Hy Brasil Read online

  When th’hostile horse, she should receive to friend;

  For therein should the Grecian kings lie hid,

  To bring the Fate and death, they after did.

  Erected to commemorate the first founding of our nation Hy Brasil. April 10th, 1958. In gratitude to the four men who alone overcame the forces of oppression and liberated our people:

  Fernando Baskerville

  Lemuel Hawkins

  John Honeyman

  James Hook

  There be of them, that have left a name behind them, that their praises might be reported.

  I guessed from the salt wind blowing in my face that I was facing straight down over the town to the harbour. If so the view must be magnificent, but I was marooned in an island of small visibility, alone with a bronze memorial and surrounded by the wreathing mists. I’d had enough. A cobbled street led off the hill, so I followed it, and wandered between terraces of stone houses with fog-water dripping from their eaves. I smelt fish. Then I was at the harbour, where fishing boats swayed queasily in greasy water. I still felt disorientated, as if I hadn’t quite landed yet. From the quay only the lowest street of the town was visible: Water Street. There was a lighted window with a neon sign. Outside there were white plastic tables and chairs, all dripping wet, but suggesting that summer sometimes happened even here. When I pushed the door open, heat and the smell of chips and ground coffee met me.

  The coffee is good. If it’s good in a downmarket spot like this it’ll be good everywhere. And look: I’ve started writing already. The fog slowly lifts from my brain, and at last I am arriving. I sit in the window with my back to the wall, so I can see both the fog outside, and the shrouded figures that drift past and vanish, and also the red tables inside, where no one sits but an old man reading The Hesperides Times. I can see the headline: ‘New Patrol Boats at Ogg’s Cove.’ On each table there is salt and pepper, milkin a jug, sugar, and a red plastic tomato with ketchup in it. Behind the counter a girl sits on a high stool reading – I duck my head and peer through the glass shelves to see – The Hesperides Times. The back page is turned to me: ‘Season Opens with Seven Wickets for Dorrado.’ Is The Hesperides Times what everyone reads? Presently I shall buy a copy. Presently I shall begin.

  TWO

  STANDING ON THE summit of Despair, a young man watched a pair of gannets sailing above the sea on black-tipped wings, their yellow heads outstretched. One dived, then the other, hitting the sea with white splashes, as if an invisible galleon were firing broadsides against the sheer north coast of the island. The sea was blue and sparkling gold, the sky today was the blue arch of heaven. A pale moon the size of a sixpence lingered like a belated ghost. Below it a half-submerged skerry marked the spine of lava that had made the lee of Despair a mariner’s nightmare since the day the island was discovered. Down there, between the skerry and the cliff, lay the wreck of the Cortes, driven on to a lee shore by a following wind on Hallowmass Night, in the year of Our Lord 1611, on its way from Seville to Panama. The only survivors were the few who’d taken to the ship’s boat, and come ashore on the white shell beach of Evanor, now lost forever under the lava desert of Brentness.

  Looking south from the top of Despair he could see almost every island in the country dotted across the wrinkled sea. Despair itself was so steep that the green slope below him was out of sight right down to the edge of the white beach that faced the mainland. The backbone of Hy Brasil was a curving ridge with three volcanic cones for vertebrae: Mount Prosper, Mount Brasil, Mount Ailbe. Today the three peaks rose into air so clear that he could make out where the trees ended as far away as Ailbe. Close to, there was the thread of the waterfall this side of Prosper, and the whitewashed house across the sound at Ferdy’s Landing, then further east the village street with the white church above it at Lyonsness. Between the two settlements, high up on the slopes of Prosper, hung the tall grey rectangle of Ravnscar with its battlemented roof. South of that, a gleam of metal on the slopes of Brasil was the road over the pass between St Brandons and Dorrado. Far beyond he could see the blue serrated edge of Mayda, eighty miles away.

