Pirate Hunters

by Robert Kurson

  So, he offered them a deal.

  He would give them 20 percent of the Golden Fleece if they found the pirate wreck for him. There might be gold, silver, and jewels aboard. There might be swords, muskets, pirate beads, peg legs, and daggers. Even skeletons. Or there might be nothing at all. In any case, Bowden wanted something bigger than treasure. He wanted Bannister, the greatest pirate of them all.

  Bowden didn’t require an answer on the spot. He knew Chatterton and Mattera were about to embark on their own journey. He admired their guts and vision—it reminded him of when he’d thrown over his own safe American life to seek his Caribbean fortune. But Bannister’s Golden Fleece was once in a lifetime. Think it over, he told them, and give me your answer soon.

  Pulling out of Bowden’s driveway, the two partners said almost nothing, but each was thinking the same thing. Between them, they’d dived the most famous and fascinating shipwrecks in the world—Titanic, Andrea Doria, Lusitania, a mystery German U-boat, Britannic, Arizona—but neither could imagine anything cooler or rarer than a Golden Age pirate ship, especially one captained by a gentleman sailor turned rogue who had defeated the Royal Navy in battle. Every diver, at some deep level in his soul, dreamed of discovering a pirate ship. Yet, it never seemed to happen to anyone. Ever. Now, Chatterton and Mattera were being given a chance to find one as thrilling as any history had known.

  Yet, both men knew they could never accept Bowden’s offer.

  They had trained for two years to find treasure, spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on boats and equipment, pledged their lives’ savings to the cause. They’d put together a crew, researched at archives in Spain, consulted legends and gurus, nearly got into gunfights in wild but beautiful places, survived an attack by shadowy rivals. It all had led them to a target few others knew about, a galleon called the San Bartolomé, sunk in a hurricane in 1556 on the Dominican south coast, and still filled with mountains of treasure. They knew she was there. They’d come too far to turn their backs on her now.

  In another era, the two partners might have delayed their search for this treasure ship, but time was running out for treasure hunters now. Governments and archaeologists had pressured many of the countries richest in treasure wrecks—Jamaica, Mexico, Cuba, the Bahamas, Bermuda—to outlaw private salvage. Just a few years earlier, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) established an international treaty effectively holding that shipwrecks more than one hundred years old belonged to the nations that lost them, not to the person who found them. Already, several countries had adopted the treaty. The Dominican Republic had managed to hold out thus far, but it was just a matter of time before it signed on, too. In 2008, if a person intended to hunt treasure in that country, that person had to go now.

  Time was running out on the divers, too. Chatterton was fifty-seven, Mattera forty-six. Both were much older than most participants in deepwater-wreck diving, a sport that pushed the body to its limits and could paralyze or kill a person for the slightest mistake. Most got out of the game by forty; those who stayed longer often just dipped their toes on the weekends. But galleon hunting was no part-time job. To do it, Chatterton and Mattera had to be ready to spend full days in the water, perhaps for weeks or even months on end. They couldn’t afford to grow older by searching for a pirate ship that very well might not be there.

  And there was no guarantee they could afford a pirate ship search, in any case. Both men had begun life as blue-collar workers; neither was independently wealthy. Together, they’d invested nearly a million dollars to hunt for a galleon. If they detoured now for a pirate ship, they risked expending what remained of their funds to find a wreck that might have no treasure at all.

  So, it was clear they needed to call Bowden to thank him for the pirate opportunity, and then to politely decline. Yet, even as they arrived at the Miami airport, neither man could reach for his phone.

  —

  IN JUST TEN YEARS, John Chatterton had gone from being an underwater construction worker to perhaps the most famous living scuba diver in the world. He hadn’t done it by being a great swimmer or by exploring beautiful coral reefs. He did it by going inside the most dangerous and deadly shipwrecks on earth.

