Pirate Hunters

by Robert Kurson

  And he would have done just that if he didn’t have a pirate ship meeting to attend.

  He drove his car out the way he came in, found the next road in to the beach and, sweat dripping down his face, made his way to the makeshift bar where the old fisherman had told him to go. He found the man, dark-skinned and about seventy years old, already nursing a beer, and the two men shook hands. When the fisherman asked if Mattera had trouble finding the place, Mattera said, “Just a few pirates along the way.”

  The men settled in and got to talking. The fisherman said his grandfather had been a great storyteller. One of his best was about a pirate ship in Samaná Bay.

  “How did he know it was a pirate ship?” Mattera asked.

  “That’s what his grandfather told him.”

  That’s what Mattera had hoped to hear. Stories were heirlooms in these parts of the Dominican Republic. That’s how the best wrecks were found.

  “What did your grandfather tell you?”

  The fisherman laughed. He said the story changed every time his grandfather told it, but a few of the details remained the same. A great pirate captain fought a battle against his sworn enemy. Many men died. The captain got away. But the pirate ship sank to the bottom of the bay.

  “Where in Samaná Bay?” Mattera asked. He held his breath for the answer. Samaná Bay was massive, reaching nearly thirty miles in from the Atlantic Ocean, and stretching more than five miles from north to south along its shores. If the fisherman couldn’t specify an area, his story would be useless.

  “Near Cayo Levantado.”

  Bingo. Now Mattera needed the exact location. Which meant it was time to talk business. If the fisherman asked for a large sum of money up front, his information was probably no good. In the two years since Chatterton and Mattera had joined forces, they’d been approached by several locals offering to steer them to lost shipwrecks—almost always for a price. One had even promised to show them to the San Miguel, perhaps the most valuable Spanish galleon ever lost, for two million dollars cash. They always passed on such offers. To them, if a guy had real information, he didn’t need the money up front; he’d be content to make a deal in exchange for a piece of the wreck. Everything else, like so much in the wilds of this country, was just a cash grab.

  “What can I offer you?” Mattera asked.

  “Give me what you think is fair after you find the ship,” the old man said.

  The men shook hands and Mattera pulled out a small black leather notebook. A few minutes later, he had a description of the area, a place less than a mile from the villa on the northern shore of the bay. Nearly four miles from Cayo Levantado, it stretched the limits of the team’s search parameters, but the water depths seemed right, it had a good beach for careening, and there was ample cover for pirates to fire on English warships.

  After thanking the fisherman and saying good night, Mattera returned to his car, where he checked the magazine in the pistol to make sure it was full, and that there was a round in the chamber. Driving down the side road, he steered with his knees, keeping one hand on the gun and the other on the directions to the pirate ship. He wasn’t about to let go of either of them.

  CHAPTER SIX

  NOWHERE LEFT TO GO

  When Chatterton returned from the States, the team loaded their boat and headed out to the place where the fisherman’s grandfather said a pirate ship had sunk.

  The men began their survey about two hundred yards offshore, in waters thirty feet deep. Ehrenberg could hardly keep up with the magnetometer’s readings. There was something large and metallic in the water here; that much was certain. He called over to the others to take a look.

  Ordinarily, the men would have waited a day or two to complete the survey. But Chatterton and Mattera stripped off their T-shirts and shorts and pulled on their dive gear, and before Ehrenberg or Kretschmer could wish them good luck, they’d gone over the side to find the massive object sunk beneath them.

  Landing on the soft muddy bottom, the men checked their depth gauges—twenty-eight feet—a near match for the depth at which they expected the Golden Fleece to lie.

  Now their job was to zero in on the source of the mag hits. They’d brought along a handheld magnetometer, and as they moved it back and forth, the instrument began whistling into Chatterton’s earpiece; Mattera could hear it through the water from three feet away. The men followed the sound until a shape materialized in the distance, a wall rising out of the mud and reaching up twenty feet from the bottom, something huge and, with its stark right angles, man-made. As they drew closer, the shape of the wall came into focus. To both of them, it looked like the gunwale or upper edge of a large boat, and when they got there they knew they were right, and it deflated them, because the gunwale was made of steel, and steel hadn’t been mass-produced until the mid-nineteenth century, more than 150 years after the Golden Fleece had sailed.

  Still, the men drifted over the top of the wall to investigate. Looking down, they could see rows of benches, each with room for five or six passengers. Both Chatterton and Mattera had grown up in New York; they knew what a ferryboat looked like. They could only hope this one had been empty, or at least that the passengers had escaped, before the boat went under.

  Both men had seen human remains on shipwrecks through the years, and now they steeled themselves to see more. Near one edge, Mattera saw what appeared to be a human femur. He reached to move debris from the area, but when he got near the object, a cloud of sand and mud exploded near his hand, and a row of razor-sharp teeth lunged toward his face, knocking him backward and sending him sprawling. He regained his footing just in time to see his attacker, a four-foot barracuda, and that the fish had turned back to come at him again. Local legend had it that the barracuda in these parts were crazy, that they lost their minds by eating parrot fish infected with toxins—a disease called ciguatera—and that they would tear off a man’s face if given the chance. Mattera did not wish to test the legend now. Swinging the giant lens from his camera, he hit the barracuda in the nose and sent it torpedoing out of the wreck.

