Pirate Hunters

by Robert Kurson

  “Fish trap.”

  Mattera made the notation, but when he turned back Chatterton was gone, already onto the next hit. Chatterton and Ehrenberg floated above a straightened section of iron that rose from a coral mass on the bottom. Straight lines were the stuff of shipwreck hunters’ dreams. Chatterton moved closer, then pulled out a slate and wrote:

  ANCHOR

  Ehrenberg’s eyes lit up. Chatterton looked even closer. Slowly, he erased the word and wrote a new one:

  WORKING

  A working anchor was one that had been lowered by a ship in the routine course of its business, but which had become stuck in the coral or otherwise lost on the bottom. Chatterton and Mattera had found many such working anchors in the Dominican Republic while learning to use their gear, and though it was interesting to see these pieces, they were rarely associated with a wreck. The kind of anchor Chatterton and Mattera wanted likely would be lying flat on the bottom, meaning it had gone down with the ship.

  Ehrenberg went after the third hit. He, too, found a working anchor. Back on board the Deep Explorer, the men drove the boat to the next set of numbers, which Mattera and Kretschmer would dive.

  Their exploration proved equally fruitless: some telephone cable and a hammer. Still, cruising back to the villa, the team couldn’t hide its excitement. The magnetometer had worked. And there were more hits to explore the next morning. No one wanted to say it, but each of them believed it would be just a matter of days before the Golden Fleece was theirs.

  Too jazzed to stay home that evening, the team went to Fabio’s, a pizza parlor they’d nicknamed for its owner, who had hair (but little else) like the Italian male model. They ordered meat-lovers pies and Presidente Lights, and took turns listing how they would spend whatever treasure they might find aboard the Golden Fleece. This is what each man vowed to do with his haul:

  Mattera

  —Buy a five-hundred-acre ranch in Pennsylvania

  —Buy a Beechcraft King Air B200 (capable of flying from Miami to the Dominican Republic)

  —Buy the Binghamton Mets, the New York Mets’ minorleague team (a pirate ship, if it had treasure on board, wouldn’t carry enough to buy a major-league franchise)

  Chatterton

  —Buy the blue Maserati in the window of the Fort Lauderdale dealership (using his Mini Cooper and a bag of gold coins as trade-ins)

  —Take a three-month tour of Machu Picchu and the Galápagos Islands

  —Hire a chauffeur (must wear traditional chauffeur’s hat)

  —Buy a solid gold dive helmet

  Ehrenberg

  —Stage a private concert by the remaining members of the Grateful Dead (the band he followed for three years in the late 1980s)

  —Buy an Aston Martin DB5, the fabled James Bond car equipped with ejector seat, machine guns, bulletproof plates, and tire spikes

  —Buy the best drum set in the world, along with a house far enough from neighbors so they wouldn’t complain about the noise when he played it

  Kretschmer

  —Move his wife, daughter, and stepson from the Dominican Republic to the United States

  At closing, the men paid the bill and walked into the steamy night. They felt lucky to be staying at the villa, with its dependable plumbing and view of the bay. They had no doubt, however, that Mattera’s future father-in-law would soon want his place back for family getaways and weekend entertaining, just another reason to find the pirate ship fast.

  The men were back at the island and diving hits the next morning. This time, they found a toolbox, a radio antenna, and three fish traps. Mattera logged the results and called the others to the wheelhouse.

  “I know this is frustrating. But we gotta keep mowing the lawn and diving the hits; it’s part of the game. So back at it tomorrow morning.”

  Chatterton fired up the engines and put the Deep Explorer into a sweeping turn that brought the men to within fifty yards of the beach at Cayo Levantado. They watched sunbathers stretch under the rays of a giant sun.

  “Every woman is in a bikini,” Chatterton said. “Poor Bannister never got a view like this.”

