The Lost Fleet

by Barry Clifford

  The Spaniards fought harder, but not smarter. They flung themselves again and again at the city’s defenses, into the pirates’ devastating fire. The battle raged for the better part of the day, until finally de Grammont led his troops in another flanking maneuver that caught the Spaniards in a crossfire. That was enough for the militia. They withdrew from the field, abandoning the city to the freebooters.

  The Spanish garrison in the citadel had been holding out waiting for the relief column to arrive and drive the buccaneers off. The pirates’ victory quashed any hope they might have had. Threatening to shoot any officers that interfered with them, the troops in the citadel deserted the place, slipping away in the darkness.

  By eleven o’clock, the citadel was abondoned. A couple of English prisoners, freed by the fleeing garrison, called out to the pirates that the way was clear. The pirates feared a Spanish trick and ordered the Englishmen to discharge all of the cannons so the pirates could be certain they were advancing in the face of unloaded artillery. When this was done, the old freebooting partners, the Chevalier de Grammont and Laurens de Graff, personally led the men over the wall and into the citadel. Campeche was entirely in their hands.

  The attack on Campeche was one of the few instances in which filibusters encountered a fully prepared enemy and attacked anyway. It says much about the courage of de Graff and de Grammont and much about their skill. No wonder colonial governors were eager to bring such men under their direction.

  Once the city was in their hands, the pirates settled in for a long stay, just as they had in Maracaibo seven years before. Once again, de Grammont organized an ad hoc cavalry and dispatched mounted buccaneers to the countryside to plunder as they might. Pickings were slim. With all their forewarning, the inhabitants had cleaned out Campeche of anything the buccaneers might want. The pirates’ frustration mounted.

  Two weeks after the taking of Campeche, de la Barrera received word from the governor of Yucatán, Juan Bruno Téllez de Guzmán, that all available troops were to be assembled at the town of Tenabó, about twenty-five miles from Campeche. De la Barrera accordingly set out with the handful of men he had left under his command, only to be captured by a patrol of de Grammont’s mounted buccaneers. De la Barrera once again entered the city of Campeche, not in triumph but as a prisoner.

  FRUSTRATION AND FALLING OUT

  During the nearly two months the buccaneers held Campeche, they carried out the customary atrocities of the time, which, in this instance, were aggravated by their frustration at finding so little plunder.

  August 25, 1685, was the feast day of the patron saint of Louis XIV, and the French filibusters celebrated in high style. The next day they made preparations to get under way, possibly prompted by an outbreak of fever. Before the buccaneers abandoned a city, they would usually exact a ransom in exchange for not burning the place to the ground. In the case of Campeche, it looked as if such a ransom would be the primary source of any loot they might garner.

  A message was sent to Governor de Guzmán demanding eighty thousand pesos and four hundred head of cattle for the protection of Campeche. In return, the governor sent a bluntly callous letter, assuring the pirates that “they would be given nothing and might burn down the town, as [Spain] had ample funds with which to build or even buy another, and people enough with which to repopulate it.”5

  Such insolence would have angered the pirates in any event, but coming at the end of two fruitless months, it pushed them over the edge. De Grammont ordered a number of houses put to the torch by way of demonstrating his sincerity. The next day he sent another message inland, this time promising to begin executions if his demands were not satisfied. The governor sent the same reply as before.

  De Grammont did not make idle threats. The day after receiving the second message from de Guzmán, the Chevalier paraded his prisoners in the town square and began to systematically execute them.

  After half a dozen men had been hung, Felipe de la Barrera y Villegas and a few other leading citizens, who lacked nothing in courage and honor, approached Laurens de Graff, whom they considered the more humane of the two buccaneer leaders, and tried to bargain for the lives of the prisoners. De la Barrera and the others had nothing with which to bargain, save their own lives. They offered themselves as de Graff’s slaves if he would spare the prisoners de Grammont was determined to execute.

