Pirate Hunters

by Robert Kurson

  Delighted, Molesworth issued a report to London. The hanging, he said, was: “a spectacle of great satisfaction to all good people and of terror to the favorers of pirates, the manner of his punishment being that which will most discourage others, which was the reason why I empowered Captain Spragge to inflict it.”

  No matter the legality of his actions, Molesworth had been unwilling to try Bannister again in the courts. “I find from letters that [Bannister] wrote…that he intended to plead that he had been forced into all that he had done by the French. How far this would have prevailed with a Port Royal jury I know not, but I am glad that the case did not come before one.”

  —

  JOHN MATTERA COULD FIND no further information on Bannister. So, nearly a month after he’d begun research, he packed his bags and booked a flight from London back to the Dominican Republic. In a taxi on the way to the airport, he sent Chatterton an email.

  “Partner,” he wrote, “have I got a story for you.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE WISDOM OF OLD FISHERMEN

  Chatterton couldn’t wait to hear what Mattera had learned about the pirate Bannister, so he drove six hours from Samaná and picked him up at the Santo Domingo airport. But before they could start talking, Mattera’s phone rang. It was Victor Francisco Garcia-Alecont, Mattera’s soon-to-be father-in-law, calling to ask the men to meet him downtown. The urgency of the request startled Mattera, but at least he knew Carolina must be okay, or he would have been asked to come alone.

  The partners arrived a short time later at a small restaurant across the street from the Caribbean Sea. Garcia-Alecont was already there, the only customer inside.

  Few men in the country commanded as much respect as Garcia-Alecont. He had been vice admiral and chief of staff of the Dominican Navy, a director of immigration, a cultural attaché in Washington, D.C., and the author of several books on Dominican naval protocol and tactics. Garcia-Alecont was a serious man; this meeting hadn’t been arranged to discuss table settings for Mattera’s upcoming wedding to Carolina.

  The admiral got straight to business. Through high-ranking political and military sources, he’d learned that the Dominican government was amenable to signing on to the UNESCO international treaty that would kill private shipwreck hunting in country. The deal hadn’t been finalized, and the timing still was uncertain, but the political winds were blowing unmistakably. Soon, the days when ordinary guys like Chatterton and Mattera could hunt galleons in the Dominican Republic would be over.

  The news blindsided the men. They’d intended to return to treasure hunting after finding the Golden Fleece. And while they’d been sober about the threat posed by UNESCO, they never expected the hammer to drop so soon. Yet, here was Garcia-Alecont, a man with ties to the government, telling them to choose between pirates and treasure—there didn’t seem to be time to do both.

  For several moments, no one spoke. Then Mattera pulled a notebook, drawings, and a map from his messenger bag, and spread them across the table.

  He laid out Bannister’s history, even acting out some of the parts, barking orders aboard the Falcon to fire on the Golden Fleece, and firing at navy warships from salt and pepper shakers he set up on the table to look like cannons. By the time Mattera finished, the waiter had replaced lunch menus with dinner menus, but none of the men seemed interested in food. They just wanted to talk about Bannister.

  “This guy was already made,” Chatterton said. “He’s got money, he’s got respect, he’s got the admiration of society. All he has to do is cruise to the finish line and call it a good life. But he can’t do that. Something is calling to him. He has the chance to do something great—something beyond what he ever imagined for himself; he just has to figure out what it is. And in the seventeenth century, the hardest and greatest thing you can do is turn pirate. The whole world is chasing you. Countries have signed treaties against you. You know you’re going to hang if they catch you. But think of the life you’re going to live if they don’t.”

  “Here’s how I see it,” Mattera said. “You’ve got a guy who’s played it safe since he’s a kid—they don’t give you a transatlantic merchant route unless you’re really responsible. Then his ship turns over in Port Royal and some of his guys get killed, and he sees how short life can be. At the same time, he’s watching all these pirates in Port Royal making history. They’re writing their names in the history books in real time. And he sees he’s got a chance to do the same thing. He’s got a chance to do something people will remember, and maybe even read about, centuries later.”

