The Simeon Chamber (6 page)

“What possessed him to come up here?” asked Bogardus. “I thought all of the gold in 45

the Americas, at least at that time, was in Mexico with the Aztecs or in Peru with the Incas.”

“True, but Drake didn’t know that. All he knew was that the Spaniards were pulling a king’s ransom in silver from their mines in Peru. He’d heard stories about Inca and Aztec cities awash in gold. For all he knew the entire west coast of the Americas was sprinkled with the stuff like manna from heaven.” Nick used his napkin to catch sandwich relish as it dripped down his beard. “But he had a more practical reason for coming north.”

There was a blank look in Nick’s eyes as his mind was transported to another age, and his cadence slowed.

“After he navigated his way through the Straits of Magellan, Drake had a field day sacking Spanish villages and plundering their sea traffic off Peru, Chile, and right up to the Isthmus of Panama. He caught a Manila galleon north of Panama in Mexican waters coming the other way and parted it from its cargo.

The Spanish had no warships in the Pacific at that time—there was no need. No English ship had ever sailed that far west before. But Drake had a problem.”

He paused and shot a sideways glance at Sam. “By the time he reached California the Spanish had assembled a veritable armada to track him down, and Drake needed to find an eastward passage through North America in the worst way. It would have been the fastest way back to England. The fabled search for a Northwest Passage was not the noble quest one reads about in most history books, at least not as far as Drake was concerned.”

Nick picked up his fork and chased a French fry around his plate.

“Most scholars don’t believe that Drake ever intended to sail around the world,” said Nick. “What he really had was a little larceny in his heart and a quick getaway on his mind. We know from records that he went as far north as the Oregon coast, but the weather turned foul so he came back south. His ultimate trek across the Pacific was born of practical necessity.

It was either that or decorate the end of a Spanish pike.” Nick sipped his beer and gobbled the last bite of his sandwich.

Sam had only picked around the edges of his lunch and half of his sandwich remained on his plate.

“You gonna eat that?” asked Nick.

Sam smiled. “No, you go ahead.” The vision of bloody heads hoisted on sharpened spears had curbed Bogardus’s appetite.

Nick plucked the sandwich from the plate and went to work on it. He spoke with his mouth full. “From everything we know, Drake had about thirty tons of gold, silver, precious gems and other treasure on board the
Golden
Hinde when he finally landed at Nova Albion. He had to careen his ship—scrape the bottom and patch it—and gather provisions for the Pacific crossing. We don’t know exactly what went on during the period that he stayed in California. We know he was here for more than a month, but the theories on where he landed and where he pitched his camp are as numerous as the scholars studying the question.”

“I thought you guys at Berkeley had a plate of some kind left behind by Drake?”

“The brass plate,” said Nick. “a fellow found it near Novato, twenty miles inland, in 1937, and for a while it looked like it might provide some answers, though no one could say why it wasn’t found closer to the coast or the bay. After some debate and a lot of publicity in the papers, another man came forward and said he’d found the plate a couple of years earlier nearer the coast and that he’d carried it around in his car for a time before tossing it out on the highway thinking it was a piece of junk. There’s a lot of conjecture about the plate, but metallurgical tests on the age of the brass indicate it’s not old enough to be authentic. Besides, it doesn’t answer the question of where Drake landed. Archaeologists have scoured the area near Novato where the plate was found and sampled the place near the coast where the second man said he first picked it up and they’ve come up with nothing.”

He paused to take another bite. “There’s probably only one thing that can ever settle the dispute as to where Drake landed,” said Nick.

“What’s that?”

“Drake’s journal.”

“Well, I would assume that he kept a ship’s log.”

