The South Seas

"On the whole it is clear that the financial attractions of privateering were greater than those of the queen's service. In the latter the men were paid ten shillings a month, whereas a single share in a successful privateering cruise would amount to four or five pounds, giving the ordinary seaman twelve or fifteen pounds for a few months' service, quite apart from what he might gather by way of pillage or embezzlement." – from Elizabethan Privateering

Upon the second dive down into such shallow water, the grandfather took an enormous breath.  His lungs were of course not what they used to be -- there had been a time when such a task, a mere six feet below the surface, would have hardly been felt, but there were slight catches in his breath, his sternum perhaps a bit softer now, but there was one thing that had not yet been taken from him, his determination.  He could still see clearly and what was his utter disbelief that now, after thirty three years of coming to the same place, of looking over virtually every inch, secretly, always secretly, of the island, that it would be an accidental dive off of the most obvious shoreline that may have found his privateering ship.  Yes, this was it, he was certain.  In the logs that he had read, it did mention that the English vessel The Jezebel, owned by one Rone Culper, had slipped into these shallow shores in among the hundreds of islands off of Fort Myers in waiting for the Spanish Hispaniola, which carried, if any of the legend could possibly believe, the only great load of gold ever taken from New America in Colorado.  The Spanish had claimed the inner states above Mexico and named it Sante Fe De Nuevo Mexico.  There the mountains were high, the winters unusually dangerous to Conquistadors not prepared for such climate.  They had interacted with Arapaho at modern Boulder enough to learn their trading routes and their stores of buffalo. They had also found, by accident, what was then called the cave of the Mother Lode, supposedly made of gold, which filtered down the Flatirons through its rushing creeks.  It was said, the grandfather knew well, that the Spanish did not have the patience for the mere flakes of gold and forced the Arapaho under harsh circumstance, to lead them up the mountain and to what appeared an "enclosed cave, the entrance no wider than a man's body." Two Spanish witnesses had written that what lay inside was beyond anything yet encountered in the Americas. "Entire walls of only the gem. Torchlight revealed a solid wall of gold." The same two men began an immediate excavation and had even melted many pounds into transportable blocks, only to then disappear after the shipment had arrived at the docks near Tampico, Mexico.  Two months later, it was recorded that the Hispaniola had skirted along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico to the shores near Cape Coral, hidden in among the many islands for repairs before its journey to the other shore and across the Atlantic.  It was here that Culper and his infamous Jezebel laid in waiting for the new Spanish traffic.