The Praying Nun (Slave Shipwreck Saga Book 1) Read online

  That’s no reason for panic though as we both know what we’re doing in waves. Just keep one’s head, swim toward the wave as it approaches, and go deep to get under each of the half dozen waves that always run together in a set. A lull always follows.

  I have my breath back and pop the snorkel into my mouth.

  We’re diving just behind the wave line, off a beach crowded with a throng of late summer revellers. The inbound weather is the first storm for the advancing autumn season, born as it is in a tempest a thousand or more miles south, between Africa and the Antarctic.

  “We’ll get it another day.” Jacques plugs his snorkel into his mouth, his spent demand valve dangling against his chest, hanging from a ribbon looped around his neck.

  I take a breath and slip ten feet down in the water column just as the first wave thunders overhead. It’s beautiful down here, even as the tendrils of the wave’s violence come looking for me, probing, trying to get a grip and put me through the spin-cycle of a dump. But I’ve been at this for a lifetime and stay easily out of their reach.

  A little flick of the fins and I pop to the surface, out through the froth of bubbles behind the wave.

  The next wave is roaring toward us and about to crash over so I descend again before it does. An instant later, Jacques appears in the calm under the impact zone of turbulent water. He’s grinning, mischievous blue eyes set wide on a handsome face, visible through his goggles.

  He lives off this ocean. Sure, this section of coast is a legal sanctuary for lobster, but nearly the only way this guy has of earning money is to help himself to a little of the bounty.

  Technically it’s poaching. But he—we—do it like gentleman…we harvest, we never pillage. We’re rogue gentleman, one could say.

  My justification for taking a bag of crawlies from time to time are my dad’s words, “We were here before the laws.”

  And it is true. He was born in this bay, as was I.

  Jacques’s need to make a living from it gives him an even better justification than mine. His dad was missing long before I met him, and it’s something that’s off limits to talk about. His mom, it seems, is mostly absent too—another taboo topic.

  Sad and sorry stories aside, we’re both conscripted by the apartheid government to the navy, and we’ve both worked the system well enough to be posted at SAS Unitie, an admin base without residential barracks.

  He’s essentially on his own, living off his wits and the sea, a street dog.

  Did I mention he always has a plan? His plan is to make it big with one big find: gold bullion. And this wreck, according to our investigations through the Archives, might well be it.

  Until we crack open our treasure trove though, he harvests the sea where we live. In his case, a garden apartment rented from a house up some stairs. In my case, a few doors down.

  I look back and can see my folk’s house set into the mountainside two hundred or so stairs above the beach and traffic-congested roadway.

  The fourth wave is on us. This means we’re more than half way through this set.

  I look down through the water and see that we’ve finned and have been washed well off the mark of our dive. The hole I was working in is nowhere to be seen, perhaps forty yards away now.

  The set peters to an end and we begin finning toward the shore.

  The sudden upsurge of swell has brought a few surfers out to the backline.

  “Got anything?” they ask of us knowingly.

  Familiar faces, they’ve recognized us too. They know we normally come in with something edible, but it’s prudent to never talk about it, even to friends.

  Answering with specifics is a quandary. The wreck’s not yet registered to Jacques, so we must be cagey as to our purpose. He submitted all the paperwork months ago and swore me to secrecy, but the authorities grind slowly. Right now, I’m the only other living soul who knows about it.

  “Just a look around,” we assure them, holding our hands up, surrender style, to reveal the lack of a bag of living bounty, bound for the pot.

  “Yeah right!” The laughter is unanimous. They know that if we are diving for ‘fish’—a widely used euphemism for illegally caught seafood of whatever kind—we’d never be stupid enough to bring it to shore in the daylight. Instead, we’d tie it out on a marked spot for retrieval after midnight.

  A great neighbourhood, this is.

  The locals are all buccaneers in spirit. There’s a beach culture with family affiliations and friends that threads through the whole community. Some, like mine, stretch back three generations since my granddad became the first permanent resident to settle under this splendid mountain.