“This was no ship’s log. It was a detailed journal containing entries of the most minute 49

details of his voyage. A personal diary, if you will, chronicling his innermost thoughts and fears, his private conversations with other officers, his dealings with indigenous peoples at each landing. There’s just one hitch.” Nick looked up at Bogardus. “Nobody knows where it is. We know the book existed because several crew members wrote and talked about it after the
Hinde reached England. There are a number of theories on what happened to it. Some believe that Drake destroyed it himself in order to embellish upon the trip in later writings. Others think that it was confiscated by the king of France when Drake landed there on his return to England. The journal is reputed to have contained meticulous notes on all of the exploits of the trip, including drawings, in Drake’s own hand, in the margins. It seems the captain fancied himself a real …” Nick’s sentence trailed off and his gaze lifted to engage Sam’s eyes directly. Sam’s jaw sagged. “… artist,” Nick finished the sentence.

Before Nick could say another word Sam had retrieved the brown leather briefcase. Nick pushed the plates to one side and mopped up the water condensation from under the glasses. Sam spread the parchments on the table and both men sat and stared in disbelief. There in the margins of each of the four pages were small, delicate ink drawings, one of a bird of prey perched on a stand, an object clutched in its talons, another showing human figures gathered behind tall grass and still another depicting a small boat or canoe. In all there were seven miniature ink drawings on the four pages. 2

Threading his way through traffic onto the Bay Bridge, Bogardus wondered what connection could exist between a sixteenth-century manuscript and the disappearance of a naval officer three hundred years later. He was confident that the pages that he’d left with Nick would be deciphered by experts, but would they reveal anything?

As he approached the Treasure Island off-ramp from the bridge, Sam moved into the right lane and took the winding road down toward the naval base. He was stopped by a marine at the gate.

“Can I help you, sir?”

Sam looked up into the bright glare of the afternoon sun and shaded his eyes with his hand. “I’m here to look at some records of a naval board of inquiry convened back during World War Two. Do you know where I can get some information?”

“Yes sir, you might try Fleet Operations Building, the public information counter. They can probably help you.” The marine quickly gave directions, and five minutes later Sam was at the counter being assisted by a young sailor. He was ushered down a long corridor and asked to take a seat in a small reception area.

After several minutes a young officer approached Sam.

“Mr. Bogardus, I’m Lieutenant Keenan, attached to the Judge Advocate General’s staff, Sixth Fleet. How can I help you?”

The officer was in his late twenties, impeccable in his attire, with straight dark hair parted neatly on the left—a preppie who had traded in his tweed jacket and argyle socks for a uniform.

“Hello, Lieutenant.” Sam flashed a broad grin. “I’m here doing some investigation on a case.” He pulled a business card from the breast pocket of his suit coat and passed it to the officer. “I’m looking for the official records of a naval board of inquiry that convened back in 1942. It involved the loss of a naval blimp that crashed in a residential part of San Francisco. I believe the crew was lost.”

A slight smile began to form around the corners of the officer’s mouth. “Why is everybody so excited about that blimp after all these years?

You’re the second person to ask about those records in the last week.”

“Oh?” said Sam. “Who was the first?”

“A gentleman who was in here a few days ago. We don’t get requests for case files that old very often. The man seemed to know exactly what he was looking for. He had the whole nine yards on the case when he walked in, even the file number. Otherwise we’d still be looking.”

“Do you have a name, anything?”

The officer looked quizzically at Sam.

“On the other man I mean, any name?”

“Oh, let me look.”

The officer moved to the counter and looked 53

at a large journal that lay open facing the other direction. He turned it around, flipped one page and ran his finger down the column. “Here it is, Mr. George Johnson, 1420

Olstead Street, San Francisco, California.”

Sam opened his briefcase, took out a note pad and entered the name of George Johnson and the address from the book.

“Would you like to see the file?” asked the officer. “I think it’s still in the reading room. We haven’t had a chance to refile it in archives yet.”

Sam followed the officer down a well-lit corridor and into a room with another counter and several library tables surrounded by chairs.

The officer went behind the counter and rummaged through a stack of files on a metal cart.

“Yes, here it is.” The file was not voluminous, only one single manila folder, legal length and no more than an inch thick, a product of the period before commercial copying machines and word processors, when hearings and trials took days not months to complete.

“Here, if you’ll sign this card I’ll take your business card and have the clerk at the front counter enter the information in our log. You can take the file to a table and if you need any copying just ring the bell on the counter and a clerk will assist you.