  The gannet colony had established itself along the edge of the cliff just below the summit. Gannets first bred here in 1991, and now there were forty nesting pairs. Between the nests the ground was already worn down to the rock, slippery with fish bones and guano. There had never been gannets before in Hy Brasil, and the hundred and twenty birds here had become a subject of much speculation among ornithologists. In Europe and Iceland gannet colonies had been growing for over a century; in Canada the rate of recovery after the slaughter of the nineteenth century had been much slower. But on either side of the Atlantic, gannets frequented the waters of the continental shelves, and no one had considered it a bird of the deep ocean. Yet here were gannets on Despair, as far from any land mass as an island in the Atlantic could possibly be. It was a mystery that the University of the Hesperides was willing to pay a small pittance to fathom; it was convenient for them that Jared was already on Despair, and they had taken kindly to his proposal.

  He was pretty sure himself that the key to the mystery was mackerel. Later on, when the young gannets were hatched, he’d collect discards and send them back to the university, and they’d know for certain just what these birds were eating. The herring had been more or less fished out years ago, and now there were no cod either. But in the last year or two the number of mackerel around the shores of Hy Brasil had risen, maybe because the sea was warmer than it used to be, and the advantage of this for both people and gannets was that the fishing was well within coastal waters. The coastguard patrols were as stringent now as they’d been at the height of the Cod War. Even now Jared could see a patrol boat heading north-west on a parallel with the edge of the deep.

  Jared watched the boat bumping into the tide-rip to the north of Despair, then he went down into the colony, just a few feet from the cliff edge. He came this way every morning, and the gannets ignored him; only once a yellow beak shot out from a nest and jabbed his boot as he passed. He’d sprayed the backs of the breeding birds with purple dye last week, and yesterday he’d finally got the last two, but none seemed disturbed by the experience now. He ticked off the nests in his notebook. The eggs had all hatched between ten and fourteen days ago. The plan was that Per Pedersen would come out sometime this week and help him get blood samples. Once that was done an answer might emerge as to whether these birds came from the eastern or western Atlantic seaboard.

  He ticked off the nesting birds against his list, stuffed his notebook in his pocket, and set off back to the lighthouse. The Despair light had shone for a hundred and fifty years from the northernmost point of Hy Brasil. It was built five hundred feet above the sea, and its red-and-white tower was thirty feet high. The old foghorn was set on a thin promontory, flanked by cliffs on three sides, with a chain set into the rock to guide the lightkeepers across the foot-wide causeway on a bad night. The horn was abandoned now, and the light was entirely automatic. The houses were still there, three in a row, facing inwards across a windswept walled yard where the outlines of long-ago rows of earthed-up potatoes could still be seen under the grass and dockens. Until forty years ago there had been families here. They used to tether the children to keep them away from the cliffs, and the poultry were kept under wire mesh in the corner of the yard to stop them blowing away in bad weather. Then after the Revolution the families had been moved to Lyonsness, and the men came out here by themselves, in shifts.

  Two of the houses were boarded up now. The third was his, courtesy of the Hy Brasil Commissioners of Lights. The front door opened straight into the kitchen. Jared left the door open to let the sun in, slid the kettle into the middle of the stove, and put his notebook away on the shelf with his reference books.

  Breakfast was the major event of the morning, but today it was somewhat depleted. Time to go shopping again. After this he’d be out of bacon; the eggs had been finished since Tuesday, and he could barely recall the taste of a t
omato. Jared stirred his porridge, cut slices from one of his own flat loaves, and chopped bits of yesterday’s potato into the pan with the bacon. He measured three teaspoons of Cuban coffee into a jug and opened a new tin of milk with his Swiss army knife. Apples, he was thinking, oranges, bananas, tomatoes, mushrooms, milk, cheese. The farmer’s market in St Brandons was on Tuesday, so it might be better to wait until then. Soap powder, eggs, a thing to clean the big saucepan with.

  The table was already laid. He always put everything back as soon as he’d washed up: knife, fork, spoon, plate, mug, tomato sauce, salt, margarine. He added a paper and a green pen so he could write his list while he ate.

