Pirate Hunters

by Robert Kurson

  Copyright © 2015 by Robert Kurson

  Maps copyright © 2015 by David Lindroth Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  IMAGE CREDITS:

  iStock (frontispiece), Library of Congress (this page), courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica (this page)

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Paul Cox for permission to reprint the map of Port Royal (this page) by Oliver Cox, drawn subsequently as part of the report proposal “Upgrading and Renewing the Historic City of Port Royal, Jamaica,” June 1984. Reprinted by permission.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Kurson, Robert.

  Pirate hunters: treasure, obsession, and the search for a legendary pirate ship / Robert Kurson.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-4000-6336-9

  eBook ISBN 978-0-8129-9652-4

  1. Golden Fleece (ship) 2. Shipwrecks—Dominican Republic.

  3. Treasure troves. 4. Pirates—History. 5. Mattera, John (wreck diver)

  6. Chatterton, John 7. Deep diving I. Title.

  G530.G5986K87 2015 910.9163′65—dc23 2014020225

  eBook ISBN 9780812996524

  www.atrandom.com

  eBook design adapted from printed book design by Barbara M. Bachman

  Cover design: Daniel Rembert

  Cover illustration (map): courtesy of John Mattera

  v4.1

  a

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Author’s Note

  Map

  Chapter One: The Greatest Pirate Story Ever

  Chapter Two: Bannister’s Island

  Chapter Three: None of this Makes Sense

  Chapter Four: A Well-Respected Englishman

  Chapter Five: The Wisdom of Old Fishermen

  Chapter Six: Nowhere Left to Go

  Chapter Seven: John Chatterton

  Chapter Eight: A Place Equal to the Man

  Chapter Nine: John Mattera

  Chapter Ten: The Oracles

  Chapter Eleven: The Golden Age

  Chapter Twelve: The Sugar Wreck

  Chapter Thirteen: I Hope We Can Stay Friends

  Chapter Fourteen: Drifting Away

  Chapter Fifteen: Drowning

  Chapter Sixteen: The Battle

  Chapter Seventeen: Another Way

  Chapter Eighteen: The Golden Fleece

  Epilogue

  Photo Insert

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Note on Sources

  By Robert Kurson

  About the Author

  Now and then we had a hope that if

  we lived and were good,

  God would permit us to be pirates.

  —MARK TWAIN

  Pirates could happen to anyone.

  —TOM STOPPARD

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Early one January morning in 2012, I received an international call from an unknown number. It was coming from the Dominican Republic, but I didn’t know anyone in that country, I had never been there in my life. The voice on the line, however, was unmistakable.

  “If you like pirates, meet me in New Jersey.”

  The caller was John Chatterton, one of the heroes of my book Shadow Divers, a true story about two weekend scuba divers who discover a World War II German U-boat sunk off the coast of New Jersey, and their obsessive and deadly quest to identify the wreck. I hadn’t spoken to Chatterton in more than a year, but knew his New York–tinged baritone right away.

  “What kind of pirates?” I asked.

  “Seventeenth century. Caribbean. The real deal.”

  Just the mention of pirates sat me straight up in my seat. But the timing for a trip from Chicago to New Jersey could not have been worse. It was snowing. I was researching a new book. And I was just winding down from the holidays. But I’d learned something from Chatterton the first time around—if there’s a window to go, you go. An hour later, I was on I-94 headed east.

  Late that night, I pulled into Scotty’s Steakhouse in Springfield, New Jersey. I hadn’t seen Chatterton for three years, but he looked younger than I remembered. He was sixty now, but appeared in better shape than men half his age. He introduced me to his friend John Mattera, a man of about fifty with a broad smile and a Staten Island accent. I’d met Mattera years earlier, and remembered he’d worked as an executive bodyguard. His arms still looked the part.

  We ordered drinks and caught up on family, then Chatterton got down to business.

  “How much do you know about the Golden Age of Piracy?” he asked.

