The Lost Fleet
Page 25
The day before we were scheduled to wrap things up, we got some good news. Our permit from the navy had come through.
The BBC already had the film in the can. We had located and mapped nine of thirteen wrecks and proved the accuracy of d’Estrées’ map. An adventure that began with Max Kennedy’s tale of lost cannon had yielded a rich and rewarding prize: a lost fleet that virtually changed Caribbean history. That we had found two pirate vessels from the age of the buccaneers in the process was a bonus, especially for me.
Now it was time for us to go, and for the Venezuelan government to decide the fate of the sites we had found.
As we prepared to leave, Charles asked Mike if the Antares would take him and his gear back to Los Roques. This would save him the trouble of loading it all back on his own boat. It was a reasonable request: Los Roques was the Antares’s destination as well, and we had plenty of room, but Mike refused outright.
I was surprised that Charles would ask Mike if he could come along, after all that had come between them. It was like Bill Clinton asking George W. Bush if he could hitch a ride to Arkansas on Air Force One’s next trip to Texas. I tried to change Mike’s mind, but he had had enough of Charles, and that was that.
We left Las Aves and cruised back to Los Roques. Yankey Willems had made the same trip three years after the loss of the French fleet. He had shown up at Las Aves, fished up two cannons off one of the wrecks, and brought them back to Los Roques, where he had careened. These had been Sam Bellamy’s waters as well. So, once again, we were sailing in the wake of the buccaneers.
From Los Roques we took a plane back to Caracas. I spent a day there with Bart Jones, the AP reporter, before heading back to the United States. Timing is everything when you’re south of the border. It was the day before the election, and the atmosphere was extremely tense. Bart took Margot and me to an overcrowded bar popular with foreign journalists and novelists such as Gabriel García Márquez. It was like stepping into the Hemingway novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, which is set on the eve of the Spanish Civil War.
Our explorations at Las Aves created quite a bit of attention in the press. Bart wrote several articles about the expedition, as did Charles Brewer. Charles’s articles were in stark contrast to Bart’s. Charles was out to lambaste Mike and me in the press, and, since Bart wouldn’t join in, Charles declared war on Bart as well.
He also sent an e-mail to Max Kennedy describing me as “a good performer. A medicine man.” Disappointed that I had not allowed the expedition to degenerate into a treasure hunt, he called me “an opportunistic pirate” and characterized my desire to see the integrity of the reef preserved as a ploy to cleanse myself “in front of the international opinion.”
And so it goes….
From Pinzón versus Columbus, through Speke versus Burton, to all the Mount Everest tiffs and Darkness in Eldorado, there are no rivalries in this world like the rivalries among explorers.
Mike Rossiter, in the meantime, tried to find out what had happened to delay the permits. He was concerned about what had taken place and wanted to be certain that there had been no official problems, nothing that would reflect badly on the BBC. He learned that virtually every claim Charles had made about the permits he had supposedly secured was untrue. It was like learning that a weather forecaster who knew a hurricane was on its way had nonetheless given “clear sailing” advice to a regatta.1
We learned that many people in the Venezuelan government had worked hard to overcome the problem. High-level government people had lobbied for us in Caracas. They had dealt mostly with Antonio Casado, who spoke Spanish and had led the way since he was in the city. When we returned to Caracas, we asked him what had happened, and how permission had been finally secured. It was a mystery to him as well: “I never really did understand. Suddenly I was told fine, the permit is granted.”
Ironically, when our story hit the press, it was a perfect opportunity for the competing Venezuelan company to take the heat off their failed Nazi U-boat project by touting the Las Aves wrecks as a treasure fleet worth over $100 million. Some months later, after learning how well our expedition was conducted, one of their principals came to Cape Cod and asked me to lead another expedition to Venezuela for their company.
In any case, we were packed and headed for the airport and home. It was election day in November 1998, and soldiers with automatic weapons were everywhere, inspecting each car on its way to the airport. “A good day to get out of Venezuela,” I thought.
And that ended my involvement with the wrecks on Las Aves. I like to think we managed to make some significant advances for maritime history. We identified nine wrecks—confirming the fundamental accuracy of d’Estrées’ map. We had also made very accurate drawings of the wreck sites, recording a great deal of information that might otherwise be lost.
