The Lost Fleet

by Barry Clifford

  I spent some time walking around the shore, thinking of those men cast up on the beach. I looked for evidence of graves but did not find any. The French would have buried their dead properly, perhaps a mass grave for the common soldiers and seamen and individual graves for the officers and gentlemen.

  I did find some old foundations made out of conch shells and crude brick hearths. They were ancient structures, most likely long deserted when the buccaneers wrecked on the reefs. No doubt they were already no more than foundations when de Grammont was cast up on the beach. These had been European-style houses, the biggest perhaps ten feet by twenty. They represented an earlier, unrecorded attempt to settle there. Nothing in the record indicates that these houses were still habitable at the time of the wrecks on Las Aves. They had belonged to settlers who had given up.

  I pictured filibusters sheltering themselves from the wind, decked out in finery they had salvaged from the surf, drinking themselves into happy oblivion with wine and brandy liberated from the holds of the men-of-war.

  The freebooters were hard men. Amid all that death and suffering, a tragedy of epic proportions, legend says they were toasting the short and happy life of the buccaneer. Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die. It is hard to imagine people so fatalistic and careless of suffering—their own or anyone else’s.

  37

  Cannons, Anchors, and Surf

  NOVEMBER 2, 1998

  LAS AVES

  On our sixth day of work, just as the conditions were going from bad to worse, we made an extraordinary find: a pile of iron cannons, fifty or more of them, and an anchor, all heaped together. It was unlike anything I had ever seen. When a ship goes down as they did when the fleet struck Las Aves, the cannons tend to be scattered around the seabed, or fall off as the ship rots away. But not here. These were piled up like logs in a logjam. It was not a random accident.

  Someone had done this, and from the coral growth, done it a long time ago. It might have been Thomas Paine in his effort to salvage what he could find. It might have been d’Estrées himself, who did return to the island some months after the disaster to recover some of his lost fleet, and perhaps some of his reputation. It could also have been any of the thousands of buccaneers, wreckers, and human flotsam who prowled the Caribbean world, aware of the riches that lay strewn over the reef.

  I asked Chris Macort to make a careful drawing of the site. We all wondered, why did this happen? Why were the cannons deliberately piled in that way?

  From the size of them, they looked to be from one of the larger ships, maybe Le Terrible. Once the ship hit the reef, the crew might have lowered the cannons overboard with a block and tackle to lighten the ship in an attempt to get her off. Or it might have been part of a salvage effort. Iron cannons become useless as artillery after they have been submerged in seawater for any length of time. Bronze guns can be salvaged, however. Perhaps the salvagers pulled the guns up one at a time, kept the bronze ones, and threw back any iron guns.

  Just past the halfway point in the expedition, the wind was back with a vengeance, blowing nearly as hard as it had on our first trip. The surf was exploding against the reefs with a force like an earthquake, sending shock waves through the water that could be felt a quarter mile away. We no longer had the luxury of motoring over calm water to look for wrecks. We once again had to pull ourselves against the current over the shallow reef.

  It was hard and brittle. We tried to be as gentle as possible as we pulled ourselves over the reef, but it was hard not to break the delicate coral. It was much like cave diving, with its delicate stalactites and stalagmites. I realized the disastrous effects dozens of divers might have over the course of many years.

  There was more than just coral, of course. The reef is alive with a wide range of undersea flora and fauna: sea fans, gorgonias, brain coral, staghorn coral, and all of the other creatures dependent on that ecosystem. It was beautiful, but that beauty was hard to appreciate when we had to drag ourselves over it just to get to the wrecks.

  Once again, the conditions were just like being inside a washing machine. We would stick to the bottom, which was only a few feet down, weaving our way through the taller stands of coral. When the big waves we called gorillas came, we would blend into the bottom like flatfish and wait for it. We wore leather gloves for just that purpose. The waves would crash on top of us, and we wouldn’t see a thing except froth, bubbles, and turbulence.