  As it turned out, I knew quite a bit. Years earlier, at a used bookstore, I’d picked up a tiny paperback called The Buccaneers of America by Alexandre Exquemelin, a true account of pirate life by a man who’d sailed aboard real pirate ships and had chronicled the exploits of Captain Henry Morgan. The book, considered a classic, couldn’t have been more than two hundred pages. I had paid two dollars and taken it to lunch with me down the street.

  I never got to the food.

  Exquemelin’s pirates were wilder than in any movie, more treacherous than in any novel. They conquered entire cities, devised ingenious methods for plundering, and struck terror into the hearts of their enemies, sometimes without raising a sword. By a single act alone—perhaps by eating the still-beating heart of a merchant captain who refused to surrender—they broadcast their reputations across oceans. Even their downtime was epic, so packed with debauchery and fast living it would have spun the heads of modern millionaire rock stars. And yet, these pirates lived by a code of conduct and honor so far ahead of its time it made them nearly invincible.

  They also left no trail. Only one pirate ship had ever been discovered and positively identified in the centuries since the buccaneers prowled the oceans: the Whydah, found in waters off Cape Cod in 1984. Nothing was harder to find underwater—or maybe in all the world—than a pirate ship. It was as if every trace of the buccaneers had disappeared.

  I read every pirate book I could find after devouring Exquemelin, asked at rare coin shops to see silver pieces of eight, and even drove cross-country to explore a museum exhibit on the Whydah. So I knew about the Golden Age, which lasted from about 1650 to 1720.

  “Good,” Mattera said. “Because we just spent a year living in the seventeenth century.”

  For the next three hours, the men told me of their quest to find a great pirate ship—a journey filled with danger, diving, and mystery. They talked about researching the history of pirates in libraries and archives around the globe. They described using cutting-edge technology and tracking down ancient maps and manuscripts. They told stories about learning from wise elders, and doing battle with cutthroats and rivals. And they told me about their search for a pirate captain more notorious than Blackbeard and more daring than William Kidd, a real-life Jack Sparrow, a man who’d been legend but whose story had been lost to time: the buccaneer Joseph Bannister.

  I pressed the men for more details and asked questions until the restaurant closed. In the parking lot, they told me they’d be happy to talk further, but that a person couldn’t truly understand what they’d been through without seeing for himself where it all had happened.

  Two weeks later, I met Chatterton and Mattera in the Colonial Zone in Santo Domingo, the oldest permanent settlement in the New World. We walked down the cobblestoned Calle Las Damas, the first paved road in the Americas. To my right, I could see the home of conquistador Nicolás de Ovando, built i
n 1502, complete with dungeons; to my left, the oldest church in the New World. After breakfast, the men took me to a sixteenth-century coral block structure. This was the laboratory at the Oficina Nacional de Patrimonio Cultural Subacuático, the place where artifacts discovered by treasure hunters were cataloged and divvied up.

  I didn’t know where to look first. On one table was a nine-foot gold chain from the seventeenth century. On another was a set of slave manacles and an egg-shaped box made of pure silver. In a cement tank, lying in water, was an anchor used by Christopher Columbus. In the States, the anchor would have been protected by Plexiglas and guarded by lasers. Here, I was free to reach in and touch it, and I did. Time disappeared with the contact. This is what Columbus’s world felt like. Now I was feeling it, too.

  Near the exit, I was shown to a final table, this one piled high with hundreds of pieces of eight, all from the seventeenth century. I scooped up as many of the silver coins as would fit in my hands, then let them spill onto the table. They made a sound I’d never heard before but somehow had known my whole life, a waterfall of muted chimes, dense and deep and old. This was the song that had called to the pirates. This was the sound of treasure.