  The team began a new survey the next day. Chatterton moved the Deep Explorer east and west, shortening the towline around jagged reefs, speeding up when waters turned shallow. And the men did it again the next day, and the next after that, until they’d compiled a new set of targets to dive. Some of the hits looked certain to be duds—tiny specks off by themselves in areas too deep or too shallow. But Chatterton insisted they dive every one. The first time they skipped something, that would be the musket ball that led to the ship’s rigging that led to the cannon that led to the Golden Fleece.

  The next time they got in the water, the men found a modern ax, a paint can, and some drainpipe.

  And that’s how it went for the next week: more surveys, a few rainouts, and dozens of hits, but no trace of Bannister’s ship. Despite it, the men stayed in high spirits, knowing the wreck couldn’t hide from them. It had been folly, in any case, to think they might find a Golden Age pirate ship in the first days of exploring. Things only worked like that in the movies.

  For the next three weeks, the men expanded their survey westward, but found nothing important. One afternoon, Chatterton gunned the boat’s engines and headed east into the open Atlantic. At the entrance to Samaná Bay, he shifted to idle and brought the craft to a halt. Standing on the bow, he and Mattera looked back toward the island, and they kept looking until the sun disappeared.

  At Fabio’s that night, they laid things out for their crew.

  “There are problems with the island,” Mattera said.

  In Bannister’s time, a ship could have careened only on the island’s western beach. But that beach could be seen from the open Atlantic; they’d proved it themselves that day. Bannister was a capable man on the run from the Royal Navy. It seemed unlikely he would have made himself so visible, and so vulnerable, by beaching the Golden Fleece in view of passing ships.

  And that wasn’t the only problem with Cayo Levantado. The surrounding waters were full of shallow reefs capable of tearing open the hull of a large sailing ship. There was no way a captain smart enough to defeat British warships in battle would risk bringing his ship into a minefield like that.

  And then there was the issue of depth. According to Bowden, the Golden Fleece had sunk in twenty-four feet of water. It was true that the depths of seafloors could change over time, but the men had to move the Deep Explorer nearly a half mile offshore to reach waters twenty-four feet deep—too far from shore to careen a ship.

  Pizzas arrived and everyone dug in.

  “Maybe it’s us,” Mattera said. “What do we know about seventeenth-century naval strategy? I’m a bodyguard. Chatterton’s a commercial diver. Heiko, you’re a mechanic, and Howard, no offense, you’re a geek.”

  “Maybe,” Chatterton said. “But the Golden Fleece is out there. If we can find fish traps and hammers, we can damn well find a pirate ship at some tiny bullshit island.”

  —

  STANDING ON THE BOW of the Deep Explorer the next morning, Mattera caught sight of a twenty-foot boat about a mile away, bobbing on the waves but not moving. Probably sightseers or a fishing charter, he figured, but not locals; the boat looked too expensive for that. Later in the day, the boat was still there. Mattera showed it to Chatterton, who watched it through binoculars.

  “They haven’t moved in hours,” Mattera said. “Drive toward them, real slow. I want to see what they do.”

  Chatterton took the wheel and set course for the target. The distant boat began moving away, leaving white foam in its wake.

  “Think they were watching us?” Mattera asked.

  “I don’t know,” Chatterton said. “But now I’m watching them.”

  The crew collected strong magnetometer hits over the next two weeks but found nothing old when they dove them. Every miss frustrated them more, especially Chatterton, who found himself tossing and turning at night, trying to figur
e out what he and the others were doing wrong. “Think creatively,” he told himself. “Think like John Chatterton.” But the answers never came.

  One evening, while the men were studying aerial photography of the island, the power went out at the villa, as it did almost daily.

  “Goddamn it!” Chatterton yelled, slamming down a stack of photographs. Again, he would need to sleep without covers, windows open, a mosquito net his only protection against the swarms. In minutes, he was dripping sweat and stringing together expletives that would have made the pirates blush.

  The move to Samaná hadn’t been easy for the team. The sudden decision to swerve from treasure to pirates had required all four men to uproot their already-uprooted lives. They’d planned to search for treasure near Santo Domingo, population nearly three million, a place of modern conveniences and a dazzling nightlife. Samaná, on the other hand, was a portal into the past. A treacherous six-hour drive to the north of Santo Domingo, its roads had pumpkin-sized potholes, chickens ran wild in town, and ice was a luxury.