  “Sorry, buddy,” he said. “We were just looking for pirates.”

  Neither diver found human remains. Still, they searched the surrounding area for another two days in case the Golden Fleece lay nearby, but every mag hit they collected belonged to the ferryboat. By making a few phone calls, they learned that a ferry had sunk in the area in the 1970s. Samaná officials were thankful to know of the discovery, as they’d never been able to find her. But it left the men nowhere to look. And no one knew what to do next.

  It made little sense to continue searching Samaná Bay to the west—they’d already strayed too far from Cayo Levantado. There was a mile or two of coastline to the east of the island, but it seemed impossible that Bannister would have gone there, so close to the battering weather of the open Atlantic and so easily seen by passing ships. Mattera had wished to avoid this moment, but he could put it off no longer. At the villa, he pulled Chatterton aside for a talk.

  He needed a break, he told his partner, not for a vacation or for clearing his head, but to take paying customers diving. The salvage business had become more expensive than either of them had imagined, draining thousands of dollars from their bank accounts every week. Boats, generators, electronics, fuel tanks, stomachs—all of it needed fixing or filling constantly, and it all cost a fortune here. Already, they’d had to replace the magnetometer cable three times, at a price of nearly four thousand dollars each. It cost more than seven hundred dollars a month just for the crew’s cell phone service and Internet access. Salt water was eating everything. It had been more than two years since Chatterton and Mattera had gone into business together. Combined, they’d spent nearly a million dollars between them. Neither had seen a dime in return.

  “Are you quitting?” Chatterton asked.

  “No,” Mattera said. “But we have to earn when we can. I’ve got clients who will pay good money to come here and dive with us. With you, I mean. You’re
the attraction. You’re the brochure.”

  Chatterton shook his head.

  “We’re in a fight for our lives here. They can take Tracy’s lease any time. UNESCO is breathing down our asses. And we might have thieves trying to jump our claim as we speak. And you want to take tourists out to look at the pretty coral reefs?”

  “I don’t want to. I have to,” Mattera said. “It’s just a week, John. Smile, sign some books, tell stories. We need to do what we can.”

  —

  SAMANÁ BAY WAS BREATHTAKING when one didn’t need to find a pirate ship there. For a week, Chatterton and Mattera took a group of well-heeled Americans to dive the ferryboat they’d found, some sunken cannons in nearby Barco Perdido Shoals, even the Tolosa, one of the galleons Bowden had worked. Both men smiled and laughed, and Chatterton told thrilling stories about exploring the U-boat and Titanic. But whenever the partners could steal a moment away, they talked about where they might search next for the Golden Fleece. Neither could come up with an answer.

  When tourist week ended, the partners took their guests to dinner at Tony’s. The power went out, so the group ate in the dark, making sure to drink their Presidente Lights before the beer turned warm. Talk turned to a recent news event, one making international headlines.

  In 2007, Odyssey Marine Exploration, a publicly traded salvage company, made one of the richest treasure scores of all time when it pulled half a billion dollars’ worth of silver coins from an early-nineteenth-century shipwreck off Gibraltar. Now, more than a year later, Spain was claiming the wreck, and demanding that the treasure be returned to the government. Odyssey contested, and the two parties were slugging it out in court. The case likely would determine the future of private treasure hunting.

  One of the guests asked if Chatterton and Mattera were afraid a government might claim the Golden Fleece. Chatterton shook his head. That was the beauty of a pirate ship, he explained. She didn’t belong to any country. No government could claim her.

  “So the treasure’s all yours?” one of the guests said.

  “Might not be any treasure,” Mattera replied. “And besides, treasure’s not the point.”

  Now the man looked confused.

  “Treasure gets found all the time,” Mattera said. “But a Golden Age pirate ship? That’s once in a lifetime. That’s forever.”

  —

  THE MEN COULDN’T WAIT to get back to the pirate search, but when they went to draw up a plan there was nowhere left to go. They’d surveyed every viable area near Cayo Levantado, dived every last magnetometer hit. For the first time since arriving in Samaná five months ago, the team was out of ideas.

  For a week, no one did much more than clean the boat or organize the supply shed beneath the villa where they kept their equipment. In between chores, they wondered who among them might be the first to quit. They missed their homes, no one was making money, and they were being eaten alive by mosquitos while living on pizza and Frosted Flakes in the middle of nowhere. Chatterton’s wife, Carla, and Mattera’s fiancée, Carolina, began asking if the men might come home more often.

  Chatterton and Mattera met at Fabio’s to discuss their next move. It had occurred to each of them, more than once, that things would be easier if they abandoned this pirate quest and went back to hunting treasure before UNESCO pulled the plug on salvors. Or, and they both hated to think this, they could even go back to their original lives, pre-partnership, while they still had enough money left to get a proper business started.