  That night, the men drove me to the north coast of the country, where they’d launched their search for the Golden Fleece, the greatest pirate ship that had ever sailed. In New Jersey, they had told me the outline of the story. Here, on a sticky hot night in which even the moon seemed to sweat, I heard more—about how difficult the quest had become for Chatterton and Mattera, how much they’d risked to undertake it, how they were still paying the price for going on this hunt for history, and for getting into the mind of a great leader and adventurer, the pirate Joseph Bannister. And I could feel, in between the swashbuckling details of their tale, how they’d been searching for more than a pirate ship all along.

  When I got home, I didn’t feel much like going back to work on my old project. Instead, I woke my two young sons and told them the pirate story. Then, I decided to tell it to you.

  Detail left

  Detail right

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE GREATEST PIRATE STORY EVER

  John Chatterton and John Mattera were days away from launching a quest they’d been planning for two years, a search for the treasure ship San Bartolomé, sunk in the seventeenth century and worth a hundred million dollars or more. To find it, they’d moved to the Dominican Republic and risked everything they owned and held dear. The discovery would make them rich beyond their dreams and engrave their names in the history books. The New York Times would profile them. Museums would hold black-tie affairs in their honor. Best of all, they knew just where to look.

  And then their phone rang.

  On the line was Tracy Bowden, a sixty-nine-year-old treasure hunter and a legend in the business. He said he had something big to discuss and asked if the men might fly to Miami to hear him out.

  Chatterton and Mattera didn’t have two minutes to spare in advance of their quest for the San Bartolomé. They’d vowed never to let anything put them off track. But there was an urgency in Bowden’s voice they hadn’t heard in the year since they’d met him, and Miami was just a two-hour flight from Santo Domingo; they could be there and back the same day. If nothing else, Bowden told great stories, and in treasure hunting, stories were the next best thing to gold. So, one morning in early 2008, they packed day bags and booked tickets, and went on their way. The treasure on board the San Bartolomé had been lost for four hundred years. It could wait another few hours for them to come find it.

  In Miami, they rented a car and set out for Bowden’s house. He wasn’t like any other treasure hunter they’d met. He seemed to work in the shadows, shunning publicity and almost never teaming up with others. He didn’t boast or issue bullshit claims. And he used little of the modern technology that had revolutionized underwater salvage, relying instead on old drawings, aging equipment, and his own decades-old notes to find wrecked ships loaded with silver and gold.

  During his career, Bowden had discovered not one but two Spanish treasure galleons, and he’d done groundbreaking work on a third, yet neither Chatterton nor Mattera could judge how wealthy he’d become. His home in the Dominican Republic was hardly larger than a garage, and his salvage boat, the Dolphin, was good but not grand. As a successful treasure hunter, Bowden should have been able to live in a palace, a place with solid gold doorknobs and a moat. But as Chatterton and Mattera pulled into the driveway, they had to double-check the address. The house, while lovely, looked no different than any other in this ordinary suburban subdivision.

  Inside, Bowden offered them coffee, but they hardly heard him. Everywhere they looked they saw treasure. In one room were silver coins embedded in coral; in another, centuries-old brass navigational instruments that museums would have paid a fortune to own. The china in Bowden’s dining room was seventeenth-century Delftware, still as blue and white as the day it was made, and a match for a priceless set Mattera had seen in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

  Bowden showed them other coins and artifacts, each with a story, each from a shipwreck he’d worked. He let them handle everything; touch was important, he said, otherwise a person could never really know this stuff. Finally, Mattera excused himself to use the bathroom. He stopped when he walked in the door.

  Piled high in the bathtub were plastic bags filled with silver pieces of eight, all from the seventeenth century. He lifted one of the bags from the tub and inspected the contents through the flimsy plastic. For years, he’d seen silver coins like these sell for a thousand dollars apiece at auction. By his count, there were at least one hundred bags in the tub, and fifty coins to a bag. Mattera had never been quick at math, but he made this calculation right away. In a single bathtub, he was looking at five million dollars in treasure, all bundled in the cheapest baggies he’d ever seen, not even with Ziploc tops.

  Returning to the living room, Mattera quick-stepped over to Chatterton and whispered in his ear.

