Costas put out his hand resignedly. ‘Okay, what did he give you?’
Sofia passed over a crumpled piece of paper. ‘He said it’s a circuit diagram. He scribbled it down while I kitted up.’
Costas flattened the paper and stared at it. ‘Why oh why didn’t he show me this earlier?’ he groaned.
‘He said he was giving you the time to work it through yourself and realise you were never going to get there.’
Costas reached up, pulled out one cable and plugged in another. A red light began to flash on the panel. ‘Okay. We’ve got maybe half an hour while the system reboots.’ He leaned back against the Perspex dome and looked at Jack. ‘Which gives you just enough time to fill me in on exactly what we’re doing here. I missed your briefing topside because I was down here apparently failing to spot what Lanowski knew all along. So what do we know about our target?’
Jack did not relish the idea of a further half-hour swaying in the submersible under Seaquest II, and he welcomed Costas’ request. He reached over and clicked on his laptop, lifting it and turning the screen towards the other two. ‘It’s a fantastic story,’ he said. ‘Of all the artefacts looted by European travellers to ancient lands, this one is probably the most extraordinary. In 1837, a British army officer named Richard Vyse and an engineer named John Perring used gunpowder to blow their way into the main burial chamber of the pyramid of Menkaure at Giza. Inside it they found a great basalt sarcophagus and a wooden coffin. After an incredible effort inching the sarcophagus along the entrance shaft, Vyse and his Egyptian workers managed to get it out of the pyramid and down to Alexandria, where it was loaded on to the Beatrice. She set sail, and was recorded leaving Malta on the thirteenth of October 1838. That was the last anyone ever heard of her.’
‘Do we know what the sarcophagus looked like?’
‘There’s an illustration in Vyse’s book.’ Jack clicked on the laptop and an image came up. ‘Basalt, two and a half metres long, almost a metre high and a metre wide. There were no hieroglyphs, but you can see it had carved decoration, in the style of an ancient Egyptian palace facade. It’s one of the most important pieces of Old Kingdom sculpture.’
‘So what do we know about the Beatrice?’ Costas asked.
Jack clicked, and another image came up. ‘This is a facsimile page from Lloyd’s Register of 1838. The owner and captain was a man called Wichelo, and the ship was built in 1827 at Quebec in Lower Canada. You can see she’s described as a snow – a type of brig – and was bound from Liverpool for Alexandria in Egypt on the outward leg of her last ever voyage.’
He tapped the keyboard again. The image changed to an old painting of a ship anchored close to shore, its sails furled but the British Red Ensign flying from its stern.
‘This is by Raffaello Corsini, a painter based in Ottoman Turkey, and shows Beatrice in 1832 in the Bay of Smyrna – modern Izmir in Turkey. At this point she’s a brig, meaning two square-rigged masts, fore and main, with a big fore-and-aft sail at the stern hanging from a boom stepped to the mainmast. Sometime between that date and 1838 she was converted to a snow, which meant that a small mast was stepped into the deck immediately abaft the mainmast as a more secure way of flying the fore-and-aft sail.’
‘She must have been a pretty good runner to merit the upgrade,’ Costas said.
Jack nodded. ‘Those were the days when merchant ships were designed to outrun pirates and privateers. People look at an image like this painting and are surprised to be told it wasn’t a warship.’
‘Any guns?’
‘Good question. You can see the single row of eight gun ports along the side. They could be painted on, of course, but I think they’re real.’
‘Guns mean a greater chance of seeing the wreck on the seabed, right?’ Sofia asked.
‘Right,’ agreed Jack. ‘In the Mediterranean, any exposed hull timbers would have been eaten by the Teredo navalis shipworm, and without big metal artefacts like guns we might not see anything.’
‘What was her condition recorded in the 1838 Register?’ Costas asked.
Jack reduced the image so they could see the register again. ‘First grade, second condition. The little asterisk means that she’d undergone repairs, in this case replacement of the wooden knees holding up her deck timbers with iron girders.’
Costas pursed his lips. ‘Even large iron girders are unlikely to survive after almost two hundred years in seawater. Sofia’s right. We’re looking for guns.’
‘Not forgetting eight tons of sarcophagus,’ Jack said.
‘What about the wrecking?’ Sofia said. ‘How did you pin it down to this place?’
Jack paused. This was the revelation that had brought them here, that had preoccupied him for weeks now. He looked at Sofia keenly. ‘I said that the departure of Beatrice from Malta was the last anyone ever heard of her. Well, we now know that’s no longer quite true. There have always been rumours that the ship went down off Cartagena, but they’ve never been substantiated. Then a couple of months ago IMU was contacted by a collector of antiquarian books on Egyptology who thought I might be interested in his copy of Vyse’s Operations Carried on at the Pyramids of Gizeh in 1837. Here’s what Vyse says about the loss of the sarcophagus: “It was embarked at Alexandria in the autumn of 1838, on board a merchant ship, which was supposed to have been lost off Cartagena, as she was never heard of after her departure from Leghorn on the twelfth of October that year, and as some parts of the wreck were picked up near the former port.”
‘But that’s not all,’ he continued. ‘And that’s not why the man contacted me. It was because in his copy, on the page where Vyse mentions the loss of the Beatrice, was an interleaved sheet containing hand-written latitude and longitude co-ordinates and a couple of transit bearings from precisely the position we’re at now. They were taken by someone who knew what they were doing, a trained seafarer, from a boat over the spot. The sheet was unsigned, but the giveaway was the ex libris plate at the front of the book, with the name Wichelo.’
‘No kidding!’ Costas exclaimed. ‘The ship’s master, the one named in the Lloyd’s Register? So he survived the wrecking?’
‘So it seems. He must have come to this spot again to take transits, in a local boat. That’s perhaps where the rumours of the wreck originate. But there’s no record anywhere else of his survival. He seems to have disappeared from history.’
‘Maybe he knew there’d be an insurance claim, and he’d be found liable,’ Costas said.
‘How can we know that?’ Sofia asked.
‘Well, let’s think of what we’ve got here. Beatrice was a cargo ship, but not a specialised stone carrier. Looking at the details in the register, we see she’s got a fourteen-foot beam, fully laden. Where does the captain put the sarcophagus? On the deck, confident that those new iron knees will hold the weight.’
Jack nodded. ‘So confident that he fails to calculate the instability of a ship of that size with an eight-ton stone sarcophagus laden so high above the keel.’
‘She’s a good runner, but not as manoeuvrable against the wind as other ships,’ Costas said thoughtfully. ‘She leaves Malta in mid October, the beginning of the winter season, a time when storms and squalls become more common. That was the captain’s first mistake. Add to that the uncharted reefs of a shoreline like this one, and a ship blown north-west off its intended route towards the Strait of Gibraltar is heading for disaster.’