The Purple Pterodactyls

Dead Man's Chest

After I got rid of Habib the jinn, our boy Stephen, who had a summer job, arrived at Ocean Bay to spend a week end with his old folks. Stevie was full of a plan that he and his friend Hank had dreamed up, to hunt for pirate treasure with a World War II mine detector on an island off the Jersey coast. A local tradition claimed that Captain Charles Vane had once put in there to bury his hoard.

Stephen told me about it while we labored through a round of miniature golf, into which he had coaxed me. Tennis is my game, although as a banker I have to play golf in the way of business. But Stephen is too slow and dreamy ever to make a tennis player.

The miniature course had fancy decorations. There were models of space rockets, grotesque animals like dinosaurs, and mythical monsters, such as a life-sized statue of a fish-man like those my pulp-writing friend in Providence used to write about. It had fins running down its back and webbed hands and feet like those of a duck. It stood on a revolving turntable. I asked the ticket taker about it.

"I dunno," said this man. "It's one of them things that crazy artist who designed this place put in. Said he'd seen one alive once, but it was probably a case of the DTs. He's dead now."

We finished our round as Stephen wound up his account of their treasure-hunting plan. He looked at me apprehensively.

"I suppose," he said, "you'll tell me it couldn't possibly work, for some reason we never thought of."

"I don't want to spoil your fun," I said. "If you'd prefer, I won't say a word."

"No, go ahead, Dad. I'd rather have the bad news now than later, after we'd wasted our time."

"Okay," I said. "As I understand it, the routine on a pirate ship was, as soon as possible after taking a prize, to hold the share-out. This was done, not by the captain, but by the quartermaster, normally a pirate too old for pike-and-cutlass work but trusted by the crew. The division was equal, except that the captain might get a double share and the other ship's officers—the doctor, the gunner, and so on— might get one and a half shares, according to the ship's articles. Anyone who held back loot was liable to be hanged or at least keelhauled.

"You see, the captain didn't get all that rich from a capture. When the ship got back to its base, the pirates spent their shares in one grand bust. Rarely did enough loot accumulate in the hands of any one man to be worth burying. Moreover, I thought the pirate Vane stuck pretty close to the Caribbean."

Poor Stevie's mouth turned down, as it always did when I shot down one of his wild ideas. The year before, he and Hank had talked of going to the Galapagos Islands to grow copra. Somehow that sounded glamorous. I had to explain that, first, those islands did not produce copra; second, that copra was nothing but dried coconut meat, which stank in the process of drying and was eventually turned into shampoo oil or fed to the hogs in Iowa.

As things turned out, Stephen had a chance both to see the Galapagos Islands and to hunt for treasure much sooner than either of us expected.

The following summer, my boss, Esau Drexel, took off in his yacht for one of his expeditions in marine biology. Before he left, he said:

"Willy, I can't take you on the whole cruise, because somebody has to run the trust company. But we're going to the Galapagos. Why don't you take Denise and the kids, fly to Guayaquil and Baltra, and meet me there? We can make a tour of the islands. It'll be a great experience, and you can be back in ten or twelve days. McGill can handle the business while you're gone."

It did not take much persuasion. Of my family, only Héloise, our undergraduate daughter, balked. She said her summer job was too important, she had promised her employers, and so on. I suspected that she did not want to go too far from the young man she was in love with. Stephen, who had just graduated from high school, was enthusiastic.

An airplane put Mr. and Mrs. Wilson Newbury, with son Stephen and daughter Priscille, down on the island of Baltra, where Drexel's Amphitrite was moored to the pier. The two little ships that took tourists around the islands were both out, so the Amphitrite had plenty of room.

Drexel, looking very pukka sahib in shorts and bush jacket, with his white mustache and sunburned nose, greeted us with his usual roar. With him he had his wife, a little gray-haired woman who seldom got a chance to say much. There was another man, small, tanned, and white-haired, whom I had not met.

"This is Ronald Tudor," said Drexel. "Ronnie, meet Denise and Willy Newbury. Willy's the one who keeps the Harrison Trust from going broke while I'm away from the helm. Willy, Ronnie's the man who recovered the loot from the Santa Catalina, off Melbourne."

"Melbourne, Australia?" I asked.

