The Columbus Affair: A Novel

a second in 1795, which ended with several hundred tricked into deportation. Only a few families survived that purge, keeping to their mountain villages.

The Rowes were one of those.

Bene meant “Tuesday” in Maroon, the day of the week upon which he was born, per the naming tradition. Rowe came from a British plantation owner. Again, not uncommon, his background report had noted. Rowe hated his last name, a daily reminder of all his ancestors had endured. Though slavery ended on Jamaica in 1834, its memory still haunted. The island had been the last stop on the traders’ route from Africa, which began in South America, then headed north to the lower Caribbean, and finally west, to Jamaica. All of the best and most docile Africans were bought and gone by the time slavers docked in Kingston harbor. The result became a population of aggressive Negroes, some of whom were bold enough to both flee and war on their former masters. Nowhere else in the Western world had that successfully happened.

Bene Rowe was a direct by-product of that rebellious stock. His father had been a gangster, but smart enough to involve his family heavily in Blue Mountain Coffee. Bene was an astute businessman, too. He owned resorts throughout the Caribbean and controlled leases for several Jamaican bauxite mines, which American companies paid him millions per year to exploit. He held the title to a massive working estate in the Blue Mountains that employed nearly a thousand people. He was a man possessed of few vices. Which was surprising, given that he peddled so many of them. He despised drugs and drank only modest amounts of rum and wine. He did not smoke, nor were there any women in his life, beyond his mother. No children, either, not even the illegitimate kind.

His one obsession seemed Columbus’ lost mine.

Which was what had brought them together.

On his first voyage across the Atlantic, Columbus commanded three ships loaded with enough food and water for a year. He also brought navigational equipment, trinkets for trade, ships’ stores, and three unmarked wooden crates. Room had to be made in the hold of the Santa Maria to accommodate them. They were loaded aboard by several of the crew who were conversos—Jews at heart, forced into a Christian baptism by the Inquisition. Unfortunately, the Santa Maria ran aground off the coast of Hispaniola on Christmas Day, 1492. Every effort was made at salvage, but the ship was lost, her cargo offloaded to the island. The three crates were buried, at night, by the admiral and his interpreter, Luis de Torres. That much was known for certain because, decades ago, his father had found documents, preserved in a private cache, that told the tale.

After that the story blurred.

The three crates disappeared.

And the legend of Columbus’ lost mine was born.

———

BENE WAITED FOR HALLIBURTON TO EXPLAIN, THOUGH HE LIKED the smile filling his friend’s tanned face.

“I hope these parchments aren’t now missing from the national archives,” Tre said to him.

“They’ll be kept safe. Tell me what they say.”

“This one that looks like a deed grant with wax seal is just that. For 420 acres. The land description is vague, they all were back then, but I think we can place it. Several rivers are mentioned as boundaries and those still exist.”

Eastern Jamaica was striped with hundreds of waterways that drained the nearly constant rain from the higher elevations to the sea.

“Can you actually locate the parcel?”

Halliburton nodded. “I think we might be able to. But that tract will look nothing like it did three hundred years ago. Most of it then was dense forest and jungle. A lot of clearing has occurred since.”

He was encouraged. Jamaica comprised nearly 11,000 square kilometers. The highest mountains in the Caribbean rose from its surface, and thousands of caves dotted its porous ground. He’d long believed that any lost mine would have to be in the Blue or Jim Crow mountains, which consumed the eastern half of the island. Today some of that land was privately held—he himself was one of those owners—but most of it had become a wilderness national park controlled by the government.

“This is important to you, isn’t it?” Tre asked him.

“It’s important to Maroons.”

“It can’t be the possibility of wealth. You’re a multimillionaire.”

He chuckled. “Which we don’t need to advertise.”

“I don’t think it’s a secret.”

“This is not about money. If that cursed Italian found a mine, he was shown it by the Tainos. It was theirs. He had no right to it. I want to give it back.”

“The Tainos are gone, Bene.”

“We Maroons are the closest thing left.”

“You might actually have a chance to do that,” Tre said, motioning with the documents. “This one is unique.”

He listened as Halliburton explained about Abraham Cohen and his brother, Moses Cohen Henriques. In May 1675 the two apparently sued each other. The document Felipe stole from the archives was a settlement of that suit in which Abraham agreed to give Moses forty farm animals in return for watching over his Jamaican property during his absence.

“What makes this interesting,” Halliburton said, “is that no lower court handled the case. Instead, the island’s chief justice, its governor at the time, Thomas Modyford, recorded the decision.”

“Too small a deal for him to be the judge?”