Cassius Brown And The Waters of Bimini

A Man Who Should Have Died The Spanish pilot had been meticulous about the condition of his water barrels. He had recorded how many had leaked during the storm, which ones smelled of sour timber and how much remained for the men who were still capable of drinking it. Of the sailor who had lain without speaking for three days, he had written very little until the middle of the twelfth page. Then, in a cramped passage squeezed between two navigational observations, the man had apparently got up and asked for food. Cassius Brown read the passage again. He knew enough Spanish to follow the argument of it, although the pilot's spelling and habit of abbreviating words demanded care. The institute had provided a modern transcription and a preliminary translation, and he had been comparing them with the photographed page for the last half-hour. There were three possible readings of the verb that described the sailor's recovery. None accounted for the sudden interest in breakfast. 'Is that the part?' asked the woman across the table. 'It is. He seems to have been a good deal better before anyone was ready for him to be.' 'He'd make a very popular patient here.' The collections manager had introduced herself by her title and invited him to use her first name, then promptly been called to the telephone before he heard what it was. Cassius had decided against admitting this. She was busy enough without being required to introduce herself to the same English visitor twice. Her desk stood beyond the glass partition separating the reading room from the collection store, and through it he could see a man trying unsuccessfully to fit a new wheel onto a trolley. She set a folder beside his elbow, keeping it beyond the manuscript's padded support. 'The photographs of the binding came through this morning. The owner says the loose leaves were inside when her grandfather bought the collection, and I can at least confirm they were listed in the inventory we have from nineteen sixty-eight. Earlier than that, we're still finding out.' 'And the manuscript itself?' 'On deposit for examination. The family haven't given it away. They're perfectly willing for it to be studied, provided nobody starts announcing that they've found eternal life before we've established who wrote the thing.' 'Sounds like a sensible family.' 'You may have missed the number of calls I've taken since Monday.' Cassius smiled and brought the folder closer. He had arrived in Nassau the previous evening after a flight that had given him ample opportunity to read the preliminary report and no opportunity to sleep. His hotel overlooked a street where a generator had run beneath the window until shortly before dawn. At breakfast a waiter had advised him that the quieter rooms were quieter only when the building's air-conditioning worked. He rather liked the place, though he suspected his enthusiasm would benefit from another night's rest. The institution occupied a low building away from the principal tourist routes, with workrooms that had been adapted over time to accommodate collections their original planners hadn't anticipated. Cassius had walked past a small exhibition on Bahamian maritime trade before being admitted to the reading room. A group of schoolchildren had been discussing a photograph of a cargo schooner with much greater energy than the accompanying label required. One boy had wanted to know whether the vessel could outrun a motorboat. The guide had said that depended upon the motorboat, which struck Cassius as an excellent answer. On the table now lay the reason for his journey: forty-odd written leaves, some numbered twice, the edges rubbed and discoloured, held in a later binding whose covers had been detached long before the current examination. A pilot's private account, according to the label in the collection. The dating remained provisional. The suggestion that it described an undocumented Spanish voyage near Bimini in 1514 or 1515 was more provisional still. He had come because the document contained a small accumulation of things that did not belong comfortably together. Descriptions of islands and banks, a reported landfall following a violent storm, a damaged vessel seeking water and shelter. Then the sailor, who by the pilot's account had not been expected to recover, drinking from a flask brought out of a cavern and becoming conspicuously younger and stronger before the other men had finished preparing a place to bury him. 'What do you make of it?' the manager asked. 'I've got several opinions, none of them worth charging for yet.' Cassius turned the photograph until the inked lines sat square to the light. 'The translation says he was cured. Your transcriber was careful to note that the actual wording is less emphatic. The pilot describes what the man did, and how he looked. The judgement belongs to whoever read it afterwards.' 'I thought we invited you because you were prepared to make judgements.' 'I'm prepared to charge for them. I like to know what I'm buying first.' She laughed, then went to answer the telephone again. A cleaner appeared in the corridor, manoeuvring a bin past the stalled trolley. Cassius returned to the pages. Beside the extraordinary account lay a routine notation about freshwater, one source close to the cavern's outer passage and another found farther within. The pilot had not explained why the men had collected water from both, or what led them to carry a flask from the inner one back to the ship. The entry had been copied in a different shade of ink, but the letter forms appeared to belong to the same hand. Cassius added a question mark in his notebook rather than deciding whether the distinction mattered. The surviving text described the storm without much sentiment. A spar had cracked, the vessel had lost its bearing for part of a night, and an attempt to take a sounding had nearly cost a sailor his fingers. When land appeared, the pilot estimated their position from a course he admitted had become unreliable. Cassius appreciated the admission. Mariners could be as reluctant as archaeologists to record uncertainty, particularly when later readers might judge their competence by it. A scrap of paper had been inserted between two photographed leaves when the collection was first documented. It bore a later hand's brief description, in Spanish, identifying the writing as an account of islands north of Cuba and an extraordinary recovery. That was useful evidence of how a past owner had understood it, but it did not settle where the voyage had gone. Cassius had seen family libraries produce rather firmer claims from far less. His phone vibrated beside his notebook. Harriet Denby had sent a message from York asking whether he had encountered a real fountain yet or was merely enjoying a trip to somewhere warm. He replied that the fountain was presently occupying the same category as an accurate airline departure time: reported by several people, not independently verified. A second message arrived before he could return the phone to his bag. Had he eaten? He replied that he had, carefully leaving out how much. At eleven, the collections manager returned with a man carrying a set of photographs and a complaint about the scanner. His description of the problem was specific enough to make Cassius suspect the equipment had been failing for some time. The manager promised to send somebody from maintenance. Cassius had enough material for the moment, so she left the machine to its troubles. 