THE SPANISH GALLEON

THE SPANISH GALLEON

“Okay! Okay!” Riley looked around nervously, making sure the coast was clear. “Don’t tell anyone! You have to promise me.”

“Dude,” said Trent, rolling his eyes. “What are you looking around for? We are in the boonies. There probably isn’t a living soul around here for twenty clicks.”

“Yeah, well you can never be too careful.”

 Trent rolled his eyes again. “Got it! What's up? What’s the big deal?”

“You have to promise,” stressed Riley.

“What? Are we like ten years old or something? Do you want me to pinky swear? Or maybe cross my heart and hope to die?” Trent drew a cross with his fingers over his heart. “I don’t think we have done the pinky swear or cross my heart thing since we were, like, together in middle school and that was like, maybe ten years ago? Hey, remember our homeroom teacher Mrs…”

 “Trent! “ Riley broke in. “Focus! This is not the time for a walk down memory lane. I’m serious here Trent.”

“Fine! I promise. I will take this secret to the grave.”

“Come here,” ordered Riley as he led Trent around the side of his car to the trunk. Looking around again, he opened the lid and held it open only enough for Trent to peek inside. He shifted an old blanket out of the way so Trent could get a better look at the contents of the trunk.

“Holy crap!” exclaimed Trent, dragging out each syllable.

Riley carefully closed the lid. “Did I tell you or did I tell you.” 

“Okay! Now I get the picture and the whole obsessively cautious thing you’ve got going on.” Trent shook his head in disbelief. “I saw it with my own eyes but I still can’t believe it.”

“I know ehy!”

“Where did you get that?” questioned Trent.

“From my Grandfather’s safe.”

“Which Grandfather, the one with old timer’s disease, or the surfer dude who owned a dive shop?”

“First of all, it’s Alzheimer's disease and that was Grandpa John, the architect. Secondly, Grandpa George wasn’t really a surfer dude. He owned a dive shop, yes, but he was primarily an underwater welder. He worked on welding up holes and cracks in giant tanker ships and repairing bridges spanning water and did underwater salvage work, and stuff like that. The surf shop was just a side hustle in his younger days as he already had a lot of diving equipment. You know, renting out snorkeling, diving equipment, boogie boards, and surfboards. Grandpa George was always very entrepreneurial.”

“Got it! But what were you doing in your Grandfather’s safe? I think you had better just start at the beginning, this is all getting so confusing. How did you get all that stuff? I mean, I have never seen anything like that outside of the movies.”

“Well, as I just explained, my Grandpa George was a diver and did salvage work underwater. One day while he was on his holidays in the Caribbean with Gus, one of his co-workers, he came across this old wreck lying about sixty feet off the shoreline of an out-of-the-way beach. He knew it was a Spanish Galleon from hundreds of years ago. As he swam around the bow he could just barely read the name of the ship, which fortunately had the name carved deep into the hull. It was the ‘Arianna.’ I’m sure it must have been painted at one time but of course, after hundreds of years under water there was no paint left; hardly any ship left either. Grandpa said it looked like a ghost ship, something out of a movie; something like one of those pirate movies that you like to watch so much.”

“Cool! So what did he do?”

“He kept it a secret, he didn’t even tell his buddy that he was on holiday with who was diving on the other side of the cove. He came back to the site later, by himself. It’s a secret that he has kept for all these years. He had a boat and the equipment but he didn’t want to hire anybody else because he was doing everything on the sly. I’m sure that must be some Maritime Salvage Laws or authorities that you were supposed to notify, but Grandpa was always a bit of a risk taker and did things his way. I could tell you some of the wild things he did when he was younger.”

“Wow, you would never know by just looking at him that he was a modern-day Calico Jack, William Kidd, or Jack Sparrow. He looks like he could barely make it up a flight of stairs.”

“ You do know that Jack Sparrow is only a fictional pirate, right?” One could never quite tell with Trent. Sometimes his reality was just a little different from everybody else's reality. Riley was fairly used to Trent's idiosyncrasies by now. “This was years ago when Grandpa was just in his twenties, I think.”