  The men waited for Garcia-Alecont to steer the conversation back to the dangers of UNESCO. The retired admiral gazed out the window toward the Caribbean.

  “Bannister was a born leader,” Garcia-Alecont said. “He had an instinct to lead men to greatness. If you have that quality you must act on it. But you can’t do it carrying sugar and animal hides across the Atlantic. And if you’re thirty-five or forty years old, as I’m guessing Bannister was, it’s too late to go do it in the navy. But you can do it on a pirate ship. And you can keep doing it as long as men believe in you. If men believe in you, you can even defeat the Royal Navy.”

  The men finally called over the waiter. But even as they enjoyed grilled octopus and spoke of baseball and the upcoming elections, each was thinking of Bannister. In the parking lot after dinner, Chatterton and Mattera began to apologize for staying so long at the villa, but Garcia-Alecont put up his hand.

  “Mi casa su casa,” he said. “Go and find your pirate.”

  —

  NO MATTER HOW FASCINATING Bannister’s life, it was all academic if the information didn’t help lead Chatterton and Mattera to the Golden Fleece. On the hours-long journey back to Samaná that night, the men spread out a chart of Samaná Bay between them in the front seat, and set out to connect the dots.

  It was clear to them now that Bannister was too skilled a captain to have careened his ship at a place so exposed and vulnerable as Cayo Levantado. But that didn’t mean the Golden Fleece wasn’t near the island. Located just a mile north, at the mainland, were several stretches of beach where the pirate captain might have careened. Chatterton marked each of the places that looked large enough to hide a great sailing ship. If the Golden Fleece had sunk at any of them, she could still be said to have been lost at Cayo Levantado, as Bowden had urged from the start. The men would begin a new search at sunrise, and they wouldn’t stop until they had Bannister’s ship.

  The next morning, as the team loaded its boat, Mattera’s security man, Claudio, brought a local fisherman to the villa. The man reported seeing an expensive dive boat off the western beach at Cayo Levantado a few days earlier. He hadn’t spotted divers, but watched crew members pull electronics from the water.

  To Chatterton and Mattera, there were two possible explanations for the sighting. The boat might have been chartered by weekend divers using department store metal detectors to look for sunken treasure—a common tourist fantasy in these parts. Or it might have belonged to a rival salvage company that heard Bowden was closing in on the Golden Fleece and wanted to jump his claim. Neither man was bothered by the first possibility. The second was a dagger.

  For more than thirty years, Bowden had maintained a lease with the Dominican government that granted him exclusive salvage rights to any shipwrecks sunk in a massive area that included Samaná Bay. On paper, that meant no other person or entity was permitted to search for wrecks in those areas. In reality, it was almost impossible to stop them from trying. There was simply too much water to patrol, and in any case, the few navy boats stationed in the area did not have enough fuel or resources to protect the claims of treasure hunters.

  But that’s just where the trouble started.

  If an outsider happened to find a wreck in a leaseholder’s area, or even could make a good claim it was close, it could petition the Ministerio de Cultura, the government agency in charge of the country’s cultural heritage, to award it rights to that wr
eck. Ordinarily, Cultura rejected such requests in favor of the leaseholder. But if the outsider had good credentials—perhaps as an established salvage company or as university researchers—and could show that the wreck might remain unfound without its continued efforts, it could prevail. And that’s the part that worried Chatterton and Mattera most. Bowden had spent the past several years working the great galleon Concepción in the Silver Bank, more than one hundred miles from Samaná Bay. It would be easy for an interloper to argue that Bowden had long since abandoned his search for the Golden Fleece. If Cultura agreed and awarded rights to the wreck to the interloper, that would be the end of Chatterton and Mattera’s pirate ship dreams.

  Still, the presence of a dive boat around the island, even one loaded with high-end electronics, shouldn’t have worried the men by itself. Academics and researchers often parked their vessels in the area to study whales or marine biology. But the memory of an incident that had occurred a year earlier still weighed heavy on their minds.