  We swim on by, now well inside the wave line.

  That bloody yellow protrusion of tooth wedged into black tar keeps plaguing me.

  For years, we’ve found shards of pottery hurled ashore by storms and wedged into the cracks between the boulders that divide the four beaches of this kilometre-long bay. The fragments look like Ming porcelain, haunting blue pigment on white clay from long, long ago.

  Occasionally, just to tease us, we find a hint of a VOC crest stencilled onto a fragment. It’s the spectre and tell-tale legacy of the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, the Dutch East India Company that prospered in the 17th Century. At the time, they were the owners of this land at the tip of Africa, with ships that plied and floundered in these perilous waters the Portuguese navigators before them dubbed the ‘Cape of Storms’.

  It’s very undignified to be tumbled about by the white-water froth, floundering in the shallows in scuba gear. This is especially true when a beach full of curious onlookers and bikini-clad nymphs look on.

  The solution is to stop swimming in waist deep water, remove fins, and steady one’s balance against the cumbersome weight of scuba equipment. Then, saunter out in nonchalant fashion. This we do impeccably.

  As we make tracks between the towels, colourful sun umbrellas and bronzed bodies, I look back toward the little rock we call ‘Cherry’ that marks the boundary of our exploration site.

  Cherry is just a peak of granite jutting above the water, the height of a man at slack tide.

  We’re interested in the reef just behind and off to the left of this rock.

  I look down impulsively at the sheath secured to my right calf. Seeing it empty assures me that I didn’t dream up the whole escapade; there is a huge tooth out there in a ball of conglomerate tar. It’s wedged in by a perlie and my knife is still lodged under it.

  A sudden gust of wind blows through and a few of the umbrellas that have been dancing with the rising onshore breeze dislodge and cartwheel away, their owners in hot pursuit.

  Summer is officially over.

  As we begin to ascend the stairs up to the roadway and to my house, I notice with some irritation that a stranger is sunning himself on top of my overturned fiberglass dingy.

  My family has had a rowing boat lying atop one of the two flat rocks on this beach for decades. The rocks are the size and shape of beached whales, sitting up near the top of the beach. It should be clear even to an imbecile that someone has gone to a lot of trouble to put it out of harm’s way.

  “Excuse me,” I call to him, “Oi… you… on the dingy… Mate... HEY!”

  He finally lifts the cap covering his face and looks my way.

  “Do you mind? That’s my boat.”

  He sizes me up.

  Jacques, being Jacques, is keen to take it further and makes a show of unbuckling the clip that holds the diving knife in the sheath on his right calf. It’s not like he’d actually use it, but the stranger doesn’t know that.

  “Sorry,” says the fool. Swinging his legs down, he stands to arch his back and look out to sea at the incoming clouds, ignoring us.

  “Just leave it,” I tell Jacques. I don’t want problems and this guy needs to save face too.

  The weather’s changing fast now and folks are packing up. The beach is half empty by the time we’ve climbed the hundred or so stairs
threaded between bungalows that are set into the steep talus slope.

  At the road, we stop and I look down again. Cherry is small from this distance. Out to sea beyond it, is a finger of reef that stretches an additional hundred yards out to sea. It’s a break that we sometimes surf when the swell is up. But the way this storm is going, it’s probably too big and messy for surfing. The sea is already quite ugly.

  To the south of Cherry, the yellow tooth and its implications are calling to me through time.

  Lion’s Head mountain above us is now cloaked in a mane of cloud.

  We bid our farewells as Jacques turns up a flight of stairs to his apartment and I continue toward my home farther along.

  Chapter 2

  “You’ve developed a real obsession,” Jacques tells me again. “A tooth…? As big as your hand?” He’s squinting in disbelief. Mocking with his eyes.

  “Yes. In the conglomerate.”

  “Next you’re going to tell me it’s a shark’s tooth.”