"No, stupid; Melbourne, Florida. She was one of the treasure fleet wrecked there in 1715."

"Oh," I said, "Is that your regular business, Mr. Tudor?"

"Wouldn't ever call that kind of business regular," said the little oldster with a sly grin. He had a quick, explosive way of speaking. "I do work at it off and on. Right now—but better wait till we shove off."

"You mean," said Priscille, "you're going to find some treasure in these islands, Mr. Tudor?"

"You'll see, young lady. Since we're not sailing till tomorrow morning, how about a swim?"

We swam from the nearby beach, where the hulk of a World War II landing craft lay upside down and rusting to pieces. The children had fun chasing ghost crabs. These, when cut off from their burrows, scuttled into the water and buried themselves out of sight.

Back at the Amphitrite, we met the Ecuadorian pilot, Flavio Ortega, as he came aboard. Flavio was a short, broad, copper-colored man with flat Mongoloid features. While he must have been at least three-quarters Indian, he had the Hispanic bonhommie. When I tried my stumbling Castillian on him, he cried:

"But, your accent is better than mine! Usted habla como un caballero espanol!"

He was a flatterer, of course; but one of life's lessons is that flattery will get you everywhere.

While we sat on the fantail nursing our cocktails before dinner, Esau Drexel explained: "The waters around these islands have got more rocks in them than the Democrats have in their heads. So we've got to have a local man to keep us from running into them."

"Well," I said, "how about Ronnie's great secret?'

When Tudor looked doubtful, Drexel said: "You can trust him as far as you can anybody, Ronnie. He's worked for me for over twenty years."

"Okay," said Tudor. "Wait a minute."

He went out and came back with a folder containing sheets of paper. In a lowered voice, he said: "Be careful; don't let water from your glass drip on these. They're only photostats, but we need 'em."

I examined the sheets. They were reproductions of three pages from an old manuscript, written in a large, clear longhand. The English had many obsolete usages, which put the document back two or three centuries. The sheets read as follow:

and so departed y^t Hand.

On June y^e 6th, Capt. Eaton anchored in a Cove on y^e NW Side of y^e Hand, y^e which Mr. Cowley hath named y^e Duke of York's Hand. This Cove, which Mr. Cowley calls Albany Bay, is sheltered by a small, rocky Hand over against it. This little Hand hath a rocky Pinnacle, like unto a pointing Finger. Mr. Dampier assured us, y^f Water was to be found on y^e larger Hands, like unto y^s One, even during y^e long Drought of Summer. Whiles y^eMen went ashoar to seek for Springs or Brooks, Capt. Eaton privily took me aside and said: Mr. Henderson, y^e Time hath come to bury y^t which lies in y^e Chest. Sith I know you for a true Man, I will y^t ye and I, alone, shall undertake y^e ticklish Task, saying Nought to Any. But Captain, I said, be ye determined upon y^s Course? For by God's sir, it seems to me y^t y^e Contents of y^e Chest would, if used with Sense and Prudence, furnish us with a handsome Living back in England for y^e Rest of our mortal Dayes. If we ever get home, said Capt. Eaton; but with y^s accursed Thing aboard, I doubt me we ever shall. A Curse lies upon it; witness our Failure to take y^e Spanish Ship whilst she had 800,000 Pieces of Eight aboard; so y^t all we gat for our Trouble was a Load of Flower, a Mule for the President of Panama, a wooden Image of y^e Virgin, and 8 Tuns of Quince Marmalade. Well, saith he, verily, our Men have a Plenty of Flower wherewhith to make Bread and of Jam to eat thereon, but we had liefer have y^e Money. The Men also be in Fear of what it may bring upon us and will be happy to see y^e Last of it.

So we went ashoar in y^e Pinnace with y^e Chest. Capt. Eaton and I carried y^e Chest inland from y^e Shoar and thence up y^e Slope towards y^e SW to y^e Top of y^e Cliff, which overlooks y^e Cove. At y^e Tip of y^e Point, which marks y^e western Limit of y^e Bay, we buried y^e Chest, and not without much hard Labour, for it was heavy to bear and y^e rocky Soil hard to dig withal. When we returned to y^e Ship

"Where did this come from?" I asked. "Picked up the originals at an auction in London," said Tudor. "They're in a safe at home, naturally."

