The Lost Fleet (19 page)
Authors: Barry Clifford
F
RUSTRATION AND
F
ALLING
O
UT
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.
D
EATH OF A
F
LIBUSTIER
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.
L
ife 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 denominatorâgold.
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.
T
he 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 indigenous 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.
Mike Rossiter kept up his barrage of radiotelephone calls. The contact with the Venezuelan ambassador was paying off. The ambassador had mobilized his assistant in Caracas, and she was trying to find out what was happening and what we would need to get our permits recognized.
Halfway through the expedition, the worst happened: the wind came back, that damned wind.
The morning of the fifth day on the site it came from the east, setting up a line of breakers along the reef. Fortunately, it was not nearly as bad as it had been the first time around. Wind has to blow steady and strong for at least a few days before big seas build up. If the wind did not let up, it could become bad.
We had worked our way north along the reef, exploring and mapping the wrecks of the
Hercules,
the
Défenseur,
the
Prince.
It was an awesome sight, and more so when you looked at the wrecks and considered the terrible tragedy that had put them there.
At one site we found two anchors in an odd configuration. The stock (the wooden crosspiece) of one apparently had been removed, and through the anchor ring another anchor had been inserted. This created a double anchor, almost like a grappling hook. The men aboard that vessel must have rigged the anchors up that way in one last desperate attempt to get the flukes to hold the bottom and to keep the ship off the reefs. There is no historical source evidence that the ships had enough warning before striking to try to get anchors down, but perhaps they did. I couldn't think of another reason for the two anchors to be joined in that manner. There, encrusted and motionless on the bottom, was vivid evidence of the French sailors' last desperate attempt to save their ship. It was a futile effort, for there was no place for an anchor to bite on that hard coral bottom.
Very often, we would find anchors farther out to sea. If we followed a straight line from the anchor to the reef, there we would find a wreck.
Just south of the big freighter that had driven up on the reefs was another wreck, a small ship, a coastal merchant vessel. As it ran over
the reef in its final death throes, it smashed down a swath of staghorn coral, damaging the reef but clearing a narrow path for us to the open water. A rusting thirty-foot section of hull was all that was left of the ship. Approximately three hundred yards south of the wreckage was one of the wrecks marked
flibustier.
Before the seas became too high, Margot and I went out to the site and had a look around. We went by ourselves. We wanted to be alone for a while.
We found a wreck, right where the map indicated, in just six feet of water. There were the telltale ballast stones, and a scattering of cannons. Not huge cannons, like those you would find at the site of one of the big men-of-war, but smaller, appropriate to the size of a buccaneering ship. And, most intriguing of all, we spotted an encrusted shape that looked very much like a crate or chest of some kind.
That was all there was. It was not much to look at. Still, it occurred to me that I might be, for the second time in my life, looking at the remains of a pirate vessel. If that was true, then it would make us the first modern explorers ever to set eyes on two pirate wrecks. We swam, knowing that for a moment we were the only people to know
its secret location. During the long Cape Cod winters to come, this moment would be recalled again and again.
The next day Margot and I went back, hoping to get a better look at the wreck. D'Estrées' map showed the
flibustier
as the wreck closest to the island. I envisioned d'Estrées standing on the beach looking out over the reefs and the shipwrecks sitting on top of them. Since the pirate ships would have been the closest to him, it seemed reasonable to me that of all the shipwrecks, the pirates' would have been the most accurately located on the map. By finding them and comparing them to the map and the overlays we had done we could establish an accuracy factor for the entire map.
I had the other team members scour the reef from the wreck Margot and I found to the edge of the island. I had to be sure there was no sign of another wreck between the presumed pirate wreck and the point of land where the island began. If there were no other wrecks between, then we could assume that the wreck we had found was the
flibustier,
given the available evidence.
The winds had been building all night, and now the waves were getting high and the going was treacherous. We took the small chase boat out to the wrecked coaster and anchored it in the coaster's lee, using the hull of the old ship as a windbreak. It was over-the-reef time, just as before, and we weren't looking forward to it.
We would snorkel, as the scuba gear was in the chase boat outside the reef. We went over the side of the boat and into the water. We paused behind the wreck of the coaster, orienting ourselves and psyching ourselves up for another fight with the reef. Then we left the shelter of the wreck and plunged into the surf. It was like stepping into a blizzard.
We began to work our way over the reef, pulling ourselves along through that terrible current that I remembered all too well. We grabbed the coral to pull ourselves along, but the coral was brittle and it would break if we applied too much pressure.