  It had happened on the eve of a dive workshop Mattera was sponsoring in the town of Juan Dolio, near Santo Domingo. A young man had shown up unannounced, pulled Mattera and Chatterton aside, and told them that complaints had been filed at Cultura against Carolina, Mattera’s fiancée. She’d been accused of taking gold coins that had washed up on shore near the dive center without reporting it to the government—cultural theft. Some at Cultura were even calling her “the Pirate Princess of Juan Dolio.” The news infuriated Mattera—Carolina hadn’t found any coins, and she wouldn’t have stolen so much as a seashell—and he demanded to know who’d made the charge. The informant, however, had no further information. So Mattera went to Garcia-Alecont, who was enjoying a drink at the bar.

  If anything, Garcia-Alecont was even angrier than Mattera. Moments later, he was pacing the beach and barking into his cell phone. Garcia-Alecont’s network of contacts ran deep, and there was little doubt he was calling on them now. When he returned, he told Chatterton and Mattera that the complaints against Carolina had been anonymous, which led him to believe they’d come from rival treasure hunters who didn’t appreciate new competition from the Americans. He’d straightened things out and warned Cultura to never again sully his daughter’s name. But he told Chatterton and Mattera that two things should be clear to them from that moment forward. First, things could turn on a person—and especially gringos—very fast in the Dominican Republic. And second, someone was already gunning for them in the country.

  It was that memory that now caused Mattera to pull out a wad of cash and hand it to the fisherman who’d brought news of the dive boat at Cayo Levantado. In his makeshift Spanish, Mattera asked the man and his friends to keep an eye out for more boats, and the man promised he would.

  The team resumed loading the Deep Explorer with dive gear and computers, then set out for their new target area, just a few thousand feet to the north of Cayo Levantado. There were miles of shoreline to search, but the men would cover only those areas that:

  1. included a beach suitable for careening

  2. were well hidden from passing ships

  3. had good areas for cannon defenses

  4. included waters roughly twenty-four feet deep (the depth at which the Golden Fleece had sunk)

  The group arrived at a U-shaped stretch of beach about a quarter mile long. It had been weeks since they’d last dragged the magnetometer, but everyone moved instinctively now, flipping switches and connecting cables in a shipwreck hunter’s ballet.

  Mag hits piled up from the start, and the team returned to dive them the next morning. In the water, Mattera followed the blips of his handheld metal detector until he came upon a pile of sandstone slabs near the shore. Lifting one toward his mask, he could see the shape of an angel engraved on the stone, along with faint lettering in a language he couldn’t make out. He picked up another, this one shaped like a cross, and ran his fingers along the edges of the letters etched onto its surface. Again, he could not decipher the words, but now he knew where he stood. This had been a cemetery, built centuries ago on an edge of the earth that had since fallen into the sea.

  The discovery fascinated the men but didn’t further the cause. Chatterton and Ehrenberg fared little better underwater nearby. Still, they dove every hit from the survey. No one pulled up anything but junk.

  That meant the team would need to move farther west, to the next viable stretch of shoreline. Studying charts at the villa that night, they zeroed in on a location, but when they tried to examine it closely, the lights in the house went out.

  “Sonofabitch!” Chatterton said.

  A minute later, Claudio, the security man, walked into the room, holding a flashlight and a bottle of suntan lotion.

  “They still have power at the Gran Bahia, boss.”

  A short time later, the men pulled up to a resort located just across the channel from the villa. Only registered guests were permitted on the grounds, but the team had taken precautions by dressing in Bermuda shorts and carrying cameras and the bottle of lotion, their tourist disguise. Security waved them through. In a corner of the lobby, they laid out their maps and charts across a table, focusing on a stretch of beach about a mile and a half to the west of the ancient cemetery they’d found. This place was hidden behind a small island and looked to be surrounded by water of just the right depth. Best of all, on one of Mattera’s old charts, the area had a name: Carenero Samaná. Mattera made the translation—carenero meant careening place. The Golden Fleece had been careening when she was sunk by the Royal Navy.

  “I would’ve fought the British there,” Mattera said.

  “This could be it,” Chatterton said. “We go there in the morning.”

