Paragon Island E-Book

Erik Alexander Dresen

• Herausgeber: Ventura Verlag
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Seitenzahl: 623

Beschreibung

While spending his holidays on the paradisiac Seychelles, the British ornithologist John Deed is confronted with a prominent rumour. The French pirate Olivier Levasseur is said to have buried his vast hoard of gold on one of these islands! Deed’s curiosity is aroused. Despite being on holiday, he sets himself to work in a meticulous manner in order to decipher the cryptogram of Olivier Levasseur. Along with his old companion Juste Colley and after having an encounter with the owner of the island and talking to the adventurer Cruise-Wilkins, who is hunting for Levasseur’s loot on the Seychelles for quite some time, he gets on the track of the treasure. In the course of his investigations, Deed has a spark of inspiration; but, to this end, he has to revive and reestablish his former ties to the British Government. Is the treasure within his grasp? ----- The book on hand is about the complete decipherment of the cryptogram of the French pirate Olivier Levasseur (* approx. 1689; † 7 July 1730) and the search for his treasure. For nearly a hundred years now, a great many treasure hunters and distinguished experts in the field of cryptography have been trying to decipher the cryptogram of Olivier Levasseur – but to no avail. According to the prevailing opinion of cryptographers, the decipherment of the cryptogram is believed to be impossible. The act of deciphering is accurately described at the beginning of the second part of the book and so made known to the general public for the first time. Where is Paragon Island located? Is the long-lost treasure still there? Has it been lifted yet? Questions upon questions – my book is giving the answers! But at this juncture, I do not want to reveal more yet.

Leseprobe

PARAGON ISLAND.

PARAGON ISLAND.

BY

ERIK ALEXANDER DRESEN

Ventura Verlag

Werne

Published by Ventura Verlag2015

Copyright © Erik A. Dresen2015

All rights reserved.

The moral right of Erik A. Dresen to be identified as the author

of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with

the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act1988.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any

means – electronic, mechanical, photocopying,

recording or otherwise – without the prior

written permission of the publisher.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not,

by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out,

or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior

consent in any form of binding or cover other than that

in which it is published and without a similar condition,

including this condition, being imposed on the

subsequent purchaser.

First published in Germany in 2015 by

Ventura Verlag Magnus See

Carl-von-Ossietzky-Str. 1, 59368 Werne

Phone: [phone]

A catalogue record for this book is available from the

German National Library (Deutsche Nationalbibliothek).

ISBN:978-3-940853-32-5 (e-book)

ISBN:978-3-940853-29-5 (printed edition)

Bibliographic details can be found at:

www.dnb.de/EN/Kataloge/kataloge_node.html

Manufacturing management and copy editing: Erik A. Dresen

Cover illustration and design: © Erik A. Dresen2015

www.ventura-verlag.de

Author’s Note

Not that I mind, but a great deal of the back­ground story is actually true and based on his­toric­ally verified facts and knowledge.

The book on hand is about the complete de­cipher­ment of the crypto­gram of the French pirate Olivier Levasseur (* approx.1689;† 7 July1730) and the search for his treasure.

For nearly a hundred years now, a great many treasure hunters and dis­tin­guished experts in the field of crypto­graphy have been trying to decipher the crypto­gram of Olivier Levasseur – but to no avail. According to the pre­vailing opinion of crypto­graphers, the decipher­ment of the crypto­gram is believed to be impossible. The act of de­cipher­ing is accu­rately described at the beginning of the second part of the book and so made known to the general public for the first time.

Today the original manu­script is safely de­posited in the Musée nationale de la Marine, Brest, and kept under wraps. In essence, the crypto­gram is an authentic treasure map, showing the precise spot of Levasseur’s treas­ure. Where is Paragon Island lo­cated? Is the long-lost treasure still there? Has it been lifted yet? Questions upon questions – my book is giving the answers! But at this junc­ture, I do not want to reveal more yet.

Instead, I would like to take the readers by the hand and go with them on a real treasure hunt – to wit, all the way from A to B and from the beginning to the end.