The tropical sun was beating down on our dark wet suits. I had taken a black nylon shirt, a chafe shirt, normally worn under a wet suit, and wrapped it around my head to keep the sun off. That was a mistake. The sun on the black shirt only made my head hotter. Instead of kicking my legs and pulling myself along with the coral, I tried to swim, which turned out to be another mistake. The current was very strong, and the effort it took to swim against it was physically draining.
Despite being in the water, we were getting overheated. Our wet suits were wicking the moisture away from our bodies.
We fought our way out over the reef, and by the time we got to the open ocean we could barely see the chase boat because of the high seas, and that meant the people in the boat could not see us. It was several hundred yards away. It had been our plan to swim back after exploring the wreck. Normally that distance would have been no big deal, but now it seemed nearly impossible. What I did not realize was that I was suffering from sunstroke.
We had exhausted ourselves just getting to the wreck site. We were not able to accomplish much. We decided to head back in. But how?
We were not sure if we had the energy to swim to the chase boat outside the reef. We were wearing weight belts, and it would have been possible to drop our belts and surf back over the reef, floating in our wet suits. But the path through the coral was down current, and we would have been really cut up or worse. And I was not ready to drop my weight belt. Doing that is an admission that you are in big trouble, and I was not yet willing to admit that to myself.
Going back over the reef was not a good idea. I could see Carl and Todd in another boat on the outside of the reef about a half mile away, so we started swimming for them. That's usually not far for us, but there was a bit of a current holding us back. It was becoming difficult to breathe. I looked at Margot and could see the strain on her face. I was surprised at her composure; it was the closest I'd ever come to losing it all. The sun was baking us in our wet suits, and our strength was going fast. I thought that I was strong enough to make it, but I wasn't sure about Margot, and I knew that I did not have the juice left to pull us both to the chase boat.
She later told me that she was planning to pull me in if she had to. I believe she would have, too.
We waved, but the crew aboard the chase boat didn't see us. We swam toward it, but with each stroke we became more overheated. I was starting to hyperventilate. I unzipped my wet suit and forced myself to calm down. We were both on the edge of blacking out.
And then, at last, the crew of the chase boat realized we were in trouble. They pulled anchor and raced over to where we were. I was playing it cool, as if there was no real problem, but I honestly don't how much longer we could have kept swimming.
Once aboard, Margot became sick from exhaustion and
mal de mer
brought on by the choppy conditions. She was so sick, in fact, that she asked me in all seriousness if I thought she was going to die. Her tone was resigned and a bit apologetic, as if she felt bad for spoiling the party. I said, “No, you won't die, though you may feel so bad that you'll wish you would.” She was in rough shape for the rest of that day.
I wanted to collapse in the bottom of the boat, but I was not going to give Todd the satisfaction of seeing me prostrate. Instead, I sat and let my breathing return to normal. Soon I was ready to go in again.
I am not a philosopher, nor am I an expert on interpersonal relationships. But something I have learned to value, above all else, is the importance of mutual commitmentâof having someone you can “ride the river with,” as the old-timers used to say out in Colorado. This experience made me realize that Margot was the proverbial “girl for me,” and so I asked her to marry me at midnight on the last full moon of the millennium. To my astonishment she accepted my proposal.
The rest of the team had finished combing the reef from the wreck site to the point of land. We did visual searches and sweeps with metal detectors, back and forth. After searching every inch of coral and finding no trace of another wreck, it was clear that the one we found was the closest to the beach, and hence the
flibustier.
Chris and the others were on the wreck now, measuring and plotting the artifacts, and the film crew wanted to get some footage. I went in with dive gear this time, Aga and tanks, which was much less exhausting. I searched for the chest, but I was unable to find it again. Perhaps it was my imagination, but I don't think so.
The next morning we woke to find the wind was back. We prayed it would not increase. Unfortunately, it continued to build, day after day, blowing steady and increasing by four or five knots every day. The seas started getting bigger along the reef, and the currents came back. Chris and I recalled how it was impossible to work outside the reef when the wind blew. As the seas continued to build, Charles hit a wave wrong while going over the reef in his Boston Whaler and the boat flipped end for end. Luckily no one was hurt. But it was a sharp reminder that the weather could shut us down as fast as the navy. With each extra knot of wind, we felt the pressure to finish grow more acute.
By the fifth day I had the flu. Diving with the flu is pure misery. With plugged sinuses it is hard to equalize the pressure in your ears,
and so they hurt like hell. I won't describe the unpleasantness of sneezing into the face mask of an Aga. Since our time on the site was so limited, there was no time for the luxury of staying in bed to recover.