Pirate Hunters

by Robert Kurson

  Chatterton began to thank the Dominicans and reach into his pocket, but none of them wanted his money. Instead, they went out collecting again, farther away this time, bringing back heavy palm branches and giant rocks. Chatterton tried to explain that the jack couldn’t be saved, but that’s not what they had in mind. The men used the stems to dig a hole under the truck’s strut assembly, then replaced sand with rocks. Chatterton grabbed his own leaf and jumped in to help them dig. A space began to open under the flat tire, and the truck’s frame came to rest on its rock support.

  Now Chatterton could see the beauty of this plan—it was right in front of him. And it struck him that he’d often seen this kind of approach in Dominicans—that they rarely had what they needed, and often had nothing at all, but they didn’t seem to notice that or at least be much bothered by it. Instead, they focused on what they did have—if not a jack then a branch, if not money then time—then cobbled together a solution, a different way of getting there. He’d long cursed their mañana culture, swore that these people were going nowhere because they didn’t go at full speed, but as he watched the old man flip off the ruined tire and replace it with the spare, he could see what he’d admired about Dominicans all along—that they didn’t worry for the future because they knew there was always a way to arrive.

  The men shoved piles of rocks under the truck to give it purchase, then Chatterton backed it off the beach. He insisted they take the money in his pocket, about twenty dollars, and they did, gracias, gracias, then walked back to where they came from, a place where they were dirt poor, able to figure their way as things came to them, looking happier than anyone Chatterton knew.

  It was morning before Chatterton received the cannonball photos from Mattera. By that time, he was on his way to catch a flight to Miami, to take care of personal matters he’d put off for too long. The flight lasted more than two hours, much of which he used to gaze at the images his partner had sent him.

  When he landed, he called Mattera, who told him about the discovery, and about how things looked from the top of the island, a worthy place for the “veriest rogues in these Indies,” as the governor of Jamaica had referred to Bannister and his crew.

  To both Chatterton and Mattera, the cannonballs proved that the battle had occurred at Cayo Vigia, and that the so-called sugar wreck, located less than two hundred yards off the island, was the Golden Fleece. It was imperative that Bowden resume salvage on the sugar wreck immediately, not just to prove the wreck’s identity, but to put an end to the parade of interlopers at Cayo Levantado. Yet, Mattera was reluctant to tell Bowden about the cannonballs. He knew Bowden didn’t want anyone working on land—an area that went beyond his lease rights.

  “Let me talk to him,” Chatterton said. “I’ll go in person.”

  Mattera saw all kinds of risk in the idea. Chatterton could lose his cool and blow up at Bowden. Or Bowden might become frustrated with Chatterton and finally pull the plug on the pirate quest. Until now, Mattera had been a buffer between the two, but he’d be eight hundred miles away from this meeting. Still, he agreed to it.

  “John, call me when the meeting’s over. And keep that famous Chatterton temper under control.”

  Chatterton laughed.

  “What temper?”

  He sat down with Bowden a day later at a Denny’s restaurant in Miami and detailed Mattera’s adventure. He took Bowden all the way to the top of the hill at Cayo Vigia, just as Mattera had described it to him. To Chatterton, Bowden looked more excited with every detail.

  “How many cannonballs did Mattera find?” Bowden asked.

  “Two. In an hour. Can you imagine what else is up there, Tracy? Weapons, bones, treasure—who knows? Give the island to Cultura. They get shipwrecks all the time. They get galleons. How many pirate islands do they get?”

  Bowden looked uncomfortable. In the past, he’d warned Chatterton and Mattera that his lease didn’t extend to the land, and he didn’t want to anger Dominican officials by working beyond the lease boundaries. But now Chatterton tried to reassure him: At the end of the day, would Cultura really be upset with him for unraveling the mystery of a historic pirate battle?

  “This is your island, Tracy,” Chatterton said. “The Golden Fleece is your idea. Only now, you don’t just have a pirate wreck to offer; you have a pirate camp. How many of those are there in the world? Give Cultura the island. And let’s finish the sugar wreck.”