The treasure hunt itself is woven into a fic­tional novel, the plot of which was hope­fully well contrived and thought out. The par­ticu­lars of the events are narrated in a faith­ful and verisimilar manner. The circum­stances, as re­counted in the book, take place between the beginning of June and the end of De­cember1975. The setting is initially located on one of the islands in the Indian Ocean (see frontis­piece) and sub­se­quently the scene changes to London, where the story ends.

For the sake of full dis­closure, I have ap­pended two dos­siers at the end of the book. The Appendix embodies a hoard of care­fully re­searched facts as well as com­pre­hen­sive docu­men­tary material. I venture to cherish the hope that both dossiers will prove them­selves to be useful for future refer­ence. They are chiefly addressed to the hesi­tating pur­chaser who is un­ac­quainted with the piratical subject matter of this book or else brings scant fore­knowledge along in one’s wake. I suggest to the gentle reader that the afore­mentioned dossiers should be read through before pro­ceeding to the perusal of the first chapter.

The historical back­ground to the story was thor­oughly in­vesti­gated and the whole par­ticu­lars about Paragon Island were written down as faith­fully as possible. Today, of course, Paragon Island is still at the place where early navi­gators of Arab trading ships are said to have discovered her first – some­where in the Inner Islands of the Sey­chelles. In August1502, some of the granitic islands were sighted by the famous Portu­guese explorer Vasco da Gama and their geo­graphical lay was alleged to have been mapped on Portu­guese admi­ralty charts at that time. Thus it was not until mid-November1742that Lazare Picault, a French-born navi­gator and ex­plorer, re­dis­covered the Inner Islands and explored some of them more exten­sively. But at this point, it should be stated that approxi­mately half a century prior to Lazare Picault’s arrival, a con­sider­able num­ber of pirate vessels had already touched at these islands. For all that I know, a great many sea-rovers had alighted there and quite a few of the notorious pirates had been hiding them­selves away and living there in secrecy for a while. Among those reckless rogues and vil­lains dwelled our erst­while pirate, who, by the way, had a very con­spicu­ous cut on his right cheek.

Be that as it may – for a variety of reasons, certain proper nouns of theθησαυρόςhave literally fallen prey to the ink eraser. The charac­ters, names and action described in this book are ficti­tious. Any cor­respond­ence or simi­larity to fictional or non-fictional charac­ters, or personae, entities and events, which have singly arisen from someone else’s in­genuity or power of imagi­nation, are entirely un­witting and un­in­ten­tional. Any analogy what­so­ever to real places, islands and persons, living or dead, is illus­tra­tive and purely acci­dental, and there­fore a mere coinci­dence; and, to conclude, no identi­fi­cation or recog­nition shall be in­ferred from it in either way.

Drawing con­clu­sions from the book’s con­tents re­mains un­af­fected by it and is at the reader’s dis­cretion.

E. A. D.

TO

MAI-LING FEN

 It’s plain to tell the truth that I bound you to secrecy;

 For both you are dead and silent as a graven poesy.

 Still will we be twinned by birth and by blood akin to a T.

 Far cry away from the cradle, O ’tis mere a myth for me,

 That the breakers are booming abreast in perfect harmony,

 Till the waves do refract – and vanish into uniternity.

Contents

(verbatim): Colley dit, ‘John, les Sey­chelloises ont un adage très juste et des plus édifiant à ce sujet: “Une fois c’est une chose unique. Deux fois c’est une co­ïnci­dence. La troisième fois c’est la contre­partie.” ’ ‘The third time is the charm,’ figured John Deed without thinking twice about it, ‘though I person­ally have doubts whether I have seen, let alone parsed it once before.’ Literally it looked as if some­one had finally met his match: A unique specimen, a double and a pendant corre­sponding there­to, someone who was perhaps himself the opposite number having his roots in Réunion. In actual fact he had a sense of déjà-vu; but the apposite remark passed foolishly over his head.

PART ONE

Singularity

 1 The Point of Departure003 2 The Undiscovered Check013 3 Return to the Scene027 4  Le Caractère Équivoque044 5 Mondial Concern073 6 Table-Talk094 7 Dead Reckoning109 8 The Calm before the Storm                               128

PART TWO

Duplicity

 9 Signed, Sealed and Delivered                            14410 In Medias Res16511 On Reconnaissance18312 From a Bird’s eye View20713 Cum Grano Salis22614 The Secretive Man24715 Squalls over London26116 A Rusty Mooring Ring278

PART THREE

Counterpart

17  ‘The Die is … cast.’29018 The Quarry for Stone31019 Live-saving Measures33020 Blow Up33821 Moidores and Louis-d’ors34822 How the Treasure was Brought Homeward  36223 Bound in Limbo37124 A Logical And385

Appendix

A. Dossier on La BuseiiiB.

PART ONE

1. The Point of Departure

The important-looking personage whose head eased and shifted gently to make himself a bit more com­fortable turned his right cheek to the Perspex window.

