Riptide (2 page)

His curiosity aroused, Rutter enlisted the aid of a brother and returned one Sunday several weeks later with picks and shovels.
Locating the depression in the ground, the men began to dig. After five feet they hit a platform of oak logs. They pulled
up the logs and, with increasing excitement, kept digging. By the end of the day, they had dug almost twenty feet, passing
through layers of charcoal and clay to another oak platform. The brothers went home, intending to renew their digging after
the annual mackerel run. But a week later, Rutter’s brother was drowned when his dory capsized in a freak accident. The pit
was temporarily abandoned.

Two years later, Rutter and a group of local merchants decided to pool their resources and return to the mysterious spot on
Ragged Island. Resuming the dig, they soon reached a number of heavy vertical oak beams and cross-joists, which appeared to
be the ancient cribbing of a backfilled shaft. Precisely how deep the group dug has been lost to history—most estimates assume
close to one hundred feet. At this point they struck a flat rock with an inscription carved into it:

First will y
^e
Lie

Curst shall y
^e
Crye

Worst must y
^e
Die

The rock was dislodged and hoisted to the surface. It has been theorized that the removal of the rock broke a seal, because
moments later, without warning, a flood of seawater burst into the pit. All the diggers escaped—except Simon Rutter. The Water
Pit, as the flooded shaft became known, had claimed its first victim.

Many legends grew up about the Water Pit. But the most plausible held that around 1695, the notorious English pirate Edward
Ockham buried his vast hoard somewhere along the Maine coast shortly before his mysterious death. The shaft at Ragged Island
seemed a likely candidate. Shortly after Rutter’s death, rumors began to circulate that the treasure was cursed, and that
anyone attempting to plunder it would suffer the fate threatened on the stone.

Numerous unsuccessful efforts were made to drain the Water Pit. In 1800, two of Rutter’s former partners formed a new company
and raised money to finance the digging of a second tunnel, twelve feet to the south of the original pit. All went well for
the first hundred feet of digging, at which point they attempted to dig a horizontal passage beneath the original Water Pit.
Their scheme was to tunnel up from underneath the treasure, but as soon as they angled in toward the original pit, the passage
rapidly began filling with water. The men barely escaped with their lives.

For thirty years, the pit lay fallow. Then, in 1831, the Bath Expeditionary Salvage Company was formed by a downstate mining
engineer named Richard Parkhurst. A friend of one of the original merchants, Parkhurst was able to gain valuable information
about the earlier workings. Parkhurst decked over the mouth of the Water Pit and set up a large steam-driven pump. He found
it impossible to drain the seawater Undaunted, he brought in a primitive coal-drilling rig, which he positioned directly over
the Pit. The drill went well beyond the original depth of the Pit, striking planking as deep as 170 feet, until the drill
was stopped by something impenetrable. When the drilling pipe was removed, bits of iron and scales of rust were found jammed
in the torn bit. The pod also brought up putty, cement, and large quantities of fiber This fiber was analyzed and found to
be “manilla grass” or coconut fiber. This plant, which grows only in the tropics, was commonly used as dunnage in ships to
keep cargo from shifting Shortly after this discovery, the Bath Expeditionary Salvage Company went bankrupt and Parkhurst
was forced to leave the island.

In 1840, the Boston Salvage Company was formed and began digging a third shaft in the vicinity of the Water Pit. After only
sixty-six feet, they unexpectedly struck an ancient side tunnel that appeared to lead from the original Pit. Their own shaft
filled instantly with water, then collapsed.

Undaunted, the entrepreneurs dug yet another, very large shaft thirty yards away, which became known as the Boston Shaft.
Unlike earlier tunnels, the Boston Shaft was not a vertical pit, but was instead cut on a slope. Striking a spur of bedrock
at seventy feet, they angled downward for another fifty feet at enormous expense, using augers and gunpowder. Then they drove
a horizontal passage beneath the presumed bottom of the original Water Pit, where they found cribbing and the continuation
of the original backfilled shaft. Excited, they dug downward, clearing the old shaft. At 130 feet they struck another platform,
which they left in place while debating whether to pull it up. But that night, the camp was awakened by a loud rumble. The
diggers rushed out to find that the bottom of the Water Pit had fallen into the new tunnel with such force that mud and water
had been ejected thirty feet beyond the mouth of the Boston Shaft. Among this mud, a crude metal bolt was discovered, similar
to what might be found on a banded sea chest.

Over the next twenty years, a dozen more shafts were dug in an attempt to reach the treasure chamber, all of which flooded
or collapsed. Four more treasure companies went bankrupt. In several cases, diggers emerged swearing that the flooding was
no accident, and that the original builders of the Water Pit had designed a diabolical mechanism to flood any side shafts
that might be dug.

The Civil War brought a brief respite to the diggings. Then, in 1869, a new treasure-hunting company secured the rights to
dig on the island. The dig foreman, F.X. Wrenche, noticed that water rose and fell in the Pit in accordance with the tides,
and theorized that the Pit and its water traps must all be connected to the sea by an artificial flood tunnel. If the tunnel
could be found and sealed, the Pit could be drained and the treasure removed safely. In all, Wrenche dug more than a dozen
exploratory shafts of varying depths in the vicinity of the Water Pit. Many of these shafts encountered horizontal tunnels
and rock “pipes,” which were dynamited in an attempt to stop the water. However, no flood tunnel to the sea was ever found
and the Water Pit remained flooded. The company ran out of money and, like those before, left its machinery behind to rust
quietly in the salt air.

