would only allow forty-five minutes working at 130 feet, for the effects of gas absorption into the blood are cumulative, and repeated deep diving greatly increases the danger.
We worked carefully through the forests of bamboo stems and over the tumbled coral blocks, exploring the gullies and cracks between them, pausing every few minutes to map the locations of interesting features, then going on, back and forth on the legs of a search pattern between my marker buoys.
Time elapse was forty-three minutes, and I glanced across at Chubby. None of our wet suits would fit him, so he dived naked except for an ancient black wollen bathing costume. He looked like one of my friendly dolphins - only not as graceful - as he forced his way through the thickets. I grinned at the thought and was about to turn away when a chance ray of light pierced the canopy above us and glinted upon something white on the floor below Chubby. I finned in quickly, and examined the white object. At first I thought it was a piece of clam shell, but then I noticed that it was too thick and regular in shape. I sank down closer to it and saw that it was embedded in a decaying sheet of coelentrate coral. I groped for the small jemmy bar on my webbing belt, drew it from its sheath and prised off the lump of coral containing the white object. The lump weighed about five pounds and I slipped it into my netting carrybag. Chubby was watching me and I gave him the signal for the ascent.
“Anything?” Sherry called immediately we surfaced. Her confinement to the whaleboat was obviously playing the devil with her nerves. She was irritable and impatient - but I was not letting her dive until the ugly, suppurating lesions on her hands and thighs had healed. I knew how easily secondary infection could attack those open sores under these conditions, and I was feeding her antibiotics and trying to keep her quiet.
“I don’t know,” I answered, as we swam to the boat and I handed the net bag up to her. She took it eagerly, and while we climbed aboard and stripped our equipment she was examining it closely, turning it over in her hands.
Already the surf was breaking heavily on the reef, boiling into the pool and the whaleboat was swinging and bobbing in the disturbance. Angelo was having difficulty holding her on station - and it was time to go. We had spent as much time underwater as I considered safe for one day, and soon now the heavy oceanic surf would begin leaping the coral barrier and sweeping the pool.
“Take us home, Chubby,” I called and he went to the motors. All our attention was focused on the wild ride back through the channel. With the flood of the tide the swells came up under our stern, surfihg us, coming through under our hull so fast that our relative speed was reversed and the whaleboat’s steering was inverted so we threatened to broach to and tumble broadside on to the coral walls of the channel. However, Chubby’s seamanship. never faltered, and at last we shot out into the protected waters behind the reef and turned for the island.
Now I could give my attention to the object I had recovered from the pool. With Sherry giving me a great deal of advice that I did not really need, and cautioning me to exercise care, I placed the lump of dead coral on the thwart and gave it a smart crack with the jemmy bar. It split into three pieces and revealed a number of articles that had been ingested and protected by the living coral polyps.
There were three round grey objects the size of marbles and I picked one out of the coral bed and weighed it in my hand. It was heavy. I handed it to Sherry.
“Guesses?” I asked.
“Musket balls,” she said without hesitation.
“Of course,” I agreed. I should have recognized it and I made amends by identifying the next object.
“A small brass key.”
“Genius!” she said with irony, and I ignored her as I worked delicately to free the white object which had first caught my attention. It came away at last and I turned it over to examine the blue design worked on one side.
It was a segment of white glazed porcelain, a chip from the rim of a plate which had been ornamented by a coat of arms. Half of the design was missing but I recognized the rampant lion immediately, and the words, “Senat. ANGLIA’. It was the device of John Company again, part of a set of ship’s plate.
I passed it to Sherry and suddenly I saw how it must have been. I told her my vision and she listened quietly, fondling the chip of porcelain. “When at last the surf broke her back and the coral tore her in half, she would have gone down by the middle, and all her heavy cargo and gear would have shifted - tearing out her inner bulkhead. It would all have poured out of her, cannon and shot, plate and silver, flask and cup, coin and pistol - it would have littered the floor of the pool, a rich sowing of man-made articles and the coral has sucked it up and absorbed it.”
“The treasure crates?” Sherry demanded. “Would they have fallen out of the hull?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted, and Chubby, who had been listening intently, spat over the side and growled.
“The forehold was always doubleskinned, three-inch oak planks, to hold the cargo from shifting in a storm. Anything was in there then, is still in there now.”
“And that opinion would have cost you ten guineas in Harley Street,” I told Sherry, and winked at her. She laughed and turned to Chubby.
“I don’t know what we would do without you, Chubby dear,” and Chubby scowled murderously and suddenly found something of engrossing interest out on the distant horizon.
It was only later, after Sherry and I had taken our swim on one of the secluded beaches and had changed into fresh clothes and were sitting around the fire drinking Chivas Regal and eating fresh prawns netted in the lagoon, that the elation of our first minor finds wore off - and I began soberly to consider the implications of the Dawn Ijght broken up and scattered across the marine hothouse of the pool.
If Chubby were wrong and the treasure crates, with their enormous weight of gold, had smashed through the sides of the hold and fallen free, then it would be an endless task searching for them. I had seen two hundred blocks and mounds of coral that day - any one of which could have concealed a part of the tiger throne of India.
If he were correct and the hold had retained its cargo, then the coral polyps would have spread over the entire front section of the vessel as it lay on the bottom, covering the woodwork with layer upon layer of calcified stone, until it had become an armoured repository for the treasure, disguised with a growth of marine plants.
We discussed it in detail, all of us beginning to appreciate the magnitude of the task we had set ourselves, and we agreed that it fell into two separate parts.
First we had to locate and identify the treasure cases, and then we had to wrest them from the stubborn embrace of the coral.
“You know what we are going to need, don’t you, Chubby?” I asked, and he nodded.
“You still got those two cases?” I felt ashamed to mention the word gelignite in front of Sherry. It reminded me too vividly of the project for which Chubby and I had found it necessary to lay in large stocks of high explosive. That had been three years ago, during a lean season when I had been desperate for ready cash to keep myself and Wave Dancer aloft. Not even by stretching the letter of the law could our project have been considered legal, and I would rather have closed that chapter and forgotten it - but we needed gelignite now.
Chubby shook his head. “Man, that stuff began sweating like a stevedore in a heatwave. If you belched within fifty feet of it - it would have blown the top off the island.”
“What did you do with it? “Angelo and I took it out into the Mozambique Channel and’gave it a deep six.”
“We will need at least a couple of cases. It will take a full shot to break up those big chunks down there.”
“I’ll speak to Mister Coker again - he should be able to fix it.”
“Do that, Chubby. Next time you go back to St. Mary’s you tell Fred Coker to get us three cases.”
“What about the pineapples we saved from Wave Dancerr Chubby asked.
“No good,” I told him, I did not want my obituary to read, “The man who tried to fuse MK VII hand-grenades in 130 feet of water.”
I was wakened the next morning by the unnatural hush, and the static charged heat of the air. I lay awake listening, but even the fiddler crabs were silent and the perpetual rattle of the palm fronds was stilled. The only sound was the low and gentle breathing of the woman beside me. I kissed her lightly on the cheek and managed to withdraw my bad arm from under her head without waking her. Sherry boasted that she never used a pillow, it was bad for the spine she told me with an air of rectitude, but this didn’t prevent her from using any convenient portion of my anatomy as a substitute.
I ambled out of the cave trying to restore the circulation to my limb by massage, and while I made a libation to my favourite palm tree I studied the sky.