  “No. Sharks’ teeth are adapted skin, they wouldn’t yellow. This looked like hippo tooth.”

  “A hippo tooth,” he hoots. “In a shipwreck…? Maybe one swam out there?”

  He laughs so loud that one of the librarians behind the Archives’ counter glares at us for disturbing her hushed domain.

  I don’t mind him taking the mickey. If he’d seen it, he’d be more obsessed than me, and I’d be teasing him worse.

  “Anyway…” He looks back at the screen at the microfiche image I have up. “The slaver went down at Glen Beach,” he points out.

  He emphasizes it with his finger below the words “Bay of von Kamp” on the record, in that flowing cursive from an ancient archived document.

  Today we call this area Camps Bay. It’s the suburb where the two of us went to school, a nautical mile around a headland of coast that divides the suburbs, each wrapped around their own bay.

  The accompanying nautical chart with an ‘X’ marking the site of the slave wreck, indicates that it’s located in the north-eastern corner of Camps Bay. That corner picks up the swell and is a surfer’s paradise called Glen Beach. Out behind the waves is a reef where huge waves crest during storm conditions.

  Our wreck lies similarly in the north-eastern corner of Clifton Bay. The prevailing wave conditions along this stretch of coast will generally drive a vessel to flounder as these two evidently have.

  We’re at the Cape Archives, scanning records from recent antiquity.

  Conscripted against our will by the military, we’ve both independently managed to manoeuvre ourselves into the most forgotten little corner of the South African Navy.

  As I mentioned, SAS Unitie is an admin office down at the harbour, tucked conveniently alongside The Royal Cape Yacht Club.

  It’s so far out of the way that normal military strictures there are rather elastic, and we’re able to finagle lots of time off.

  Whenever we’re off and the weather turns against us, we come to the Archives to painstakingly scan the records from the early days of Cape Colony that stretch back to 1652.

  The librarians know us well by now. They’re pretty helpful, assisting us to find the shipping records we’re after, following the threads of sinkings and tragedies in centuries past.

  “I don’t know why you’re all excited about this. Slave ships don’t carry gold on the middle passage…” he chews my ear for wasting time and then reads aloud from the paragraph I’ve insisted he peruse:

  “‘…after three weeks under sail and losing the weakest among our cargo to dysentery and foul airs, the company arrived at this remote and dangerous place. Whereupon a grievous wind arose from the northwest blocking our passage and we found the making of headway impossible...’”

  His voice trails away as he falters, defeated by the clumsy period English.

  “Look for treasure,” he advises me like an older brother would, then goes back to his own screen where he’s on the enigmatic trail of a Dutch ship carrying a king’s ransom in gold bullion, bound for Batavia to pay troops.

  It’s the one he’s convinced me that he’s already found. The one we’re trying to salvage.

  The Dutchman we seek was lost in a storm out of Table Bay. All we’ve learned thus far is that it was never sighted rounding Cape Point, forty or so nautical miles south.

  His salvage application for our site hasn’t yet been confirmed. Without a clear indication of the ship’s name, it takes more time to identify and allocate it to an explorer. It’s a massive haystack out there with plenty of icy fathoms for this pair of late-teen lads to find a life-altering needle in.

  In the absence of confirmation that we haven’t found the Dutch ship, the possibility tantalizingly remains that we already have a pay-day in the bag.

  To me, there’s as much treasure found in the human spirit and our history books as in any deadweight of gold, so I ignore his admonition and find myself back in my slave story from the pen of the Captain.

  “…Presently, a most disastrous reef and tumult blocked our way ahead. The wind coming ashore in great squalls made us to go hard a’starboard and toward the terrifying coast. A vast mountain stood before us, but before we could come about in this treacherous sea, we found that we were hemmed in by waves on all sides.

