping detailed records, usually for self-protection. Anyway, under normal circumstances Ubilla’s word would have been law.

He was responsible for the fleet, and it was up to him to say who sailed with him and who didn’t. But evidently there was more to El Grifon than Dare was willing to tell. He went over Ubilla’s head, to the highest royal representative in Havana, and in jig time Ubilla was ordered to take El Grifon with him. So now there were eleven ships in the fleet.”

Sanders broke in. “You said last night there were ten ships in the fleet, and they all sank off Florida.”

“That’s what I thought. That’s what everybody thought.” Treece held up a sheet of paper. “This is Ubilla’s manifest. It lists ten ships and all their cargo. What must have happened is that Ubilla had made up his manifest, had done all his paper work, and he was impatient as hell to set sail. If he had gone by the book and presented his manifest for revision, to take into account the eleventh ship-one he didn’t want to bother with anyway-the bloody bureaucrats would have kept him in Havana for another month. They insisted on listing every farthing that went with a fleet, or at least every farthing they weren’t bribed to ignore-and that would have delayed the fleet’s departure until the middle of the hurricane season.”

Gail said, “How did you find out about El Grifon ?”

Treece picked through the pile of documents and found a frayed, cracked, yellow piece of paper. He pushed it across the table to her. “Don’t bother to read it. It’s in Old Spanish, and the fellow couldn’t spell worth a damn. It’s a survivor’s account. About four lines from the bottom, there’s a word spelled o-n-c-e the number eleven. I must have read that bastard a hundred times before, and I never picked it up. He says there were eleven ships in the fleet.” He riffled the stack of paper. “It was easy enough to check, or double-check once I had that clue. The King’s flunky kept a meticulous diary, and he mentioned El Grifon as leaving with Ubilla. Reading him kept me up half the night. He was a pompous bastard, and I had to wade through a pile of self-serving crap. When Ubilla got the order to take Dare with him, he apparently told Dare to join up with the fleet a few hours out, so as to avoid the bureaucrats knowing-they’d have forced him to wait till he could revise his manifest.” Treece coughed, stood up, and, without asking, poured three glasses half full of rum.

“The fleet of ten, plus one, left Havana on Wednesday, July 24, 1715,” he said, sitting down. “It carried two thousand men and, officially, fourteen million dollars’ worth of treasure. The real value was likely something over thirty million. The weather stayed fine for five days. You’d think they’d be well out to sea by then, but those hogs only made seven knots, so they’d barely got to Florida, somewhere between where Sebastian and Vero Beach are today. They had no way of knowing it, but ever since they’d left Havana there had been a hurricane brewing down south, and it had been gaining on them every day.

“It caught up with them on the sixth day out, a Monday night, and by two in the morning it was beating the bejesus out of them: forty-, fifty-foot seas, hundred-mile winds blowing out of the east and driving them west, toward the rocks. Ubilla gave one course correction after another, and most of the ships tried to follow him, but it was hopeless. Dare must have been the only one who consciously disobeyed. Maybe he didn’t trust Ubilla; maybe he was just a royal fine sailor. Either way, he kept El Grifon

half a point farther to the northeast than the other ships, and, by Christ, he survived.”

“He made it alone?” Sanders said.

“No. He went back to Havana. He was still worried about pirates. That, or his ship might have been so beat up that he didn’t dare try the crossing without making repairs. And now,” Treece said with a mischievous smile, “the plot thickens. There is no record at all of what happened to Dare and El Grifon once he got back to Havana. For all practical purposes, he disappeared. So did his ship.”

“He could have tried to make it alone,” Sanders said.

“Later on.”

“He could have. Or perhaps he laid low for a while, changed his ship’s name, and joined another fleet.”

“Why would he do that?” Gail asked.

“There are reasons. But a caution: What I’ve been telling you is fact, close as I can get it.

From here on, it’s pure speculation.” He took a drink. “We know that Dare was carrying goodies worth a hell of a lot more than his manifest said, else he never would have been foisted off on Ubilla.