Contents
Copyright
Title Page
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
THE END (OR NOT)
Barracuda’s Glossary
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Landmarks
Cover
Table of Contents
Title-Page
Frontmatter
Start of Content
Original title: El tesoro de Barracuda
© Llanos Campos, 2014
© Júlia Sardà, 2014
© Ediciones SM, 2014
English translation Copyright © 2014 by Little Pickle Press, Inc.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in an information retrieval system in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, taping, and recording, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in Publication Data is available.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number on file.
ISBN 978-939775-14-6
Little Pickle Press, Inc.
3701 Sacramento Street #494
San Francisco, CA 94118 US
Please visit us at www.bigdillstories.com
Prologue
I’m going to tell you a story that I’m sure will seem incredible in many places. I know this, and it’s not surprising because it’s a story full of journeys to the end of the world, of winds that drive the bravest of men mad, of lost islands, and of sleepless nights beneath millions of stars. If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, if I hadn’t walked there with my own feet, it would seem incredible to me, too.
I can assure you, though, that what you are going to read is completely true. As true as the sea is salty and the sky is blue, and that the blackest eyes I’ve ever seen were those of an old woman named Dora, in Barbados. You don’t yet know me, but you’ll learn that I never, ever lie. And it’s not because my parents taught me to behave this way (I never knew them), but because I’ve learned, after dealing with liars of all sorts, that lies bring problems for only one person: the one who speaks the lie. Believe me, you’ll never get anywhere through a lie, no matter how good it seems to you. Sooner or later, someone will turn up who knows the truth, and then you’ll have so many problems that you’ll wish you had kept your mouth shut.
But let’s leave the lessons for later. For now, I just want to give you a warning: if you come along with me, you’ll need to be attentive and clever because we’re going to visit dangerous places where you’ll meet some people I wouldn’t recommend meeting. I will guide you on the journey, and it’s best if you heed me because, where we’re going, mistakes can be quite costly, and there are no second chances.
To begin, I’ll give you two pieces of advice that will serve you anywhere you go: one, never sit in a tavern with your back to the door; and two, when you’re introduced to someone new, never open your mouth first. It’s better to let the other person speak for a while until they no longer know what to say. Then an uncomfortable silence takes place, and just after it, if you manage to remain quiet a little longer, the other person will tell you something important, some secret that you can use later. This is because pirates hate silence. They’re quarrelsome and noisy sorts, and they don’t like to think too much.
Because (did I forget to say so earlier?) this is a story about pirates—with their ships, their eye patches, their wooden legs, and their hidden treasures.
I know, I know! You’re going to tell me that you’ve already heard this story a thousand times, but I can assure you that you haven’t. This will be, I promise, the strangest story of pirates you’ll ever hear, even if you were to live a thousand years and travel to the last port of the Caribbean, listening to everyone who had something to say. I swear on it.
There was never a captain like Barracuda, there was never another adventure like ours, and no one could ever tell it better than I, who was there since the beginning.
The beginning . . . Yes . . . All this began . .
. just like this . . .
“Blasted freshwater fishermen! And you call yourselves pirates?” Captain Barracuda shouted from the bridge. “I swear I’ll hang anyone who abandons his station from the mizzen!”
The entire crew of the Southern Cross was terrified and shook in their boots. Barracuda was the pirate most feared by other pirates. Clever and merciless, he boasted of having no friends. His face was crisscrossed with scars. His left hand was missing, and in its place was an enormous, rusty hook. No one ever dared to ask him how he had lost it, so there were many legends about the matter.
“But, Captain . . . ,” Nuño, an old Spaniard who had sailed the Seven Seas, dared to say. “We’ve been sailing for ten days with no sign of the wretched island of Kopra. The men doubt if it really exists. Perhaps we should turn around . . . ”
The pirates began shouting, protesting, and cursing in Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and English. So much swearing in so many languages that it’s impossible for me to write it all down here.
“By all the devils of the sea,” Barracuda roared, banging the ship’s helm with his hook. “If you lot don’t stop whining, I’ll send you to swim with the sharks! I tell you that the island exists! And that it’s there, right in front of your dirty noses! This ship will reach Kopra, even if I have to sail it alone! Whoever doesn’t want to go can swim back to Maracaibo! I won’t tolerate a mutiny on board!”