Is there anything else I can do for you, Mr. Bogardus?”

“No, I don’t think so. It’ll just take me a few minutes.” Sam was actually surprised. Having heard the horror stories about the military, he’d expected a raft of red tape and delays. Instead he had everything he could ask for, all wrapped up in an attitude of professional courtesy that was unheard of at the county courthouse, where he knew most of the clerks by their first names.

He sat at the table, opened the file and began flipping through the papers. There were a number of statements from eyewitnesses who had seen the blimp hit the beach by the Great Highway, and statements from others who had watched it drift aimlessly over the city before coming to rest on Bellevue Avenue.

Sam scanned the statements quickly, looking for some key, some piece of information that might help him find a thread that could lead to Jennifer Davies’s father. But there was nothing unusual.

The typed record of the formal hearings before the board of inquiry was fixed by a metal fastener to the back cover of the file folder. It took Sam twenty minutes to canvass the double-spaced transcript. The document contained a bland account of the events leading up to the crash, from flight preparations early in the morning of August 16, 1942, to the mopping up of the destroyed airship several days later. In its findings the board concluded that the two crew members, Lieutenant James Spencer and Chief Petty Officer Raymond Slade, were lost at sea during a routine antisubmarine patrol at an unknown location off the Pacific coast near San Francisco, California. The cause of the accident—”Unknown.” The board seemed particularly puzzled by the fact that the normal three-man flight crew had been pared to two members on the day of the accident. For some unexplained reason Slade had instructed the flight engineer to step out of the craft just seconds before it lifted off the runway. The engineer would no doubt spend the balance of his life wondering why he had been spared, thought Bogardus. Slade and Spencer knew something that day. But what?

The file contained a number of yellowed news clippings, the earliest dated August 17, 1942, the day following the crash. Several of the clippings showed faded pictures of the ill-fated craft drifting over the city. Other photos captured the gondola teetering on its single-wheel landing gear, the deflated gray envelope of the airship draped over it. Sam’s eyes passed from the pictures to the news clippings with their bold headlines: U.S. NAVY BLIMp FALLS In DALY CITY; CREW MISSINg Patrol Craft Hits House in Street Crash

A derelict navy blimp, its crew of two missing, drifted in from the ocean and crashed into the street in Daly City yesterday. Sagging in the middle like a broken cigar, with big rips visible in the bag and its motors idle, the blimp wandered crazily at treetop height over the Lake Merced area and drew a throng of

hundreds pursuing it by automobile and afoot before it came gently to earth on a suburban street …”

Several hours later, no trace had been found of the crew, although a continuing search was in progress at sea and in the area surrounding the crash scene. All of the parachutes and the rubber raft were found in the gondola. Two life belts were missing.

The news stories concerning the crash declined in intensity as the days passed, and they gradually slipped from the front page to the inside columns.

They told of a depth charge from the blimp found on the property of a local country club. The navy scrambled to come up with theories for the crash to explain the missing crew. But none of them fit the facts of a perfectly airworthy ship, its engines in working order with a full tank of fuel. Microscopic and chemical tests ruled out the possibility that the craft went down at sea before being blown back over the coast. There were no traces of salt water anywhere on the blimp.

Sam continued to pick through the file. It contained a number of pieces of correspondence—

telegrams and letters—to family members and next of kin. One letter was addressed to “Mrs.

James Spencer,” informing her that it was the conclusion of the board that her husband had been lost at sea while on patrol. Sam guessed that this was the letter that Jennifer Davies was shown by her mother as a child. There was another letter dated a week later. Sam read the half-page document: Dear Mrs. Spencer:

I write to convey my deepest sympathies on the loss of your husband. All of us who knew Jim greatly admired him. I have been asked to go through his personal belongings at the base and return them to you. Enclosed you will find an inventory of these items, which will be delivered to you by courier in a few days. If there is anything that I can do please do not hesitate to call on me. Captain Jack Caulford U.S.N.