“And all this time he has kept this stuff under his bed?” asked Trent.

 “Well not exactly. Years ago he bought a gun safe and stored it there, in his basement.”

“How did he get it up out of the galleon?”

“He carried it piece by piece and hid it under a tarp and some rope and other junk in his boat. To hide it from prying eyes. You have seen the boat before, remember that large wooden boat that he has stored in his garage.”

“Oh yeah, it’s a beauty, the one he calls his pride and joy.”

“That’s the one. It’s actually called ‘The Carolina.’”

“Isn’t that your Mum’s name?”

“Yeah, either she was named after the boat, or the boat was named after her, I never could remember which.”

“So tell me how he did it?”

“He just used his underwater cutting torch and cut a hole in the hull. He said it was no problem, the ship was about ready to fall apart as it was. He swam around for a while then he found these old barrels and crates that were pretty much disintegrated, then he found this old sea chest. Some of the things he could only guess at or figure out what they had once been used for, like the barrels. He knew they were barrels because of the metal bands that held them together. He saw the chest and didn’t think much about it till he touched it with his glove and the lid fell apart in his hands. There in the beam of his flashlight, he saw them shining … dozens of gold bars and a few gold coins. A Spanish fortune.”

“You mean to say your Grandpa has been sitting on that fortune for all these years and is living in that dinky house?”

“It’s not exactly a dinky house. It’s a very nice house. One of the biggest in town.”

“Yes, by most people’s standards it’s a very nice house, but considering he had a King’s ransom of gold bars buried in his basement it’s a piece of…”

“I told you it wasn’t buried in his basement.”

“Ok! Ok! It's just semantics. It was in a safe, which was, where; in his basement. Actually, I think I do remember it. Didn’t we used to climb on it when we were kids? Pretend that there were dead bodies in it every Hallowe’en.”

 “Yeah, that’s the one,” confirmed Riley. “Grandpa George did some salvage work on several treasure ships in his day when he lived in the Caribbean. He told me all about his treasure hunts and also about some of the more famous treasure hunts that have been discovered around the world.”

 “I love your Grandpa’s stories. He used to tell us about them when we were kids and visiting his place. I think that’s why I love all those pirate movies that I watch all the time. There was one about a famous pirate…”

“Yeah, he used to tell us about Edward Teach, also known as Blackbeard, the famous pirate who confiscated a ship from some country and sailed it for a year or so as his flagship and then ran it aground, full to the brim with treasure. It was called the ' Queen Anne’s Revenge’ and it sank off of Topsail Inlet in North Carolina in 1718. They did a TV documentary about it years ago. It was found in only 28 feet of water. She held thirty cannons on board.”

“That’s incredible.”

“No, thirty cannons isn’t really all that many, " informed Riley.

“It’s not?”

“No, the “San Jose” which sank in 1708, was sunk by a British warship, had 64 canons on board and I think it had one of the largest treasures ever recovered. Something like seventeen billion dollars worth of treasure. Eleven million dollars in gold coin, 200 tons of silver and emeralds plus tons of historical relics.”

“Tell me more,” urged Trent his voice eager with excitement.

“Ok! A bunch of countries and indigenous groups, all wanted to claim the treasure. It was known as the ‘Holy Grail’ of treasures and it was finally decided by an International Maritime Court, I think, after years and years of deliberations, that Colombia would get the treasure. I know at one point the divers who actually discovered the ship, were awarded only five percent as a finders fee, and even then, they were taxed at an outrageous amount. I am sure that Grampa George knew he would be ripped off if he told people about his discovery of the ‘Arianna.”

  “That’s incredible!”

“Trent, you keep saying that. That's why they call it treasure.”

“No! I mean, it’s incredible that you can remember all those details and yet every year in high school you flunked history and math. Yet you remember every detail about these old ships.”

