The Deep

The Deep by Gordon Korman alternates between a 17th-century historical storyline and a modern-day adventure in which four teenage interns discover the identity and location of a sunken treasure galleon worth over a billion dollars.

The historical thread opens on August 29, 1665, as 13-year-old Samuel Higgins, a cabin boy aboard the English privateer Griffin, prepares for battle. The privateer fleet, led by the ruthless Captain James Blade, paddles south in 24 canoes to surprise Portobelo, a Spanish treasure city on the Caribbean coast. Samuel harbors anger toward Blade for murdering Evans, the sail maker who was Samuel's only friend. When cannon fire from Santiago Castle reveals their approach, Blade orders the assault onto the beach.

In the present day, four interns at Poseidon Oceanographic Institute on the Caribbean island of Saint-Luc have discovered that their summer internship is a sham, designed by their supervisor, Tad Cutter, as cover for secret treasure hunting. During a dive, 13-year-old Dante Lewis, a color-blind photographer, develops nitrogen narcosis, a dangerous condition caused by breathing nitrogen under pressure. Impaired, he reaches for a venomous lionfish and begins removing his protective wet suit. His dive partner, 14-year-old Star Ling, tackles him away, but a bull shark appears. Menasce Gérard, a hulking native dive guide known as English, drives the shark off but then quits as the interns' guide, furious at the constant emergencies they create.

Captain Braden Vanover, skipper of the interns' dive boat, offers welcome news: The Poseidon Underwater Self-contained Habitat (PUSH), a subsea lab at 65 feet, is available for five days. Star, an expert diver whose mild cerebral palsy disappears underwater, is eager for unlimited dive time near the reef. Before descending, Adriana Ballantyne receives word from her uncle Alfred, an antiquities expert at the British Museum, who identifies a carved whalebone artifact from the wreck as a walking stick or whip handle bearing the initials "JB" and a 17th-century English thistle design. The fourth intern, Kaz (Bobby Kaczinski), is a former hockey prospect from Toronto who left the sport after a clean body check paralyzed another player.

At PUSH, the interns find diver propulsion vehicles (DPVs) that allow them to reach the wreck site. Their first visit nearly kills them: An airlift, a massive underwater vacuum and blower hose operated by Cutter's partner, Chris Reardon, hurls them through turbulent water. Adriana loses her mask and nearly drowns. Aboard Cutter's boat, the treasure hunters sort through Spanish artifacts but find no gold or silver.

Star proposes night dives when Cutter's crew is absent. The interns sift through rubble at the excavation and uncover ballast stones, pewter spoons, a brass crucifix, musket balls, and a human skull partially encased in coral, a grim reminder that the wreck is also a mass grave. Adriana confirms all items are consistent with 17th-century Spanish origin but notes a contradiction: The English-made JB artifact does not belong on a Spanish ship, since colonial Spaniards were forbidden from purchasing foreign goods.

The historical thread resumes as Samuel witnesses the aftermath of Portobelo's fall. Blade strikes Samuel with his bone-handled whip, set with an emerald, and threatens to kill him for desertion. A Spanish officer nearly kills Samuel before drums sound the cease-fire. Blade then leads the crew to Portobelo's waterfront storehouses, legendary as the richest acre on earth, only to find them empty: The treasure galleons departed four days earlier with the entire cargo.

After a second night dive, the interns become lost returning to PUSH. Adriana's air drops to nearly zero, but she cannot surface because days of saturation diving have loaded her body with dissolved nitrogen; a rapid ascent would cause fatal decompression sickness. English, who found PUSH empty and came searching, arrives with emergency air tanks and saves them just as their supplies run out.

English discovers the interns' artifact cache and follows them to the wreck site. Dante notices shadowy objects on the steep slope where the seafloor drops into deep ocean, and together he and English unearth a corroded brass ship's bell. When Cutter and Reardon arrive with underwater jackhammers, English watches them destroy the living reef with barely contained rage. Back at PUSH, the interns explain everything. English believes them but refuses to help fight Cutter. He reveals, almost reluctantly, that his ancestor was English, from the shipwreck.

Adriana cleans the bell, uncovering engravings reading "Toledo" and "1648." Cross-referencing Spanish government archives, she identifies the wreck as Nuestra Señora de la Luz ("Our Lady of the Light"), which vanished in a hurricane in 1665. The cargo manifest lists 700,000 pieces of eight, tons of gold, and chests of gems, with an estimated modern value of 1.2 billion dollars. English overhears and is disgusted, accusing the interns of being no different from Cutter, and orders them to leave.

After decompression, the interns confide in Captain Vanover, who advises against reporting Cutter, reasoning that firing him would only send him elsewhere. With help from Dr. Igor Ocasek, an eccentric Poseidon scientist, they build a deep-water camera array. Lowered from the Hernando Cortés on a stormy night, the cameras capture a bronze cannon and ballast stones at 350 feet, confirming the galleon broke apart during sinking. Back in their cabin, Kaz and Dante find sandy footprints near the bell, suggesting Cutter has discovered their find. The next morning, Adriana discovers a gold fleck under her fingernails from mud on the camera array, evidence of gold dust from the wreck scattered across the deep seafloor.

Vanover proposes using Poseidon's research submersible, Deep Scout, to retrieve treasure and file a legal claim. With Vanover piloting and all four interns aboard, the sub descends along the slope. At 344 feet, Dante spots the cannon. Artifacts thicken as they pass 500 and 600 feet. At roughly 700 feet, they reach a mound of debris that Vanover identifies as a second, separate shipwreck. Before they can retrieve anything, Clarence, an 18-foot tiger shark, explodes from the darkness and rams the sub repeatedly. The shark departs, but the impacts separate hull plates, and cold mud packs into the belly, adding half a ton of dead weight.

The sub will not rise. With dwindling air, Vanover uses thrusters to claw upward. At 206 feet, he blows the hatch. The ocean floods in, slamming Vanover against the acrylic sphere. Star, fighting narcosis, pushes the others out and untangles Kaz from exposed wires. She sees Vanover's body drift from the sub and dives back to force her regulator between his lips, but there is no response. The captain is dead. Star races for the surface with almost no air. Her dive watch warns her to decompress, but stopping means drowning. She risks decompression sickness and kicks upward, reaching the surface with sharp pains in her joints.

A helicopter evacuates Star to an oil-drilling platform's infirmary. When a technician blocks access to the recompression chamber, Kaz body-checks the man to the floor, and the medical team seals Star inside. Hours later, Adriana and Dante arrive to find Star unconscious behind the chamber glass. English bursts through the doors, his fury softening when he sees Star. He presses his hand to the window, then turns on the remaining interns: This is their treasure, he says. Are they happy? Do they feel rich? The interns cannot argue. They can only wait.

The historical thread closes as the Griffin sails into a massive hurricane, pursuing the treasure galleons that departed Portobelo four days earlier. Blade laughs at the danger, declaring that they may die, but if they survive, they will all be rich.