He might have been sleeping the day away while one side of his face was resting on the head sup­port cover of his re­clined aircraft seat7A. Even the amber glow of the seat belt warning light slightly above his head might have gone un­noticed, had it not been for one of those sylph­like air hostesses of Air France who sashayed over to the dormant passenger, wak­ing him up with a cute foreign-accented hiss and telling him to fasten his seat belt. Rous­ing out of his sleep, he re­sponded with assent and re­stored his seat back to an upright posi­tion, chin in air.

A Sunday broadsheet newspaper, Philip Henry Gosse’s ref­er­ence work on The Birds of Jamaica and Sir Richard F. Burton’s published work on falconry were lying at hand, but left un­touched, whereas Burton’s travelogue bound in teal cloth and entitled Explorations of the Highlands of the Brazil had been proper­ly put aside on the tray table of the vacant aircraft seat next to him. The scantily clad, bare-breasted Tupy woman stood still as a statue, tilting her lance at the subdued animal under her feet, ready to thrust the spear­head to the heart of the creature. Upon closer in­spection of the open book, one could easily see that it revealed a coloured woven silk Steven­graph which was pro­truding un­ob­tru­sively from in between two pages of this devious itiner­ary, somewhere at the end of the last chapter of the Brazilian adventure story. The beauti­ful book­mark was in­serted the wrong way round and the part clearly visible to the eye was em­broidered with the following words:

Those blessings of

          Our early youth,

Shall cheer our     

 Latest age.

                                                    WILLIAM COWPER

Just a few minutes ago, thePIChad re­ceived the initial approach fix and manipu­lated the ailerons and the rudder, so that the jumbo jet was now in its final descent, heading toward the runway with a humming sound. The promi­nent man, who winked re­flex­ively and looked out of the oval Perspex, glanced casu­ally at the clear blue sky and the leading edge of the wing – day­dreaming and with a barely per­cepti­ble smile on his lips.

To judge by the look of his face, Dr. John Deed,CBE,FSO, appeared raddled and seem­ing­ly dead tired. The travel by air was a long odyssey once again; and the flight du­ra­tion of the passage was ap­proxi­mately half of the total travel time spanning between A and B, which amounted to twenty-four hours all told.

The day before, the commuter flight from London to Paris had been on schedule, but the take-off of red-eye flight AF952from Aéroport Charles-de-Gaulle to Mahé via Mombasa was delayed due to signs of material fatigue. Truth be told, that was the prin­ci­pal cause as to why the airliner was going to touch down almost two solid hours behind the scheduled arrival time. For quite a while prior to the plane’s landing approach to Victoria – the British capital of the Sey­chelles situated on the north-eastern coast of Mahé and sole port of entry with offices for customs and clearance for­mali­ties, too –, Deed had re­flected upon himself and his attitude towards life; and in par­ticu­lar on his rather ‘un­gla­morous pro­fes­sion’ as a some­what under­paid, middle-ranking civil serv­ant and fairly noted orni­tholo­gist, who (in a given case) risked his health and heart for a few thousand pounds per annum (and a modest pension granted) till either cardiac arrest or irre­versible cerebral death was going to be de­termined.

Deed’s whole life was pre­destined for the birds or, to be more specific, destined for the rapacious ones – to wit: The Magnificent Man-o’-war birds (Frégate superbe), the Pirate birds and the Boatswain birds; the latter of which are com­monly known as Tropicbirds, taxo­nomic­ally belonging to the family Phae­thon­tidae, such as the Red-tailed Tropicbird, a seabird which (among lay­women and lay­men) can easily be mistaken for a con­specific namesake. More­over he had a distinct fancy for the birds of prey and, to crown it all off, he had made a point of watching out for all sorts of nest robbers who plundered un­guarded clutches of rare bird’s eggs by unjust and unlawful means.

