The Deep

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.

It’s a good bet that only a couple people knew what Dare had on board-Dare himself and the King’s man in Cuba. Suppose Dare went back to Havana and reported to the officials that the fleet was lost. Then suppose he went to the King’s man and made a deal. Say, in return for a portion of Dare’s goodies, whatever they were, the King’s man would report that Grifon had gone down with the fleet. Dare would then disguise the ship and sail away again, scot-free. He could keep what was on board, because everyone thought it had all been lost.”

Sanders said, “That’s an awful lot of ‘supposes.’”