At that moment, Two Molars shouted from the crow’s nest: “Land ahoy! To port! Yes! Land!”
For a moment, there was such a silence that you could have heard a cockroach scuttling.
“To your places, you slimy sardines,” shouted Captain Barracuda. And as if they had gone mad, the pirates began running from one end of the deck to the other.
Among the pirates, a young one with a face full of freckles, green eyes, and a head full of red curls tugged on the cords that released the sails. That was me, Sparks. I was eleven-years-old and had been part of this crew since I was eight. Nuño had found me in a port on Española Island, where I’d been abandoned to my luck at some point I can’t remember, and the other pirates had let me stay. At first, I gutted fish, helped in the kitchen, and swabbed the deck. Without complaining. That’s why, finally, those men began to treat me with something like affection (pirate affection, you understand: knocks on the head, tugs at the ear, and slaps on the back). Little by little, they were willing to teach me things about the pirate profession. No one knows my name from before; even I don’t remember it. So they called me Sparks (because of my red hair), and nothing more was said about the matter. So, if you suddenly read “we disembarked” or “we entered into battle,” don’t think that I’m exaggerating or lying. I was there.
But let’s not get distracted from the story. We approached the island of Kopra. It was, as Barracuda had told us, barely a small pile of sand in the middle of the sea. We brought the ship in until the keel scraped the sandy bottom and then we lowered the boats. In them, piled together like the hairs of a beard, we rowed to the beach. Fifty-three pirates disembarked on that little island, and it was so crowded, it was fit to bursting. And if you tripped, there wasn’t even room to fall. The captain commanded us to encircle the island and to stand in knee-deep water. So that’s what we did. Then, Barracuda started counting off giant strides: two to the south, ten to the east, five to the north, two complete somersaults over his left shoulder, and two leaps backward on one leg.
Boasnovas, also called One-Eyed because, well, he had only one eye, was tempted to laugh, but he controlled himself. It wasn’t time for jokes.
“Here it is!” Barracuda said, using his hook to mark an X in the sand. “Right here! Start digging!”
We took turns digging. While two dug, another two pushed the sand excavated from the hole to the sea. The rest of us stood looking on from the water’s edge. It was such a small area; no one else could fit on the island. No one thought that such a tiny island could be so deep, but it took seven turns of two men digging until, finally, one of the shovels hit something solid. It then took five pirates to pull it out of the hole.
It was an enormous black chest and as heavy as if the entire Dutch Antilles was inside it. Fifty-two pairs of eyes (plus Boasnovas’s single eye) were fixated on it. If Barracuda was telling the truth (and nobody had ever caught him in a lie), then on that day all those pirates had just become filthy rich, so rich that they could leave behind a life of wandering the seas, if that’s what they wanted. Because inside that dark wooden box was the famous treasure of Phineas Krane, the oldest pirate to have sailed the South Seas. And it was buried there because, as everyone knew, Phineas Krane died while boarding a Dutch vessel, right as he retired to enjoy his old age. Many had searched for the treasure since then, but only clever Barracuda had believed an old man who, in jail on the island of Tortuga, shouted at all hours that he knew exactly where Krane’s treasure was.
“Fry me in pig fat!” Nuño the Spaniard exclaimed, with a smile that stretched from ear to ear. “He told the truth! That crazy old codger from Tortuga told the truth! Phineas Krane’s treasure!”
A monumental ruckus erupted. Everyone cheered loudly for Barracuda, crying “Hurrah!” and “Bravo!” Then, the captain, using his hook as a lever, busted the lock on the coffer and lifted the heavy lid. The hinges let loose a rusty squeal.
If you had been there at that moment, you would have seen the most surprised group of pirates in the world, standing with their mouths and eyes opened wider than you would ever think was possible. Fifty-three defrauded pirates, that’s what you would have seen. Because there, in the bottom of the enormous chest, was . . . a book! That was it! Phineas’ treasure was a blasted book!
“Does anyone know how to read?” One-Legged Jack asked in a low voice.