  When everything was cooked he put the frying pan on the edge of the stove with its lid on, spooned his porridge into a pudding basin, added two tablespoons of brown sugar and half a tin of condensed milk, filled his mug with coffee and sat down. He ate slowly, and added items to his list between mouthfuls. Sugar, matches, tea. Compressed air, if Ishmael hadn’t already seen to that. They used Ishmael’s boat for the diving, and Ishmael always took the empty tanks home to Ferdy’s Landing with him. The problem was that Ishmael had other things on his mind and wasn’t always prompt about getting them refilled; he’d only take them when he was going into St Brandons anyway, and more than once they’d had to miss a day of perfect weather because of that. Jared added a note, borrow car? He looked up at the calendar on the wall opposite him. Trink’s Garage, it said, with the compliments of the Season. Underneath was a picture of a blonde with improbably large breasts, and a tear-off calendar impaled on one of her stiletto heels. FRIDAY MAY 9th. The first eight days had been obliterated by green crosses. Jared frowned. Having the equipment ready was more important than the farmer’s market. Better go in tomorrow. He scraped his bowl clean, and reached over for the frying pan.

  He was thinking about treasure. ‘Library’ he wrote quickly. ‘Check Faraday. Kidd?’ He stared at the blonde. Her lips were parted alluringly, but he wasn’t seeing her. ‘Baskerville re Cortes’.

  Money was a problem. He could live quite well, since his needs were minimal. The University of the Hesperides Department of Marine Sciences was paying him £30.10.6 a week for as long as the gannets were in residence. His monthly grocery and fuel bill was seldom more than £80, which left £40 or more for petrol and compressed air. The Commissioners for Lights let him run his electricity off their generator for nothing, wood for the stove came out of the sea, and he had more than enough clothes to cover him. Anything else had to come from his savings. The first thing he’d acquired when he came home was a fifteen-foot Boston whaler, which he’d bought cheap when Ishmael got his new model. It wasn’t the boat he dreamed of: instead it was fibreglass, with a cathedral hull, no mast, and an ancient outboard motor, but it served his immediate purposes, and it was cheap to run. Even so he never seemed to have any money. Every single dive ate further into his savings, and there was nothing else left in Jared’s life that he could reasonably give up.

  He pushed his plate to the other end of the table, leaned back and reached for the rolled-up chart on the shelf behind him. He spread it open, weighed it down with the margarine tub on one side and the book of tide tables on the other, and pored over it for the umpteenth time.

  It represented the whole of last summer’s work. They’d followed the methods used on the Santa Maria de la Rosa in the Blasket Sound, as being the most similar site for which a detailed report was available. The Santa Maria had been in a hundred and ten feet of water, the Cortes was only ninety-two feet down, a small advantage, but one far outweighed by lack of resources. For surveying the Cortes they’d taken a jagged excrescence on the spur of submerged basalt running out from the foundations of the island as their base point, and the top of the layered lava outcrop at the head of the wreck site as the second fixed point. The main difficulty of the Cortes site was its uneven nature. On the other hand, if the ship had not found its resting place in a hollow of the lava beds that shelved out from Despair, its remains would have been swept away and scattered long ago, in the constant battering of the Atlantic against the basalt cliffs of Despair. But it had taken the best part of the season, with only two of them, to work out a constant level and fix the points on the grid. The University had provided the basic surveying equipment, and Ishmael had paid for the grid frame itself. The worrying part had been doing the grid points in the sand at the bottom of the hollow. Jared was all too aware that they lacked the necessary probing equipment, though they’d been as careful as they could not to disturb anything.

  They didn’t have a metal detector; in fact they had no electronic instruments at all. They’d not needed any for the initial identification of the site. Even thinking about that day now, Jared looked up from the chart and grinned at the framed print of Millais’ Boyhood of Raleigh that hung on the opposite wall. That day when he and Ishmael had swum in to explore the eastern slope of the lava ridge behind the skerry, and shone their torches across the hidden hollow for the first time: that was when he’d seen the first gun barrel, lying black against the white sea floor like a carefully displayed exhibit under the spotlight of his torch. Jared reached for the shelf again and dragged out the file with the photographs, and opened it. No 1:17-pounder full culverin. 5¼ inch bore. Length 31 inches calibre.