  They ordered pizzas and ate mostly in silence, a Shakira video blaring on a crooked TV above them the only sound in the joint. But after a while they got to talking. What was the evidence that the pirate ship had sunk in twenty-four feet of water? And what was the evidence that it had happened at Cayo Levantado at all? Bowden seemed convinced of all that, but why? None of the research Mattera had gathered made mention of the island, only that the pirate ship had sunk in Samaná Bay. In all the time they’d been searching, they’d never questioned Bowden’s assertion that the wreck was at the island—or any of his other information, for that matter. Chatterton took out his cell phone and called Bowden, and two days later he and Mattera were on a plane to Miami to talk to Bowden about what he really knew.

  —

  THE THREE MEN MET for breakfast at a Denny’s in South Miami. Chatterton and Mattera got straight to the point. They needed to know why Bowden believed the Golden Fleece lay in twenty-four feet of water. And they needed to know why he thought it had sunk at Cayo Levantado.

  “How much do you know about the real story of the Concepción?” Bowden asked.

  The Concepción was one of the three fabled treasure galleons on which Bowden had built his reputation. He was famous for the years of painstaking and beautifully detailed salvage work he did on her remains, an effort National Geographic had chronicled in a lengthy article penned by Bowden himself.

  “We know the basic story,” Mattera said. “But what does that have to do with the Golden Fleece? The Concepción sank fifty years before Bannister’s time.”

  That much was true, Bowden explained. But for decades after her sinking, no one could find the Concepción or the staggering treasure she carried. That changed in 1686, when a barely educated boat captain and former shepherd from Maine, William Phips, struck an unlikely deal with the king of England, and was granted permission to look for the wreck. During his journey, Phips put in at Samaná Bay, where he hoped to trade with the natives. There, his crew came upon the wreck of the Golden Fleece.

  “They saw it?” Chatterton asked.

  “Not only did they see it,” Bowden said. “They saw it up close.”

  He reached into the oversized pocket of his Bimini Bay shirt, pulled out a folded sheet of paper and his eyeglasses, and began reading from the log of the Henry, one of Phips’s ships.

  At three in the afternoon Capt. Phips sent his long boat and pinnace well manned and armed to cruise along shore and see if they could find any conveniency of careening. About two miles from the ship they found a wreck in four fathom water and burnt down to her gundeck, judging her to be a ship about four hundred tons, likewise found two or three iron shot which had ye broad arrow upon them, and several firelocks….By all circumstances the wreck is judged to be Bannister the pirate who was careening her and surprised by some of our English frigates.

  Chatterton and Mattera were impressed by the amount of information in this simple log entry. Here was an eyewitness sighting of the wreck of the Golden Fleece, made just a few months after her sinking, and in detail. A fathom equaled six feet, so the wreck would indeed be lying at a depth of twenty-four feet. There would be cannonballs aboard, some marked by an arrow, a symbol used by the Royal Navy. The ship would show evidence of having burned, and might still contain muskets used by the pirates to fire on the English force.

  Every one of these details fascinated the men. Still, not one of them told where the wreck might be found. To that end, they asked Bowden perhaps the most important question of all: Why did he seem so convinced that the Golden Fleece had sunk at Cayo Levantado?

  Bowden had an answer for that, too. Salvors had been looking there for decades, probably centuries; in the treasure business, that kind of generational constancy often was an excellent indicator. Also, the island’s name, which meant levitate, suggested the place had long been used to careen ships. And then there was Miss Universe.

  In the 1980s, a film crew had come to the Dominican Republic to shoot an episode of a television documentary series called Oceanquest. The host, twenty-five-year-old Shawn Weatherly, had recently been crowned Miss Universe, and would go on to appear on Baywatch and other television programs. For now, however, her job was to pull on scuba gear (and a tight-fitting suit) and “confront her deepest fears” by exploring some of the world’s most dangerous underwater environments. It was Bowden’s job, during the shoot, to help show her around.

  He took Weatherly to Cayo Levantado. There, while exploring the western end of t
he island, she discovered a large ceramic jar on the ocean bottom, buried in mud but intact. Bowden had seen similar examples in books and auction catalogs. To his eye, the jar was European and dated to the late seventeenth century, just the kind of piece the Golden Fleece might have carried. He had searched the area many times since then, but had never recovered another artifact like it.

  Mattera scribbled notes on the back of a placemat. People looking at Levantado for centuries. “Levantado” means “levitate.” Miss Universe. Chatterton didn’t write down a word.

  “Are you going to remember this?” Bowden asked Chatterton.

  “Don’t need to. I don’t think your evidence cuts it.”

  Just because people had always believed something, Chatterton said, didn’t make it so. In his experience, it was almost always by looking where others hadn’t considered that the things most worth finding turned up. As for the island and its name, the place might have been used for careening, but not by a pirate of Bannister’s caliber. Finally, while he remembered Shawn Weatherly—in glorious detail—the jar she found could have been dropped from any number of passing ships of the era.

  Bowden shook his head. He told the men he had a strong feeling about Levantado. But to Chatterton that didn’t matter; he didn’t operate on feelings. He respected all that Bowden had accomplished in his career, but he respected evidence even more. And the evidence he and Mattera had put together over five months said the Golden Fleece wasn’t at the island.