Cádiz, July 1713. Mateo Montero has sold his father's land for a commission on a Spanish treasure galleon, and the man who sold it to him runs the unofficial trade of contraband throughout the Spanish Colonial Americas.

Montero's title is sobrecargo, keeper of the cargo. The Casa de Contratación issues him an official manifest. Otero's network in Cádiz hands him a second one, for the English broadcloth and the undeclared goods that ride in every hold on the Carrera de Indias. Montero keeps a third ledger for himself to track his own back room deals.

The run will take two years. Fifteen bolts of English cloth under a Spanish flag. A hundred thousand pounds of mercury in the deepest part of the hold, bound for the silver mines of Potosí. A fair at Portobelo where a year of Peru's silver changes hands in forty days, and where a man with trail dust on his boots sets a pouch of uncut emeralds on a gambling-house table. Ten months rotting at anchor in Cartagena while the warehouse fees eat the margin. A harbor at Havana where a Canary Islands captain named Amaro Pargo sells his wine, and sails in May while the Crown's fleet waits for its dispatches.

And at every port, a quiet Jesuit with a leather notebook, always somewhere nearby, writing.

Father Ignacio has been aboard the Santa Catalina since Cádiz. He asks the questions a merchant would ask. In Portobelo he walks into Montero's warehouse with two priests, a wooden chest, and a folio that lists every deal Montero made at the fair, and he names the Church's percentage.

Then, in the last week of July 1715, eleven ships sail for Spain with the richest cargo in the Americas, straight into hurricane season. Six days out of Havana, the sky changes.

The 1715 Fleet was real. Three centuries later, the beaches of Florida's Treasure Coast still give up its silver after every storm.

A prequel to The Treasure Hunter's Legacy, Book One of The Pargo Expeditions.

The Shadow Manifest

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