Free The Treasure of El Patron by Gary Paulsen

1641
    Admiral Bartolomé de Campos of the Spanish galleon
El Patrón
set his jaw and stared grimly at the vast horizon.
    The wind was beginning to die.
    He’d seen it like this only a few times before. The air was thick with a muggy yellow haze, and in the distance high, thin clouds rolled across the sky.
    It was coming. He could smell it. Why wouldn’t that fool Captain Vargas pay attention to him and ready for bad weather?
    The admiral considered their vessel.
El Patrón
was a top-heavy, leaky ship that seemedto require constant manning of her pumps just to keep her afloat.
    The ship was overloaded in every way—a fact the admiral had complained about also, but to no avail. Some 495 passengers and more than 140 tons of cargo took up practically every square inch of room.
    It was the cargo the admiral thought of now. There was, of course, the consignment of gold and silver belonging to the Spanish Crown. And there were the Chinese porcelain and silks brought aboard to use for trading purposes in the colonies.
    But there was also the contraband, large fortunes in gold bars accumulated by colonial traders and smuggled aboard ship by bribing the officers to not declare it on the manifest. In addition there were the personal items, jewelry and precious gems of great value that the more important passengers had managed to conceal and bring aboard.
    The admiral thought of his own personal contraband. He was fond of one item in particular—a gold dagger with three perfect emeralds in the hilt, given to him in the colonies by a very special lady.
    The wind suddenly picked up. Whitecaps appeared on the surface of the ocean and rain began pelting the deck. The admiral raced to speak to the pilot.
    The galleon was already being tossed about like a child’s toy. From somewhere forward, timbers snapped. To lighten the ship, the frantic crew began tossing the deck cargo overboard, along with five of the ship’s bronze cannons.
    In the first hour of the hurricane, the mainmast was cut in two. As it fell into the ocean it took with it immense portions of rigging.
El Patrón
was crippled and water was coming in faster than the crew could pump it out.
    The struggle lasted three days. Miraculously,
El Patrón
stayed afloat. Some of the crew and passengers had been lost, but those remaining had worked around the clock to hold the water at bay, while others had managed to rig a makeshift sail.
    They had been blown so far off course that the captain and pilots were confused about their position. To the admiral, however, the new area seemed familiar. He was convinced they were near the deadly coral reefs that extendedsome twelve miles off Bermuda in the western North Atlantic Ocean.
    His suspicions were proved correct late that third night. It was midnight when the galleon struck a reef, and with a sickening crunch the ship lurched to one side. It jolted to a stop and then pitched forward, the hull scraping against a rock. Water began gushing in.
    The crew manned the longboats, forgetting their duties and leaving most of the passengers, including the Archbishop of Havana, to a watery grave. The brave admiral elected to go down with his ship. But as the galleon heaved and the bow rose, he was flung into the foamy black sea. Sailors from a departing longboat hoisted him, barely breathing, aboard and set out in the darkness.

C HAPTER 1
    “Hey, wake up, mate. Maybe I want to buy something here.”
    Thirteen-year-old Tag Jones’s eyes flew open. He scrambled to an upright position from his makeshift bed on the bright pink Bermuda sand inside the bait shack. “I’m awake, I—Cowboy! I ought to—”
    “Ought to thank me, that’s what.” The tall, dark native Bermudian boy folded his arms smugly.
    Tag scowled at his friend. “For what? Waking me out of one of the best dreams I ever had?”
    “I got something better than an old daydream about Spanish gold. I got tourists.”
    “Where?” Tag jumped up, leaned over the bait shop counter,