  In the greatest anxiety and with a wailing from the wretched holds, our company beseeched the Virgin and we rode ahead of the storm. Our vessel was driven harshly with the mighty reef abeam. We did cast overboard lines to hold us steady, but a grave and hidden obstacle struck our rudder clean away and condemned us further to the tempest. In the sanctuary of that bay we did put a cutter to shore with a line for safety, but before the storm could blow itself out, our hull was staved by rocks and the ocean waves did set upon breaking our vessel as the sun departed the site of our misery.”

  The gist, as I understood it, was that the Portuguese slave ship, São José-Paquete de Africa, was sailing from Mozambique to Brazil with a full cargo of misery when it sank in a storm in the Bay of von Kamp, Camps Bay, Cape Town in December 1794.

  I re-checked the accompanying chart. Though distorted by the fanciful imagination and interpretation of the cartographers of long ago, drawings based on scant and limited survey data, there was enough detail there to indicate that they had faithfully recorded the general shape of Camps Bay, including its pattern of offshore rocks that I knew so well.

  Though I’ve never before dived the reef that the vessel foundered on, I know it well. It’s a nasty shoal that will go unnoticed until the sea turns brutal and the waves rear up.

  I know the history of Camps Bay fairly well and tried to imagine what the shipwreck survivors had arrived into.

  In the early part of the 1700s, the whole area belonged to the Koekemoer family. In the late 1770s, a sailor, Frederik Ernst von Kamptz, married into the family and it reverted to him and became known as “Die Baai van von Kamptz”, or Camps Bay as we know it in the modern Anglicized world.

  The colony was under Dutch rule and when Britain went to war with the Dutch, von Kamptz soon saw his land expropriated by the military to build a gun battery. After the British took the colony, and by the time the slave ship ran aground, Britain was at war with France, and the battery was reinstated.

  Soon after that, Lord Charles Somerset built Round House, now an upmarket restaurant, to be his private hunting lodge. From that lodge, he shot lion, leopard and of course antelope.

  Lashed and chained in the stinking holds of the ship I was reading about was the human cargo that the settlers to the New World would use to build their empires.

  Their route of trade was triangular, and this leg was known as the infamous Middle Passage. Manufactured goods from Europe’s factories were shipped to Africa and bartered with Arab traders and African chiefs for captives of war and abductees.

  Once the holds were emptied of slaves in the Americas, the ships were reloaded with raw materials and freighted back to Europe and the factories.

  Round and round the c
onveyor went. Upward of thirty-nine thousand such voyages were made.

  The São José-Paquete de Africa and its unfortunate passengers only made it twenty-three days into their planned six- to nine-month crossing.

  Right here on my doorstep, Africa impounded it… or rather, collected half of her load of human cargo.

  I read on in horror.

  As the São José foundered, according to the Captain’s indifferent and pragmatic account, two-hundred and twelve slaves perished with her, and drowned still chained in the hold or during attempts to salvage them.

  Knowing the coast and storms as I do, I’m astounded to read that the remaining two hundred souls and the crew made it out alive.

  I’m lost in the narrative, projecting myself—a strong swimmer—into the horror. Imagining the cannon-like salvos of sound as timber caves in and beams explode into matchwood from the driving waves slamming the vessel into unyielding granite.

  In the theatre of my mind, I hear the relentless screaming of the northwest gale howling its bitter cruelty through the rigging above while shrieks and laments join the hellish choir from below.

  I see black bodies locked in the terrible carnage, cartwheeling and plunging over the falls of colossal storm surf—churned toward the bottom then thrown one last time above the white boil of an angry sea. A final glimpse of their beloved Africa before they’re dragged down forever to an icy grave.

  There, they would certainly have made a vast banquet and boon for ancestors of the lobsters I now catch for pocket money. It sends a shiver up my spine.

  Jacques is watching me and he shakes his head and laughs. “You’re a dreamer, Mike. Look for treasure.”

  It’s like he can read my mind. Then again, I’m ashen and my mouth is hanging agape, while mouthing the tragic words that pass before my eyes.

  I leap two centuries into the past again.