The work consisted of going into Fleet Prison ostensibly to take a shit; entering the vandalized privy when no one was paying especially keen attention; and jumping down the hole. The first boy who did it got paid extra, because there was no telling what he would find, or what would find him; but he climbed back up the (provided) rope a few minutes later with the sensational intelligence that he had found himself in a long, gently curving tunnel with a firm floor beneath several inches of slimy muck, and, flowing sluggishly over that, sewage that came up to mid-thigh.

The young men that Daniel hired went down that hole with bags on their backs (nothing bulky enough to draw the notice of the turnkeys) and came up empty-handed. They constructed a wooden ladder down below so that they might re-ascend to the privy without having to use climbing-ropes (as the pioneers had done). They went down with measuring-ropes and came up with numbers in their heads, which were mapped by Saturn: eight feet to the east of the privy-orifice, on the north side of the tunnel, was a drain-opening two hand-spans in breadth, which from time to time vomited cattle-guts. Eleven feet beyond that was the output shaft of a House of Office that must be in the back room of some other edifice. Two fathoms beyond that, on the right, a drain that must belong to the prison’s kitchen. Thirty sloshing paces beyond that, around a bend, a tiny in-flow of fresh water: the overflow drain of a pump and cistern that stood between the Prison kitchen and the dungeon. Up and down the tunnel these explorations spread, a picture filled in, one scrap at a time, by the accounts of the eager, reeking lads who emerged from the privy at all hours. Within a day they had found a stretch of rotten masonry wall, ninety to a hundred feet east of the privy, that could not be anything other than the outside wall of the dungeon itself. By listening with ears pressed against this, they convinced themselves that they heard chains rattling: the massive irons that the Warden of the Fleet had borrowed from Newgate Prison to bind the Shaftoe Gang. Now they went down with iron bars, chisels, and muffled hammers to peck and scrape away the crazed mortar that held that wall together. After two days of this, a chap on the other side-black, and so presumably Tomba-pulled a brick out of the way to make a fist-sized hole, and said that the miners must on no account remove any more material, lest their gaolers notice changes in the wall. So after that they moved on to other sorts of preparations. Several privy-shafts were ascended by boys recruited from London’s surplus of chimney-sweeps, hence, very much at home in filthy and cramped verticals. A particularly accommodating one was identified, and mapped to a house of prostitution in a corner of Bell Savage Inn: one of several culs-de-sac that lay just outside the prison wall, in the smoaky labyrinth of boozing-kens and spunging-houses between it and the Great Old Bailey.

For a few days in the second week of October, Daniel felt as though Thursday Night Beer-Clubb would never roll around. For the traffic in and out of the damaged privy had begun to attract notice-not so much the comings and goings of the boys themselves (for they employed a system of lookouts, so that their entries to and exits from the shaft would not be be seen by ordinary privy-users), but the trail of nostril-singeing moisture that they tended to leave on their way out. This admittedly was not as obvious in a dark, wet, stinking London prison shit-house as it might have been in some other settings, but some had noted it and begun to talk, which made Daniel very ill at ease. Not that there was any want of other things to feel ill at ease about! The more time he spent in the Tap-Room, the worse he felt; but during the final days, he could not tear himself away from the place for more than a few hours at a time. During the afternoon of the fourteenth, he read Dappa’s auction piece half a dozen times, between re-reading that day’s newspapers, and yesterday’s. But finally the sky got dark and the place began to fill up with Beer-seekers, and Saturn ambled through and gave him a wink, and then, of course, it was all coming too fast! Happening too soon! He wasn’t ready! It was a little bit like a year ago, when Minerva had been stalled off the coast of Massachusetts for week after tedious week by contrary winds, and Daniel, irreligious though he was, had prayed for a shift in the wind-only to be assaulted by Blackbeard’s pirate-fleet when that day finally arrived. Another change was in the air now, and another adventure in the offing. He was alarmed. But he reasoned with himself thus: men like Jack Shaftoe had adventures all their lives. Even his maths tutor at Cambridge, Isaac Barrow, had once duelled Corsairs in the Mediterranean. Everything since Enoch had come to his door a year and two days ago, had been an adventure, albeit with lulls. So why not let’s get on with it!

Daniel summoned one of the Tap-Room’s crack staff, and ordered that a certain keg of beer be tapped, and paid for it in gold. This was received, by the Debtors, with no less awe than a Biblical miracle. They responded with a miracle of their own: they transmogrified a full keg into an empty one. Daniel bought another, for word had gone out into the rules and beyond that Old Partry was buying a round for London, and people were thronging the place-coming in through the gate, Daniel was informed, in such a solid stream that no one could get out. To Daniel it only seemed like a more crowded than usual Beer-Clubb (and a more appreciative!), but when finally he was hoisted up onto the shoulders of several debtors, and huzzahed a good many times, and made the object of divers toasts, he was able from that vantage point to see over the heads of the Clubb and out the open door and windows into the Racket Ground, where he saw: fog. Not the usual London sea-fog, but the condensed breath of hundreds of persons who had backed up outside the doors because the Tap-Room was full. It might have been alarming, had these been Red Indians or Turks. But they were Englishmen. Daniel recognized here only the normal traits of Englishmen, viz. a wont to convene, drink, and be sociable, especially on chilly dark nights. He deemed this an apt moment to trigger another English predilection: joining together in mad projects.

“I have spent all of my gold,” he announced, when a speech had been called for, and the Clubb had got as quiet as it was ever likely to. “I have spent it all,” he repeated, “and my family, who look a-skance at my researches, would opine that I am now likely to become your fellow-inmate here in the Fleet; which they would be ashamed of, but I would deem a higher honor than to be made a Knight of the Garter.” Now, a pause for toasting and huzzahing. “But this is not to happen. I have only spent my gold thus in the Tap-Room, because I am so sure of finding more anon, out yonder. For lately I have uncovered new documents that shall enable me positively to fix the location of the cache of coins buried in these precincts one hundred and forty years ago by coiners locked up on orders of Sir Thomas Gresham!”

This utterance had begun promisingly, but then degenerated (in the opinion of most) into a windy and recondite history-lesson, and so the applause was not as vigorous as it might have been, had he simply ordered another keg tapped. But that suited his purposes well enough. The true believers in the buried-gold story had suspected, all evening long, that some new ferment was at work in Old Partry’s mind, and they now surged toward him, waving shovels and pointed sticks. The Court of Inspectors were extremely dismayed, and of a mind to have Daniel Pumped; but they were helpless as long as engulfed in a Mobb of visitors whose bellies were full of beer paid for by Old Partry.

“Now if you would be so accommodating as to bear me round to the Poor Side,” Daniel said, “I shall find the treasure, and we shall extract it, and divide it up! I make only one demand of you, which is that you remain well clear of the soldiers, and in no way menace or molest them. They are armed, after all; and if we are so rash as to hand them a pretext, why, they might just seize what’s rightfully ours!”