We also agreed, once the dust from the election settled, to lobby the Venezuelan government to protect Las Aves from vandals and to preserve it as a marine sanctuary where well-supervised sport divers could tour the site of one of the most interesting maritime disasters in the history of the Americas, on one of the most beautiful reefs in the world.
My entire background and experience is in locating wrecks, and in recovering, preserving, and displaying their remains. That’s how I make my living—not by selling artifacts. But it is my opinion that the wrecks of the reef of Las Aves should be left untouched.
There has been no official decision concerning the disposition of the wrecks. But, with so many of its citizenry hungry and in rags, preserving ancient shipwrecks is not a priority of the Venezuelan government.
It has been reported that others have dived on the wrecks and have looted artifacts. Pedro Mezquita told the Sunday Boston Herald, “If the government does not take immediate action to protect the place there will be a new piracy.” Pedro, more than most, knows how things go. “In Venezuela,” he added, “national parks are not very well protected. Governments change. Policies change.”
Governments themselves are sometimes the problem. There are suggestions that our permit problems were more than just bureaucratic red tape. There may have been other people with government connections with an eye on Las Aves, who were trying to block our progress.
It cannot be assumed that all of these were treasure hunters. It has been my unfortunate experience that the “ethic” of some archaeologists is geared far more toward the past than to the needs of the present or future.
The reefs at Las Aves are among the most beautiful ecosystems I have ever seen. D’Estrées’ ships are no longer just wreckage lying atop the reef waiting to be excavated. After three hundred years, they are the reef, the living reef, inextricable parts of the whole. Even the most careful and unobtrusive archaeological excavation would cause irreparable damage to a natural resource.
These great ships should be allowed to fade away, like the bones of the men who sailed them, until they too are no more than history, a part of the endlessly fascinating legacy of the Spanish Main.
May the coral be their tombstone.
Notes
CHAPTER 1
1. “A list of ffrench fleet which was under ye Comand of Count d’Estrée and designed for Curacoa,” Colonial Office Papers (hereinafter cited as CO), British Public Record Office, London, 142 no. 98XV.
2. William Dampier, A New Voyage Round the World (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1937).
3. “Governor Stapleton to Lords of Trade and Plantations,” Nevis, April 29, 1678, 10:690, Calendar of State Papers: Colonial Series; America and the West Indies, Great Britain Public Record Office, London. Her Majesty’s Stationery Office 1860–1969 (hereinafter cited as CSPCS).
4. Ibid.
5. Quoted in David F. Marley, Pirates and Privateers of the Americas (Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO, Inc., 1994), p. 137.
CHAPTER 2
1. Alexandre Exquemelin, The Buccaneers of America (Glorieta, N. Mex.: The Rio Grande Press, 1992; reprint of 1684 edition), p. 103.
2. A fir
e ship is a small vessel built to be set on fire. Fire ships were sailed into enemy anchorages and ignited in the hope that they would set the anchored vessels on fire. They rarely did, though they often managed to create a panic that led to chaos and destruction in its own right.
CHAPTER 5
1. Dampier, A New Voyage, p. 43.
2. C. H. Haring, The Buccaneers in the West Indies in the XVII Century (London: Methuen, 1966) reprint of 1910 edition, pp. 220–221. Primary sources vary in the details of this event and not all of them mention this warning.
3. Freebooter is in part derived from the term “free booty,” i.e., stolen goods, but the origins of the word go back further. Originally derived from the Dutch vrijbuiter, it has the same origin as flibustier, the French term that became filibuster, or pirate. All the terms mean, in essence, a robber, though they soon came to mean more specifically a pirate. Buccaneer, flibustier, filibuster, freebooter, and pirate were all used synonymously to mean the seaborne raiders of the Caribbean and Spanish Main.
4. Dampier, A New Voyage, p. 44.
CHAPTER 6
1. “Governor Sir Jonathan Atkins to Secretary Coventry,” Barbados, August 1, 1678. CSPCS, Addenda Volume, 10: 1646.
2. Ibid.
3. Dampier, A New Voyage, p. 44. Thirty pounds was more than a year’s income for most people in the seventeenth century.
CHAPTER 8
1. Patrick Tierney’s Darkness in Eldorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon (New York: W. W Norton and Company, 2000) covers in great detail all of the shocking events surrounding the exploitation of the Yanomami. Charles Brewer’s participation is chronicled in depth.
CHAPTER 9
1. Maurice Besson, The Scourge of the Indies: Buccaneers, Corsairs and Filibusters (New York: Random House, 1929), p. 49.
