After burying all the useless junk from the shipwreck on the isolated island, Hunter didn't waste time cleaning up the site. He boarded his yacht and sailed away.
Paradise Island had internet access, but the seaside villa he rented didn't provide Wi-Fi service.
If he wanted to research the Zephyr, he could have just moved to a high-end hotel. But after some thought, Hunter decided not to check out of the villa just yet. Instead, he asked a local staff member for directions and drove his car straight to Nassau.
Nassau was the capital of the Bahamas. While by American standards it was merely a small coastal city with a population of a few hundred thousand, as a national capital, it had all the necessary infrastructure.
After asking around, Hunter found the largest public library in Nassau.
"Hello," Hunter said smoothly as he approached the front desk. "My name is Hunter Sun. I'm a writer and journalist from the United States."
"I'm currently working on a book about missing ships in American history. My research indicates that a vessel named the Zephyr sank in the waters near the Bahamas over a century ago."
"Could you tell me where I might find more detailed records about this?"
There was only one middle-aged man manning the desk.
Hunter glanced around. No security cameras in this section.
He subtly flipped his hand, pulling a crisp hundred-dollar bill featuring Benjamin Franklin from his [Inventory], and slid it across the counter.
Franklin truly was omnipotent. The librarian had initially looked annoyed at being interrupted from his reading, frowning impatiently as Hunter spoke.
But the moment he saw the hundred-dollar bill, his irritation melted into a warm, accommodating smile.
"Just a moment, sir," the librarian said in his gentlest tone.
As he spoke, he smoothly slid his book over the bill, concealing it from view.
Then he asked, "Sir, could you be a bit more specific? Finding a ship with just a name from over a century ago can be quite difficult."
"Let me think," Hunter said, maintaining a faint smile. Over the past few months, he had truly come to appreciate the universal power of cash.
"The Zephyr sank roughly a hundred and fifty years ago. I'm not entirely sure who owned the ship."
"However, during my research in the US, I came across scattered documents mentioning the name 'Tillman Thorpe'. I'm not sure if that's a useful lead."
Tillman Thorpe was a name Hunter had found engraved inside a gold pocket watch. He had retrieved the watch from one of the skeletons in the captain's quarters.
He figured he'd drop the name and see if it produced any results.
If it led nowhere, he wouldn't push it. He already had the treasure. He was just satisfying his curiosity about the origin of such an immense hoard—nearly ten tons of gold dust alone meant the ship and its owner were far from ordinary.
While not every librarian was a walking encyclopedia, spending all day in a quiet library usually meant they were well-read.
Hearing the specific keywords, the librarian paused, his expression shifting.
"Tillman Thorpe?"
"Do you mean the Tyrant, Tillman Thorpe?"
The librarian nodded thoughtfully. "The timeline fits... He was a major slave trader operating in the Caribbean and Central America a little over a century ago."
"Sir, if the Zephyr you're looking for is truly connected to the Tyrant Tillman Thorpe, please wait here for a moment..."
With that, the librarian hurried off into the stacks. He didn't forget to slip the hundred-dollar bill into his pocket before he left.
Hunter found it amusing, but he waited patiently.
About seven or eight minutes later, the librarian returned with three thick books.
"Sir, these three volumes contain records regarding the Tyrant Tillman Thorpe."
"You can start with this one. It has the most comprehensive information, though it's written in Latin. I'm not sure if you can read it."
"This second one is in English, but you'll want to start from the third section."
Hunter hadn't expected such a quick, positive result.
He thanked the man profusely, and as he took the books, he smoothly pressed another hundred-dollar bill into the librarian's hand.
Having just hauled up a treasure worth potentially a billion dollars, Hunter wasn't about to stingy over a couple hundred bucks.
"Thank you!"
Leaving the beaming librarian behind, Hunter found an empty table and began to read.
His [Reading] skill was at Level 5. Combined with his near-eidetic memory, he could consume text at a staggering pace, taking in ten lines at a glance.
As for the Latin, it wasn't an issue. His [Foreign Languages] skill was currently at Level 4. While writing complex Latin might be difficult, reading historical texts was well within his capabilities.
Hunter's reading efficiency was terrifying. He quickly pieced together the answers he sought.
Tillman Thorpe was born to white immigrants in the American South. His family had been wealthy plantation owners in Florida, but they had fallen on hard times.
Seeing others making fortunes in the slave trade, Tillman wanted in. Lacking the capital to buy massive merchant vessels to cross the Atlantic to Africa, he turned his sights closer to home: the indigenous populations of Central America and the Caribbean islands.
Driven by a ruthless ambition for wealth, Tillman sold off the remains of his family's plantation, bought a few armed ships, and hired a crew of mercenaries.
For the next two or three decades, Tillman Thorpe terrorized Central America and the Caribbean.
He raided indigenous villages and struck deals with corrupt local colonizers, capturing and transporting slaves to the Southern slave states in the US. He made an absolute fortune.
According to local Bahamian records, it was conservatively estimated that Tillman Thorpe had kidnapped or bought over thirty thousand Bahamian natives, shipping them off to the US.
He earned the nickname "The Tyrant" due to his extreme cruelty. Slaves who dared to resist were routinely whipped to the bone and thrown overboard to the sharks.
Far from being ashamed, Tillman reveled in his notoriety.
He reportedly commissioned a custom set of weapons—a golden sword, a golden pistol, and a silver powder horn—and had the title "The Tyrant" engraved upon them.
Tillman preferred to deal strictly in gold when selling his human cargo. Over decades of brutal trade, he amassed a horrifying amount of wealth, supposedly rivaling the treasury of a small nation.
However, his bloody empire collapsed with the end of the American Civil War.
Once the Union won the war, the Federal government turned its attention to the slave traders who had supplied the South with slaves, money, and weapons.
The US Navy dispatched warships to hunt him down, destroying his slave-trading strongholds and putting a massive bounty on his head.
According to history, Tillman Thorpe's final act was to load his fortune onto his flagship, take his favored mistress, and sail south, attempting to flee to Central or South America.
He was never seen again.
No one ever suspected that this infamous slave trader—along with his mistress and a lifetime of blood-soaked, nation-rivalling wealth—had met their end at the bottom of the sea, barely a dozen nautical miles off the coast of Nassau.
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