"Well, what does it mean?"

"Good God, don't you see, man?" Tudor exploded. "It's as plain as the nose on your face. This Henderson must have been one of the officers of Captain Eaton's Nicholas— the boatswain or the gunner, maybe—which stopped here in June, 1684."

"How do you know the year?"

"Because he mentions Dampier and Cowley, who were here with him in the Batchelor's Delight at that time. The buccaneer Ambrose Cowley gave the islands their first set of individual names, although the Spaniards later rechristed them, and then the Ecuadorians gave them a third set. Gets confusing. Cowley called his island the Duke of York's Island. Then Charles Second died, and the Duke of York became James Second, so the island became James. The Spanish called it Santiago, and then the Ecuadorians decided on San Salvador."

" 'Santiago' ought to please everybody, since it means 'Saint James'," I said, "although I don't believe James the Second was very saintly."

"Most English-speakers still use 'James'," said Tudor.

"Is this all there is to the manuscript?"

"That's all. Did some sleuthing—British Museum and such—to try and locate the rest, but no dice. Probably somebody used it to light a fire. Couldn't find any other record of Henderson, either. But this is the important part, so what the hell."

"All right, assuming the document refers to the present James or Santiago Island, do you think you can find this chest from these scanty directions? I thought James was a large island."

"It is, but the directions are as plain as a Michelin guidebook. This bay is what we call Buccaneer Cove. All we have to do is land there and follow Henderson's directions. With a metal detector, it ought to be a breeze."

I thought. "One more thing, Ronnie. The paper doesn't say what was in the chest. How do you know it's worth going after?"

"It wasn't money, or it would have been divided in the shareout. It was something of value, as you can tell by Henderson's comment. Evidently one single thing, not divisible. Must have been something of religious or supernatural significance, or the crew wouldn't have gotten spooked. My guess is, some fancy religious gewgaw—a jeweled crown for a statue of the Virgin, or maybe a golden religious statuette, which the buccaneers stole from one of the Catholic churches along the coast. But what the hell, we'll see when we dig it up. It's worth the chance."

Esau Drexel glanced over his shoulder and spoke in a low voice. "We need your help, Willy. I don't want to let the crew in on it, for obvious reasons, but this takes a bit of muscle. You remember how Henderson found the chest hefty to carry. Now, I'm too old and fat for hauling a couple of hundred pounds around rough country, and Ronnie's too old and small. There'll be some digging, too. But you're an athletic type, and your boy has pretty good muscles.

"Ronnie and I have agreed to go halves on whatever we find. If you'll come in with us, I'll give you half of my half, or a quarter of the total."

"Fair enough," I said. Drexel had his faults, but stinginess with his considerable wealth was not one of them.

At this time, the Galapagos Parque Nacional had been established only a few years, and things were not so tightly organized as they became later. Nowadays, I understand, the wardens would be down on you like a ton of gravel if you tried anything like treasure-hunting.

The next week we spent in cruising the southern islands. We saw the frigate birds and the blue-footed boobies on North Seymour. We were chased along the beach on Loberia by a big bull sea lion who thought we had designs on his harem. On Hood, we watched a pair of waved albatross go through their courtship dance, waddling around each other and clattering their bills together. We gauped at swarms of marine iguanas, clinging to the black rocks and sneezing at us when we came close. We admired the flamingoes in the muddy lagoon on Floreana.

On Plaza, Priscille, the strongest wild-life buff in the family, had the thrill of feeding some greenery to a big land iguana. That would not be allowed nowadays. On Santa Cruz (or Indefatigable) we visited the Charles Darwin Research Station. They told us of breeding tortoises in captivity, to reintroduce them on islands whence they had been exterminated.

We dropped anchor in Buccaneer Cove on James, behind the islet with the rocky pinnacle of which Henderson had written. The four treasure-hunters went ashore in the launch, leaving young Priscille furious at not being taken along. Denise was more philosophical.

"Have yourself the fun, my old," she said. "For me, to sit on a cactus once a trip is enough."

We left Flavio Ortega in charge of the boat, having told him we were looking for a brass marker plate left by Admiral de Torres in 1793.

"Be careful, gentlemen," he said. "There is said to be a— how do you say—una maldicion—?"

"A curse?" I said.