  “Take a leak.”

  “Huh?”

  “Just do it. Go to the bathroom.”

  Chatterton shrugged. They were partners. So he went.

  He returned a few minutes later, eyes bulging.

  Bowden asked the men to join him at the dining room table, then got down to business. He’d done it all in his thirty-plus-year career—worked three galleons, a slave ship, and a legendary warship from the American Revolution. He’d been featured—twice—in National Geographic (Mattera had read the first of those stories when he was sixteen, then read it over and over again). He’d recovered world-class treasures and priceless artifacts. But there was something he wanted different from any of that—something rare beyond measure, a prize he’d been seeking for decades.

  “Have you heard of Joseph Bannister?” he asked.

  The men shook their heads.

  Bannister, Bowden explained, was a well-respected seventeenth-century English sea captain in charge of transporting cargos between London and Jamaica. One day, for no reason anyone could explain, he stole the great ship he commanded, the Golden Fleece, and embarked on a pirating rampage, a genuine good guy gone bad in the 1680s, the Golden Age of Piracy. In just a few years, he became one of the most wanted men in the Caribbean. The harder the English tried to stop him, the more ingeniously he defied them. Soon, he’d become an international terror. The Brits swore they’d stop at nothing to hunt him down and hang him.

  The Royal Navy pursued him on the open seas and used the full force of its might to try to find him. In those days, no one eluded a manhunt like that. But Bannister did. And his crimes got bolder and bolder. Finally, two navy warships pinned the pirate captain down, trapping him and his ship on an inescapable island. At the sight of a single frigate like these, most pirate captains threw up their hands and surrendered. Confronted by two? Even the toughest would drop to his knees and pray.

  Not Bannister.

  He and his crew manned cannons and rifles, and they
waged an all-out battle against the two Royal Navy warships. The fighting lasted for two days. Bannister’s ship, the Golden Fleece, was sunk in the combat. But Bannister won the war. Battered, and with many men dead and wounded, the navy ships limped back to Jamaica, and Bannister made his escape. It was a stunning defeat for the English and made Bannister a legend. Through the ages, however, his name had been lost to time.

  “This is the greatest pirate story ever,” Bowden said. “And no one knows about it. I want the Golden Fleece. And I think you guys can help find her.”

  Bowden did not have to explain the rarity of finding a pirate ship. Both Chatterton and Mattera knew that only one had ever been discovered and positively identified—the Whydah—lost in 1717 off Cape Cod and recovered by explorer Barry Clifford in 1984. The discovery had inspired books, documentaries, and an exhibit that continued to tour major museums more than twenty years after the find. It was clear, after the Whydah came up, that the world couldn’t get enough of real pirates. Now Bowden was talking about going after a pirate ship captained by a man who sounded even more daring than the swashbucklers in Hollywood movies.

  But that wasn’t the only big news. Bowden also believed he knew the wreck’s location. History was clear that the Golden Fleece had sunk off Cayo Levantado, a small island on the north coast of the Dominican Republic. Chatterton and Mattera knew the place; it was shimmering with white sandy beaches, and home to a five-star resort. For years, it had been known as Bacardi Island, used by the rum maker in ads to depict a paradise on earth. It was a manageable area to work.

  Bannister’s story had been legend in its day, but few people seem to have searched for the wreck. The late Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo was rumored to have sent divers to Cayo Levantado as recently as the 1960s, but his men came up empty. Bowden picked up the search in 1984 but had found little more than modern debris at the island. In recent months, he’d come to believe that without the use of state-of-the-art equipment such as side-scan sonar and magnetometers, the Golden Fleece might never be found. Bowden had never gone in for technology like that; he’d stayed loyal to the time-tested ways that had made him. But he couldn’t deny that guys like Chatterton and Mattera were the future. He knew they’d spent two years of their lives and a fortune to master the modern equipment, and he’d seen them make it work as they trained to hunt for their own galleon.