'I've enough to keep me out of trouble.' He considered the manuscript. 'If anything, slightly too much.' The man left with the photographs he had brought, having discovered they were the wrong set. The manager watched him go. 'He's very good at his job. The machine has decided to make it difficult.' 'I know a departmental photocopier with similar ambitions.' She found him a newer set of images on a laptop and showed him the places where the manuscript had been sewn into its later cover. At some point the original leaves had been gathered and rearranged; an owner had added a paper strip to strengthen a damaged fold. The pilot's account might therefore have lost pages before it reached its present form. There were also passages where an early reader had marked the margin in red. Cassius wanted to see those in better light, but the manuscript was being examined under agreed handling limits. He made a list and left the pages alone. By lunchtime he had established little that the preliminary report didn't already allow. The manuscript used the language of an experienced mariner, and many of its observations sat comfortably in the early Spanish Caribbean. Whether this was the pilot's own account, a later copy or a careful compilation would take more work to establish. The miraculous sailor had evidently appealed to at least one past owner, but Cassius kept returning to the route. If the man really had sailed these waters, some of the places he described ought to withstand a comparison with the islands themselves. The collections manager had arranged for him to eat with two members of staff in a small place across the road. He found them midway through an argument about a local football fixture, interrupted by the arrival of their plates. A television above the counter was showing a cricket match from somewhere overcast. Cassius, who had expected fish and ordered it, received something with a much more generous amount of pepper than the menu had suggested. He was halfway through the meal before he realised he had been drinking from the wrong glass. His neighbour laughed and swapped it back. They asked what he thought of the Spanish manuscript. He told them there were several interesting questions and that he would prefer to be right about one of them before announcing the others. Nobody seemed disappointed. Instead one of the men described a tourist who had demanded to be shown an eighteenth-century treasure chest after mistaking a harbour buoy for evidence of a wreck. Cassius contributed an account of a carved stone in Yorkshire which three successive catalogues had confidently identified as three different saints. By the time they returned, the conversation had moved to an unreliable office air-conditioner and a cousin who was threatening to repair it with parts from his fishing boat. The afternoon passed more quickly. Cassius worked through the pilot's navigational entries, extracting directions and estimated distances into a separate sequence. The initial storm had damaged more than the ship; it had shaken the reliability of every subsequent course. One stretch appeared to place the vessel west of where the next observation suggested it should be. The pilot had included a description of a low break in the reef, an approach through shallow water and an inlet whose orientation Cassius could not reconcile with the charts he had brought. He pulled a sheet towards him and tried another arrangement. It was tempting to correct the pilot's figures until the voyage ended somewhere familiar. He had watched scholars do the equivalent to old road maps, and the results were often impressively tidy. They could also be wholly imaginary. Instead he kept the observations in their recorded order and wrote down which assumptions caused the difficulties. The collections manager brought him tea in a mug with a chipped blue rim. She had finally given him her name again while signing an access form, and he had committed it to memory with some relief. He thanked her and showed her the two possible courses on his sheet. 'Both take them to Bimini?' she asked. 'If I'm generous about the distances. One of them also puts them on the wrong side of a reef.' 'People have been finding themselves on the wrong side of reefs here for a long time.' 'Yes, but I'd rather not begin by accusing the man of carelessness. He'd had an unpleasant night, by the sound of it.' 'And a sick sailor.' She looked down at the page marked with the extraordinary account. 'You've not said much about that part.' 'I haven't any way of testing it. People recover unexpectedly from illnesses. People also misremember how ill someone was. He may have written it exactly as he saw it, or he may have been trying to make an ordinary event sound remarkable.' 'Would you have crossed an ocean for an ordinary event?' 'I've crossed one for things considerably less entertaining.' He took his tea. 'A genuine pilot's account of an unrecorded voyage would justify the trip. The sailor is a complication.' She took that well enough and went back to her work. Near closing time Cassius compared the two passages describing the water. The first was practical: what could be carried, where the men had obtained it, how the barrels were filled. The second had a different texture. The pilot had recorded the report of someone who went farther into the cavern and found water flowing into a small basin in the rock. This was the water given to the sick man. The pilot's manuscript did not call it the Fountain of Youth. That name had appeared in a later collector's note, written by someone who had already heard the legend and wanted to recognise it. Cassius put the photographs into their numbered order. He had spent a long day in the company of people who were professionally interested in preventing a fragile old book from being turned into a headline, and he liked them for it. He was leaving when the manager reminded him that a maritime archaeologist would be joining them the next morning. 'Dr Pinder,' she said. 'She's been looking at the navigational descriptions independently. I thought the two of you ought to compare notes.' 'Has she reached a conclusion?' 'You can ask her. She was rather interested in why nobody had asked someone who works on these waters.' 'An entirely fair question.' Outside, the late afternoon traffic was working its way through Nassau at a pace that gave pedestrians ample time to reconsider crossing the road. Cassius walked back towards his hotel by a longer route than necessary, passing shops whose shutters were being drawn down and a delivery driver arguing cheerfully with the owner of a parked car. He bought a bottle of water from a small grocery and stopped beneath a tree to check the pilot's course once more. In the manuscript, the vessel had come through bad weather and found a place that allowed its crew to survive. Their record had now survived long enough to puzzle a man standing beside a street in Nassau with an inaccurate map on his telephone. He put the phone away. There were enough wrong assumptions on his sheet already without adding the ones supplied by a small glowing screen. He had arranged to be back at nine, and hoped Dr Pinder might enjoy disagreeing with him more than the manuscript had.