Pirate Hunters

by Robert Kurson

  “Ever worked with side-scan sonars, magnetometers, or subbottom profilers?” Chatterton asked.

  “Never,” Ehrenberg replied.

  “Okay, you’re perfect for us,” Chatterton said, and Ehrenberg became crew.

  Now the men could see Cayo Levantado, where Bannister’s ship had sunk. Chatterton cut back on the throttle, and the men stood on the bow and admired the island’s white sands and swaying palm trees. In the years since it had been featured in Bacardi ads, it had become home to a luxury resort, complete with sparkling swimming pools and a dock built for cruise ships.

  “It’s even more gorgeous than in those old Playboy magazine ads,” Mattera said.

  “You were looking at the ads?” Chatterton asked.

  As the boat slowed its approach to the island, the men jumped down to the deck and got ready to search the waters. Until about the 1970s, treasure hunters did their work by putting on a snorkel or peering through glass-bottom buckets or, in the case of famed salvor Teddy Tucker, swaying in a window washer’s chair under a hot-air balloon. And they didn’t look for shipwrecks so much as for straight lines; nature didn’t make anything linear, so when they saw straight edges and right angles, they knew they were seeing something man-made.

  Technology changed all that. By the turn of the twenty-first century, salvors were using two primary tools to find shipwrecks. One of them, the side-scan sonar, used sound waves to paint images of the seafloor, but it wasn’t the right tool for nonflat, coral-strewn bottoms like the ones in Samaná Bay. The other kind of technology, the magnetometer, was perhaps the most important piece in the treasure hunter’s arsenal, and it was what Chatterton and Mattera planned to rely on for finding Bannister’s ship.

  Built into a streamlined, torpedo-shaped unit, the magnetometer was designed to be towed by boat. When it passed over a ferrous object, it sensed the change in the earth’s magnetic field caused by that object. The best units were exquisitely sensitive, able to detect even a screwdriver underwater. And while they did not react to precious metals like gold and silver (which do not contain iron), they were champions at detecting anchors, cannons, cannonballs, and other magnetic objects that had been part of well-armed colonial-era ships. Deluxe versions could cost more than a new Mercedes-Benz, but without a good one a treasure hunter flew blind. Chatterton and Mattera had chosen one of the best—the Geometrics G-882 cesium-vapor marine magnetometer with an altimeter, priced at almost seventy thousand dollars, including software and upgrades.

  Buying the magnetometer was the easy part. Towing it was art. An operator set up a predetermined grid, then towed the instrument slowly and methodically back and forth, a process known as “mowing the lawn.” As the magnetometer detected ferrous metal objects below, the locations were recorded by the boat’s onboard computers, which would make a chart of the hits. All the while, the captain would work to keep his magnetometer at optimum altitude, about ten feet above the seafloor. In that way, surveys often turned into an ongoing waltz with the sea. The finest captains were the ones who could dance.

  Chatterton, Mattera, and crew planned to move in lanes seventy-five feet wide, each of which stretched for a mile, then to dive every one of the hits the mag detected, looking for any iron remnant from the wreck of the Golden Fleece. If the first grid failed to produce evidence of the shipwreck, the men would set up a new grid, adjacent to the last, and survey that area, and they would continue expanding, mowing more lawns until they’d found their pirate ship.

  Ordinarily, that kind of search might have required surveying the waters around the entire island, a massive area. But Bowden had provided the men information from historical records that helped narrow the search. The Golden Fleece, he told them:

  —had sunk in twenty-four feet of water

  —had muskets scattered on her deck

  —had been careening when confronted by the Royal Navy warships

  It was the last clue that was most significant to the men. Wooden ships sailing in tropical waters were plagued by Teredo shipworms, barnacles, and other marine life that attached to the underside of a vessel’s hull, slowing the ship and eating away at the wood. Left unchecked, these tiny scourges could bring down the mightiest of ships. To prevent the damage, crews cleaned and repaired hulls on a regular basis, and they did this by beaching the ships at high tide, then tilting them onto their sides as the water went out, a process known as careening. Since the Golden Fleece had been sunk while careening, it meant she would likely be found near a beach.

  That, more than anything, gave the men hope for a quick discovery. By studying aerial photographs, they could see that there were no beaches on the northern coast of the island; it was all rocks, so a ship could not have careened there. The southern coast had beaches, but they’d been built for the resort in the past decade, so the island’s southern coast was out, too.

  The island’s eastern coast had a large beach, but the area was rocky and exposed to wind and weather, making that location impractical and risky for a pirate looking to evade authorities.

  That left the western beach, the only one that made sense. It was at the leeward side of the island, so it was protected from wind and waves. And it seemed well hidden from the open Atlantic, so passing ships couldn’t see it. If a pirate captain chose to careen at Cayo Levantado, that’s where he’d go every time. And that’s where Chatterton went now.

  He guided the Deep Explorer toward the southern tip of the western beach and allowed her to drift to a halt. Once the boat was settled, Kretschmer prepped the magnetometer, while Ehrenberg set up the software program to collect data. Just after dawn, it was already eighty degrees outside, the coolest it would be all day.

  Mattera reminded the men that the pirate ship had been lost in twenty-four feet of water. Depths could rise and fall at random near islands like this, so they would start their survey a good distance offshore and work their way in toward the beach. That way, they wouldn’t miss any area that included the appropriate depth.