As a scientist who earned his doctorate (Sc.D.) about twenty-five years ago, John Deed was ap­parently in an im­perfect con­di­tion; and it was only the other day when Deed realised that he had developed a feeling of dislike for himself and his chosen pro­fes­sion. During the flight to the Sey­chelles he had been remi­nis­cing about the lapsed lines of his life, as an orni­tholo­gist of renown in his own country, and recalled to his mind how many journeys of ex­plo­ra­tion and ex­cur­sions he had made over the years – fourteen, perhaps fifteen, con­sider­ably more than ten, defi­nite­ly –, but he couldn’t say exactly, let alone put a digit on it.

For most of his life, it had been an integral part of his academic job to study birds and examine closely their habits, descrip­tions and syn­ony­mies. As of this writing Dr. Deed worked as Chief Librarian of the Alexander Library of Ornithology and mostly at the week­ends (and when on holidays) as a free­lance writer on a royal­ties basis. In addition to this, he held mem­ber­ships of three pres­tigi­ous orni­tho­logic­al organi­sa­tions. Deed occu­pied a post as one of the elected officers of The British Hawking Club and func­tioned as a cor­re­spon­ding mem­ber of an in­ter­national non-profit organi­sation known asIAF. The third member­ship, which he took up in ’53, wasSPORT– a learned society based in London. A fellow­ship was awarded to him in ’69and thence­forth he was entitled to bear the post-nominal lettersFSOas such. A year later he became elected Honorary Head of Depart­ment, being fully in charge of the ‘Over­seas Sanctu­aries, Endemic Bird Species A - F’; and, at that time, he was ap­pointed by the President ofSPORTfor a period of five years.

At present John Deed was fulfilling a second term in office. According to the statutes ofSPORT, short for Society for Promoting Orni­tho­logical Research and Taxonomy, he was sometimes chosen as a ‘prin­ci­pal in­vesti­gator’ and in this function re­quested, as was almost annually the case, to go on a mission of ex­plo­ra­tion and conduct an ex­pe­di­tion – mainly to foreign countries. And on that score, for instance when he was travelling abroad at the behest and expense of the said Society, the President ofSPORTgave him strict orders and precise directions for the ac­com­plish­ment of the prin­ci­pal tasks, which had to be carried out in a most accu­rate manner.

Dr. John Deed, by the by, who’s con­sidered as ‘not un­known’ in expert circles, had an out­standing re­pu­ta­tion as a charm­ing and divert­ing guest lec­turer and deliverer of speeches on his ‘speciality disci­pline’, that is to say, mor­pholo­gy, homology and the odd meta­mor­phoses of endemic bird species. Besides, he was still ranking as one of the fathers of com­para­tive orni­thology con­cern­ing the nomen­cla­ture of endemic birds nesting on un­in­habited islands, as is exem­plarily the case with Paragon Island (insofar as it is taxo­nomically known).

A long time ago, he had written a mutually related trilogy of treatises, to wit: A Mono­graph of the Falco buteo of Linnaeus (1953), The Strange Meta­mor­phoses of the Species of the genus Buteo (1954) and, last but not least, The Homology of the Eu­rasian Hobby (1960), all of which found universal recog­ni­tion in the press and the academic world. To be per­fectly frank, he had never liked doing the arduous research work on his scientific books. But when he attended to a mat­ter in question, he pursued his ob­jec­tives in a most dili­gent manner, dis­porting himself true to the motto and the dictum of Virgil, “Hoc opus, hic labor est.” – and after achieve­ment he de­liber­ately forgot about it.

Apart from academic life he had also re­col­lected, as an un­romantic but not quite un­ap­pealing man, how many times he had heaven­ly down-to-earth affairs with a spread of different beauti­ful women nearly every­where in the world. He could not recall the number pre­cise­ly and at some date in the past he had de­sisted from tallying it.

