Gordon Korman: The Discovery

It had not been a loving family. But at least he’d belonged. Now he was being driven out. Would the world ever find a place for Samuel Higgins?

Sewell had been hard, but hunger, Samuel’s new master, was even harder. At first, he considered a return to the countryside and his mother. But he was not certain where he might find her, or if she was even alive. This life — with Sewell — was the only life he remembered. And now that was over.

His heart yearned for his lost family, but his empty belly was in charge. There was no future in England for a penniless boy except starvation and death. His only hope, his one chance, lay with the sea.

He signed on with the Griffin for a plate of stew and a promise of future wages — not a princely contract, to be sure. But considering that his former employment had come as the result of a kidnapping, this represented freedom, and he was much satisfied. He had no inkling, at that time, of the true purpose of the Griffin and its fleet, nor what its business was in the vast ocean that stretched westward to a new world. He knew only that there was food in the galley for him to eat, and a small rectangle of deck planking outside the captain’s quarters where he could sleep. Home.

As the captain’s boy, Samuel was the personal manservant to Captain James Blade. His duties included everything from delivering the captain’s meals to cleaning and brushing his uniform and wigs, delivering messages to crew members, and emptying the man’s chamber pot.

To Captain Blade, Samuel was less than human, a utensil, like a spoon or a shaving razor. “Boy!” he would bark when he needed something. Or often he’d shout, “You!”

The one time that Samuel had the audacity to venture, “My name is Samuel, sir,” the captain pulled out a furled snake whip from his belt and smacked him across the side of the head with the bone handle.

“You can ride on this ship or in the waves below — take your choice, boy. But you’ll not open your lip to me!”

The blow knocked Samuel clear through the hatch to the captain’s quarters, sending a laden tray of food flying every which way.

“And swab this deck!”

There was an emerald the size of a musket ball set in the handle. It left a deep, bloody gash in Samuel’s cheek. The wound did not stop oozing until they had passed the Canary Islands.

Tad Cutter and his team had been sent from Poseidon’s head office in San Diego, California, to map the reefs of the Hidden Shoals northeast of Saint-Luc. Like many scientific undertakings, the results may have been interesting, but harvesting the data was very boring work indeed.

The job consisted of dragging a sonar tow that would measure the depth of the seabed below. To do this over 274 square miles of ocean would take every minute of the eight weeks budgeted for the project. To help them, Cutter and company had been assigned the four teenage interns. But as the early days of summer passed, Kaz, Dante, Adriana, and Star found themselves completely ignored by the Cutter team.

Day after day, the four would awaken in their cabins in the Poseidon compound to find that Captain Bill Hamilton and his Ponce de León , the boat assigned to Cutter, were already out there mapping, and had left them behind.

Cutter always had an excuse. “Sorry, guys, but we’re just so busy . To gather this much data in just a couple of months leaves us no wiggle room. If you’re not on board at five A.M., we’ve got to take off without you.”

The next day, they were there at five only to find that the Ponce de León had slipped its moorings at four-thirty. The day after that, they arrived at four. There they waited by the boat for three hours before realizing that Cutter and his crew had taken the catamaran to Martinique for supplies.

“We have to complain,” argued Dante. “This is our internship, and they’re not letting us do it. It’s a rip-off.”

But there was no one to complain to. Dr. Gallagher was far too busy to see them. And when they ran into him around the institute, he was always lecturing to the video camera that seemed to follow him like a tail. In addition, the director now wore a thick bandage on his forearm, which he carried in a sling. They were all pretty sure it had something to do with his great white shark jaw.

“If he doesn’t get away from here fast,” Kaz observed, “one of these days that thing is going to come down off the wall and eat him.”

Captain Vanover was sympathetic, but not a lot of help. “I know it’s lousy, but Tad’s probably not doing it on purpose. These research guys — when they get their teeth into a project, they’re like zombies. They eat, sleep, and breathe work. They just can’t focus on anything else. Don’t let it bum you out. I’m sure your time will come.”

“Maybe,” grumbled Dante, “but what year?”

Vanover promised to take them out for another dive. But the Hernando Cortés was booked almost every day by other scientists, so they would have to wait until the ship was free. In the meantime, the captain agreed to have a word with Bill Hamilton.

The only other person they knew around the institute was English, and no one was in the mood to ask him for favors. Whenever they passed the hulking dive guide in the halls or on the gravel paths of the grounds, they would slink by, and he would look right through them.

“You should talk to him,” Dante urged Star. “He likes you.”

“He doesn’t like anybody,” she growled. “He just hates me the least. Besides, he doesn’t have any clout around this place.”

Poseidon was only a part-time job for English, whose main employment was as a hard-hat diver for the oil rigs off the west side of the island. There his skill and toughness were legendary. He would work at incredible depths of one thousand feet or more, welding underwater pipe and repairing drills and equipment that weighed hundreds of tons.

The more they learned about Menasce Gérard, the more cowed they became.

Their situation did not make for a happy group. Staff members who took pity on them gave them odd jobs to do around the institute. But photocopying, pencil sharpening, and stirring iced tea were not what they had traveled to the Caribbean for.

The others were jealous of Dante, who at least had some meaningful work to do. He got permission to spend a couple of hours in the Poseidon darkroom, developing his underwater photographs. The pictures, though, were a big disappointment. They were excellent wildlife studies, beautifully framed and composed. But the color processing had been so overdone that the pale turquoise Caribbean appeared a deep purple.

“This is the reef?” Star said dubiously, examining the prints. “It looks like outer space.”

“It needs to be lighter,” Dante agreed.

“It needs to be blue ,” Star amended. “A coral reef is the most beautiful scenery on Earth, not that you can tell from what you shot. You don’t have to be a genius to make it look good. Just so long as the water isn’t purple.”

“I specialize in black and white,” Dante admitted sheepishly. “I’m just getting the hang of working with color in the lab.”

They were all unhappy, but Adriana was downright miserable. After three summers with her uncle at one of the top museums in the world, this felt a lot like exile.

It was exile, she reminded herself, thinking bitterly of Payton with Uncle Alfie in Syria.

And for what? To run errands for a bunch of oceanography nerds. With the British Museum, she had dug on Roman ruins, translated hieroglyphics, and helped to present a paper at Buckingham Palace. This place was a joke by comparison, and a bad joke at that.