  Since then they’d identified, beneath the encrustations of seaweed and barnacles, ten more bronze guns. Jared turned back to the chart. By plotting the position of the ordnance, they’d worked out the alignment of the Cortes. She was lying at an angle of 388° east of north. Right at the end of the season they’d also found an anchor, and part of the oak keel and scattered pieces of blackened wood from the hull. Once they’d been charted, he and Ishmael had salvaged various spikes and iron bolts, now in the Museum of Hy Brasil in St Brandons.

  The good news was that when they’d gone back for the first time this spring, the permanent markers were all undamaged and in place. There was still no money, so a full-scale excavation was impossible, and serious salvage was out of the question. If they had a proper dive-boat, two more divers, lift bags, electronic surveying equipment … But they had managed to lay down a section of fixed grid over the sand in which the pieces of hull were half buried, and they’d begun to excavate the surface. Four dives so far this season, and they had two silver coins – two Spanish reals, Baskerville said – a nine-pound cannon ball, a bright-green earthenware pot broken into three neat segments, a pewter dish with the name Cortes engraved on it, as well as several congealed lumps of rust that must have been nails and bolts. In fact the stuff was just lying there, barely covered by sand, simply asking to be lifted. Hidden away in its lava-girded hollow, ninety-two feet down, and protected from the tide-rip that kept casual shipping well away from the wild coast of Despair, the Cortes was the kind of wreck one dreamed about.

  But still there was no money. He and Ishmael had put in an application. He’d been waiting to hear something all winter, and now it was spring, perfect diving weather, and still silence. Jared suspected a scam. The word was out now, and although he had officially been granted exclusive rights of salvage he doubted if the coastguard patrols that regularly circumnavigated Despair would bother to enforce a licence so casually issued as this one had been. He knew the west coast of Despair better than anyone, even Per and Ishmael, the other two members of his team. Jared had discouraged unwanted investigators before, and he had ideas about how to warn people off. But so far no one had come, and there had been no letter from the Mayda Trust either. Jared chewed the end of his pen. Then he wrote down quickly, ‘Mayda Trust office?’

  The other problem was that although Per was retired, Ishmael had a job. Last year they’d managed two dives a week if the weather and Ishmael’s commitments combined to be favourable. Sometimes they hadn’t been able to work for over a fortnight. It wasn’t the sort of site you could work on every day; the boat had to work less than four hundred yards from the foot of the cliff, so if there were much sea nothing could be done. No one c
ould have a better partner than Ishmael, either above or below water, but eventually Jared would have to bring in someone who could be on call whenever the sea was right. He tapped his teeth with the end of the green pen. Ideally it would be someone who was a trained marine archeologist, which Jared himself was not. Ideally, in fact, he knew exactly who he wanted. Jared was not a letter-writer, but he knew where to find the man he needed, and he knew that if the money were there, he’d come, even if it meant leaving the fleshpots of Key West for the duration. But the money wasn’t there. The site of the Cortes was littered with Spanish treasure beyond price, and Jared knew just what to do to get it, but still the money wasn’t there.

  He reached behind him and picked out one of the row of books on the top shelf. It fell open at a familiar page:

  This Indenture made the seventeenth of July 1585, in the seven and twentieth year of the reign of our sovereign lady Queen Elizabeth, between the right honourable Ambrose, Earl of Warwick, Master of her Majesty’s Ordnance General, of the one part, and the right worshipful Sir Francis Drake, knight, on the other part …

  He’d read all this a hundred times. These were English guns, and Cortes was a Spanish galleon, larger and more richly equipped, less seaworthy in every way. But it was a useful account. Jared had sketched the guns on site, and drawn them afterwards as well as he could, using Ishmael’s photographs. But no real work could be done on them until they were raised. Raising a two-ton gun required the right equipment. That meant money, and he had no money.

  Abruptly he shut the book, rolled up the chart and put both away on the shelf. Then he put the dirty dishes in a bowl and poured hot water from the kettle over them. The sun was pouring in through the open door. He sighed, stuck a battered green sunhat on his head, and went out.