Lost and Found

Our annual beach vacations had always been defined by a welcome sameness: the scent of salt and seaweed in the air, the steady soundtrack of waves rolling onto the shore, the unchanging faded gray of the shutters on our family’s cottage. I recognized, year after year, certain seagulls by the splotches on their beaks and the patterns of their feathers—and I knew which “regulars” were the most brazen about stealing my peanut-butter crackers off the beach blanket.

But this year, everything was different.

Nobody was on the beach but Trevor and me, probably because thick clouds, the color of milky tea, blanketed the sky. Our parents were still inside the rental house on the other side of the dunes, trying to figure out where to put the dishes in the unfamiliar kitchen cupboards. I used to always drink my orange juice out of the same chipped nautical mug—one my grandma had bought the first summer she and my grandpa came to Hatteras, way back before my parents were even born. This morning, I’d gulped my juice out of a plain, clear glass.

It hadn’t tasted as good.

The water was rough, and I didn’t know this new stretch of beach, which was right on the edge of the National Seashore. The hurricane last fall had redrawn the shoreline. So instead of swimming, I squatted by a tide pool, watching a crab hobble across the sand.

“Laurel! Laurel! Come over here!”

I pushed myself up and raced toward the sound of my big brother’s voice. He was standing in the middle of some debris, a few feet away from the water’s edge.

“What is it?” I stopped, panting, next to what looked like a chunk of wooden boardwalk. It was about the size of a boogie board.

“It has to be a piece of wood from a shipwreck,” Trevor said with complete confidence.

I bent over for a closer look. Yesterday’s waves must have left it on the beach for us to find.

“I think you’re right, Trevor,” I whispered excitedly. In all the years of beachcombing at the old cottage, we’d never found anything like this.

Trevor tiptoed gingerly around the debris. The planks looked rough, and I wondered what kinds of rusty, sea-worn metal might be sticking up in the wet sand, ready to slice open Trevor’s bare feet. I did not want him to hurt himself—or to worsen our vacation by making all of us spend the day at the urgent-care center while he got stitches. 

Trevor gasped.

“What?” I pushed salty strands of hair off my face and moved closer. “What is it?”

Trevor rubbed something on his T-shirt, leaving a brown smudge behind. “I thought it might be sea glass or a bottlecap.” He held out his cupped palm, trembling a little. In it was a thin metal circle, greenish with a hint of gold. “But Laurel . . . I think it’s treasure.”

I plucked it out of his hand. The worn and scuzzy coin felt heavy in my palm. Something was stamped on it, a shape like an X or a cross. I ran my fingertip over the surface, feeling the shape of rough letters or maybe numbers. On the opposite side was a picture of something like a coat of arms. The edges of the coin were smoother, where sand and saltwater had worn away more of the markings.

There are lots of ways that loose change can wind up on the beach. But this did not look like an ordinary coin.

 “It looks really old,” Trevor said, taking the coin back. “Maybe a piece of eight . . . No, I think it’s gold, which means it could be a Spanish escudo.” My brother had spent many summers reading Grandpa’s books about pirate ships and the kinds of treasure they carried. “This is unbelievable!”

A seagull let out a squawk, like it was just as amazed as we were. “We have to get Mom to drive us to the museum,” I said. “They’ll be able to identify it!”

The museum has a lot of artifacts from shipwrecks discovered on North Carolina beaches. This area is called the Graveyard of the Atlantic because its dangerous shoals have wrecked so many boats over the years, from Spanish colonial ships to German U-boats to Blackbeard’s last pirate ship, Queen Anne’s Revenge. It’s not uncommon for a storm to unbury parts of a wreck on a beach or close offshore. It was always a big event at the museum when something new was discovered; Trevor and I loved listening to the stories the curator would tell about each object.    

“Wait.” Trevor looked at me, shading his eyes and leaving a dusting of sand on his forehead. “Let’s not tell anyone. Not yet. If we found one coin—we might find more.”

I frowned. “We can’t keep this a secret.” I motioned to the open beach surrounding us. “Plus, we’re probably on the National Seashore part of the beach right now, which means the coin isn’t ours.” A large sign at the entrance near the dunes had made it very clear: Any objects—including historical artifacts—found along the National Seashore are protected and are not to be removed.

“But,” Trevor paused, his eyebrows pinching together, “nobody knows where we found it. Think about it, Laurel. If this coin really is an escudo, something old and rare, it would be worth money. Like, thousands. Maybe—maybe even enough to fix the cottage.”