  Just reaching the place required an explorer’s heart. To get there, the men had loaded their belongings into a truck, then picked up a makeshift road that took them past abandoned towns, feral dogs, and cliffs so muddy a small tire slide would have plunged them into an unfindable grave. For miles at a stretch they saw no living thing. Halfway to Samaná, Mattera ran over a wild pig that had darted in front of the truck. An hour later, he reached for his gun when a gang of men with machetes refused to move off the road. (He steered around them and never looked back.) On the outskirts of Samaná, a bull wandered into the street and lowered its horns to fight them. If Samaná Bay hadn’t been the most beautiful place the men had ever seen, with its jumping dolphins, elderly fishermen, and crystalline waters, the mosquitos alone might have driven them mad.

  Mattera knocked on the door and invited Chatterton to sleep with him in the pickup truck.

  “There’s no room in that Mitsubishi,” Chatterton said. “The seats don’t recline. How are two grown men going to sleep in that?”

  Mattera shrugged and walked away. In the driveway, he got into the truck and put his Glock under his right thigh—a running vehicle made a tempting target in this part of the country. Cranking the air conditioning, he was asleep in minutes, and he stayed that way until a strange figure began pounding on the passenger window. Mattera reached for his gun, but then saw it was Chatterton, standing in the driveway wearing nothing but his underwear and a mosquito net.

  “Jesus, John, do you want to get shot?” Mattera said, rolling down the window.

  “It would’ve put me out of my misery. Can I sleep here?”

  “Sure. But only if we can cuddle.”

  “Don’t make me laugh, Mattera. Laughing makes me sweat.”

  Chatterton climbed in the truck and the men sat staring up at the stars.

  “We’re looking in the wrong place,” Chatterton said. “I’ve been around a long time, and I’m telling you—none of this makes sense.”

  —

  RAIN POUNDED SAMANÁ the next morning, so for the first time in a month, the men took a day off. Chatterton needed to open a bank account anyway, and Mattera had errands in town.

  After the usual cold shower, Chatterton went to call Carla. His cell phone was out of power. He opened his laptop to send her an email. Dead.

  The men went to the local bank. Inside, they waited in line for nearly an hour before a manager explained that Chatterton would need more documents in order to open an account, and in any case would need to wait several weeks before paperwork could be processed. Mattera could see veins bulging from Chatterton’s neck.

  “You gotta go with it, John,” Mattera said. “This isn’t the States. We’re in the wild up here. Third world.”

  Chatterton thanked the manager, and he and Mattera went outside.

  “It takes three weeks to open a goddamn bank account?” Chatterton asked. “I have to break my ass to give them my money?”

  The men were back on the water the next morning. Only the outer edges of the western beach remained to be surveyed. Chatterton landed the boat near the northern edge and set up a grid, and by sunrise the men were mowing the lawn. By now, the team had become so sensitive to the magnetometer’s blips and spikes that they could tell the fish traps from the anchors just by scanning the data readouts. But they dove every hit, fearful that the first one they skipped would be the key that led to the pirate ship.

  And then, in late April, nearly two months after the team had launched its search, their magnetometer registered an especially strong reading. Mattera had a feeling about this one. He and Kretschmer got in the water. Not far down, they saw an unmistakable shape rising four feet out of the sand. Mattera wrote on his slate:

  CAREFUL!

  It was a grappling hook, an anchor-like device with sharpened claws. Ominous, even frightening, in appearance, they were often used by salvors—and opportunistic pirates—to pull up objects from sunken ships.

  Mattera drifted slowly toward the hook and pulled it from the mud. Four claws bloomed from the shaft, each still razor sharp. The base, overgrown in gravel-colored coral, made Mattera’s heart race; by his estimation, it was at least three hundred years old. He glanced at his depth gauge. Twenty-four feet.