CHAPTER 10
1. Exquemelin, Buccaneers of America, p. 89.
CHAPTER 13
1. Dampier, A New Voyage, p. 44. Interestingly, a pirate of a later generation, Calico Jack Rackam, would pull an almost identical ruse off the coast of Cuba. Trapped by a Spanish guarda del costa, Rackam and his men rowed out to the Spaniard’s prize, an English sloop, took her, and sailed away in the night, leaving, according to Charles Johnson’s A General History of the Pirates (Manuel Schonhorn, editor [Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1972], p. 149), “but an old crazy hull in the room of her.”
2. “Don Pedro de Ronquillos, Spanish ambassador to the King,” Windsor, Sept. 6, 1680. CSPCS 10:1497.
3. Ibid., 1498.
4. Ibid.
CHAPTER 14
1. Haring, The Buccaneers in the West Indies, p. 241.
2. “Relation de la prise de la Gouaire,” Archives Coloniales, F3 162, fol. 132. I am indebted to Raynald Laprise for this reference and translation.
3. Dampier, A New Voyage, p. 28.
4. Ibid., p. 30.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid., p. 35.
7. “Sir Thomas Lynch to Secretary Sir Leoline Jenkins,” Jamaica, Nov. 6, 1682. CSPCS 11:769.
8. The translation is “through fair means or foul.”
CHAPTER 17
Much of this chapter is based on Amy Turner Bushnell, “Pirates March on St. Augustine,” El Eseribano, April 1972, pp. 51–72.
1. Sir Thomas Lynch, quoted in Marley, Pirates and Privateers, p. 304.
2. “The King to the Governor and Magistrates of Massachusetts,” Nevis [?], April 13, 1684. CSPCS 11:1634.
CHAPTER 18
1. “Earl of Craven to Lords of Trade and Plantations,” May 27, 1684. CSPCS 11:1707.
2. Governor Edward Cranfield, quoted in Marley, Pirates and Privateers, p. 304.
3. “Relation of T. Thacker, Deputy Collector,” Boston, August 16, 1684. CSPCS 11:1862ii.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. “Lynch to Jenkins,” CSPCS 11:769.
7. “The King to Sir Thomas Lynch,” Windsor, April 13, 1684. CSPCS 11:1633.
8. Alexander Boyd Hawes, Off Soundings: Aspects of the Maritime History of Rhode Island (Chevy Chase, Md.: Posterity Press, 1999), p. 11. Hawes uncovered this information in the Public Record Office in London. He also uncovered a record in the Jamaican archives from 1689 that designates Lynch as a Gentleman of the Privy Council.
9. William Dyer, quoted in Howard M. Chapin, “Captain Paine of Cajacet,” Rhode Island Historical Society Collections, January 1930, vol. 30, no. 1, p. 23.
CHAPTER 21
1. Quoted in Marley, Pirates and Privateers, p. 105.
2. “Sir Henry Morgan to the Lords of Trade and Plantations,” St. Jago de la Vega, July 2, 1681. CSPCS 11:158.
3. Quoted in Marley, Pirates and Privateers, p. 105.
4. “Morgan to Lords of Trade and Plantations,” CSPCS 11:158.
5. “Symon Musgrave to [Governor Sir Thomas Lynch],” Port Royal, Sept. 29, 1682. CSPCS 11:709.
6. Ibid.
CHAPTER 22
1. “Affidavits of Van Hoorn’s Piracies. Depositions of James Nicholas, gunner; John Otto, coxswain; Peter Cornelius, sailmaker; George Martyn, sailor, late of the ship Mary and Martha, alias St. Nicholas, 400 tons, 40 guns,” March 3, 1683. CSPCS 11:963i.
2. Ibid.
3. “Sir Thomas Lynch to William Blathwayt,” Jamaica, Feb. 22, 1683. CSPCS 11:963.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid. In the last sentence, Lynch is referring to the fiction of Van Hoorn’s being sent after pirates on Ile à Vache, an island off the southern coast of Haiti. Had he been going to Ile à Vache, Van Hoorn would not have carried six months’ worth of provisions. Nor would he have sailed all the way downwind to Jamaica (“come to leeward”), which would have forced him to make the tedious and difficult sail back against the trade winds to fetch Haiti (“when he knows they are to windward”).
6. Ibid.
CHAPTER 25
1. “Lynch to Blathwayt,” CSPCS 11:963.
