O'Donnell crossed himself.
"Leave religion alone, Murray," he said sourly. "'Tis a bid for ill-fortune to mock the Church and holy men and women."
"Prejudice, my dear chevalier!" protested my great-uncle. "Yet any sane view of mundane affairs must recognize religion hath its uses to mankind."
He rose.
"If you will pardon me, I have much to see to on deck. Should you desire any refreshment do but ring that bell and state your wants to the steward. Robert, if you and Peter can so far submerge your Hanoverian sympathies I should appreciate such aid as you might render in the accounting of the treasure."
Peter and I went with him, as much to escape the company of the Irishman as to satisfy our curiosity regarding the chests and boxes we had glimpsed in transit across the Santissima Trinidad's deck. And certes, the scene that awaited us was worth going far to see. The maindeck, immediately for'ard of the poop, was jammed with the contents of the Spaniard's lazaret, piled helterskelter as the working-parties had hastily shifted it from one ship to the other.
Murray produced tablet and ink-horn; a desk was arranged for me atop of a water-butt, and one by one a procession of pirates filed past, each with his load of gold or silver, minted and in bullion.
'Twas a marvelous concentration of wealth. The columns of figures I set down upon the tablet never condescended to detail—5,000 pieces of eight, they would run, or 10,000 doubloons, 12,000 onzas, 20,000 castellanos, 25,000 eights, and so on. One cask we opened was filled with quaint Eastern coins, some square, some oblong, some cubical, some round, inscribed with spidery characters, a consignment from the Spanish possessions in the South Seas. There was upward of two hundred thousand pounds in bar silver, fifty-pound ingots sheathed by threes in thick canvas jackets to facilitate their transport by mule-trains—each mule carrying a load of three hundred pounds. There was a quantity, too, of gold bullion, each ingot of eighty pounds in its own canvas jacket. There were a chest of precious stones, the value of which we could only guess at, and three chests of plate.
The total value, by the Government estimates upon each package, chest or keg, was £1,563,995 in English money, exclusive of the jewels and the plate; and we did not conclude the accounting and bestowal of the treasure in Ben Gunn's wine-cellar until an hour past dusk, when Murray dismissed all hands with an extra ration of rum and instructed Saunders, who had the watch, to allow his men to sleep on deck, except those actually needed for lookouts and the wheel.
In the cabin we found Colonel O'Donnell asleep, sprawled on the table with his head rested on his folded arms, a puddle of wine by his elbow. My great-uncle's eyebrows twitched upward.