  These places were steel labyrinths, twisted like balloon animals by nature’s temper and the ravages of time. Many lay at depths never intended for humans, where water pressure could collapse vital organs, and the buildup of nitrogen could disorient the mind and turn blood to foam. If a person stayed in the sport for a season, he would see fellow divers hallucinate underwater, get lost inside wrecks, become tangled in wire and cable. If he stayed longer, he would see them succumb to crippling nerve damage, become paralyzed, or drown. And that’s if it didn’t happen to him first. In his twenty years as a deepwater-wreck diver, Chatterton had seen nine men die, including a father and son, and one of his best friends.

  He didn’t risk these wrecks for the usual reasons—to stockpile artifacts, bragging rights, or mentions in dive magazines. In fact, he gave away much of the rare china and other relics he found, even when the stuff had great value. He pushed inside these wrecks because he believed, as he had since volunteering to fight on the front lines in Vietnam, that the only way to see what really mattered in life was to go to the places that were hardest to reach. After the war, he found those places to be made of steel and sunk hundreds of feet underwater.

  Over the next decade, Chatterton went to dozens of the most dangerous wrecks, often penetrating into places thought too difficult, or deadly, for a human being to reach. By the time he was thirty-five, some veterans of the sport were calling him the greatest shipwreck diver they’d ever seen.

  In 1997, Chatterton and dive partner Richie Kohler solved an international mystery by identifying a World War II German U-boat sunk off the coast of New Jersey. Three divers died during the six-year odyssey; Chatterton lost his marriage and his money, and several times he nearly lost his life. When people asked why he’d been willing to risk it—the sub had no gold or priceless artifacts aboard, just an identifying number—he told them the U-boat was his moment, that once-in-a-lifetime chance a person gets, if he’s lucky, to see who he really is. For that reason, he would have rather died than turn his back on the wreck just because it got difficult, just because it couldn’t be done.

  The U-boat brought Chatterton and Kohler international acclaim. By 2004, they’d been featured in a book and in documentaries, and had become hosts of a popular television show on the History Channel. Chatterton, handsome and tall, and with a beautiful baritone voice, was paid to do speeches and endorse products. For the first time since Jacques Cousteau, a scuba diver had emerged from the sea and into the mainstream. People recognized him on the street. Kids asked for his autograph. Women sent him their pictures.

  Most wreck divers, especially those past fifty, would have hung it up then and called it a career. But Chatterton kept pushing—body, technology, and nature—to go deeper into oceans and farther into wrecks. He saw more divers die. He reached even more places no one had ever gone.

  His last big adventure had come in 2005, when he and Kohler put together an expedition to Titanic. The trip produced new insight into the ship’s sinking, but in the end it hadn’t pushed Chatterton to his limits. The location of the wreck was already known. The ship was sunk in thousands of feet of water, which meant he could do no more than remain in the Russian submersible that had delivered him to the site. Others had been there first.

  After returning home from Titanic, Chatterton began to look for a new shipwreck project, something harder and rarer than anything he’d done. For more than a year, he came up empty. Accountants and lawyers urged him to retire and invest his money. Relax. He redoubled his efforts. He couldn’t pretend to be happy when Kohler announced he was going back to work in his family’s glass-repair business. How could a man fix broken windows at Burger King after he’d pushed into a World War II German U-boat that no one in the world knew was there?
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  And yet, he wondered if Kohler might not have it right. Great wrecks were rare; a person could search for decades and never find another. Chatterton was fifty-six then. He didn’t have decades anymore.

  That’s when he connected with Mattera. They’d met once or twice in the early 1980s, but hadn’t spoken for twenty-five years. At a dive seminar in 2006, the men reacquainted; by the end of the weekend, they’d pledged their lives and their savings to an idea: They could find a Spanish galleon in Dominican waters, one of the last places on earth left to hunt treasure ships. And that they would find one, whatever it took.