In the early 1880s, Gold Seekers Ltd. was formed by a consortium of industrialists from Canada and England. Powerful pumps
and a new kind of drill were floated out to the island, along with boilers to power them. The company tried boring several
holes into the Water Pit, finally hitting pay dirt on August 23, 1883. The drill came up against the plate of iron that had
defeated Parkhurst’s drill fifty years before. A new diamond bit was fitted and the boilers were stoked to a full head of
steam. This time the drill bored through the iron and into a solid block of a softer metal. When the corer was extracted,
a long, heavy curl of pure gold was found inside its grooves, along with a rotten piece of parchment with two broken phrases:
“silks, canary wine, ivory” and “John Hyde rotting on the Deptford gibbet.”

Half an hour after the discovery was made, one of the massive boilers exploded, killing an Irish stoker and leveling many
of the company’s structures. Thirteen were injured and one of the principals, Ezekiel Harris, was left blinded. Gold Seekers
Ltd. followed its predecessors into bankrupty.

The years immediately before and after 1900 saw three more companies try their luck at the Water Pit. Unsuccessful in duplicating
the discovery of Gold Seekers Ltd., these companies used newly designed pumps in concert with randomly placed underwater charges
in an attempt to seal and drain the waterlogged island. Working at their utmost capacity, the pumps were able to lower the
water level in several of the central shafts by about twenty feet at low tide. Excavators sent down to examine the condition
of the pits complained of noxious gases; several fainted and had to be hauled to the surface. While the last of the three
companies was at work in early September 1907, a man lost one arm and both legs when an explosive charge went off prematurely.
Two days later, a vicious Nor’easter howled up the coast and wrecked the primary pump. Work was abandoned.

Although no more companies came forward, individual diggers and enthusiasts still occasionally dared to try their hands at
exploratory tunnels. By this time, the original location of the Water Pit had been lost among the countless flooded side shafts,
holes, and tunnels that riddled the heart of the island. At last the island was abandoned to the ospreys and the chokecherry
bushes, its very surface unstable and dangerous, shunned by the mainland townspeople. It was in 1940 that Alfred Westgate
Hatch, Sr., a young, wealthy New York financier, brought his family to Maine for the summer. He learned of the island and,
growing intrigued, researched its history. Documentation was spotty: none of the previous companies had bothered to keep careful
records. Six years later, Hatch purchased the island from a land speculator and moved his family to Stormhaven.

As had so many others before him, A. W Hatch, Sr., became obsessed with the Water Pit and was ruined by it. Within two years
the family’s finances had been drained and Hatch was forced to declare personal bankruptcy; he turned to drink and died soon
after, leaving A. W Hatch, Jr., at nineteen, the sole support for his family.

July 1971

M
alin Hatch was bored with summer. He and Johnny had spent the early part of the morning throwing rocks at the hornet’s nest
in the old well-house. That had been fun. But now there was nothing else to do. It was just past eleven, but he’d already
eaten the two peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches his mother had made him for lunch. Now he sat crosslegged on the floating
dock in front of their house, looking out to sea, hoping to spot a battleship steaming over the horizon. Even a big oil tanker
would do. Maybe it would head for one of the outer islands, run aground and blow up. Now
that
would be something.

His brother came out of the house and rattled down the wooden ramp leading to the dock. He was holding a piece of ice on his
neck.

“Got you good,” Malin said, secretly satisfied that he had escaped stinging and that his older, supposedly wiser, brother
had not.

“You just didn’t get close enough,” Johnny said through his last mouthful of sandwich. “Chicken.”

“I got as close as you.”

“Yeah, sure. All those bees could see was your skinny butt running away.” He snorted and winged the piece of ice into the
water.

“No, sir. I was right there.”

Johnny plopped down beside him on the dock, dropping his satchel next to him. “We fixed those bees pretty good though, huh,
Mal?” he said, testing the fiery patch on his neck with one forefinger.

“Sure did.”

They fell silent. Malin looked out across the little cove toward the islands in the bay: Hermit Island, Wreck Island, Old
Hump, Killick Stone. And far beyond, the blue outline of Ragged Island, appearing and disappearing in the stubborn mist that
refused to lift even on this beautiful midsummer day. Beyond the islands, the open ocean was, as his father often said, as
calm as a millpond.

Languidly, he tossed a rock into the water and watched the spreading ripples without interest. He almost regretted not going
into town with his parents. At least it would be something to do. He wished he could be anywhere else in the world—Boston,
New York—anywhere but Maine.

“Ever been to New York, Johnny?” he asked.

Johnny nodded solemnly. “Once. Before you were born.”

What a lie,
Malin thought. As if Johnny would remember anything that had happened when he was less than two years old. But saying so
out loud would be to risk a swift punch in the arm.

Malin’s eye fell on the small outboard tied at the end of the dock. And he suddenly had an idea. A really good idea.

“Let’s take it out,” he said, lowering his voice and nodding at the skiff.

“You’re crazy,” Johnny said. “Dad would whip us good.”

“Come on,” Malin said. “They’re having lunch at the Hastings after they finish shopping. They won’t be back until three, maybe
four. Who’s gonna know?”

“Just the whole town, that’s all, seeing us going out there.”

“Nobody’s gonna be watching,” said Malin. Then, recklessly, he added, “Who’s chicken now?”

But Johnny did not seem to notice this liberty. His eyes were on the boat. “So where do you want to go that’s so great, anyway?”
he asked.

Despite their solitude, Malin lowered his voice further. “Ragged Island.”

Johnny turned toward him. “Dad’ll kill us,” he whispered.

“He won’t kill us if we find the treasure.”

“There’s no treasure,” Johnny said scornfully, but without much conviction. “Anyway, it’s dangerous out there, with all those
pits.”

Malin knew enough about his brother to recognize the tone in his voice. Johnny was interested. Malin kept quiet, letting the
monotonous morning solitude do his persuading for him.