We looked at one another.
“Well . . . I . . . a little,” old Two Molars answered, and he picked up the book. He stared at it so intently; it looked as if his eyes were going to pop out. He read out loud in fits and starts: “My . . . Li-uf . . . as a . . . Pi . . . Pi . . . rate. by Phi . . . Phineas John . . . Johnson . . . Kra . . . ne.”
By that point, Barracuda was as red as a chili pepper. “A book? Years searching for a wretched book?” Barracuda screamed. The buttons of his jacket were ready to explode.
“Yes, Captain, but a book written by him,” Nuño whispered. “They say there are writers who get rich that way . . . ”
Then, Barracuda suffered a complete breakdown. He began to run like a madman, almost without moving from where he was, since as I’ve already explained, it was a minuscule island. With knees pumping high and arms flailing, he looked like he was being attacked by thousands of invisible ants. The crew, staring in disbelief, either cried about the treasure or laughed hysterically at the captain’s antics.
The journey back to Maracaibo was terrible. We didn’t dare open our mouths. It was the most silent crossing that had ever taken place on board a pirate ship, which is a noisy place, even at night. Because (let me tell you what almost no book ever reveals) pirates snore like mad. It’s true! If you manage to sleep an entire night through while surrounded by these men, I assure you that you’d be able to sleep even inside the entrails of an active volcano.
But that’s how the Southern Cross sailed—as if the entire crew had disappeared or died. It was almost funny to see men as large as mountains walking with care, almost on tiptoe, to avoid making the slightest noise on deck. For John the Whale, it was difficult to be stealthy; after all, he weighed one-hundred-and-fifty kilos and was more than two meters tall. So, he earned aggravated scoldings and slaps on the head from the other pirates.
The Barracuda was livid, and the pirates were terrified of his wrath. For an entire week after the Kopra debacle, the captain was holed up in his cabin, pacing back and forth and cursing in Turkish (his mother tongue, which he seldom used). Boasnovas, who was the cook as well as the artilleryman, deliver
ed the captain his food. With a knot in his throat, Boasnovas opened the door just a bit, left the plate on the floor, and then quickly shut the door. Like what one does with a wild beast. A terrible silence ensued for a few days in the captain’s quarters. Then one day, without warning, Barracuda finally emerged on deck carrying a mountain of plates.
“What the devil is going on here? Lousy lazybones! We should have reached Maracaibo a day ago! Nuño? Where’s Nuño?”
The pirates pointed at the Spaniard, who, at that precise moment, was coming up from the hold. Nuño froze in place, holding the cord for which he had been searching.
“What . . . What’s the matter?” he asked, nervously looking at his companions.
“The matter is that no one here does any work the moment I turn my back,” Barracuda said, angrily lowering the tone of his voice. “The matter is that we’re a day and a half late! That’s what’s the matter!”
“But, Captain . . . There’s no wind and . . . ”
“Excuses! That’s the only thing you lot know how to do—make excuses! If there’s no wind, then blow. I want to reach Maracaibo as soon as possible.” He took a step and smashed some of the plates. “Someone clean up this mess!”
Barracuda returned to his cabin and slammed the door. The sun began to set, and then, perhaps not wanting to oppose the captain any longer, the wind, at last, began to blow and fill the sails. The ship picked up speed. Gathered in the prow, the men whispered to one another, trying to figure out Barracuda’s plans. I was there, and I can say that no one correctly guessed what he was going to do. Nobody knew why he was in such a hurry all of a sudden. For years, the captain had searched for Phineas Krane’s treasure without rest. He intentionally had himself arrested in Tortuga to extract information from that old prisoner. Barracuda had heard about the crazy old guy, by chance, while in San Juan. Many of the Southern Cross pirates had followed Barracuda for many years because of his blind faith that he’d find Krane’s lost treasure.
And now, those men were heading full tilt back to Maracaibo, with no plans beyond docking at the port and drinking jugs of rum. They were beyond disoriented. When at last we saw the lights of the port, it was late at night. Barracuda, as if someone had warned him, emerged from his cabin and in two strides, climbed to the bridge, grabbed the helm, and directed the docking maneuvers.