Yesterday, we had stopped by the cottage on our drive to the rental home. It had looked so sad and neglected. The hurricane winds had ripped off chunks of the roof, so a blue tarp covered most of it. Shingles and siding were missing all over, creating bald patches. The deck had looked rotten. But even if the cottage were repaired, it would never be the same. The floodwaters had ruined things that we couldn’t replace: albums full of vacation photos going back to when my dad was a kid, the shell art that my grandma had glued together on cloudy days, a picture of the sunrise that Trevor had painted. The beach cottage hadn’t been just a house; it was a home for my family’s memories. After my grandparents passed away, we needed all that stuff even more—curling up at night with my grandma’s handmade quilt in my grandpa’s favorite chair felt like they were giving me a goodnight hug.

Part of why we’d come back to the beach this summer was so Mom and Dad could talk to people about repairs. If fixing the cottage was going to cost too much, though, they were going to sell the whole lot—just like that.

I watched Trevor dig madly through the sand. “Whoever lost these coins did so long, long ago,” he declared. “Didn’t Grandpa keep the stuff he found?” Trevor stopped searching for a moment and looked at me. “Maybe he’d want us to do this—use treasure from the beach to save his cottage.”

When we were little, our grandpa would sometimes get the metal detector out after storms and scan our beachfront for loot. He let me put on the headphones and listen to the blip-blip-blips beating in excited unison with my own heart. Grandpa never found anything valuable or historical, and he only hunted for treasure where it was allowed.

Trevor went back to raking his hands through the sand. Only moments later, he let out a whoop. “I found another!”

I didn’t know why, but my heart sank a little.

Grandma’s porcelain whale figurine used to sit in the kitchen window of the cottage. It was one of her favorite “trinkies,” her name for the handpicked trinkets sprinkled throughout the house. I used to sneak the whale off the sill and play with it when I was little, until the day I accidentally dropped and broke it. Horrified, I ran out onto the beach. Nobody had seen me do it, so I was just going to pretend I hadn’t. It was Trevor who eventually came outside and found me sniffling in the sand.

“Laurel, did something happen with Grandma’s whale?”

“No!” My cheeks flushed red, though, so he knew the truth.

“Look, I know you feel bad,” he said, squatting beside me. “But you have to tell her what happened and that you’re sorry. It’ll be OK. Trust me.” He helped me up and walked inside with me. I told Grandma the truth, and she wasn’t that mad. She got out the glue gun and together we fixed the whale, although its spout was always kind of messed up after that.

I left Trevor and wandered over the dunes, determined to figure out if we really were on protected land. Then I saw the sign. Trevor’s treasure was well within the boundaries of the National Seashore.

I decided to go back to the rental house and pretend I had never seen that sign. But just then, the wind kicked up, pushing against my sweatshirt. I turned back to the water, giving in to the wind. The clouds were moving fast now, and the waters beyond the beach looked like a roiling stew, waves crashing against each other haphazardly, as if they couldn’t find the shore.   

I saw the shape of my big brother, hunched over and small in the distance. When I reached him, I noticed that he was cradling a small bounty of greenish coins in his shirt.

“Trevor,” I said, squatting down next to him. “We’re definitely on the protected beach.”

Trevor stared at me for a moment, chewing on his lip.

“I want to fix the cottage just as bad as you do but . . . ” I said.

Trevor gave me a sad smile. “It’s just too bad, you know? How some stuff gets lost.”

I held out my hand and helped my brother stand up. Coins fell around his feet. We stood there for a moment, looking at the pile of treasure on the sand. I pictured my mom back at the rental house, lining up the bottles of sunscreen in the bathroom, and my dad marinating the fish we’d be eating for dinner. I thought of my grandma and grandpa, and the way they loved to hike the island, hand in hand.

Suddenly the shoreline didn’t seem so unfamiliar.

“I know,” I told my brother. “But you never know where you might find it again.” 

The story you just read was inspired by a real shipwreck off the eastern coast of Florida. It was one of the worst maritime disasters in history. In 1715, a fleet of Spanish ships making its way to Spain from Havana, Cuba, was caught in a ferocious hurricane. Eleven ships—along with the gold and silver coins and jewelry they were carrying—were lost. Approximately 1,000 sailors died.

For nearly 250 years, the sea kept most of the treasure to itself. Then, in the 1950s, a housebuilder found coins and other artifacts on a Florida beach. He soon realized that one of the sunken Spanish ships must have been nearby—and the modern salvage of the 1715 fleet began. Since then, divers have recovered millions of dollars worth of precious cargo.

Two big discoveries were made just last summer. In June 2015, a family of professional treasure hunters found coins and jewelry worth more than $1 million. (One rare gold coin was worth over $500,000 alone!) The following month, a team of three treasure hunters found 350 gold coins, together worth $4.5 million. According to Queens Jewels, the salvage company that owns the rights to the wrecked fleet, some $400 million worth of treasure has yet to be recovered.