“Yeah! I know! Go figure!” Riley shook his head. “Grandpa George used to tell me this stuff for my bedtime stories.”

“So let me get this straight. Your Grandpa George bores a hole in this antique ship, crawls through the hole, finds some gold and brings it up one by one, hides it in his boat, smuggles it home like a modern-day pirate, and somehow stores it in his old gun safe and then, suddenly, out of the blue gives it to you. Does that just about sum it up?”

“Yup, that’s pretty much the gist of it.”

“So my question is … why? Why now! Why isn’t he living in a mansion on some tropical island, driving a Lamborghini or a ….”

“That’s not his style, Trent. He never wanted a mansion for himself. When my Grandmother died shortly after my Mum was born, all Grandpa wanted was to live in the house that he and my Grandmother had lived in, the place where their baby was born. He didn’t want a mansion, just the memories in a house that had been full of their love. I know he is putting me through university now and gives tons to his various charities.”

“I’m sure I could have found a whole lot to do with all that gold. Imagine pieces of eight.”

“ I think he might have sold off all the coins and a few bars here and there throughout the years, but not many of the bars. He said he didn’t want to raise suspicion. I imagine it’s not easy to fence gold coins and it must be almost impossible to fence gold bars without raising a lot of suspicion.”

“So why now?”

“Grandpa had a mini-stroke or a small heart attack or some kind of episode last week. He spent the night in the hospital and then they shipped him home and told him to rest. It was enough to scare him. I asked him what he thought brought it on. If he had been doing heavy lifting or was stressed about something, he told me that he had heard from an old friend of his recently. The guy who had worked for him years ago and holidayed with him the summer he found the Spanish galleon. He told me that his “friend” Gus, had always been suspicious of him ever since he found the gold and suspected that Grandpa was covering up about something. Grandpa can be pretty sneaky when he wants to be. Shortly after finding the gold Grandpa sold his dive shop and moved away. Apparently, Gus has been looking for him for years. And only recently found him. He asked some very pointed questions when he talked to Grandpa. Grandpa tried to joke his way out of the situation. But that night he woke up in the middle of the night and went to get a drink of water. He’s lived in the house for like, forever, so doesn’t bother turning on the lights. He saw something from the kitchen window. He said he thought he saw someone in his backyard at his back door that leads down to the basement.”

“That’s pretty scary.”

“ His old dog started to bark and whoever it was, made a beeline for the back gate. Grandpa said whoever it was, wasn’t moving very fast … like they were old or something. In the morning he went out in the backyard and found a set of fresh footprints by the back door.”

“This keeps on getting better and better. It's like a movie,” said Trent rubbing his hands together in glee.”

“The next night pretty much the same thing happened. It looked like someone had taken a pry bar to the back door. There were splinters everywhere. Grandpa started getting chest pains a few hours later. When he got out of the hospital, he called me up and asked me if I would help him move a few things. I told him, of course. And went over the next day after class. He told me to pull my car around the back of the house and told me the long version of the story of the Spanish Galleon. The short version which I had heard years ago, was that he had just found a ship underwater and a few gold coins. Nothing about the bars of gold."

“So as we loaded the bars in the trunk of my car, he told me the whole, unabridged story. He told me to find a safe place for the bars. He said he always planned to give it to me as an inheritance. He only had one child, my Mum, and she was always just interested in nature and art and not in monetary things. I’m not sure if she even knows about the gold. I was so shocked I forgot to ask Gramps, and now she is living in some third-world country helping women start businesses. There is virtually no communication going on there. Anyway, I didn’t really know what to do with this stuff. And I thought of your devious mind, and your love of all things to do with pirates, and all the great ideas you have from all the movies you watch and thought that my best lifelong friend could help me out with this problem.”

Trent stared at him in unbelief.

“ Do you have any ideas about what to do with a boatload of gold? asked Riley.”

Tyler grinned, the mischievous dimple in his right cheek deepening. “Ideas? Dude! Have I got an idea? Have I ever. And Riley, I can keep a secret. “