Pirate Hunters

by Robert Kurson

  —

  OF ALL MATTERA’S PIRATE BOOKS, the one he loved most was the oldest and tiniest, The Buccaneers of America, written by onetime pirate Alexandre Exquemelin, and first published in 1678. It was skinny enough to pocket, so he took it on a trip to the grocery store one morning with Carolina. Flipping through pages while Carolina inspected the produce, he found this sentence: “When a ship has been captured, the men decide whether the captain should keep it or not.”

  “Carolina!” he called.

  “Siento—sorry,” he said to startled customers, then made his way past the bananas and papayas until he could whisper in Carolina’s ear.

  “I think I’ve got it. I think I found what I’ve been looking for.”

  At his apartment, he tore through Exquemelin and other books. He’d been through many of these volumes before, but always for the swashbuckling stuff. This time, he turned to the chapters on pirate organization and politics. He’d always presumed them to be the dreariest sections. From the moment he began reading, they opened his eyes.

  —

  BEFORE EVERY VOYAGE, PIRATES gathered together to commit an unthinkable act: They made every crewman an equal. From the greenest of lookouts to the captain himself, no one would own rights over any other or possess privileges unavailable to all. The men would eat the same meals, earn similar wages, share the same quarters. The captain would exercise absolute authority only in battle; at other times, he would guide the ship according to the pleasure of the crew.

  And that was just the start of the madness.

  Having made everyone equal, the pirates now put almost everything to a vote. To choose where to stalk prey, they voted. To decide whether to attack a target, they voted. To determine the rules of the ship, the punishment for wrongdoers, division of booty, to maroon or shoot traitors, they voted. And every man’s vote counted the same.

  One might have expected these men, who lived lawless lives in the shadow of gallows, to cast their ballots in unpredictable ways. Yet, time and again through the decades that spanned their Golden Age, the pirates seemed to vote exactly alike. Mattera could see the patterns right away. Using his orange highlighter, he began underlining rules that seemed to govern every pirate ship that sailed in the era:

  —Captains were to earn no more than two or three times that of the lowliest deckhand.

  —Every man was to have an equal share of food, liquor, and other provisions.

  —Battle injuries would be compensated according to body part. On one pirate ship, damages were paid as follows:

  Lost right arm 600 pieces of silver or six slaves

  Lost left arm 500 pieces of silver or five slaves

  Lost right leg 500 pieces of silver or five slaves

  Lost left leg 400 pieces of silver or four slaves

  Lost eye (either one) 100 pieces of silver or one slave

  Lost finger 100 pieces of silver or one slave

  Internal injury up to 500 pieces of silver or five slaves

  Lost hook or peg leg Same as if original limb was lost

  —Anyone caught stealing from the ship’s plunder would be punished, including by being marooned on an uninhabited island.

  —Anyone caught cheating another crewman would have his ears and nose slashed by the aggrieved party, then turned out at the next port.

  —No women were allowed on board. Anyone sneaking a woman onto the ship would be killed.

  —Disputes between crewmen would be settled onshore by duel.

  —Bonuses would be awarded for courage in combat, the sighting of prey, boarding a target ship first, and other heroics.

  —Punishments would be inflicted for cowardice, drunkenness, insolence, disobedience, rape, and any other action that undermined the ship’s primary purpose—to steal.

  —Any unsettled issues would be put to a vote.

  —Every man’s vote carried equal weight.

  One after another, these ideas seemed incredible to Mattera. He tried to imagine Paul Castellano accepting just two times the salary of the lowest Gambino foot soldier, or John Gotti taking the votes of street corner bookies. The criminal bosses Mattera had known killed men who aspired to be their equal. Now, he was reading about pirate captains who wouldn’t take an extra pig’s foot for dinner, and didn’t get a cabin to themselves.