  The electricity was still out when the men returned to the villa, so Chatterton and Mattera slept in the Mitsubishi. They set out at sunrise and spent that day, and several more, surveying and diving Carenero Samaná. They found nothing.

  Chatterton was scheduled to fly back to the States to give a talk, and it was just as well, since no one could find another area on their charts near Cayo Levantado that fit even half their criteria. Mattera gave Ehrenberg and Kretschmer a few days off, then did the only thing he could think to do by himself in Samaná—he went to talk to old fishermen.

  He started near the old cemetery he’d found, carrying a bottle of Brugal rum and a rusty can full of gasoline. At the shore, he approached two elderly Dominicans who were baiting their hooks. He admired men like this, hard workers who ran fishing line from plastic bottles and who rigged sails from blue tarp when they ran out of gas. Some, even into their seventies, used spear guns to shoot parrot fish or snapper while holding their breath underwater.

  He handed the men the rum and the gas and took a shot with his Spanish.

  “Dónde están los barcos perdidos?” Where are the lost ships?

  The men asked what kind of ship he was looking for.

  “Pirata.”

  The men smiled, but they had no answer.

  Mattera moved on to the next group of fishermen, and the next, handing out rum and gas. One after another, they said, “Lo siento”—I’m sorry—but not far from the villa, he found an elderly man who began talking and waving his hands, and this is what Mattera took him to say: “I have a cousin in Rincón whose grandfather knew of a pirate ship in Samaná Bay. My cousin is old now but he will help you.” The fisherman wrote a phone number on a piece of paper and handed it to Mattera, but would not accept any money in return.

  Mattera didn’t wait to get back to the villa. From his truck, he dialed the phone number and reached another elderly man, this one who spoke passable English. Yes, the man said, he might know something about a pirate ship sunk in Samaná Bay. He could talk about it that evening, and gave Mattera instructions for a beachside meeting place at Rincón Bay, a forty-five-minute drive north.

  Mattera knew Rincón Bay. Galleons were said to have sunk there, and he and Chatterton had considered working the area when launching their plan to find treas
ure. Rincón was equally beautiful and dangerous, a spot at the end of the peninsula and at the end of the earth, where smugglers and killers did business in tiny inlets too remote and too dangerous for authorities to patrol. Mattera was willing to go there, but not without the Glock 19 pistol he’d carried for years.

  His Mitsubishi, however, would not start, so he grabbed the keys to Garcia-Alecont’s Mercedes C230. Anything more than a jalopy was too valuable to take to a place like Rincón, but what choice did he have? If he postponed his appointment, the fisherman might change his mind. “Sorry, Victor,” Mattera said to himself. “I’ll do my best with her.”

  An hour later, he pulled off the main road near Rincón and turned onto a gravel side street that led to the beach. In the distance, a young man stepped onto the road and waved for Mattera to come through. In all likelihood, he’d been sent by the fisherman, but Mattera slowed the Mercedes to a crawl to make sure. Shining his brights, he could see the man take a long drag from a cigarette, then flick the butt into the air. When it landed, the street burst into flame, a wall of fire that blocked Mattera’s path. By instinct, Mattera slammed his car into reverse—he knew he was being ambushed—and as his tires dug into the gravel, six more men jumped into the street and began running toward him, waving clubs and knives, and throwing flaming bottles. Mattera screeched backward about forty yards and then spun his vehicle around, but when he shifted back into drive to get out, the transmission grinded and the Mercedes died on the spot. This was a place where men killed for ten dollars, so Mattera had a decision to make. He could try to restart the car. Or he could reason with the men in the best way he knew how.

  He pulled the emergency brake and opened his door halfway. Placing one foot out onto the road, he stood up into a crouch, lifted his T-shirt, and drew his pistol, then began firing rounds into the pavement in front of the onrushing gang. At the sound of the gunfire, the attackers skidded to a halt and rushed back toward the flames. Mattera looked for muzzle flashes—signs of return fire—but none came, and in just seconds the street was silent but for the barking of wild dogs. Breathing hard, he changed the magazine on his weapon, then got back in the car and got it started. If he left now, he could make it home before anyone came looking for revenge.