2. “The Examination and Confession of Robt. Dangerfield aged thirty-two years or thereabouts taken this 27 Sept 1684,” CO 1/057 146 ff. 375–376 (565–568).
3. “Sir Thomas Lynch to Secretary Sir Leoline Jenkins,” Jamaica, July 26, 1683. CSPCS 11:1163.
4. “Sir Thomas Lynch to the Lord President of the Council,” Jamaica, May 6, 1683. CSPCS 11:1065.
5. De Grammont was most likely in his forties at this time, which was getting up in age for a buccaneer.
6. Little is known about Foccard’s activities prior to this, though he would go on to participate in some of the major pirate raids of the 1680s.
CHAPTER 26
1. “Captain Van Hoorn’s Taking of Vera Cruz,” in The Voyages and Adventures of Capt. Bart Sharp and others in the South Seas: being a Journal of the same [Anonymous]. Printed by Philip Ayres, 1684.
2. “Sir Thomas Lynch to the Lord President of the Council,” Jamaica, May 6, 1683. CSPCS 11:1065.
3. The same mistake allowed John Hawkins to sail unopposed into Vera Cruz over one hundred years before.
4. Cochenelle, or Cochineal, a scarlet dye, consists of the dried bodies of the insect coccus cacti, which is found on several species of Mexican cactus. Like indigo, it was extremely valuable. One can scarcely imagine the labor involved in collecting enough dried insect bodies to fill a two-hundred-pound bag.
5. “Captain Van Hoorn’s Taking of Vera Cruz.”
6. “Sir Thomas Lynch to the Lords of Trade and Plantations,” Jamaica, Feb. 28, 1684. CSPCS 11:1563.
CHAPTER 29
1. “Governor Sir Thomas Lynch to the Governor of Havana,” Jamaica, Aug. 18, 1683. CSPCS 11:1198.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. “The pirate Laurens to Governor Sir Thomas Lynch,” Petit Gouaisne [sic], Aug. 24/Sept. 3, 1683. CSPCS 11:1210.
5. Once again, Lynch’s instincts seem almost uncanny. Nearly a year later there would be much urging among the buccaneers for another attempt on Vera Cruz.
CHAPTER 30
1. “Lynch to the Lords of Trade a
nd Plantations,” CSPCS 11:1563. Lynch, like many people of his time, used the terms “privateer” and “pirate” almost interchangeably, though strictly speaking a pirate operated with no official commission. For practical purposes during the seventeenth century, it seems a privateer was one who attacked other countries’ ships, with or without a commission, but left yours alone.
2. Ibid.
3. “Laurens the pirate to Sir Thomas Lynch,” St. Philip’s Bay, April 26/May 6, 1684. CSPCS 11:1649.
4. “Sir Thomas Lynch to the pirate, Laurens,” Jamaica, August 15, 1684. CSPCS 11:1839.
5. “Sir Thomas Lynch’s Overtures to the pirate, Laurens,” Jamaica, May 31, 1684. CSPCS 11:1718.
6. Governor Edward Cranfield, quoted in Marley, Pirates and Privateers, p. 13.
7. All quotes from Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 64–66.
8. Bradstreet, who was too tolerant of pirates for the Crown’s taste, was eventually replaced by Edmund Andros, a Crown appointee. Andros, however, was too strict about enforcing Crown policy for the colonists’ taste. In 1689 he was ejected by the colonists in what has been called “America’s First Revolution.”
9. The story of de Graff’s marriage is from C. H. Haring, Buccaneers in the West Indies, p. 246. Haring quotes E. Ducere’s “Les Corsaires sous l’ancien regime,” Bayonne, 1895.
10. Ravenau de Lussan, Journal of a Voyage into the South Seas (Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark, 1930), p. 7.
11. Ibid.
12. “Sir Thomas Lynch to the Lord President of the Council,” Jamaica, June 20, 1684. CSPCS 11:1759.
CHAPTER 31
1. Ironically, Joseph Bannister’s defection to the French appears to have hastened Lynch’s death. Bannister had been tried for piracy, but the Jamaican jury acquitted him of the charge. Lynch, who had not been well for some time, was apparently so infuriated by that decision that his anger pushed him over the brink. He died a week after the verdict was handed down.
2. “Lt. Governor Molesworth to William Blathwayt,” Jamaica, May 15, 1685. CSPCS 12:193.