Clive Cussler; Craig Dirgo Read Online Free PDF Page A

Captain René Aigron of the supply ship L’Aimable. Aigron, whose ship was anchored off Port-de-Paix, was separated from the other ships of the fleet by a mix-up in orders. He had traveled by donkey to the other side of the island for the conference.
    “La Salle is touched,” Beaujeu said. “First he refuses permission for us to stop in Madeira, then he bans the sailors from baptizing the passengers as we cross the line into the tropics. Those two rituals are time-honored nautical traditions.”
    Aigron was a short man, just over five feet in height and weighing 120 pounds. Pursing his lips, he puffed on a long thin pipe. The bowl of the mahogany pipe had been carved into the shape of a jellyfish. Waving away the smoke, he pointed to a crude chart on the table in Joly ’s captain’s quarters.
    “I’m more than a little concerned,” Aigron noted. “Nowhere on this crude chart do I see where La Salle has marked the great river running into the Gulf of Mexico.”
    “I asked him before we left La Rochelle,” Beaujeu said as he sipped from a silver flute of wine, “what exactly was our intended course. Then as now, he refused to disclose the route.”
    Aigron nodded and waited for Beaujeu to continue.
    “Honestly, I don’t believe La Salle knows where we are going,” Beaujeu concluded.
    Aigron stared at Beaujeu. His fellow captain was not a handsome man. His left cheek sported a dark red birthmark that was roughly the shape of the British Isles. Half his front teeth were missing, and the rest were stained from the wine Beaujeu habitually drank.
    “I agree with you, Captain,” Aigron said. “I believe La Salle is bluffing. Even though he claims to have traveled to the mouth of the river by land, I don’t think he has a chance of finding it from sea. Navigating on land is much easier than over water.”
    “It will become extremely dangerous once we enter into the gulf,” Beaujeu noted. “From there on, we’ll be sailing under the Spanish death sentence.”
    For the last hundred years, the Spanish Crown had made it known that any foreign vessels found in the Gulf of Mexico would be impounded and their crews killed. That was the primary reason no navigational charts were available. The Spanish alone had charts, and they were not about to share them with another country.
    “La Salle must be losing his mind” Aigron said.
    Beaujeu nodded and took another puff. At this very instant, La Salle was bedridden with the fevers, so it was hard to argue with Aigron on that point.
    “Then we need to make plans to ensure the safety of our ships and our sailors,” Beaujeu said.
    “Understood,” Aigron agreed.
    Then he reached for a flask of brandy to toast their treasonous alliance.
     
    As LA SALLE lay in his sickbed, the fact that his expedition was already fractured was the least of his worries. Surely, the lies he had told his king must have topped the list.
    Specifically, to receive the funding necessary to the venture, La Salle had told Louis XIV three lies.
    The first lie was that the savages in the new land sought conversion to Christianity. The truth was far from that—other than a few scattered pockets where the Jesuits had made inroads, the Indians had resisted any attempts at salvation. Second, La Salle had boldly claimed he could raise an army of 15,000 savages to stave off any attacks from the Spanish, who currently claimed the area. That was simply not true. The Indian tribes in America were scattered and warring among themselves. The third, and probably the most important, was his representation that the return to the mouth of the great river was a foregone conclusion. The truth was that his knowledge of the river came only from land—finding it from sea was an entirely different matter altogether. He clung to the hope that he could locate the muddy brown stain where the river mixed with the salty water of the gulf. And that would prove as easy as finding a pin in a hayfield the size of Belgium.
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