  As the water rushed out, we’d kick like hell until the next one hit, and then we’d stop and hang on again. It was hand over hand over hand and stopping while the waves battered us. You couldn’t stand up in it—you’d get knocked over or get your legs knocked out from underneath you. So we clawed our way along, burning air, exhausted and frustrated that we were reduced to this once again.

  As on our first trip to Las Aves, coming back in over the reef was a wild ride. Every day the wind blew stronger, and the danger increased proportionally.

  On the ocean side of the reef, it was ten or twelve feet deep in this area. There were a couple of cannons in three feet of water, but about 80 percent were in ten to twenty-five feet of water, which made working somewhat easier.

  Once we took the Aquana outside the lagoon. With the big surf breaking, the only way to get the dive boat out was to motor all the way around the tip of the reef, several miles from the Antares. It was almost as dangerous, however, as crawling over the reef.

  What we really wanted to do was to move the Antares to the edge of the reef to make the trip in the dive boat shorter. That would have put us in plain sight of the coast guard station and the navy ship, like a mouse making its nest in plain view of the cat’s favorite chair.

  The coast guard or the navy continued to board us on a regular basis, and we’d go through the same routine. We were actually getting to know them. Many of the Venezuelans asked to have their pictures taken with us. We were happy to oblige.

  Mike’s people were still working to get the navy to recognize the validity of our permits. They were making headway, but, as in dealing with any military organization, it can take a while for decisions to work their way down through the chain of command. We were on a tight schedule. We knew we had valid permits, but there was no sense in flaunting what we were doing until the local commander had received his instructions from Caracas. So we left the Antares where it was and either swam over the reef or took the long ride around the outside.

  The big seas made it difficult not only to get to the wrecks, but to work them once we were there. During the first part of the expedition the divers had the luxury of freely swimming around the wreck sites in relative safety. Those days were gone.

  Now the current was running strong, even in the deeper water outside, threatening to sweep divers into the reef zone. We needed to maintain handholds as we worked or to keep kicking like hell. The surge from the big waves created aftershocks that bounced us around like rag dolls in the mouth of a bull terrier. If we let go of whatever we were holding on to, we would get swept away and smashed up against coral like the surface of a cheese shredder.

  The current would rip things from your hands. The hundred-foot tape measure that Carl and Todd were using became a nightmare as the current carried it off, twisting and tangling it around coral and artifacts. Chris’s underwater notebooks were wrenched from his grip. The work was much tougher now, and much more dangerous. If it got any worse, our expedition would be cut short.

  The next day, November 3, we moved north along the reef. The big freighter stuck high on the reef had gone aground right at the location of one of the larger wrecks, perhaps d’Estrées’ flagship, Le Terrible. In fact, the modern vessel probably went aground at the very point where several of the bigger French ships had struck. The freighter captain could not have found a worse place from an archaeological point of view. I imagine, however, that he had little choice in the matter.

  The freighter had done massive damage to the reef and the wreck site, and added some drama of its own.
On the bottom, we found a navy stockless anchor, the standard anchor on a modern steel ship. Still attached to the ring, a great length of chain snaked across the reef. Draped over staghorn and fire coral and the debris field of d’Estrées’ flagship, it led right to the wrecked freighter from which it came. This was a vivid reminder of the freighter crew’s last desperate attempt to keep their ship from the killer reefs, like those two ancient anchors hooked together. Their effort, like the Frenchmen’s before them, was in vain—the modern version of d’Estrées’ nightmare.

  I don’t know how the freighter came to be wrecked or if any of the crew were killed. I doubt very much that they were. I doubt anyone was even hurt. The ship held together, save for the big gash in her bottom. Steel hulls do much better on reefs than wood. In this case, it was the reef that got the worst of it.

  But the sea is as patient as Ah Puch, the Mayan god of death, and will win in the end. For all her modern materials and construction, the freighter is quickly oxidizing away. Like the French fleet, someday she will become an indistinguishable part of the reef.