  But Bowden still didn’t look sold, and Chatterton believed he knew why. The sugar wreck debris field lay in forty-four feet of water. Treasure hunter William Phips had seen the wreck of the Golden Fleece in twenty-four feet, just months after her sinking. That disparity, Bowden often had told Chatterton and Mattera, troubled him.

  “I don’t think the sugar wreck is right,” Bowden said.

  Chatterton sat there for several moments.

  “All right, Tracy,” he said finally. “Thanks for your time.”

  From his car, Chatterton called Mattera and reported on the meeting. It was clear, he told his partner, that Bowden would never finish salvage of the sugar wreck no matter what the evidence showed, because he believed it was too deep to be the Golden Fleece. After that, there was nothing left to discuss.

  Mattera knew this must be the end for Chatterton. He’d lived with the man for two years, knew him better in ways than he did his own brothers. You couldn’t ask a person like that, one who’d been willing to swing a sledgehammer around live explosives in a sunken U-boat, to stand down from something that was speaking to him, something great and rare he believed he could reach.

  “So, I guess that’s it, John,” Mattera said.

  But Chatterton didn’t hear him.

  “I think there’s another way to do this,” Chatterton said. “I’m coming back.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  THE GOLDEN FLEECE

  The team didn’t know about Chatterton’s plan when they boarded the Deep Explorer toward the end of February 2009, but one thing was clear: He’d returned to the bay to search. The magnetometer, in storage at the villa, had been unwrapped and carried aboard. Lying in its wooden cradle, it looked like an old friend to the men.

  Chatterton fired the engines, then put the boat into a swooping arc away from the villa and on course for the sugar wreck. Mattera feared this might happen—that he or Chatterton would finally be pushed too far by Bowden’s obstinacy and take matters into their own hands. Mutiny, however, was not an option. The partners liked and respected Bowden and considered him a friend. The pirate project had been Bowden’s idea, not theirs, so to go rogue now would dishonor them. And they despised claim jumpers. Mattera was about to remind Chatterton of all this when his partner cut the wheel hard to the right, bypassed the sugar wreck, and set course straight for the island. Two minutes later, they were there.

  “What are we doing?” Ehrenberg asked.

  “The cannonballs are irrefutable,” Chatterton said. “They prove Bannister was at this island. That’s the first solid evidence in more than three hundred years, since Phips was here. But we’ve been so focused on the sugar wreck we never magged the shore along the island. That changes today.”

  “What are we looking for?” said Kretschmer.

  “I don’t know,” Chatterton said. “I think we take whatever the island gives us.”

  And with that, the men started a magnetometer survey along the shore. Their work was difficult—the island had an irregular shape and quirky dipsy-dos, and modern debris threatened their sensitive equipment. Chatterton kept the survey tight until all of the island’s coast had been covered, even the back side, where everyone knew nothing had happened.

  Survey complete, the team returned to the dive center to process the data. Ehrenberg began to see anomalies on the middle part of the northern side of the island, where Chatterton and Mattera believed the battle to have occurred. Everyone’s instinct was to gun the Zodiac back to the island and dive the hits, but they waited on Ehrenberg’s data, and by the end of the
day they had their survey, a map with electronic Xs in places no one had ever looked.

  The men would have mortgaged future treasure for another eight hours of daylight, but they had no choice but to wait until morning. And they needed to call Bowden anyway. They sensed they were getting close to something important, and he would want to know. Mattera reached him by phone. Bowden said he would be there soon.

  The next morning, the team moved the boat to the northern shore of Cayo Vigia. A handful of tourists were strolling the bridge that connected the nearby resort to the island, watching the sunrise as if this had always been the most peaceful place on earth.

  Kretschmer anchored the boat, then backed in and tied a line from the stern to a palm tree onshore. Then he and Mattera lifted the Zodiac from the roof of the boat, dropped it into the water, and used it to hover over the targets from their survey, marking each one of them with a buoy. Chatterton and Ehrenberg suited up, then splashed to check out each hit.