Admittedly, no matter how you looked at it, Deed was lucky with the study of birds, even though un­ad­mittedly unlucky in love. He was married only once, but never found for­give­ness in the arms of all those willing women for the death of the one he truly loved. Deed’s wife was de­ceased in ’69, but that was a long way back. A subject of con­ver­sa­tion he always changed quickly; and if it came up now and then, he usu­ally acted as if she had never been there. Nowa­days Deed didn’t have a wife, he didn’t have a family – and he didn’t want to die child­less one day. During the last few years, he had neither fallen in love with someone nor even won someone else’s love – what, if he were in flames anew, would have been the third time in his life –; and, besides all that, there had been no serious female candi­date on the short list for quite some time. It was only recently that Deed found himself asking ‘Why?’. Hard to tell! For the time being he ex­pected no reply, no sym­pathy or the like, he awaited nothing. Some­times he imag­ined how it would be as a father of at least one little Jim. Thus Deed was down for some time, trapped in the midst of the doldrums, discouraged and filled with melan­choly; and, in retro­spect, surely the most melan­cholic man on the whole plane. It was beyond doubt that he felt com­plete­ly empty, ex­hausted and drained like an old battery – urgently in need of ‘re­charging’ and a break from it all.

At9.00on Monday morning of this par­ticu­lar week, Deed had decided to take a four-week leave and his current employer, the Edward Grey Institute of Field Ornithology in Oxford – generally known asEGI– had no ob­jec­tions. The Director of theEGI, a debo­nair, middle-aged Oxonian, even favoured Deed’s in­ten­tion to fly to the Sey­chelles and prompted him to seek some rest and re­cuper­ation there.

For the sole purpose of privacy, he was allowed to take some rare books on birds along. In addition to these volumes, he had borrowed two good phrase books in two languages from the Bodleian; and after that was hastily grasped, also picked out a bundle of cata­logued and classi­fied papers from the archive racks of Section R (the Alexander Library’s Refer­ence Section), Section F (the Alexander Library’s Faculty Section) and Section M (the Alexander Library’s Manu­scripts Section). This bundle of papers con­sisted of scraps and dupli­cates of some older refer­ence files as well as a stack of car­bon copies, which com­prised the latest type­script version of Dr. Deed’s file on Falco subbuteo and a fair copy ofSPORT’s written records of the bird species Falco buteo (as first described by Linnaeus in his reference work Systema Naturae,1758).

Following this, he had arranged his travel to the Sey­chelles, booked the flights on his own hook and then packed his belongings in much the same manner as he had done it once before – way back in the spring of ’58.

But this time, Deed was travelling pri­vate­ly, so to speak, such as a boringly common Euro­pean who was pursuing a hobby like average citizens simply love to do, just for the delight of it, in Asia, Africa, Australia, America or wherever else. And now, only three days later, he was around five thousand miles away from his private attic flat at25Old Bond St. in May­fair.

Juste Colley, a familiar face and John Deed’s old Sey­chel­lois friend, had cared for minor parti­cu­lars about his ac­commo­dation. He was awaiting Deed’s immi­nent arrival at the mod­ern Sey­chelles Inter­national Airport, which had been splen­did­ly con­struc­ted within sight of the main town and the ad­join­ing mili­tary base.

About half an hour later, Deed passed through the passport check and customs. Then he went over to the baggage-claim area, and waited at the carousel for his suitcase and one heavy holdall to come off the plane. While killing time with staring at the baggage con­veyor belt, he listened to the airport an­nounce­ments and a series of bloody stupid flag carrier jingles that blared in an infinite loop over the re­sounding Tannoy®system. After that he ex­changed some money in a jiffy, squeezed a thick wad of Rupee notes into his pocket and left the terminal building. Juste picked him up outside the main entrance of the airport; and, in the moment of seeing each other again after such a long span of time, there was a warm and hearty exchange of halloaings between both gentle­men.

The native Seychellois, aPADISpecialty In­structor by pro­fes­sion and silent partner in the Cowtail Stingray Dive Centre on Beau Vallon, Requiem Shark Dive Centre on Praslin and Big Blue Octopus Dive Centre on La Digue, will­ing­ly offered him a free, ap­proxi­mately one-and-a-half-hour ride in his handsome28.54′sailing yacht. The shapely and bril­liant­ly white-painted vessel was designed by Jean­neau and chris­tened Barbeau de bleu, a trivial ship’s name according to Deed’s view. Anyway, he liked the facile design and humorous coin­age of the Seychellois. By this time the tide was beginning to ebb and so they set course for the neigh­bouring island, where he intended to spend his holidays for the next couple of weeks.