  She was also making it difficult to explore and map the site. We were all afraid that the swirling current around her would sweep us through the jagged, rusty hole in the freighter’s side, uglier and more intimidating even than a barracuda’s mouth. We kept a sure grip on cannons and anchors as we worked upcurrent from that threat.

  There was no way to know just how much of the old French wrecks had been disturbed by the passing of the freighter over the reef, but a wide swath was mowed through the coral and the debris field. We found twisted, rusting I-beams lying on top of seventeenth-century cannons.

  In fact, there were even some cannons underneath the wrecked freighter. It was surprising that we could see them at all, but there was a hollow space under the wreck, a narrow cave maybe four or five feet deep with the massive, rusting hull forming the roof. Into that dark, narrow space Chris went with his tape measure, to make sure we recorded every cannon possible.

  The bottom was littered with all of the detritus dumped out of the split bottom of a massive warship. If we had been digging, we could have spent months just excavating that single site. But that was pure fantasy. Now, with conditions deteriorating, we were only hoping to complete the limited mission we had set for ourselves, and to get out of there before something bad happened.

  38

  A Pirate Reaches Retirement

  Perhaps you will consider whether our ambassador should not procure the French King’s orders on the subject [of suppressing piracy], for saying anything here is like preaching in the desert.

  —Sir Thomas Lynch to the Lord President of the Council

  SUMMER 1690

  RHODE ISLAND

  The great age of the buccaneers, the de Grammonts, the de Graffs, who plundered the Spanish Main was coming to an end. This is not to say that the curtain was falling on piracy in general. Far from it. The golden age of piracy would continue on for another forty years before piracy would dwindle to the point at which it was a rarity, an anomaly, in the history of merchant sail.

  With the filibusters of old gone, the pirates of the Caribbean would rise in their place. There was, of course, a continuity, a thread that ran from the history of the old to the dawn of the new. There were men who spanned that historical gap. One of the most important was de Grammont’s old lieutenant, Thomas Paine.

  Paine was an odd figure, a shadow pirate, as often operating in the background as he was leading raids. He outlasted de Grammont, de Graff, and most of the others. He was a major link between the European buccaneers of the Spanish Main and the pirates that later swarmed out of New England for the Red Sea, and later still the second wave of pirates of the Caribbean, following the War of the Spanish Succession. Paine was one of the few who lived to old age and genuine respectability in the colony.

  After the legal close calls and active attempts to prosecute him in 1683 and 1684, Thomas Paine seems to have disappeared for a while. He might have been lying low, waiting for the storm to blow itself out. He could have returned to the Caribbean for another go at filibustering. Although there is no direct evidence that he was there, his old consort Bréha was active in the area, along with Yankey Willems. A couple of English sloops were reported to have been operating in company with those two notorious buccaneers. One of those might well have been commanded by Paine.

  Whatever Paine was doing, it does not seem to have further damaged his reputation. By 1687, he turned up again in Rhode Island with little fanfare. There were no attempts to arrest him. That year or the next, Paine married the daughter of a prominent Rhode Island citizen, Caleb Carr, a judge living in Jamestown.

  Paine and his bride, Mercy, also settled in Jamestown. Though he had not yet been made a freeman of the colony, that is, an enfranchised voter, Paine served on the grand jury in December 1688. He was becoming a respectable citizen. The government was now willing to overlook his past indiscretions.

  A PIRATE FOR RHODE ISLAND’S DEFENSE

  One reason for governmental tolerance of pirates was the hope that these men would form a floating militia in times of crisis. In 1690, Rhode Island would have reason to be glad the former buccaneer was in their midst.

  The War of the Grand Alliance, or “King William’s War” as it was known in the colonies, had been going on for two years. The governors of New York and Massachusetts had already organized attacks against French colonies in North America. The towns along the seaboard were braced for a counterattack.