"Yes, of course, a curse. They say there is a curse on this place, from all the bisits of the wicked pirates who preyed on us poor Esspanish peoples. Of course, that is just a superstition; but watch your steps. The ground is treacherous."

We headed inland. Stephen carried the shovels and I, the pick and the goose-necked wrecking bar. Tudor toted the metal detector and Drexel, the lunch.

The weight of my burdens increased alarmingly as we scrambled up the rocky wall that bounded the beach. Above this rise, the sloping ground was fairly smooth, but parts of it were a talus of dark-gray sand made from disintegrated lava. Our feet sank into it, and it tended to slip out from under us.

There was a scattering of low shrubs. Higher, the hillsides were covered with an open stand of the pale-gray pah santo or holy-stick trees, leafless at this time of year. Even the parts of these volcanic islands with a plant cover have an unearthly aspect, like a lunar landscape.

A narrow ravine cut through the terrain on its way to the bay. We had to climb the bluff on the eastern side of this gulch, and our goal lay on the west side. The ravine was too wide to jump, and its sides were too steep to scramble down and up. So we had to hike inland for a half a mile or so until we found a place narrow enough to hop across. Drexel and Tudor were both pretty red and winded by that time.

The day was hotter and brighter than most. Although right on the equator, the Galapagos Islands (or Islas Encantadas or Archipielago do Colon) are usually rather cool, because of the cold Humboldt Current and the frequent overcasts of the doldrum belt. I smeared sun-tan oil on my nose.

I could also not help thinking of Ortega's curse. Most of my friends consider me a paragon of cold rationality and common sense, never fooled by mummeries and superstitions. In my business, that is a useful reputation. But still, funny things have happened to me ...

On the western side of the ravine, we hiked back down the slope. Then we cut across towards the tip of the western point, keeping at more or less the same altitude. When we neared the apex, we stopped to let Tudor set up the metal detector.

As he thumbed the switch, the instrument gave out a faint hum. Tudor began to quarter the area. He moved slowly, a step at a time, swinging the head of the detector back and forth as if he were sweeping or vacuum-cleaning.

Drexel, Stephen, and I sat on the slope and ate our lunch. A handbill given us at Baltra warned us not to leave any litter. Nowadays they are still tougher about it.

The detector continued its hum, getting louder or softer as Tudor came nearer or went further away. It made me nervous to see him close to the tip of the point. The surface on which he was working was fairly steep, so that walking took an effort of balance. If you fell down and rolled or slid, you might have trouble stopping yourself. This slope continued down to the top of the cliff, which here was a forty-foot vertical drop into the green Pacific.

At last, when Tudor was twenty-five or thirty feet from the edge, the hum of the instrument changed to a warble. Tudor stood a long time, swinging the detector.

"Here y'are," he said. "I'll eat my lunch while you fellas dig."

Since Stephen and I were the muscle men, we fell to. There was no sound but the faint sigh of the breeze, the scrape of the shovels, and the bark of a distant sea lion. Once Stephen, stopping to wipe the sweat from his face, cried: "Hey, Dad, look!"

He pointed to the dorsal fin of a shark, which lazily cut the water out from the cliff. We watched it out of sight and resumed our digging. Having finished his lunch, Tudor came forward to wave his detector over the pit we had dug. The warble was loud and clear.

We began getting into hardpan, so that we had to take the pick to loosen stones of increasing size. Then the pick struck something that did not sound like another stone.

"Hey!" said Drexel.

We soon uncovered the top of a chest, the size of an old-fashioned steamer trunk and much distressed by age. Drexel, Tudor, and Stephen chattered excitedly. I kept quiet, a dim foreboding having taken hold of me. Somehow the conviction formed in my mind that, if the chest were opened, one of us would die.

Tudor was nothing to me; I distrust adventurer types. I should be sorry to lose Drexel, a friend as well as a boss. But the thought crossed my mind that I might succeed him as president of the trust company. I was ashamed of the thought, but there it was. For myself, I was willing to take chances; but that anything should happen to Stephen was unbearable.

I wanted to shout: stop, leave that thing alone! Or, at least, let me send Stevie back to the ship before you open it. But what argument could I offer? It was nothing but an irrational feeling—the kind of "premonition" we get from time to time but remember only on the rare occasions when it is fulfilled by the event. I had no evidence.

