A thousand years passed between King Minos and Plato, plenty long enough for the true facts to be forgotten and legends to grow like coral. The location of the island was lost. The storytellers moved it out into the Atlantic, where there was more room for a civilization whose accomplishments had been magnified by generations of literary liars.
It was a plausible theory, but that is all it was until a few years ago, when archaeologists began digging on the island of Thera, north of Crete. They found the remains of Minoan houses buried under thick layers of volcanic ash. Thera is the largest island of a group of islands named Santorini, which are the remnants of a volcano. Back in 1500 B.C., or thereabouts, the volcano blew itself to pieces. The entire crater collapsed into the sea, forming a deep bay, or caldera, and the remainder of the island was buried under ash and pumice-like Pompeii, only deeper.
The Atlantis story suddenly looked pretty good. Not only was Thera, with its Minoan colony, annihilated, but tidal waves and earthquakes sparked by the vast explosion hit Crete, sixty miles away, with devastating force. The Minoans were merchant sailors, and all their big cities were on the coast. I was familiar with the effects of wave action, so I could imagine what waves fifty feet high would do to the Cretan palaces. And there were other side effects of the eruption-earthquakes, falls of windblown ash that rendered the soil infertile for years, local land collapses that drowned harbors and cities. The daughter colony and the mother island had both died in that unimaginable cataclysm. It was no wonder that the memory of it would linger even after the names had been forgotten.
As I have said, I’m not academically inclined. But the idea of sunken palaces fascinated me. I’ve always loved the water. Living in Florida, with a sports buff as a stepfather, I grew up practically amphibious, and Jim and I spent our summers looking for sunken Spanish galleons. The article expanded my imagination; I could see myself swimming through the columned porticoes, gathering the golden diadems of drowned queens.
The dentist had two emergencies that morning. I finished the article and then went back and reread parts of it. What I couldn’t figure out was why the author was so antagonistic to my father. He had been one of the first to support the Atlantis-Crete identification, long before it was fashionable. Now it appeared that he had been right all along. Yet the author had nothing good to say about him. I decided that maybe the man had met Professor Frederick somewhere and had taken a violent dislike to his face, or his habit of eating peas with a knife, or something. After all, my mother hadn’t been able to get along with him, and she was a pretty tolerant woman.
However, the tone of the article set my teeth on edge. Every sentence held a veiled insult or an open sneer. The ultimate effect was exactly the opposite of what the author intended: my sympathies were with the victim, not the attacker.
Don’t imagine that the article was a big turning point in my life. I didn’t develop a sudden passion for classical archaeology or burn to defend my poor abused father. I didn’t think more kindly of him; I rather suspected he had brought the abuse on himself.
Yet that article was the first of two coincidences (if they were coincidences) that were to change my life. The second occurred a year later. Jim and I found our Spanish galleon.
I’m an excellent swimmer. I don’t claim any credit for it; most people would be good if they had spent as much time in the water as I have, with a coach like my dad. I’m not Olympic class, but I’m good, and I took to scuba gear the way the Ugly Duckling took to being a swan.
No, the Ugly Duckling reference is not meant to be a subtle description of myself. Swimming is a good way to develop the body, and my figure is all right. I look healthy. Reddish-blond hair (hence my nickname), green eyes, and the usual number of other features-nothing extraordinary, one way or the other.
Where was I? Oh, yes, the Spanish galleon.
The part of Florida where I live, about a hundred and fifty miles north of Miami, has seen hundreds of shipwrecks. There’s a reef out from our beach that has murdered ships for centuries. If Columbus had come this way, the Santa María might not have made it back to Spain. We call it Devil’s Reef. The Spaniards called it El Diablo, and they knew it well.
After the conquistadores conquered Mexico and Peru, they started looting on a scale that makes other conquerors look like amateurs. Tons of gold and silver and jewels were carried away to Spain. Every year the treasure fleet assembled in Cuba, convoys of six to ten ships. They planned to set sail for Spain in June, before the hurricane season. Some fleets carried as much as thirty million dollars’ worth of treasure. They crossed the Florida Straits and followed the coastline north until they hit the Gulf Stream; then they turned eastward for the long, hazardous crossing.
Some of them never made it. Pirates and storms took their toll, but the greatest danger came from the condition of the ships themselves. Clumsy, topheavy, loaded to the gunwales with treasure, they were difficult to maneuver in any weather, and doomed in a hurricane. The coastline they hugged on their way north has some of the worst reefs in the world, and navigational skills were not highly developed. I don’t know what percentage of the great galleons were lost during that period, but I know that the coast is thick with the wrecks of ships driven off course and ripped apart by the jagged rocks. Devil’s Reef claimed its share.
So why are the wrecks still there? Why isn’t everybody bringing up gold bars and pieces of eight?
There are a lot of reasons. Sometimes a vessel sank straight down into deep water. If the depth is great enough, salvage operations become prohibitively expensive. Most of the time it’s impossible to pinpoint the exact location of a wreck, even when survivors described it to Spanish authorities. When a ship struck a reef, it was usually traveling at high speed, driven by winds. A projecting spike of coral would rip off the bottom, but the ship itself might be driven on over the reef, scattering cargo from the wound as it went. The remains could be strewn over hundreds of yards of territory, and as time passed, the hand of nature smoothed over the intrusive material. Heavy objects sank into sand or mud. Chemicals in seawater corroded metal. Marine organisms ate wood and clustered on other materials. Within a few years nothing would be recognizable-just lumps and bumps, indistinguishable from natural formations except to a highly trained eye. And it isn’t all fun and games down there. Sharks, barracuda, moray eels, and other live hazards have to be handled with care. Sharp edges of coral and rusty beer cans add their kicks. Then there are the so-called “diving diseases”-nitrogen narcosis, oxygen poisoning, air embolism, and caisson disease, popularly known as the bends, to mention only a few. Treasure hunting is a chancy profession. The big discoveries make headlines, but most people spend their whole lives looking in vain. The successful strikes are usually the result of back-breaking work, long months of research in dusty colonial archives, and luck.
Our find was one of the rare exceptions. In our case, it was pure luck.
Jim always said there was a wreck somewhere offshore. We had been picking up stray coins for years-blackened, irregular scraps of metal that bore no resemblance to the gold doubloons of historical fiction. Once I found half a dozen pieces of eight on the sandy bottom, thirty feet out. That discovery moved Jim to some halfhearted research, but he didn’t get far; like me, he is not academically inclined, and the records are all in archaic Spanish. So we weren’t expecting anything that day in June when we went for our morning swim. We hadn’t been to the beach for several days. The weather had been bad, and the night before we had had a humdinger of an early tropical storm, with high winds and heavy rain.