  Mattera couldn’t get enough of these captains. Each needed to be fearless in vision and unflinchingly brave, and willing to visit terror on targets that resisted attack. Yet, the captain served at the pleasure of his crew. He was elected by popular vote and could be deposed by the same. If he were too lenient or too cruel, too aggressive or too passive, if he refused to be guided by the will of the ship, he was out and might be punished, even marooned, for his failures. And this was true even if, like Bannister, he owned the ship.

  All of this had a thrilling ring to Mattera. The votes, the equality, the absence of kings—this was democracy, a century before the concept took hold in America.

  To Mattera, it made sense for a regular guy to turn pirate. But what of Bannister? He already had money, power, and autonomy. His future was made. By turning pirate, he risked all of that. And he risked his life. Before, Mattera couldn’t figure why a made guy would make such a leap. But he understood it now. There was freedom aboard these pirate ships, one hundred or more men inflamed with the idea that anything was possible for anyone. Bannister might have been a gentleman, and he might have had his future ahead of him. But he’d likely never gotten inside a feeling like that.

  Mattera could have kept reading forever, but he believed he had his answer. By week’s end, he would rejoin Chatterton for their search for the Golden Fleece. But this time things would be different. This time, they were going to look somewhere entirely new.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  THE SUGAR WRECK

  “Gentlemen, we have direction.”

  Presiding over a strategy breakfast he’d called at Tony’s, Mattera asked his teammates to imagine themselves back in the Golden Age, when the greatest and most daring pirates had made their names.

  “We need to think like them,” he said. “If we can think like pirates, we can find them.”

  That’s when he started to talk about democracy.

  The pirates had sailed in the seventeenth century, but they were men ahead of their time, professional lawbreakers who made inviolable laws for themselves. Mattera read to the men from pirate constitutions, described their voting rights, and underlined their foundational idea—that any man might become rich if he dared, but that no man should ever become king.

  His companions listened rapt throughout. Then they asked him, How does this help us find the Golden Fleece?

  Mattera’s answer was simple: It all came down to Bannister and his motivations.

  Bannister was more than a great pirate—to Mattera, he was a man enthralled by democracy. No other motive so elegantly explained why a gentleman captain, likely in his thirties or forties and with a future secured, would risk everything to go plunder on the high seas. Maybe he loved money. Maybe he loved adventure. But he must have known one thing for sure: Men came alive when they were made equal. A hundred of them together could take on the world.

  Yet, in the 1680s, as empires joined forces to drive pirates to the bottom of the sea, a man like Bannister couldn’t be certain that democracy would survive, or even that future generations would know such an audacious idea had taken hold. To make people remember, he would need to do something epic—something history couldn’t ignore. Pillaging more ships wouldn’t cut it. Stockpiling treasure would leave no mark at all. But fighting the Royal Navy would have impact. Defeating them in battle would make equality echo through time.

  And that, Mattera said, changed everything about how the team might search for the Golden Fleece. For nine months, they’d been looking for the perfect place for a pirate ship to careen. Now they would look for the perfect place for a pirate ship to fight, an area of land where Bannister had placed cannoneers and musketeers and w
aged a battle for the ages.

  Chatterton agreed.

  “Bannister believed,” Chatterton said. “He wasn’t running from the navy; he was waiting for them. If we find Bannister’s battlefield, we find his ship nearby.”

  The four men laid out a map of Samaná Bay on the table, but none could immediately point to an area they hadn’t already searched. But that was just on paper. Armed with new insight, they would return to their boats and start looking back toward the shores.

  Leaving the restaurant, Heiko Kretschmer pulled Mattera aside and told him how moved he was by the pirates’ story. At age eighteen, he’d risked his life fleeing East Germany, first by hopping a train to Czechoslovakia, then stowing away aboard another train bound for West Germany, likely never again to see his family, all for a taste of freedom and a chance to see the world.

  “In those days,” Kretschmer said, “I dreamed about democracy.”

  —

  CHATTERTON AND MATTERA COMBED the banks of Samaná Bay for the next week. They found several potential battlefields, but none good enough for inspired pirates to make history in a stand against two Royal Navy warships.