"Tired, Willy?" said Drexel. "Here, give me that shovel!"

He grabbed the implement and began digging in his turn, grunting and blowing like a walrus. Soon he and Stephen had the chest excavated down below the lower edge of the lid.

The chest had a locked iron clasp, but this was a mass of rust. The wood of the chest was so rotten that, at the first pry with the wrecking bar, the lock tore out of the wood. Stephen burst into song:

He broke off as Drexel and Tudor lifted the lid with a screech of ancient hinges.

"Good God!" said Ronald Tudor. "What's this?"

In the chest, face up, lay a fish-man like that of which a statue stood in the miniature golf course at Ocean Bay. The thing had been bound with leather thongs in a doubled-up position, with its knees against its chest. Its eyes were covered by a pair of large gold coins.

"Some kind of sea monster," Drexel breathed. "Oh, boy, if I can only get it as a specimen for the Museum ..."

Tudor, eyes agleam, shot out two skinny hands and snatched the coins. He jerked away with a startled yelp. "The goddam thing's alive!"

The fish-man's bulging eyes opened. For one breath it lay in its coffin, regarding us with a wall-eyed stare. Then its limbs moved into jerky action. The leather thongs, brittle with age, snapped like grass stems.

The fish-man's webbed, three-fingered hands gripped the sides of the chest. It heaved itself into a sitting position and stood up. It started to climb out of the excavation.

"Jesus!" cried Tudor.

The fish-man was climbing out on the side towards the sea, which happened to be the side on which Tudor stood. Tudor, apparently thinking himself attacked, shoved the coins into his pants pocket, snatched up a shovel, and swung it at the fish-man.

The blade of the shovel thudded against the fish-man's scaly shoulder. The fish-man opened its mouth, showing a row of long, sharp, fish-catching teeth. It gave a hiss, like the noise a Galapagos tortoise makes when it withdraws into its shell.

"Don't—I mean—" cried Drexel.

As Tudor swung the shovel back for another blow, the fish-man moved stiffly towards him, fangs bared, arms and webbed hands spread. Tudor stumbled back, staggering and slipping in the loose, sloping soil. The two moved towards the cliff, Tudor dodging from side to side and threatening the fish-man with his shovel.

"Watch out!" yelled Drexel and I together.

Tudor backed off the cliff and vanished. The monster dove after him. Two splashes came up, in quick succession, from below.

When we reached the top of the cliff, Tudor's body was lying awash below us. We caught a glimpse of the fish-man, flapping swiftly along like a sea lion just below the surface and heading for deep water. In a few seconds, it was gone.

"We've got to see if Ronnie's alive," said Drexel.

"Stevie," I said, "run back to the top of the little cliff just this side of the ravine. Call down to Flavio, telling him to bring the boat. Don't mention the monster—"

"Aw, Dad, I can get down that little cliff," said Stephen. He was gone before I could argue. He slithered down the cliff like a marine iguana and leaped the last ten feet to sprawl on the beach. In a minute he was in the launch, which soon buzzed around to the place where Tudor had fallen.

Stephen and Ortega got Tudor into the boat, but he was already dead. He had been dashed against a point of rock in his fall.

"Maybe," said Ortega, "there is a evil esspell on this place after all."

"Well," said Drexel later, "at least we know now what Captain Eaton meant by 'this accursed thing.' "

We sailed back to Baltra and arranged for the local burial of Ronald Tudor.

"He was kind of a con man," said Drexel, "but an interesting one. Let's not put anything in our report to the local authorities about the monster. We don't have a specimen to show, and the Ecuadorians might think we had murdered poor Ronnie and were trying to cover it up with a wild yarn."

So we said only that our companion had met death by misadventure. While I had not much liked the man, his death cast a pall on our vacation. Instead of rounding out our tour by visiting Tower, Isabela, and Fernandina Islands, we cut it short. Drexel sailed for the Panama Canal, while the Newburys flew home. After we got back, it was as if Ronald Tudor and the fish-man had never existed.

But, although I have been back to Ocean Bay several times since, nobody has ever again inveigled me into playing a round at that miniature golf course. To have the revolving statue of a fish-man goggling at me while I was addressing the ball would give me the willies. No pun intended.