  De Graff was not interested in having the Spaniards as slaves, but neither was he interested in continued bloodshed. He and de Grammont had a lengthy tête-à-tête. There is no record of what was discussed or what motivated de Graff to take up de la Barrera’s cause. Perhaps he had no stomach for senseless slaughter. Perhaps he remembered how he had mortally wounded Van Hoorn after the sack of Vera Cruz, when it was Van Hoorn who wanted to put helpless prisoners to the sword.

  The end result was that the lives of the prisoners were spared. The buccaneers abandoned Campeche after spiking the guns and carrying off many of the prisoners for ransom. It was early September 1685. The pirates had spent two months at Campeche and had little to show for it.

  After rounding the Yucatán Peninsula once more, the buccaneers stopped at Isla Mujeres, where they divided what scant loot they had. Then the filibuster army split up.

  It appears that the understanding reached between de Graff and de Grammont concerning the prisoners at Campeche was not entirely amiable. There may have been friction between the two men going back to the gathering at Isla de Pinos, where de Graff had sailed off in frustration. Whatever the cause, these foremost of the buccaneer leaders went their separate ways.

  As fate would have it, they would never see each other again.

  DEATH OF A FLIBUSTIER

  Pierre-Paul Tarin de Cussy, de Pouançay’s successor, worked to bring the buccaneers into the official French government and military. In September 1686 he commissioned the Chevalier de Grammont “lieutenant du roi” of the coast of Saint-Domingue. At the same time, de Graff was made a major, though his title would later become “Laurens-Cornille Baldran, sieur de Graff, lieutenant du Roi en l’isle de Saint Domingue, capitaine de frégate legère, chevalier de Saint-Louis.”6

  De Grammont, no stranger to high office, was not quite ready to settle down. He had in mind at least one more attack on the Spanish. Where his former lieutenant Thomas Paine had failed, de Grammont was ready to try his luck. His target was St. Augustine.

  Eight months after quitting Campeche, de Grammont was sailing in company with Nicholas Brigaut and another pirate from the Campeche raid. In April 1686 they stood into the Atlantic and came to anchor south of St. Augustine under Spanish colors. Brigaut, sailing a small Spanish vessel they had captured, went on ahead to scout out the attack. De Grammont and the other vessel waited, but Brigaut did not return.

  At last, de Grammont decided to go himself, no doubt hoping to discover what had become of his consort. As it turned out, Brigaut’s ship had been lost in a storm, and de Grammont sailed right into the same foul weather. The gales drove him north along the coast. He was never heard from again.

  It was not for another year and a half that any word of de Grammont reached French ears. After escaping from a Spanish prison, a buccaneer named Du Marc passed along a rumor to de Cussy that de Grammont’s ship had been lost with all hands.

  After all the danger de Grammont had faced, after multiple shipwrecks, after a near-fatal sword wound, after the sacking of Maracaibo, La Guaira, Vera Cruz, and Campeche, the sea ultimately claimed him.

  The life of the Chevalier de Grammont was perhaps closer to the Hollywood vision of a buccaneer than that of any other pirate in history. Fleeing France under a cloud, he rose to lead armies of the most dangerous and undisciplined men, and commanded either the fear or the respect of officials of every nation represented in the West Indies, only to die an anonymous death. One of the great buccaneer captains of all time was gone, and one of the wildest chapters in the history of the filibusters had come to an end.

  32

  Of Men-of
-War and Pirates

  OCTOBER 29, 1998

  LAS AVES

  Life aboard the Antares was good, for the most part. We were pleased with the work we were accomplishing. Mike Rossiter was happy with the footage he was shooting. Every evening after dinner, Eric Scharmer would review the underwater footage on the boat’s VCR and we would gather around and evaluate our discovery work.

  The vessel itself was a little cramped. As the days went by, we started to get a bit tired of one another, and it started to seem even more cramped. That is inevitable on an expedition such as this.

  There were other problems, too, both with accommodations and group dynamics. Margot and I had a private cabin into which the holding tanks for the heads seemed to vent. The smell made me sick. Chris and Cathrine also had a private cabin, which didn’t smell much better.