  In the water, they spotted a mass of stones in the mud, clustered together into the most perfect shape in the shipwreck hunter’s world, the pile. This was ballast, assembled from rocks to give a ship stability in the water. It was not accidental, and it was not done by nature. It was from a shipwreck. And it was almost exactly where Bannister would have careened the Golden Fleece.

  In the mud around the pile, Ehrenberg and Chatterton began to see gallon jugs, many intact, at a depth of around twenty feet. Some appeared to have writing embossed on the sides. Ehrenberg moved one of the jugs toward his mask until he could read the writing: Pearl Street—New York. Other bottles were similar—beautiful and likely from the nineteenth century, too new to have come from the Golden Age of Piracy.

  But maybe these bottles didn’t belong to the wreck that lay underneath the ballast; perhaps they’d come from a passing ship. The men moved more rock, looking for older artifacts, but they found only more bottles. They spent the rest of the day discovering nothing significant. On the way back to the villa that afternoon, no one said much more than “Damn, I thought we had her.”

  By the time the men set out for Cayo Vigia the next morning, Bowden had anchored his own boat over the sugar wreck. If Chatterton and Mattera didn’t make good at Vigia now, there was nowhere left to look.

  In the water, Chatterton and Ehrenberg pushed handheld metal detectors over the shallow bottom, searching for the source of the remaining hits on the survey. Soon, they were hearing faint beeps, and they followed these bread crumbs of sound to a new rock pile. But when they began moving stones and mud, they found only a steel beam and an old navigation buoy, all modern junk, all just like the stuff they’d spent the last year of their lives finding.

  Then something in the distance caught Chatterton’s eye, the rippling outline of a pile of stones, lying about twelve feet from shore. As he moved toward it, the shape came into sharper relief. It wasn’t just a pile of rocks and stones. It was a pile of rocks and stones in the shape of a sailing ship, one big enough to cross oceans.

  He and Ehrenberg drifted over the pile. From above, they had no doubt this was ballast. And it was massive, about fifty feet long by forty feet wide. The shallowest part lay in just six feet of water, but much of the rest sloped downward. Chatterton checked the depth at the other end of the ballast pile. The reading on his gauge: twenty-four feet.

  The men found artifacts right away: a paint can, a lawn chair, a combination lock. But for the first time, they weren’t worried by garbage. They dug deeper. Near one end of the pile, Ehrenberg found a three-foot-long pipe, almost entirely encrusted in coral. Chatterton swam over and motioned—let me look.

  Angling it into the sunlight shimmering down from the surface, Chatterton and Ehrenberg could see through cracks in the pipe’s coral encrustation and down to the metal, which was not rounded like pipes should be, but forged into the shape of an octagon.

  Chatterton left the pipe back on the ballast pile and then swam to the surface. On the boat, dripping and clinging to the ladder, he called to Mattera.

  “John, you gotta get down there. You need to look at something.”

  Mattera was in the water minutes later. Hovering over the ballast pile, he could see five or six of the pipes. He picked one up. By its length and heft, he thought it looked like a musket barrel. Mattera had decades of experience with guns. He looked closer. To him, the object appeared to have been made in the late seventeenth century. That’s when he remembered what Phips’s men had said about seeing the wreck of the Golden Fleece: There were muskets lying on deck.

  Mattera swam back to the boat. On board, he scrambled for his cell phone.

  “Who are you calling?” Chatterton asked.

  Mattera pointed toward Bowden’s boat, which was anchored just fifty yards in the distance.

  Mattera didn’t know what to say first—in his hurry he stumbled over his words—but he finally asked Bowden his questions, which poured out in an unpunctuated stream: Could he and Chatterton recover the pipe and could they bathe it in muriatic acid to remove the coral and get a better look at the metal? He feared Bowden would want to step in and take over himself, but Mattera could not imagine anyone but his own team pulling up first proof of the pirate wreck.

  Mattera hung up the phone.

  “We’re a go to do it ourselves,” he told the others. “Tracy’s as excited as we are.”

  Chatterton slipped his regulator into his mouth and fell back into the water.

  Three minutes later, he surfaced, cradling the pipe with a midwife’s touch. Mattera took it from him—gently—and examined it.

