Aruba Gold

By Dan Jensen

The characters in this story are the figment of my imagination, the places and events are real, the church at Noord is there, Lago was at one time the largest refinery in the world, Aruba was attacked by a German U-Boat early on in World War II, the Scott Highlanders were sent to protect the island before the U. S entered the war. The Scotts were replaced by U. S. Troops. When I lived in Barbados the native’s spoke of the Black Heard Man and Hess has a large refinery on St. Croix. The gold found in the cave is not real and to my knowledge there never was any gold stashed in the caves of Aruba by the early Indians who settled the island. However, Aruba did enjoy a Gold Rush in the 1800’s and two gold smelters were built on the island. Also, in the past, much alluvial gold was found and probably, with luck, some could be found today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dan Jensen
• Release date: Sep 30, 2012
• ISBN: 9781301794409

Dan Jensen

Dan was born in St. Petersburg, Florida and grew up on Aruba. After attending university he moved to St. Croix in the US Virgin Islands and also spent three years in Barbados where his two children were born. Dan did not start to write until after he retired. Aruba Gold is his first book.

Book preview

Aruba Gold

Dan Jensen

Copyright 2009 by Arthur Daniel Jensen

Smashwords Edition

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

The author can be contacted at:

2300 Barton Creek Blvd.

Apartment # 1512

Austin, TX 78735

Email: [e-mail]

TABLE OF CONTENT

Chapter 1 - Church at Noord

Chapter 2 - The Discovery

Chapter 3 - The Coins

Chapter 4 -The Oil Man

Chapter 5 - The Engineer

Chapter 6 - The Engineer’s Father

Chapter 7 - The Gambler

Chapter 8 - The Bajan

Chapter 9 - The Highlander

Chapter 10 -Jan

Chapter 11 - The Attorney

Chapter 12 -The Meeting

Chapter 13 - The Honeymoon

Chapter 14 - The fifth Coin

FORWARD

The characters in this story are the figment of my imagination, the places and events are real, the church at Noord is there, Lago was at one time the largest refinery in the world, Aruba was attacked by a German U-Boat early on in World War II, the Scott Highlanders were sent to protect the island before the U. S entered the war. The Scotts were replaced by U. S. Troops. When I lived in Barbados the native’s spoke of the Black Heard Man and Hess has a large refinery on St. Croix. The gold found in the cave is not real and to my knowledge there never was any gold stashed in the caves of Aruba by the early Indians who settled the island. However, Aruba did enjoy a Gold Rush in the 1800’s and two gold smelters were built on the island. Also, in the past, much alluvial gold was found and probably, with luck, some could be found today.

I wrote and self-published this story in 1993.

At that time I had one hundred copies printed and sold a few, gave away more than I sold and ended up with only one copy for myself.

This all began because I began to write about my boyhood experiences in Aruba, stories about the Lago refinery that I had heard my father tell others, and then, when I had exhausted my material on Aruba, I began putting down facts and events that occurred in St. Croix, when I lived as a young man.

From St. Croix my writing went to Barbados where I lived for three years installing the first Ready Mix Concrete plant on the island and remained to operate the plant. Later my endeavor to record my past jumped back to St. Croix and the Hess refinery where I worked for General Electric for 6 months constructing foundations for new gas turbine generators.

During all of this unrelated writing I injected into my text events that had occurred and characters I had know, met, and enjoyed.

It was a complete hodge-podge of aimless thoughts and experiences which would have no meaning or interest to anyone. I had, what I would call, pointless chatter, and then the idea hit me, I decided to make up a story to bring it all together, out of that simple thought Aruba Gold developed.

When I retired I developed a web site about my days in Aruba. I realized I did not have the text for ARUBA GOLD on the computer, my hard drive had crashed and it was lost, so early in my retirement I set about to re-typing the book from the one remaining copy I still had. I did this in order to place the story on the Lago Colony, Aruba web site.

In the process of retyping the text I left out a lot of the original story, not because I was trying to shorten the book, maybe I should have, but because I was too lazy to retype the entire story. Even with the abridged edition, which is accessible on the web site, it ran to over 170 pages.

Now five years later I have started again, I am going back and making corrections and re-editing the original text as it now appears on the web site with the thought in mind of having eight copies of the book printed for the grandchildren.

Dan Jensen

Austin, TX

2009

A WORD OF CAUTION

The caves, wells and tunnels in Aruba that I write about in this story exist and are accessible, however they are not safe.