In the course of traversing the thrilling Archi­pelago, Deed was not exactly talka­tive. Colley had taken his seat at the tiller and the Barbeau de bleu was steering to wind­ward at about an angle of45° to the true wind, whereas he sat on the aft deck and flicked through the recent issue of The Sunday Times. Now and then he stood up and kept watch for any occurrences of zoo­logical interest; and, in par­ticular, keeping an eye on any rare birds seen from the boat. He spied nothing of note, but a flock of sea­birds, some schools of fish and the remains of an aban­doned ship­wreck. A while later, they came across a Lilliputian fishing-fleet of little beings with long blue tenta­cles and trans­lucent blad­ders, float­ing and sail­ing beauti­fully upon the crests of the waves. These dwarfish creatures were rolling and glit­ter­ing in the sun with a glassy brilliancy like blue bottles. Colley ex­plained to him that seafaring men were highly de­lighted to call these colonial inverte­brates ‘The Portu­guese man-of-war’, for their most striking resem­blance to a small mimic ship. Deed, who him­self had no con­cep­tion at all of blue­bottles and schooling fishes and these things, squinted into the midday sun, nodded twice and smiled meaning­fully. As they finally ap­proached the old mole and vieux-port of Deed’s remote des­ti­na­tion, he was unsure whether he had ever seen one of these unique organisms before in his life – per­ad­ven­ture, some­where in an anti­quated aqua-vivarium in Great Britain or Western Eu­rope.

Just before berthing, Deed folded his news­paper and stowed it properly away. Juste gave him the pass key for the island’s lodge and a helping hand in un­loading, and promised to come back to the har­bour the very next day.

2. The Undiscovered Check

Now, Deed cleaned his teeth, undressed and then took a cold shower chiefly to get rid of the unpleasant scent and noisome sweat under his arms.

After refreshment, he grabbed a white Rouen cotton towel, dried himself perfunctorily and threw the absorbent piece of cloth heedlessly to the ground.

A wet wisp of black hair crossed his right eyebrow. He brushed the lock aside, as vain as ever, unclasped the spring of his sterling cigarette case, flicked his vintage14kt gold-plated S.T. Dupont lighter No.1|61803open with a high-pitched clink and lit his fifty-fifth cigarette of the day. Deed then started to shave. In the very moment when the smouldering ash of his Benson & Hedges Gold cigarette fell off into the bathroom sink, he cut himself accidentally with his seven-year-old GilletteM4safety razor. He flinched and froze for a heartbeat. His chin was bleeding briskly and a thimbleful of blood was streaming dropwise along the outside of his throat, stagnating on the prominence of the Adam’s apple. Deed bent forward and investigated the score, before he cleansed the small incision. The flow of his lifeblood was slowing to a thin trickle and five or six sanguine drops were dripping down into the marble wash basin. He turned on the cold tap and morosely rinsed the sink. The last that he saw was a tincture of the faint claret fluid draining away together with the charcoal grey ash of his cigarette.

For a split second Deed had been inattentive; and he was unmistakably angry with himself. And then, all of a sudden, he began to curse and to swear in a pithy and self-deprecating manner, for being conscious of his own shortcomings. He hurled an echoing verbal abuse at his own reflexion, as he used to do from time to time. Feigning indifference, John Deed saw that he was actually not himself anymore and his semblance was distinct from the self-image he held in his memory. This piece of reasoning was, basically, the first thought that came to his mind.

Deed examined his face levelly in the mirror and peered deeply into his grey-blue eyes. He felt uncomfortable and was quite shocked to see the worn countenance of a cream-faced counterpart under a thin layer of cosmetic. Deed bent back and ploughed on with his shaving. He skimmed over the foam and the facial skin lying underneath, his compressed lips and the cicatrised cut across his right cheek – an opaque slash, about seven barleycorns in length – like a standing-crop cutting machine in the stubble field. His features had gradually become drawn in the last ten years; and with each further scrape of the bare blade, Deed’s visage was more and more showing signs of weariness, strain, lack of sleep and a certain degree of reluctance. Nevertheless, the shaving exposed that his countenance was still radiating a streak of captivating charm.