  “I’ve seen them in books and shows and auctions,” said Mattera. “I’m no expert, but I’m telling you, I think that’s late 1600s.”

  Mattera snapped a photo of the artifact with his cell phone, and attached it to an email he addressed to antique gun experts and collectors he knew. In the subject line he wrote, “What does this look like to you?” He noted its dimensions and weight in the message field, but said nothing further. Then, he pressed send.

  Piling into the Zodiac, and with Mattera cradling the length of iron, the men sped back across the channel to the dive center near the villa, where Kretschmer built a box made of two-by-fours, and lined it with a thick plastic bag. Ehrenberg poured in about two liters of muriatic acid and then, motioning everyone to stand upwind to avoid noxious fumes, took the pipe from Mattera and slid it into the bath. Coral broke loose in the acid, turning the liquid brown. This was shock treatment for an artifact, and likely to damage it, but the pipe could not be preserved in any case without great effort and expense, there were more of them on the ballast pile, and its value, in this condition and without its wood stock, was more evidentiary than monetary.

  The last of the coral dissolved in ten minutes. Ehrenberg pulled the pipe from the acid and rinsed it in cold water. Now its octagon shape was obvious.

  “That thing wasn’t made to move water,” Ehrenberg said. “That thing was made to kill.”

  Mattera took the artifact and brought it close to his face. Etched over the length of the metal were elegant swirling patterns, like those he’d seen on hammer-forged musket barrels from centuries past. He didn’t know its pedigree. But he knew it was a gun barrel. And he knew it was old.

  Everyone wanted back in the water now, but Chatterton thought they should wait. It was important to keep Bowden involved, so he had Kretschmer build a small wooden cradle for the gun barrel and secure it using zip ties. Only then did the team get back into the Zodiac and head for Bowden’s boat. On the way, Mattera received an email reply from Duke McCaa, a longtime dealer in rare and expensive big-game rifles, and an expert in antique firearms. McCaa had an opinion about the object in Mattera’s photo. It was a musket barrel. European. Dating from the late seventeenth century.

  A holler went up from the Zodiac. Mattera warned that this was just one opinion, but no one was listening to that, including Mattera, and a minute later they were boarding Bowden’s boat. Bowden studied the artifact
, turning it over in its wood cradle, moving his fingers over its textures and grooves, looking through its hollow barrel.

  “How deep did you find this?” he asked.

  “Sixteen feet,” Chatterton said. “But we have others that are deeper.”

  Despite their excitement, Chatterton and Mattera knew the gun barrel would not be enough proof. Even if it were period to Bannister’s time, that didn’t mean it had come from the Golden Fleece. An ironclad case couldn’t be made based on just a half dozen musket barrels and a theory. Cultura, and history, would need better proof, something no one could argue with, especially with so many competitors closing in. Mattera reminded everyone they weren’t likely to find a bell embossed with the name Golden Fleece. Most merchant ships of the era didn’t carry bells.

  So a plan was made. Bowden would move his operation to the ballast pile where the muskets had been found. Both crews would work the site, looking for anything that would conclusively prove they’d found the wreck they were looking for. But they would have to wait until the next day to do it. The weather was turning. Chatterton and Mattera had waited a year for this, but neither of them felt like he could wait for another tomorrow.

  There was an antidote to that, of course. The team would go drinking that night, because the next day was likely to be one of the happiest—or most disappointing—days of their lives.

  By the time they dressed for dinner, Mattera had received more replies to his emails, each confirming that the object in his photo was likely a European-made musket dating to the late seventeenth century. This was cause for celebration, but as the dinner wore on the mood at the table changed. It wasn’t just muskets that couldn’t be proved to belong to the Golden Fleece; it was likely true of whatever artifacts they might find. When Chatterton had finally identified the mystery U-boat off New Jersey, he’d done it by pulling a tag from the wreck inscribed with the submarine’s number. But there were no tags on seventeenth-century pirate ships. To get that kind of proof, they would need a bell or something just as good, which meant they’d need something close to a miracle. Of course, this had always been true, but it hadn’t really hit them until they’d laid their hands on these muskets.