The ladders are old and rusty and may not support your weight, there are Boa Constructors on the island and they may be dwelling in these caves and if you were to get hurt it would be very difficult to find you or get help to you.

Do not enter these caves unless you know what you are doing, have the proper safety equipment and go as a group so in the event of an accident someone can go for help.

Chapter 1

THE CHURCH AT NOORD

THE SETTING -1983

The present Catholic Church of Santa Anna, located at Noord, just north of Oranjestad, was constructed between 1914 and 1918, the last of three churches built on the site. Little is know of the first church built on the site, other than it was finished in 1776, the same is true of the second church, even the date of construction, but it was demolished in 1914 to make room for the third church.

This third church was now in need of major repair. In the past sixty-five years the present church had not undergone a major renovation, not that the church did not need work done to it, it had, but there had always the question of where the money would come from as there had always been a lack of money within the congregation, so repairs were kept at a minimum and it was showing.

The oil industry, begun in 1924 on the East end of the island of Aruba, and the small amount of aloe that was still grown on the island had not brought the same prosperity to the Catholic congregation of Noord as it had to the rest of the island, Nord remained a small poor community on the north-west side of the island and insulated from the island’s development.

Then, in the mid-fifties the government began promoting tourism, and used legalized gambling as a lure to attract the first tourists to the island. This bait had began successful, the gambling got the tourist coming, but the white sandy beaches, the hot sun, cool trade winds and friendly people kept them coming back. Tourist from Venezuela, Columbia and North America, at first hungry to gamble and later wanting to escape the cold and enjoy the warmth of the island, began flocking to the island. This influx prompted a hotel building boom on the west end along Palm and Eagle Beach and brought with it a new prosperity. The increased prosperity brought on by the tourist industry filtered into Nord and this increased the contributions coming to the church; so when the priest of Santa Anna asked the Bishop of Aruba to allow him to undertake a long overdue renovation, the Bishop agreed.

The sanctuary was closed and services were held in the adjourning school.

Before the renovation work began on the interior of the church the famous carved oak alter was moved and stored in the school. First the pews were removed and taken to a local shop to be refinished. This cleared a path to allow the large alter to be moved across the transept, through the nave, out the front doors and into the school and place in an unused classroom, where it was kept protected until the renovation was complete and it could be placed back in the church.

The wooden alter, the story goes, was destine for a Catholic church in Curacao but was mistakenly sent to Aruba where it remained. It is considered a fine example of neo-Gothic sculpture, created by Hendrik van der Geld in 1870. It was carved in the province of Noord-Brabant and soon after being completed the entire sculpture, the retable, the communion rail and pulp was shipped to Rome where it won a prize at the first Vatican Council in 1870. It was then returned to the Netherlands and placed in the Antonius Church in Scheveningen.

Why it was removed from the Antonius Church in Scheveningen and being shipped to Curacao is not clear, but after the error of being offloaded from a ship in Aruba instead of Curacao, it ended up in the Church of Noord.

With the church empty of furnishings the workman arrived and the church was transformed into a dusty construction site, swarming with workman, each doing his job to restore the church to its once splendid grandeur.

The original concrete floor, which had settled and cracked over the years, would be dug up and replaced with new steel reinforced concrete. The interior plaster was in very bad condition, moisture had seeped into the walls and this was causing the plaster to crack and become unattached to the coral stone walls and being loose it posed a danger. In many places the plaster had fall off, exposing the coral, thankfully none had fallen while services were being held.

In order to assure a lasting repair to the walls all the plaster had to be removed and a new coat applied. When the coral stones making up the walls were exposed it was found that many of the stones were loose and no longer firmly embedded in the wall. This necessitated all loose stones to be checked and if loose, removed, cleaned of old lime mortar and re-installed in the wall. When this was done fresh cement mortar was used instead of a lime plaster, as had been originally used.

The outdated electrical wiring was antiquated and nothing could be salvaged so all components were removed and replaced with modern switches, plugs, breakers and wire.

The old bathrooms were entirely modernized and the old galvanized and cast-iron pipes dug up and replaced with copper and plastic pipe. It seemed a shame to loose the old blue Dutch tile which covered the walls of the bathrooms, but most of it was cracked and broken, so all was removed.

The large wood beams supporting the roof, the window frames around the old stained glass and the wood shutters on the outside of the windows were scraped down to the bare wood, all rotten wood was replaced and then it all received a new, fresh coat of paint. Some of the shutters were in such bad condition that they could not be repaired, so they were copied and the new shutters matched perfectly with what old shutters remained.