  On July 22, 1690, a squadron of vessels, a bark and two sloops, appeared off Block Island. Immediately alarmed, the islanders hurried to the shore to determine the identity of the approaching ships. A boat put off from one of the strange vessels, and a man identifying himself as William Trimming, or possibly Tremayne, came ashore. To the colonists’ vast relief, he assured them that the ships were English privateers.

  Unfortunately, he was lying, but the people of Block Island bought the story. Soon after, when more boats from the squadron came ashore, the people of Block Island made no effort to resist. They did not even realize they had been tricked until the boat crews snatched up hidden weapons and leaped ashore, taking many of the islanders prisoner and sending others fleeing into the woods.

  Trimming turned out to be captain of one of the sloops, described by a witness as “a very violent, resolute fellow,”1 but he was not the leader of the expedition. That honor went to Pierre le Picard. Picard, like Paine, was a filibuster of long standing, one of the old-guard privateers of the Spanish Main.

  Pierre le Picard first appears in the history of the filibusters in 1668, twenty-two years prior to the Block Island raid, an incredibly long career given the inherent dangers of the business. The existing record suggests that he first sailed under the command of another pirate, the Frenchman Francis L’Ollonais.

  Though Picard seems to have begun his piratical career under the French madman, there is no evidence to suggest that he ever engaged in cruelty of L’Ollonais’s caliber. Picard and his men took Block Island with virtually no resistance and occupied it for a week. Contemporary reports say that the privateers brutalized and maltreated the inhabitants, but that maltreatment did not rise to the level of what Exquemelin attributes to L’Ollonais.

  When word of the privateers’ presence reached the mainland, bonfires were lit up and down the coast as a warning to ships and coastal residents. A sloop was dispatched from Newport to determine the Frenchmen’s whereabouts. On July 24, Picard and his men abandoned Block Island and made an attempt on Newport itself, but abandoned that plan when their intentions were discovered and the citizens of Rhode Island forewarned.

  To drive the French off by force of arms, Rhode Island governor John Easton commandeered a sloop of ten guns, the Loyal Stede of Barbados, then at anchor in Newport Harbor. To command her he chose the Rhode Island citizen most experienced with naval warfare, Captain Thomas Paine.

  Pierre le Picard and Thomas Paine had both been Brethren of the
Coast. They certainly knew each other from the old days on the Spanish Main. There is even evidence to suggest that Picard had once served under Paine’s command. Now, because of an outbreak of war two thousand miles away, they were bound to fight one another.

  Paine set sail aboard the Loyal Stede on July 30 with sixty men aboard, including his father-in-law, Caleb Carr, and two brothers-in-law, Nicholas and Samuel Carr. In company with the Loyal Stede was a smaller sloop under the command of John Godfrey. Thomas Paine was finally going out to “seize, kill, and destroy pirates,” seven years after Sir Thomas Lynch had issued him a commission to do so.

  The two improvised men-of-war sailed for Block Island but found it abandoned by the Frenchmen, who had sailed off to try a quick raid on New London, Connecticut. The next day “Captain and Commodore Paine” got his small squadron under way, heading southward, and later in the day he caught sight of the French privateers sailing to the eastward. The Frenchmen, thinking the two sloops to be merchantmen and possibly valuable prizes, hauled their wind and came after them.

  Paine was outmanned and outgunned, and he knew he was not dealing with a timid opponent. He brought his sloops into the shallows near Block Island and anchored them fore and aft so they would not swing. In that way Paine kept his broadsides trained on the approaching vessels and prevented the French from getting to either side of his own sloops.

  Picard still did not know with whom he was dealing. He still believed that the two sloops were unarmed merchantmen. Rather than go after so easy a prize with his larger vessels, the Frenchman filled a piragua with armed men and sent her in after the anchored sloops thinking a few volleys of small-arms fire would induce the merchantman to surrender. And it probably would have, had the sloops been merchantmen.