“An explosion would frighten anyone,” said Langdon. “You said there were a few incidents. What else happened?”
“One other night a backhoe started zooming toward the house, totally out of control. It hit a sand dune and rolled over long before it reached the house. The sheriff found a whole bunch of shoeprints in the sand where the backhoe had been parked. It looked like some teenagers had started it up and jumped out when they realized they didn’t know how to drive it. Kids, huh.”
There was something about these stories that Langdon wasn’t buying into but whatever it was, it was just a hunch. There was nothing to corroborate the feeling that he had. Cynthia offered another pitcher of Margaritas but Langdon asked for a soft drink instead. He decided he didn’t want to tackle the narrow inlet in Cynthia’s forty-footer unless he was good and sober. Cynthia seemed a bit disappointed but came back from the galley with two cans of Sprite and two glasses full of ice.
“At least the generator is working well.” She smiled as she handed the glass and a can to Langdon but her hand shook and her voice sounded nervous. There was a large crack in the composure she had shown while telling her story about Blackbeard and the Gold Hole.
Bravely, she hoisted a glass and proposed a toast.
“Triple A to the rescue!”
Langdon laughed. Cynthia was troubled but she was still trying to act normally.
“If you had given me one more drink it would have required AA to the rescue, instead.”
Chapter 4
Langdon Sykes
The job of going below and checking the connections and battery levels had already become repetitive and Langdon’s mind wandered.
That was one helluva story Cynthia told, he mused to himself as he puttered around in the engine room.
I wonder if I could attract fourteen wives by growing a massive beard and sticking some slow burning matches under my hat.
Langdon was fairly certain he was having a discussion with the multiple Margaritas but he answered his own question anyway.
No, I’d probably have better luck if I just kept my hair short and my credit card topped up.
Nevertheless, there was something gnawing at his craw about the odd things that had been happening to Cynthia, He rationalized that she had recently lost her husband and that now she was imagining ghosts behind every corner but an alternative thought nagged away.
It could also be that someone is encouraging her to sell her house … along with the Gold Hole that goes with it.
That idea made a bit of sense but he was more than a bit skeptical that Cynthia’s Gold Hole ever held an ounce of gold. That whole part of her story went back to the late 1930’s. Technology wasn’t that great back then. He doubted that a machine then existed that could penetrate forty feet of sand to locate a stash of gold and silver. He was leaning more in the direction that the entire expedition was a hoax, set up to lure in investors. The whole thing, locating the gold, digging a pit, building a coffer damn, pumping out sand …. Everything …. It could have been nothing more than a Ponzi Scheme.
He recalled what he knew about the famous benchmark scheme to which all other cons had been compared.
1921, New York City, a man by the name of Ponzi started promoting a plan involving postal money orders and foreign currencies. He promised huge returns and sure enough, he delivered. At least his initial investors received huge dividends. They bragged about their astute investment-making capabilities and sure enough, more investors lined up for a quick buck. Of course the investment was totally bogus and was never made. It was nothing more than a pyramid. The investors themselves became the venture’s sales force, convinced with dividends that they were making money and encouraging other investors to join in. The pool of capital swelled. For Ponzi, the only cost of doing business was paying the dividend checks. Ponzi finally decided he had enough and took off with the balance of the capital. He swindled millions, and left his investors with absolutely nothing.
Was the Gold Hole just another elaborate hoax? It seemed very likely.
Blackbeard might well have buried his treasure on Topsail Island but Julian S Jacobs claimed he had discovered an entire ship. Blackbeard would never have abandoned a ship, hoping it would sink in the sand. He tried to look at the situation logically. Blackbeard’s career as a pirate lasted less than two and a half years. Given that he seized over fifty ships and sailed from the Caribbean to Canada, stopping to celebrate with fourteen wives along the way ….. exactly when did he have time to bury treasure so deep in wet sand that his engineering marvel could defeat even 1930 technology. Maybe some other pirate with more time on his hands buried treasure that deep …. But not Blackbeard! He either hid his someplace that was easy to get to, or sank it in shallow water in a location he knew he could return to later. No one would leave treasure in an abandoned ship, in water so shallow that the ship would still be visible.
Centuries ago, the difference between the crew and the captain of a ship was that the captain had the ability to navigate. That skill was a safely guarded secret. If Blackbeard did bury his treasure on a remote beach, it was extremely likely that he was the only person who could reasonably return to the exact spot. There are thousands of miles of shoreline along the eastern seaboard and from out at sea, they all look fairly similar. Chances are good that Blackbeard was the only person on board his ship who ever knew exactly where he was. He sure as hell would never leave his treasure in a ship, run aground on a beach. Even if he ran aground by accident, he would have salvaged the treasure and loaded it onto another ship.
Perhaps some other ship was washed ashore. Nothing to do with Blackbeard at all.
That seemed more realistic. Maybe Jacobs did find a shipwreck of part of a Spanish flotilla carrying its treasure back to Spain. Perhaps the crew and officers drowned as the ship broke up against the shore. That was far more plausible. But most likely, he found nothing.
Langdon realized how accurate Cynthia had been when she said that although she really didn’t believe in the treasure, it was a constant source of hope. He acknowledged that at least part of him had been drawn into the trap. Whatever the real source of undiscovered treasure was, nothing stimulates the juices the way pirate’s gold does. Walt Disney knew that! There was no denying that Langdon was intrigued. He wondered if he was developing a Peter Pan and Captain Hook complex. He knew instinctively that Cynthia’s grain of belief in the Gold Hole had, at the very least, caused her to study the history of Blackbeard and probably the history of a multitude of shipwrecks on the Outer Banks.
The batteries were charging exactly as they should but Langdon lingered in the engine room letting thoughts of Blackbeard bounce around in his mind a bit longer. Blackbeard had been a con man of a different era. The way he had befriended Bonnet and offered him a partnership only to run off with both shares of the loot. A simple, unsophisticated con. When he saw the topsails of another ship above the horizon he would have enacted another con. His modus operandi would have been sailing up to his mark under a friendly flag. Then he would have opened his gun ports and run up his own personal Jolly Roger. At effective cannon range his opponents would have seen a fearsome giant of a man dressed up like the devil himself with smoke roiling out from below his hat. What an act! What a con artist Blackbeard must have been. It was a logical step to surmise that Julius S Jacobs had followed in the same footsteps.
Con artists had been around since the beginning of time. History was full of them.