The exterior of the church was cleaned, the plaster seemed sound, so only the cracks were repaired, missing plaster was replaced and the exterior was scraped and repainted.

Poppy Cruz was one of the native tradesmen working at the church. He was a stone mason, having started at the age of eight when he worked with his father, who was also a stone mason. At that early age he carried baskets of small stones to fill the small voids in the coral stone walls his father would build. As he grew older and stronger he carried larger stone for his father. Most of the walls he and his father built were dry stacked, no mortar was used but in the event mortar was needed he mixed and carried it for his father. By the age of thirteen he was working alongside his father laying the coral stone. His father had taught him the tricks of being a good stone mason. The idea is father instilled in him was to work with his mind, not his back.

Look at the space to be filled. His father would tell him. Then look at the pile of coral stone that is available, now, in your mind fill the space and chose the stone that will fit. With experience Pappy learned to pick the correct stone the first time and thus only lifted each stone once, not like many others, who would pick up a stone, place it in the void, find it did not fit the space or did not match the adjacent stones and thus have to put it down and pick up another. By picked the correct stone on the first try he saved energy, was more efficient and never got tired or suffered from back aches because of unnecessary lifting and bending.

When Poppy went to look for work at the church his reputation as a good stone mason was know throughout the island and he was give the job immediately.

He was assigned the task of checking each coral stone in the old wall and replacing and re-grouting those stones that were loose or poorly fitted. This work was time consuming and required a skill level that other stoned masons did not possess. By the very nature of the work it was slow, but Pappy, because of the way his father had trained him and the way he worked was more than able to keep up with the men ahead of him and those that followed. He also did the work with a great sense of pride and it showed.

To begin the process of plaster restoration or to be more correct, complete replacement, the less experienced workers first removed the plaster from the walls.

This allowed Pappy to see and get to the stones and do his checking and repair. Using the end of his trowel handle he hit every stone in the wall. From the sound of his trowel striking the stone he could tell if it was loose or well imbedded in the wall. If it gave a dull thud instead of a sharp ring he knew the stone was loose. With his stone hammer he would chip out the broken mortar around the loose stone and gently removed it from the wall. He did with such skill and care that he did not disturb the surrounding stones. If he was happy with the stone’s fit, he applied fresh mortar to the stone and re-set it in the wall. If he was not happy with the fit he would find another stone to replace the poor fitting stone. This did not happen very often, the old stone masons who had built the original wall in 1914 had done a good job and Pappy substituted few new stones for the ones he removed.

As he moved along the wall checking and resetting the loose stone another crew of men came behind and applied a new first scratch coat of plaster to the repaired wall. After all three coats of plaster had been applied the mortar was allowed to thoroughly dry and then and only then would the painters prime, paint and finish the wall. If the plaster still retained moisture the paint would not adhered properly.

Poppy liked his job. He worked alone, mixing his own mortar and, even without a helper, he stayed ahead of the plastering crew.

Poppy had been working at the church for two weeks. Repair to the east wall had been completed and he was now ready to begin on the south wall. When Poppy began on the southwest corner he found numerous stones that had to be reset. The first stone he removed was not like the other stones he had found in the east wall, this stone was smooth, it had square corners and he could see the chisel marks where the stone had been painstakingly made into a cube. All the other stones in the wall were as they came from the field, rough with irregular shapes.

When Poppy removed to smooth cube from the wall, he examined it, and found it was made from two smooth blocks of stone that had been cemented together. Fascinated with the cube; he laid it on the floor and tapped on the seam with his hammer and chisel. The old lime mortar did not offer much resistance and after a couple of light taps the cube parted.

With the two halves of the broken cube lay on the floor Poppy could not believe what he saw. Each half had been chipped out to form a cavity and inside this cavity in one of the halves there was a folded piece of gray paper.

He looked around; no one was paying any attention to what he was doing. Gingerly, he picked up the paper; it felt brittle in his dry, callused hands. His first reaction was to take it to the contractor, but, No he thought, the contractor would only take it to the priest. Not the priest. He said to himself. Pappy had been raised a Catholic and as a boy had attended church every Sunday. As a young man, Sunday became a day to visit the run shop and church was replaced with visit to the rum shop. When the priest in Santa Cruz had spoken to Pappy about missing church and frequenting the run shop he had become resentful of the priest and the church. He had stayed away ever since.

Holding the dry, gray paper in his rough hands he thought of the