I call Dan that night and tell him I’m in. He grunts and then says he’ll talk with the captain the next day, and that I should probably be ready to report to the dock around 6 a.m. the day after.
“I hope you’re not dreaming of getting a lot richer,” he says. “Most of these salvage operations end about where they started, over more empty seabed, after too many hours of very hard work. I just thought you could use a little employment.”
“I don’t. And I do,” I say, hoping that’s the truth. “I worked as a steward on yachts in the Keys between semesters of college twenty years ago, you know, serving up champagne in ice buckets on the deck for geezers with young mistresses, slopping up the vomit and come-stained sheets below decks when we got back to port. Not much to remember, but I found I had good sea-legs, and I got pretty good at scenting rough weather. Since then I’ve been out a few times deep-sea fishing. My dad was in the Navy and taught me a lot of the knots when I was earning badges for the Scouts.”
“That will do, I guess,” he says, somewhat distantly. He’s thinking ahead. Or back. “Nothing they’re doing above water on that ship that you can’t handle. Just try to remember who you are. And who it’s death for you to be anymore.”
“Yeah, I remember. But thanks for the reminder.”
A short silence. “Well, I guess I should give you some of the background.”
Here is the jist of what he told me, embellished with what I heard later, further dug up on the Internet, and thought about for long after. It’s a tale of old-school larceny, a deep strata of Florida’s bum history of getting pillaged and raped for booty which never can be kept in your hands.
***
In September 1623, a ship creeps off from a Spain-bound fleet in the Straits of Florida. The boat, a twenty-gun frigate named the Senora de Cadiz, is commandeered by a pilot named Eduardo del Silvia. His nickname de l’abysmo (“of the Abyss”) was not apparently for any prowess or bad luck over deep waters as for taking his fellow sailors on harrowing dockside nekyias, careening through a downward circuit of dives of increasingly ill-tempered repute, as if a night’s roustabout could encompass every circle in Dante’s Inferno.
A true sea wolf at heart, this Eduardo apparently was in Dutch with every interest that lay at cross purposes to Spanish crown, proving intelligence for the English, dealing in stolen trade with the Dutch. Apparently on this venture he planned to deliver the Cadiz to a Dutch privateer hiding up by what is now Fort Lauderdale, pulling off from the fleet as it heading round the tip of the Florida peninusla up into the Gulf Stream.
He contrived to have that ship, well-lardered but certainly not the biggest prize in the pack, to lag and then distance, signalling to the flagship that he was having trouble with the rudder. He knew the fleet was in a hurry to get into the Stream, it being the late already in the hurricane season; Spain was desperate for lucre at that time, depending heavily on fresh stores of gold to pay off the bankers who were financing their involvement in the Thirty Years’ War. So where a fleet commander in another season of empire might have been most patient, del Silvio was allowed to lag, in the hopes that the problem would be fixed on its own and the ship would catch up in due corse. Then as night fell del Silvio invisibly turned course and headed north, up along the Florida Coast. As it happened, the next day turned rough and rougher with an approaching hurricane, and the fleet barely escaped to the northeast while the Cadiz fought its way up to the coast seeking a sheltered cove. But there was none and the on September 6 the Cadiz got whacked by the maelstrom, mauled in every way short of shipwreck for two days. By the fortune of del Silvio’s evil sire they scaped but barely, their mainmast gone, rigging a futile mess, bilges swamped, the boat listing eight degrees to port. There was no sign of the Dutch pirate at the agreed trysting-place and del Silvio bid his men (furious now that they weren’t about to share in the profit of the trade) sail up the coast toward Amelia Island where he knew he would find British ships eager to deal. Two weeks after the first hurricane another struck, and on the night of Sept. 25, 1623, the Cadiz meet its Maker at last, split and sent spiralling down to salt doom here off the north Florida coast into 100 leagues of cold silt. Only two hands survived -- a female slave and del Silvio, found two days later clinging to a length of mizzen by the British sloop Defiance.
None of this is mentioned in the official report of the loss of the Cadiz by the Marquis of Caderita, admiral of the fleet that arrived back in Spain without further incident. He simply says that the Cadiz was lost from the fleet having rudder trouble and apparently was doomed by the first hurricane. All hands and, most importantly, its valuable freight, were assumed lost.
Captain del Silvia resurfaces twelve years later in Manila, ravaged by the pox and the final stages of alcoholism, relating his tale one dank sordid night to a British pilot who would later include it in his South Sea Tales of a British Merchantman (1662), a book that enjoyed brief genre popularity around London for the summer and then disappeared. A copy of the obok turned up at a Tampa antiquities fair in the 1980s, where it was bought by an archeologist on the faculty of the University of Florida. He didn’t get around to reading the book for a decade, finding it one summer afternoon deep down a pile next to his office bookcase as he was cleaning up.
In the tale, the author, George Boggs, comes across del Silvia in a Manila dive quite in keeping with del Silvia’s penchant for bottomfeeding haunts, where “a Terrible assortment of Thugs and Brigands tossed back Pots of ill-humoured Rum, yelling and laughing and swearing foul oaths in a Fumigous and Obscene din.” The only table with an empty seat is shared by del Siliva, apparently of too ill a repute even for this honkey tonk deep in Hell. Del Silvia cadges a few quaffs of rum and then starts raving about a great fortune that may be scattered yet on the shores of Florida, one million pesos of silver and gold bullion, six chests brimming with jewelry, including a heart built with 130 matched pearls, a 74-carat emerald ring, a pink coral rosary on a gold chain beaded with pearls ... and this native artifact that was too strange and beautiful to be destroyed even by the priests, a votive gold figure inlaid with emeralds and rubies, with eyes of pearl, a wide mouth filled with inserted shark’s teeth, breasts of round-carved obsitidan, holding a small jade scimitar over its head - not apparently Mayan, maybe it had made it over on the Pacific leg from the Orient, along with the three porcelain vases that were said to be as old as they were valued ... Boggs was bemused. “The man looked like the veritable Porter of Hell, his Face pocked and ruined, his mouth a toothless Hole, pronouncing Riches beyond Measure from Days long sundered and tossed beneath the Tides of Time.” As Boggs took his leave, scaping the jaws of hell, a fight broke out behind him and he heard del Silvia scream. He looked over his shoulder and saw the Spanish pilot crumpled back in his chair, his thoat slashed wide like a red mouth, pouring the last of his bad blood over his corpse.
The UF professor was definitely interested in the reference (taking up only a page in the book). Wrecks from the Spanish fleet had been successfully salvaged by Mel Fisher over the past twenty years, but it was known that many ships were still out there. He knew of a friend, a salvage boat operator, who had been looking for the Cadiz for the past five years, only far to the south where the offiical report had assumed it was lost. So one day he calls this friend down in Satellite Beach and says he’s come across something which suggests that the wreck of the Cadiz lies further north up the coast. The guy -- a Mike Riordan -- takes to the fresh treasure spoor like shark to chum, and agrees to take up the search on for a fee-upon-salvage basis with a shared percentage of the total haul.
That’s who is out there a half mile in the water east of my house, and tomorrow I will try to get aboard that boat and bend my back to the task of finding del Silvia’s stolen ghost fortune that has sprawled for centuries on the dark sea bed.