  He motioned to Kretschmer to summon the others, and soon the four-man team was in the water and gathered around. One by one, they examined the hook’s hand-forged black iron and timeless design. But mostly, they were impressed by its age. The grappling hook was period. It had come from Bannister’s time.

  They would have given anything to salvage the hook, but no one dared expose it to air for fear it would oxidize and fall apart in their hands. Instead, they photographed it and buried it back on the bottom. Topside, they made sober notes in their books, but couldn’t hide their excitement. Beneath them, at just the right depth, was the first solid piece of evidence that a late-seventeenth-century ship had sunk at the island. No one said it aloud, but everyone was thinking the same: They’d found a piece of the Golden Fleece.

  The men stayed out late that night, raising toasts to Bannister and his pirate crew. Back at the villa, after stripping for bed, Mattera found a book about anchors in the villa’s small library. The power went out, but by flashlight he found a page that showed a grappling hook almost identical to the one he’d discovered that morning. Carrying the flashlight in one hand and the book in the other, he made his way to Chatterton’s bedroom and knocked on the door. Receiving no answer, he let himself in. Chatterton awoke with a start.

  “Jesus, Mattera, you look like Jacob Marley!”

  “Look at this book.”

  Chatterton pressed his face to the page and saw a photograph of the very same grappling hook they’d found that day. The author dated it to the late seventeenth century.

  Chatterton fist-bumped Mattera.

  “You know what, partner?” he said. “I think we just found our pirate wreck.”

  —

  THE MEN SET OUT early the next morning for Cayo Levantado, setting up a new grid centered over the grappling hook, this one with narrower lanes—a hard-target search. If the hook belonged to the Golden Fleece, there would be more pieces of the wreck nearby.

  They surveyed for days. This time, they didn’t even find fish traps. Whatever ship had used the grappling hook was long gone. Chatterton got out of his dive gear and sat on the stern, talking to no one in particular.

  “I’ve found wrecks in the open Atlantic, in hundreds of square miles of water. Why can’t I find a pirate ship in an area no bigger than Central Park?”

  Chatterton was in no mood to drive the boat, so Kretschmer took the wheel and set course for the villa. When the water turned choppy, Kretschmer eased back on the throttle, but water still broke over the vessel. Chatterton charged into the wheelhouse.

  “What the hell are you doing, Heiko? We have water over the bow! We have a hundred thousand dollars of electronics in here! What’s wrong with you?”r />
  Mattera put up his hands.

  “Whoa, John. It’s Mother Nature; it’s nobody’s fault. He’s driving fine.”

  “He is not driving fine. Salt water on electronics means we’re out of business. If you can’t drive, Heiko, don’t take the goddamn wheel.”

  Mattera motioned for Kretschmer to leave the wheelhouse, then closed the door behind him.

  “John, you gotta calm down. You’re going to give yourself an aneurysm here, and I’m going to be the one feeding you oatmeal while you drool on yourself, and I don’t want to do that.”

  Chatterton told Mattera he just wanted things done right—anything less than perfect wouldn’t be enough to find something as elusive, as impossible, as a pirate ship. In the past, it had been his commitment to excellence—his insistence that things be done beautifully, not just correctly—that had delivered him into places others couldn’t reach.

  Chatterton let a few minutes pass, then took a deep breath and walked out of the wheelhouse. At the stern, he found Kretschmer smoking a Marlboro.

  “Heiko, I’m sorry for yelling,” he said.

  “No problem, John. Don’t worry about it.”

  “No, really, I’m sorry.”

  “It’s forgotten.”

  “Thanks. I think I yelled because I have a rash.”

  Kretschmer looked confused.

  “I’m sorry?” he said.

  Slowly, Chatterton turned around and lowered his shorts, exposing his buttocks. A grin spread across his face.

  “Heiko, do I have a rash?”

  Kretschmer looked shocked, then horrified. The others started laughing. This was trademark Chatterton humor—a sudden shift from tension into farce.