  —

  MATTERA’S LIFE WAS BIGGER than Hollywood even before he could drive. A butcher’s son from Staten Island, he started risky businesses as a teenager that earned hundreds of thousands of dollars, and owned social clubs and taverns he was too young by law to enter. At twenty-three, he became embroiled in a historic war between factions of New York’s Gambino crime family. One of his options was to plunge headfirst into the violence. His other option was even crazier—to become a cop. Mattera made his choice, and joined law enforcement. By thirty, he was a highly paid personal bodyguard, protecting celebrities and tycoons.

  All the while, history and diving had been Mattera’s salvation. In his younger years, when his life might have gone either way, he found his center in history books, which he devoured by the dozens, and in libraries, where he camped out for days. To Mattera, history was more than just a collection of old stories; it was an insight into human nature, a crystal ball that told as much about the future as it did about the past. And he learned to scuba dive, not to look at pretty fish in tropical resorts, but to go deep into cold oceans, where a person could swim inside the wrecks and touch history for himself.

  Mattera’s first trip had been to the Oregon, a luxury liner sunk in 1886 in water deep enough to kill an experienced diver. He was just fourteen. Minors were forbidden on dive charters, so he showed up at the dock one morning with a case of beer and a cooler full of sandwiches from his father’s butcher shop. He bribed the captain with this bounty, and an hour later he was on the high seas, bunking next to a rogues’ gallery of bikers, dive gang members, and other hardened souls who were the pioneers of East Coast wreck diving. For three days, he pounded out portholes on the Oregon, looking for clues that would add to his understanding of her sinking. The trip hooked him. No matter where life took him after that—to high-tech shooting schools, to third-world countries doing contract work for the U.S. government, to glamorous international locales working security detail for celebrity clients—he came back to history and diving, the two things in a risky world that always told him the truth.

  At forty, he sold his security company. It was a mistake—the money was too good to pass up and his partner wanted to sell—but there he was, with a big bank account and, for the first time in his life, nowhere to go at five every morning. Since boyhood, he’d dreamed of living somewhere warm enough to read his books outside at night, surrounded on all sides by shipwrecks. He’d done work in the Dominican Republic, loved its people and its history. And the shipwrecks were everywhere—this is where Columbus had landed, the gateway to the New World. A few months later, he moved to Santo Domingo, the Dominican capital, and began a life of leisure.

  It lasted all of two months. Mattera was blue-collar—he needed to work, so he opened Pirate’s Cove, a dive resort on the country’s south coast, and began taking paying customers to centuries-old shipwrecks in the area. Few tourists, however, seemed interested in these living pieces of history; clients preferred to stay close to the resort, where the coral was pretty and the scotch on the rocks was never more than a few minutes away. Mattera continued to smile and show his guests a good time. At night, he took refuge in his books.

  This time, he began reading a different kind of story—of popes and kings, explorers and conquistadors, and fearless captains who’d perished at sea. These were the stories of the galleons, the legendary Spanish treasure ships from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that carried vast fortunes from the New World back to Spain. The Dominican Republic—then called the island of Hispaniola—was the crossroads of it all.

  Mattera put together a plan. Whatever the cost, he would go find a galleon of his own. The monetary reward would be staggering—he could buy his beloved New York Mets and have several treasure chests left over. More important, discovering a galleon would be historic, and for that he was willing to risk all he had.

  That’s when Chatterton showed up at a dive workshop Mattera was sponsoring at Pirate’s Cove. The men hadn’t seen each other in decades, but it took just a seaside lunch for Mattera to remember what he admired about the guy. Chatterton was in love with shipwrecks, but he bothered only with those that mattered to history and were difficult to work. Once he committed to a wreck, he never let go, no matter how deep or tangled the ship, and that was true even if it might cost him his life. More than anything, Chatterton believed in rare things; to him, “hard to find” equaled beauty, and he was willing to search the world for beautiful things no one else could find.

  —

  STANDING IN LINE at Miami’s airport, the men marveled at the pirate story Bowden had told them, and especially about that badass captain, Joseph Bannister. Imagine a proper English gentleman stealing the ship he’d been trusted to sail, going on a whirlwind crime spree, then doing battle with two Royal Navy warships. And winning. You didn’t even see stuff like that in the Johnny Depp movies.

