“At least he’s got Jacob with him,” Rebecca said.
Jeremy peered at her. “Lanowski? You must be kidding. I thought he was at some big nanotechnology conference in California. Giving the keynote lecture, about pressure-resistant polymers used in diving suits or something. He and Costas were burning the midnight oil over it a few weeks ago.”
“He canceled that as soon as Aysha invited him out,” Rebecca said. “I think she thought he’d be good for Maurice. Ever since Maurice learned about Jacob’s passion for Egyptology, the two of them have got on like a house on fire. And they’re both recent fathers, so they can share the trials and tribulations of having small children.”
“Nothing like the trials of having an older child,” Jack said.
Rebecca narrowed her eyes at him, and he turned to Jeremy. “Speaking of the plaque, what have you got?”
Rebecca coughed, and put up a hand. “Before that, there’s something I want to show you. Something from my part of the excavation that came up yesterday. I’ve been saving it to tell you in person, Dad.”
Jack smiled at her. For a moment he saw her mother Elizabeth sitting in front of him, the dark eyes and hair, the olive skin of her Neapolitan background, taking him back to the time when he had last seen Elizabeth almost eight years earlier, at the ancient site of Herculaneum shortly before her murder by the Mafia. But he also saw in Rebecca’s eyes a steely determination that he knew was Howard through and through, a resolve to see things to the end whatever the odds, to follow a trail she was set on as far as she could, to never give up. He leaned forward, picked up a pencil, and tapped it on the table, nodding at her. “Okay. What have you got?”
She went to a rack behind her and carefully lifted a large finds tray with a cloth cover from one shelf, putting it on the table in front of her chair. “Those elephant tusks you found were cool, Dad, really cool. Congratulations, by the way. So I just thought you might be interested in what I found. I took this out of the fresh-water tank in the conservation tent just to show you, but it’ll be back in there pronto when we’re done.”
She lifted the cloth and picked up a bubble-wrapped object about half a meter long. Jack could see the end of a tusk poking out of one end. Her sector of the excavation was on the opposite side of the ship’s hold to his own, and this showed that there was even more ivory than he had imagined stowed beneath the amphoras, an incredibly valuable cargo. She unwrapped it, leaned over, and handed it to him, a long, straight tusk with a twist in it. “The tusk must have been broken during the wrecking,” she said. “The lower part’s still in situ. Altogether it’s more than two meters long, more than your height. And there’s another one on the site next to where I found this.”
Jack stared in astonishment. It was not quite what he had imagined. “Well I’ll be damned,” he exclaimed. “That’s not elephant ivory. It’s narwhal.”
“I sent pictures to the marine biology department at IMU, and they confirmed it. And they said that another broken fragment I found next to it was walrus.”
“Narwhal and walrus,” Jeremy said. “Not exactly African creatures, are they?”
“There’s something else.” She took back the tusk, carefully replaced it on the tray, and handed Jack a smaller bubble-wrapped package. “Open it.”
Jack did so, and gasped. Inside was a lump of translucent honey-colored material the size of his fist. He lifted it to the light, seeing the bodies of insects trapped within. “Amber,” he said, turning it slowly. “That’s one of the largest pieces I’ve ever seen. Amazing.”
“It’s from the Baltic, probably the eastern shore. There are other pieces, probably originally a basketful, and I sent a sample to the lab for analysis. There’s a lot of excitement over the potential of those mosquitoes for DNA analysis, especially if they contain the blood of extinct megafauna. But what was most fascinating to me was what these finds, narwhal and walrus and amber, might say about the voyage of our ship.”
“They could have been high-value trade goods, acquired by the Phoenician merchant in Cornwall and destined for the Mediterranean,” Jeremy said.
Jack’s mind was racing. “Undoubtedly there would have been a market for this kind of exotica in the Mediterranean, and it’s possible that these were trophies to take back to Carthage, proof that they had reached further north than anyone from the Mediterranean had ever gone before. But there may be another explanation. Think of the rest of the cargo; there’s nothing of British origin. We’re looking at a cargo ready to trade with the tin merchants, not the result of that trade. If she’d been outward-bound after trading then I might not even have spotted the wreck at all, as most of the goods we’ve found would have been traded and the only visible cargo might have been lumps of tin ore, real treasure to the Phoenicians but barely recognizable on the seabed.”
“These finds show that she hadn’t arrived here direct from the Mediterranean,” Rebecca said.
Jack weighed up the amber in his hand, staring at it. “I think this shows that the ship had sailed first to the Baltic and then somewhere far to the north, where they obtained the narwhal and walrus ivory. I think it shows that she circumnavigated the British Isles before putting into Mount’s Bay and coming to grief on her way to the tin traders. This ship was wrecked as she was heading into Mount’s Bay, to the shore marts where the British miners would have brought their tin ore, not as she was sailing away.”
“The ship not just of a merchant, but of an explorer,” Rebecca suggested.
“Yet with trade never far from his mind,” Jack added. “If I were a good Phoenician, still with my Mediterranean goods on board and looking for tin, I’d see the amber and tusks I was offered by sea peoples in the north as potential items for barter as well. Down here among the Britons of Cornwall, these goods from forbidding lands hundreds of miles away might have been as exotic as they were to people in the Mediterranean, and as desirable.”
“You always tell me that history is driven by powerful individuals, Dad, that prehistorians dealing with large expanses of time often lose sight of the effect that charismatic and motivated individuals can have on technological innovation, on colonization, on exploration. When I saw this ivory and thought about the fantastic voyage they must have undertaken, I thought immediately of Himilco and Hanno.”
Jack handed back the amber, and watched as she carefully wrapped it and then submerged the package in the tray with the ivory, replacing it on the rack. She sat down again and turned to Jeremy. “You’ve been quiet. What do you think?”
Jeremy spun his laptop round so the other two could see it. “I can only add my assessment of the literary evidence. You’ll recognize this page from Codex Palatinus Graecus 386 in Heidelberg University Library. It’s the oldest extant text of Hanno’s Periplus, bound together with the Periplus Maris Erythraei, the Roman merchant’s guide to the Red Sea and Indian Ocean of the first century AD. Some Byzantine monk in the tenth century AD decided to make a compendium of all ancient voyages of exploration that he’d come across, copying the bits that interested him from original manuscripts that are now lost. Hanno’s Periplus is usually dated to the sixth or fifth century BC, and in my estimation is within the earlier part of that range, the first half of the sixth century BC. It was originally written in Punic Phoenician, but the Heidelberg version is a Greek translation. Hanno’s voyage, and that of his brother Himilco to the north, is mentioned by Pliny in his Natural History of the first century AD and by several later authors, confirming that the Periplus was not just made up by a medieval monk. It purports to be a first-hand account of Hanno’s voyage down the west coast of Africa, but ends abruptly when he turns back before reaching the Cape.”