  Todd, Carl, and Eric were bunking together. Todd and Carl yucked it up in the evenings like a couple of high school football players on their first away game. It was the Special Forces/SEAL rivalry.

  Rivalry, of course, is a part of the game. Todd and I have been at each other for more than twenty years. From the minute we meet in the airport to the minute we get home, it is an endless competition of teasing and ribbing to see who is going to crack first, who is going to lose his cool. Believe me, on an expedition you must have a thick skin to endure some of the comments thrown at you. Everything is fair game, nothing is sacred: from pointing out someone’s lack of physical prowess to questioning the fidelity of his wife or girlfriend. The only object is to get a reaction out of the other guy.

  This is always a lot of fun, at least for the first few days of the trip. After a while I am ready to knock it off. But Todd will never quit. He never lets up. By the end of each expedition I am ready to crack. But after a month or two away from him, I’m ready to start the psychological jousting all over again.

  This time I had Carl as a secret weapon. I could get Carl and Todd going on each other, and that would lighten the load on me. This worked for a while, but finally, as we neared the end of the trip, I had to tell the two of them to lighten up. They were driving me and everyone else nuts. Todd just smiled at me and my tacit admission that, for once, he had won.

  Charles was, predictably, a problem. I believe that he considered himself the leader of the expedition, and that he felt he had to demonstrate his authority. Sometimes he would come with us while we were mapping wrecks, and sometimes he would be off with his own people doing God knows what. It was like having a shadow expedition.

  Charles would not let up on his idea of picking a wreck site and going over it with the same eye to detail he had once used as a dentist. It was annoying because my team was doing straightforward underwater surveying, working like a well-oiled machine, mapping wreck after wreck, just as we had hoped. I wanted an underwater portrait of the disaster as a whole, and I did not want to slow down the pace.

  Besides, I knew what Charles really wanted to find. I had been told that his modus operandi was to use science as a cover for his gold-mining ventures in the Amazon jungle. I had seen enough to realize that Charles was like a reincarnated conquistador. As one journalist later put it: “Instead of a cross, he and his scientist-missionaries carried cameras, computers, and blood-sampling equipment into the wilderness as a polite prologue to the engineers of destruction who always followed on their heels.”1 In the case of Las Aves, the ex-dentist turned naturalist turned anthropologist was now shedding his skin yet again to turn underwater archaeologist. In all his incarnations, however, I believe there was one common denominator—gold.

  Charles and I had more than one argument about the project mission, but we weren’t in the jungle; we were in my element now, and “gold,” as my uncle Bill once said, “don’t float.”

  Mike Rossiter and Charles got into it as well. Their relationship that had started badly only became worse. Mike would tell us that we needed to tape one thing, and Charles would insist that we do something else. It was the same thing that had happened in the planning stage, with Charles trying to dictate the mission of the expedition. I was ready to move north along the reef and locate the next wreck, and Charles was talking about renting a plane for aerial reconnaissance or some dammed thing. Much later, I would learn that he was not a stranger to faked flight plans.2 I’m sure it bugged Charles that, in the end, Mike called the shots because he was paying for it all. And Mike looked to me to lead the expedition.

  Charles had his own boat, but he was always aboard the Antares. That wasn’t a problem. For the most part we kept our opinions and feelings to ourselves and maintained a cordial attitude. It wasn’t even a problem when Charles expressed an interest in moving aboard. But soon he was insisting that his crew move aboard, too. The Antares could not hold that many people. Todd and Ron had carefully figured how much food and water would be needed for the expedition based on the number of team members I was bringing. With Charles and his entourage, we would run out of supplies long before we were done. There was no way that Charles could move aboard the Antares, and he was told as much. That did nothing to ease the mounting tension.

