out of the water even at the highest tide. This was said to 

 be close to the spot where the galleon had foundered. No 

 longer was it fifty feet high, as the sailor Smith had de- 

 scribed it to Stanley before that long-ago seventeenth- 

 century search; according to Korganoff, it now stood a 

 scant two feet above the water. 



Ed did not expect to find the lone rock and the loca- 

 tion of the wreck too easily. He was frankly skeptical that 

 it was the only dry rock in that vast extent of reefs. He 

 was still disappointed that the day he had flown a distance 

 of nearly six hundred miles from Nassau to take air photo- 

 graphs of these reefs and to reconnoiter them, he had 

 encountered such heavy clouds and rain in the vicinity of 

 Turks island and south of there that he was unable to 

 reach the Silver shoals. How much simpler our task would 

 be if we had such an aerial picture to augment the crude 

 chart, left from the time of William Phips, for it was very 

 puzzhng to try to visualize the pattern of a bank of reefs 

 from the deck of a small boat or even from the masthead. 

 Without the aid of such a picture, it would be very di£Bcult 

 to locate the spot where the galleon had foundered. 



That evening, as Sea Diver plowed along under the 

 guidance of the automatic pilot, Barney, Jane, Glenn 

 Krause, Ed and I gathered around the table in the main 

 cabin to go over the material we had accumulated among 

 us and to talk over a method of locating the wreck we 

 were seeking. 



The Criles had arrived with a portfolio of papers and 

 charts which they had secured from an "armchair" treas- 

 ure hunter in Texas who had made it his hobby to figure 

 out the location of the Silver shoals treasure, but who had 

 no means of testing his conclusions. We also had the 

 seventeenth-century chart and the log from Phip's ship, 

 the James and Mary. The hydrographic charts of the area 

 were of little use, for, though they indicated the total 



The Silver Shoals 251 