  In the terminal, they stopped at gift shops to pick up something for Chatterton’s wife, Carla, and Mattera’s fiancée, Carolina. When they got to their gate, they knew it was time to call Bowden. They would be up-front with him and explain the reasons they couldn’t deviate from their treasure quest. No one would understand better than an old treasure hunter like Bowden. They dialed him on speakerphone to deliver their regrets together.

  Bowden answered on the first ring.

  “Tracy, it’s John and John. We’re calling about the pirate ship and that captain, Bannister.”

  “Have you guys made a decision?”

  “We have.”

  Numbers flashed on the arrivals screen. The flight to Santo Domingo started to board. Chatterton looked at Mattera. Mattera looked at Chatterton. Each waited for the other to speak.

  “Tracy,” Mattera said, “that pirate ship of yours is about to get found.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  BANNISTER’S ISLAND

  Just before dawn in March 2008, in a tropical paradise on the north coast of the Dominican Republic, a leather-skinned fisherman with a cigarette in his mouth leaned over the side of his wooden rowboat and dropped a net into Samaná Bay, just as his ancestors had done day after day in this spot for centuries. In every direction, he and the waves were all that moved.

  Soon, his boat began rocking, gently at first, then with a warning—something big was coming his way. In the distance, he could see the running lights of an onrushing boat and hear the hum of its outboard engines. It must have struck him as odd to see anyone in that kind of a hurry in Samaná Bay. There was nothing to rush to here; that was the beauty of the place.

  He stood up and shined a flashlight. At the sight of it, the fast boat bit hard into the water and made a sweeping turn to the right. Only navy boats moved like that around here, but this vessel didn’t look built to chase drug smugglers or check cargos. With her long back deck and shallow draft, she looked built to go out and find things.

  The rowboat nearly capsized as the thirty-foot fiberglass vessel streaked past, but the fisherman still saw a name etched in red letters on her side—Deep Explorer—and two men waving to him from the bow. Chatterton and Mattera didn’t normally operate their boat in the dark, especially in areas that were new to them, but they had a Golden Age pirate ship to find, and neither of them could wait on the sun to get started.

  Even now, it seemed incredible to the men that they’d undertaken this mission. They’d invested two years of work, prepar
ation, and much of their savings to set themselves up to find a treasure ship, only to abandon it all to search for a pirate ship no one had heard of, on the hunch of an old man who kept treasure in his bathtub and still used visual landmarks to find his way.

  Yet, as they watched the glowing reds and blues on their instrument panel count down the distance to the island where the pirate ship sank—3.8 miles…3.7 miles…3.6 miles—neither man had a doubt he’d done the right thing. A pirate ship was the single hardest and rarest thing a person could discover underwater. And while galleons had been largely forgotten, the voices of pirates never stopped calling, to the imaginations of children and anyone else who believed the world could be thrilling if one only dared step off the dock.

  As the first fires of a red sun spit over the horizon, Chatterton and Mattera called to their two crewmen to look through binoculars at the outline of the distant island. First out of the cabin was Heiko Kretschmer, a thirty-eight-year-old dive instructor, master handyman, and East Germany native who had risked his life at age eighteen to escape Communism and come west looking for adventure and a better life. Engines, regulators, transmissions, pumps—there was nothing Kretschmer couldn’t fix with a roll of duct tape and a pair of pliers, and for that reason, and his relentless work ethic, Mattera considered him the most valuable man he’d ever employed.

  Following him out of the cabin was Howard Ehrenberg, also thirty-eight, a Long Island native and computer whiz who had previous lives as a follower of the Grateful Dead, a head shop owner, and a sound technician. He’d met Chatterton at a dive charity event and the two hit it off. Captivated by the idea of hunting treasure in a faraway land, he asked if Chatterton might use a technical guy who could dive.