Read Online Beast by Peter Benchley - Free Book Online Page B

commercial tour group on the island, ridden a motorbike around every square inch of the place, visited every fort and museum, spent money in every saloon—he had no moral objection to becoming a drunk, but he had no tolerance for liquor and didn’t like the taste of it—and seen every movie in the base video store except those involving the ax murder of baby-sitters. He read for hours every day, till his eyes rebelled and his ass atrophied. He was on the brink of doing the unthinkable— taking up golf—when he met Whip at a base function.
    He had listened, fascinated, to Whip’s discourse on the techniques of discovering shipwrecks and had asked enough intelligent questions to secure an invitation to come out on the boat some Sunday … which had quickly become every Sunday and most Saturdays. As he listened to Whip, he learned, and, curiously, he found himself becoming ashamed of his education. For, here was a man with six years’ schooling who had taught himself to be not just a fisherman and a diver but a historian and a biologist and a numismatist and… well, a walking encyclopedia of the sea.
    Sharp had offered to contribute to the cost of Darling’s fuel and been turned down; he had offered to help paint the boat and been accepted, which pleased him because it made him feel like a participant instead of a parasite. Then Whip had shown him photographs of what old shipwrecks looked like from the air, and suddenly—as if a door had cracked open, lighting a corner of his mind he had not known was there—he saw the prospect of new interests, new goals.
    Whip taught him not to look for the classic fairy-tale image of a shipwreck—the ship upright and ready on its keel, sails rigged, tricorn-hatted skeletons sitting where they died gambling over a stack of doubloons. The old ships had been wooden, and, for the most part, the ones that hit Bermuda sank in shallow water. Storm seas broke them to pieces, and centuries of moving water had dispersed them and pressed them into the bottom, and the bottom had absorbed them and corals grew on them, taking the dead to their bosoms.
    There were three main telltales, Whip had said, to a shipwreck on the bottom. When a ship was driven over the reefs—flung by the wind, shoved by a following sea—it would crush the reef, kill the fragile corals and leave a scrub mark that, from a couple of hundred feet in the air, would look like a giant tire track.
    A sharp eye might see a cannon or two, overgrown and coral-encrusted and looking like not much more than an unlikely mass in an unnaturally straight line. There was truth to the old saying that nature doesn’t like straight lines. But the presence of a cannon didn’t always mean the ship itself was nearby, because when a vessel was in its last throes, often the crew would heave everything heavy overboard to keep her from capsizing. It was possible to find a cannon here, an anchor there, and no ship at all if the sea had carried her miles away before slamming her down and busting her to bits in her last resting place.
    What was a dead giveaway—visible from the air but most difficult to identify—was a ballast pile, for Whip insisted that where a ship dropped her ballast was where she had died. Yes, her deck might have drifted away, or her rigging, carrying a survivor or two, but her heart and soul—her cargo, her treasure—lay with her ballast. Usually, the old-timers ballasted with river rocks from the Thames or the Ebro or one of the other rivers near their home ports. The rocks were smooth and round and small enough for a man to lift. Think of cobblestones, Whip told Sharp, because all the cobblestones in places like Nantucket had been ballast stones, carried in the bowels of a ship to keep her upright on her way over from England, then replaced with barrels of oil for the journey home.
    So what Sharp conditioned himself to look for was a gathering of very round stones all piled together, often in a white sand hole between dark coral