  That weekend, Garcia-Alecont threw a party at the villa. Chatterton was among the first to show up, a bottle of wine in each hand. He didn’t intend to stay—he and Mattera were scheduled to search the bay at five-thirty the next morning—but didn’t argue when Garcia-Alecont’s wife pulled him inside and introduced him to guests. For the next several hours he talked diving, recounting his adventures. Even as he laughed and described key moments, it all seemed like a lifetime ago to him now.

  When the party finally wound down, Chatterton grabbed a last glass of wine and stepped onto the veranda, where he stood, under a bright moon, looking out over the channel. Mattera joined him.

  “What are we missing?” Chatterton asked.

  Mattera couldn’t answer. He couldn’t do anything but look out over the water. Then he put down his wineglass.

  “Get in the boat,” he said. “Get Victor.”

  “It’s two in the morning….” Chatterton said.

  “We need to go. Now.”

  Twenty minutes later, the three men were in the Zodiac and heading across the channel to Cayo Vigia, a small island just six hundred yards from the villa. Mattera cut the engine and let the boat settle onto a sandbar by the island’s northern hump.

  “Holy shit,” Chatterton said.

  The men stood up in the boat and looked around. From every direction, the Zodiac remained hidden to the world.

  “If I’m a pirate looking to careen, this is my place,” Garcia-Alecont said.

  “And if I’m going to have a fight for the ages, I fight from right here,” said Chatterton.

  The three men took stock of the island. At most, it stretched five hundred yards east to west, one hundred yards north to south. Yet, the water was deep, about twenty-five feet, almost up to its beach. Its eastern end rose high above the water, where cannon batteries could be camouflaged in dense overgrowth and fired, unseen, at enemies. And it was less than a half mile to the mainland, where freshwater could be found.

  Mattera could only chuckle. He and Chatterton had been looking at this island from the villa every day for the past nine months. But it had never crossed their minds that a big sailing ship like the Golden Fleece might be capable of maneuvering in here. Yet, when one stood on the spot, it was clear that a large vessel could do that—if she were helmed by a man of daring and nerve. Even the smallest mistake or sudden current could force a big sailing ship to run aground.

  Mattera began scribbling notes in his small leather notebook, but Chatterton held up his hand.

  “Start the engine. We need to move,” Chatterton said.

  He pulled the cord and took the tiller, guiding the Zodiac from the island to a point about 125 yards off its northeastern tip.

  “Guys,” Chatterton announced, “we are now over the so-called sugar wreck.”

  The sugar wreck was a debris field worked for a few days by Carl Fismer in the mid-1980s. He’d learned of it from a Dominican treasure hunter whose family had owned land in Samaná for centuries. When Fizz dove the site, he found a sugar urn, delicate and intact, that looked to have come from the late 1600s—hence, the nickname “sugar wreck.” To him, it appeared that the urn, and the scattered debris that spread for a hundred yards around it, might have come from a merchant ship, and since he was looking for treasure galleons at the time, he put the wreck on hold. Fizz didn’t get back to the site before his lease in the area ended, but Bowden had done his own work there, recovering Delftware pottery, a pistol, cannonballs, medicine bottles, axes, and several handblown onion-shaped wine bottles. Chatterton and Mattera had seen these artifacts at the lab, pushed off into a corner, stepsisters to Bowden’s more glorious finds. Still, they remembered them. Every piece dated to the late seventeenth century. Not one was a day newer than 1686, the year Bannister did battle with the Royal Navy.

  “Guys,” Chatterton said. “Why can’t the sugar wreck be the Golden Fleece?”

  The men could see it all in front of them now. Bannister had careened at the island, the most perfect and invisible place in Samaná Bay. The Royal Navy tracked him there, but the island’s elevation, tight quarters, and dense overgrowth gave the pirates an advantage in battle, and they’d leveraged every bit of it to hold off the navy warships. Sometime during the fight, or perhaps just after it, the Golden Fleece moved off the island before sinking at this very spot. Perhaps Bannister had tried to get away in her, or maybe she’d burned her lines and drifted before going under.

