Read Online Island of Thieves by Josh Lacey - Free Book Online Page B

with bandy legs and two tiny horns. Next to it, in the text, my eye was drawn to an ornate capital G, the first letter of a word.
    I could actually read the whole word.
    It said
Golden.
    I could read the next word in the sentence too.
    Hinge.
    What’s a golden hinge?
    Would you find one on a chest filled with gold? Or a chest
made
from gold? A solid-gold chest—that would be worth a fortune!
    Or did it mean something else entirely?
    I read the whole sentence, trying to puzzle out the words on either side of the “golden hinge,” but the handwriting was so curly and scrawled that I could distinguish only a few letters here and there. An “n” or an “m.” An “o.” A “t.” An “ant.” An “st.” A capital letter that might have been an “F” or a “P.”
    I didn’t give up. Letter by letter, I deciphered the entire sentence. Eventually I got back to the word that had first attracted my attention. Reading it again, I realized I had misread one of the letters. It wasn’t a “g.” It was a “d.” I had read “Hinge,” but the word actually said “Hinde.”
    What’s a hinde?
    Dunno.
    And what on earth is a “Golden Hinde”?
    Oh.
    The Golden Hinde.
    Better known without that extra “e” as the
Golden Hind.
    We spent a whole year doing British history at school, so I knew the name, just as I knew the names of Walter Raleigh and William Shakespeare and Mary Queen of Scots. The problem was, apart from their names, I couldn’t remember much else about any of them. If only I’d spent all those lessons listening to Mrs. McNab instead of staring out the window.
    No, wait a minute. I did remember one thing. A hind is a female deer. That explained the picture. And the
Golden Hind
was a ship, captained by Sir Francis Drake.
    What did I know about Drake?
    I could summon up a picture of a guy with a little goatee beard.
    Oh, and a fact! A useful fact! The sort of fact that would get me a big smile from Mrs. McNab. Sir Francis Drake was the first Englishman to sail around the world.
    The writer of these pages might have been a sailor who accompanied Drake.
    Or even Drake himself.
    I piled up the pages and took them inside. Uncle Harvey was just finishing up. The room looked terrible. Plaster was peeling from the walls and the ceiling was dripping with condensation from all the boiling water, but apparently the old folks didn’t mind. For sixty dollars, they would have let us rip the whole house to shreds.
    I showed him what I had discovered. The drawing of the young deer and the words “Golden Hinde.” And I told him my theory.
    Uncle Harvey took the page from me and pored over the words. Then he looked up. “This is very interesting. You might be onto something. I have to confess, Tom, I don’t know very much about Francis Drake. Do you?”
    â€œWe did him at school, but I’ve forgotten it all.”
    Uncle Harvey tapped his forehead as if he were trying to dislodge a blocked chunk of information. “Wasn’t he the first man to sail around the world?”
    â€œI don’t think he was the first man,” I said. “But he was the first Englishman.”
    â€œOh, yes. After Magellan. That’s right. Now I remember. Everyone calls Drake an explorer, but he was really a pirate, wasn’t he? He sailed up the coast of South America, stealing gold from the Spanish.”
    At the same moment, we both realized what he’d said. I could feel laughter bubbling up inside me. Uncle Harvey was grinning too. Suddenly it all made sense. We knew what we’d found and why it was here. Drake’s gold. Buried on an island four hundred years ago and never seen since.
    Now we just had to find it.

13
    We said “Gracias” and “Adiós” to the old chap and his wife, then got into the car and drove down the bumpy track.
    At a curve in the road,