Free Bermuda Schwartz by Bob Morris

barrel-chested, with close-cropped white hair, a ruddy weatherworn face, and eyes of the palest blue.
    He sticks out a hand. His grip is firm, his grin congenial.
    â€œTeddy,” he says. “Teddy Schwartz.”
    â€œSir Teddy is an old, old friend,” says Aunt Trula. “You’ve heard of him, no doubt.”
    The moment she adds the title, it clicks with me who he is.
    â€œOf course,” I say. “What a pleasure.”
    â€œSit,” says Teddy. “What are you drinking?”
    â€œGosling’s, neat,” I tell the waiter at my elbow.
    â€œSame here,” Teddy says. Then to me: “So you favor our local rum, do you?”
    â€œI favor all rum,” I say.
    â€œAh, that’s a lad,” says Teddy, giving me a slap on the back.
    Strictly speaking, Gosling’s isn’t from Bermuda. It’s a blend of rums imported from several different Caribbean islands, with a few secret ingredients added to give it a flavor all its own. It goes down good, so why mince details over its pedigree with the likes of Teddy Schwartz?
    I’m in a state of minor awe just sitting next to him.
    In my former life, after I stopped playing football and before I got railroaded into jail then got out and started raising palm trees full-time, I used to have a modest charter boat operation. Fishing was always the biggest part of it, but I would run the occasional scuba trip if there were paying clients.
    So I am on fairly solid ground when it comes to diving, enough to know that if you were to make a list of the top ten pioneers of underwater exploration, then Teddy Schwartz’s name would surely be on it, right up there with Jacques Cousteau, Zale Parry, and that crew. In the late 1940s, with scuba diving in its infancy and Teddy barely in his teens, he had been one of the first to strap on a tank and go nosing around in the waters of Bermuda.
    Over the years, he had discovered and subsequently salvaged dozens of shipwrecks. And although he had no formal training in the field, he was considered one of the fathers of marine archaeology, an innovator in technique and technology.
    He was also considered something of a rogue and a scoundrel, at least in the eyes of the Bermudian government. Beginning in the 1960s, it had enacted a series of increasingly strict laws that sought to license treasure salvors and lay claim to anything they found. Teddy had long railed against such laws, and although he had donated many of the artifacts he’d found, not only to the government but to different historical societies and maritime research institutes, there was little doubt that he had probably sold off an even greater portion to various international collectors.
    The most notorious instance was the ongoing mystery of Schwartz’s Scepter. Discovered by Teddy in the early 1960s on the wreckage of a seventeenth-century British ship, the scepter was thought to have been a gift from Queen Elizabeth I to the ship’s captain, both as a good-luck talisman and the seal of royal approval. With its long gold staff and emerald-encrusted head, the scepter was the single most dazzling bit of treasure ever plucked from Bermuda’s waters. The tale of its discovery had even warranted a cover story in
National Geographic,
and led to Teddy Schwartz’s eventual knighthood.
    After nearly twenty years of wrangling with Bermudian authorities over who was its rightful owner, during which time Teddy kept the scepter on public display at a small museum he once operated in downtown Hamilton, a truce was finally reached. Teddy would sell the scepterto the British Museum for a token amount, just a few thousand dollars, and split the proceeds with the Bermudian government.
    But when curators arrived from London to prepare the scepter for transport, they discovered that the piece on display was just a replica, albeit a very good one. The official explanation: Thieves had broken into the museum at some unknown