  The three men looked at one another. There was every chance the Golden Fleece was directly under them now.

  Mattera reached for the bottle of beer he’d brought along. He opened it and splashed some over the side.

  “This is for the dead guys below,” he said.

  Garcia-Alecont started the engine and steered back toward shore. On the beach, Chatterton and Mattera stood in the surf, happier than either could remember being in a very long time, looking out over their future, looking back at an island that had been there all along.

  —

  IF THE WORLD STILL used telegrams, Chatterton and Mattera would have sent one to Bowden asking the critical question: Why can’t the sugar wreck be the Golden Fleece? They certainly weren’t going to do it by phone or email. Only a trip to Santo Domingo to ask Bowden in person could do justice to a question like that.

  So they drove the wild and bumpy roads back to the Dominican capital city, marveling throughout at Bannister’s ingenuity in choosing Cayo Vigia, imagining the sinking hearts on the Royal Navy ships as they took cannon fire from invisible guns mounted high on the unlikeliest island.

  And what an island it was! By now, Chatterton and Mattera had studied it on charts and satellite photos. At its narrowest, it stretched just thirty-eight yards north to south, but it was long and lean, nearly a quarter mile east to west. From the air, Vigia looked like a whale, its muscular front end swooping down into a lean and elegant body, then widening again at the tail, swimming toward the open Atlantic, an island in motion even as it stayed perfectly still.

  It even had a footbridge.

  Constructed in the 1960s, the half-mile-long concrete and steel structure connected Cayo Vigia to a resort at the mainland, but few used it. The island had little beach to speak of and was mostly grown over in trees. Occasionally, tourists ventured over, and sometimes amorous couples made an adventure of it. But mostly, it was just a dead end. For that reason, the people of Samaná called it the “Bridge to Nowhere.” For Chatterton and Mattera, Nowhere was the only place that mattered.

  Every mile they drove, the men grew more eager to see the look on Bowden’s face when they told him he already had the Golden Fleece. They didn’t doubt he’d ask questions, but they’d prepared answers, fact upon fact that would be hard to argue with, even by someone stuck in his own way.

  They sat down with Bowden at Adrian Tropical, an
upscale café in downtown Santo Domingo. Chatterton didn’t waste time.

  “Tracy, let me ask you a question,” he said. “Why can’t the sugar wreck be the Golden Fleece?”

  Bowden raised an eyebrow.

  “Cayo Vigia is the perfect place to careen a vessel, install shore batteries, and fight the Royal Navy,” Chatterton said. “And every artifact you brought up from the sugar wreck is period to Bannister’s time.”

  Bowden smiled. Taking a small notebook and a pencil from his shirt pocket, he motioned for the details. The men said they saw it like this: Bannister had careened his ship on a swooning dip on the northern side of Vigia. Tucked into this place, the Golden Fleece became invisible, not just to passing ships, but to the world. The pirates had access to freshwater from a nearby stream. In the channel’s calm waters, crewmen hunted turtles and scrubbed their ship’s hull without struggle.

  But Bannister hadn’t relaxed. He put two cannon batteries—and probably most of his pirates—into the wooded hills on the island’s eastern point. One hundred feet above water, these men scanned the horizon with telescopes and sharp eyes, looking for enemies, knowing they could spot trouble hours before trouble found them. After a time, they spied two Royal Navy frigates approaching in the distance. Against one, they stood a slight chance. Against both, they would need a miracle.

  Even then, there was still time to go peacefully. By surrendering now, Bannister could place his fate, and that of his men, in the hands of a Port Royal jury. But Bannister hadn’t come to surrender. Instead, he ordered the pirates to their battle stations. Then he sounded the trumpet and told his men to open fire.