  Adding to the mix was the other third of our expedition, Max Kennedy and his friends whose base was their own vessel. One of the worst mistakes made by some academic archaeologists is to either completely dismiss the aid of what they call “avocationals” or exploit them as slave labor. Men like Max and his friends bring a freshness and enthusiasm to projects that remind me of why exploration is so appealing in the first place. They had to get back to their families and their jobs after the first week, and I was sorry to see them go.

  The food aboard Antares was great at first. There were eight crew members on board the boat, including a cook. The cook was used to catering to American and European sports divers, so the meals he made were slightly ethnic but not too much so.

  Soon, however, the supplies started to run out and the meals became a greasy mess. That concerned me. Food is really important to my crew, and they are always hungry. Taking someone’s dessert is considered nearly as serious as stealing someone’s girlfriend. I’ve seen fights nearly break out over the last piece of chicken. After a hard day of diving, a good meal is essential, and we were not getting them anymore.

  Perhaps worst of all, the air-conditioning no longer worked. In the heat we experienced down there, functional air-conditioning was important. Without it, there was no escaping the heat, not even in the water. As bad as the surf was over the reefs, on the day that we went to look for the flibustiers, it was the heat that came the closest to killing me.

  33

  Flibustier

  OCTOBER 29, 1998

  LAS AVES

  The heat was brutal. At the surface of the water the temperature gauge on my dive console read in the high eighties. That’s in the water. Twenty feet below the surface it still felt like you were taking a bath. When we had to work on deck, we would constantly jump off the boat just to cool down, but it hardly helped at all.

  Most people would not think it, but a diver can overheat, working hard and fast and having to wear a full wet suit because of the coral. With the Aga it’s easy to skip-breathe, meaning that you will actually hold your breath for a beat, and then resume breathing. When that happens you get a slight carbon dioxide buildup, which can cause dizziness and even blackouts.

  The sharks that Ron had warned us about never did make an appearance, except for a nurse shark we saw sleeping on a ledge. But the reef was teeming with barracuda, huge barracuda, five or six feet long, the biggest any of us had ever seen. As we worked, the barracuda would hang back in the shadows and watch us.

  Barracuda have mouths that bristle with razor-sharp teeth. They always seemed to be watching. They can hang in the water the way a dragonfly treads air. One of the crew on Max’s boat told us that on a previous trip to Las Aves, they had caught a barracuda on hook and line. While trying to land it, it bit the bottom step off their dive ladder.

  We learned a lot about the barracuda from the in
digenous people who know the area, in particular the conch divers. Those men were in the water at the same time we were, and we took some comfort from that. They told us that a barracuda will change colors and circle around its prey before attacking. We kept an eye out for that behavior, but we didn’t have any problems.

  The conch divers are always on the lookout for sharks, but every so often a diver disappears. Sometimes the conch divers will spear barracuda, and on occasion our cook would buy one from them and serve it up for dinner. They taste great, though they can be dangerous, even when they are dead. Barracuda eat fish that eat coral, and the coral that the smaller fish eat can make a person terribly sick. We took our chances and never had a problem.

  Actually, the locals had more problems than we did.

  One day a couple of fishermen came by the boat. One of them was cradling one hand in the other and bleeding all over the place. He had been holding a barracuda by the gills, which are sharp, and his hold slipped and the gills gashed his hand open. The skin was sliced right open and a big patch was hanging in a V shape. They asked if we could help.

  Since Todd Murphy is an army medic, he took a look at the wound. It was bad, more than Todd felt he could handle. The fisherman needed to get to a doctor. Todd asked the diver who had brought him over what they would do if the hand could not be sutured onboard. The man said they would put a bandage on it and send him back to work.

  Given the choice between his field suturing or a bandage, Todd knew the fisherman was better off with field suturing. He put twenty-five stitches in the man’s hand. In the end, both were pleased with the results.

  The barracuda were not our only visitors. We were boarded nearly every day by either the navy or the coast guard. It was very nerve-racking, not knowing what they would spring on us next. We were never certain whether or not they knew that we were filming. It was anxiety-provoking. The permit question was like the Sword of Damocles. We were waiting for the morning when we would be shut down for real, or worse.