  The men were ready to go. Mattera pulled out his Nikon D300, set the delayed shutter, then joined the others for a photo. After the camera snapped, he grabbed four diet sodas from the cooler, passed them out, and raised a toast.

  “To Captain Bannister,” he said.

  “To Captain Bannister,” the others echoed.

  “One unlucky sonofabitch. First, the Royal Navy hunts him down. Now us.”

  —

  THE MEN TOWED FOR HOURS. They stopped only to wolf down soggy tuna sandwiches, then continued their survey until the waters turned choppy and the magnetometer began porpoising over the surface. It was frustrating to halt work so early in the day, but the bay stayed calm only until early afternoon in these parts, and without quiet waters their readings might be skewed. To both Chatterton and Mattera, survey work was science; there was no room for imprecision. So they pulled in their gear and turned the Deep Explorer around.

  Twenty minutes later, they docked their boat in a small channel four miles from the island. By a stroke of good luck, Mattera’s soon-to-be father-in-law, a former admiral and chief of staff of the Dominican Navy, owned a little villa on the bay, and it was here that the team would be living temporarily while they searched for the Golden Fleece. Overlooking the water, the home was cut into the cliff face and accessible only by a narrow road that wound through a mango orchard. Inside, the building opened into a spacious indoor-outdoor living area. All the bedrooms had private terraces. The view of the sunset was spectacular. Mattera’s future in-laws would want it back before long.

  The men unloaded their gear, but work wasn’t done for the day. Ehrenberg still needed to process the data the team had collected, using custom software programs to make a map of the hits detected by the magnetometer. A day or two later, the team would dive those hits. Even the smallest blip would be investigated.

  Chatterton and Mattera stepped onto the veranda and called their significant others; in this remote area, if they stood in just the right spot and tilted
slightly toward the moon, they could catch a cell phone signal that might last for an entire five-minute call.

  Chatterton reached Carla at their home on the Maine coast, where she was curled up on the couch and watching a movie with their yellow Labrador retriever, Chili. Carla missed John and did not approve when she learned that her husband had eaten Zucaritas—Frosted Flakes—for dinner three nights in a row.

  Mattera got Carolina while she was reading in the study of their apartment in Santo Domingo. He laughed when she asked if he’d found “Long John Silver,” yet the question jarred him. For all the luck shipwreck hunters had in finding real pirate ships, he and Chatterton might as well have been looking for Noah’s Ark.

  —

  EVEN DURING THE GOLDEN AGE of Piracy, between 1650 and 1720, pirates were rare. Precise numbers are hard to come by, but according to British historian Peter Earle, in the period around 1700, “it seems unlikely that they ever had much more than twenty ships at any one time and less than two thousand men.” By contrast, there might have been as many as eighty thousand sailors and navy men working on legitimate ships in the Atlantic and Caribbean at the time. It’s difficult to say how many pirate ships in total might have sailed during the seventy-year Golden Age, but the number, in any case, would have been small, perhaps fewer than a thousand.

  Not all of those ships had been lost or sunk. Some were captured by authorities; others were sold or traded by the pirates and put to lawful uses. So the number of lost pirate ships is just a fraction of those that ever sailed. Finding any of them would be a long shot. Identifying one would be virtually impossible. The reason lay in the shadowy nature of crime itself.

  Stealth was the lifeblood of a pirate ship. To survive, she had to be invisible, anonymous. Pirate captains didn’t publish crew lists or file sailing plans, and they didn’t paint names on the hulls of their ships. Whenever possible, they sailed in secrecy. These measures helped them evade the forces that hunted them, but it also meant that when they sank, they didn’t merely settle to the bottom; they disappeared from existence. No government went looking for them because they belonged to no country. Witnesses to a sinking couldn’t have described the location precisely in any case, as measures of longitude were unreliable during the era. If any pirates survived the ship’s demise, they weren’t going to report the loss to authorities.

  Nature took over from there. It might take just a few years for mud and sand to bury a shipwreck completely.

  That didn’t mean, however, that a sunken pirate ship was never to be seen again. Over the ages, it was near certain that explorers, fishermen, and even snorkelers had stumbled across the scattered remains of Golden Age pirate ships. Few, however, would have known that the debris was special, or could have identified what they’d found. Much of what a pirate ship carried—dishes, rigging, tools, ballast stones, coins, weapons, even cannons—was carried by merchant ships, too, which meant that even if a finder dared to dream he’d discovered a pirate ship, proving it would be near impossible.

  Except for one man.

  As a boy, American Barry Clifford had heard stories about the pirate captain “Black Sam” Bellamy, whose ship had been lost in 1717 off Cape Cod. As an adult, Clifford went out and found Bellamy’s ship, the Whydah, not far from Clifford’s own childhood home. News of the 1984 discovery reverberated worldwide, but it wasn’t just the artifacts or piles of silver or even the story of the crew’s dramatic end in a storm that fired people’s imaginations. It was a bell Clifford had pulled from the wreckage, inscribed “The Whydah Gally 1716.” It made identification of the wreck ironclad, and the Whydah the first pirate ship ever confirmed to be found. No one else had ever gotten so lucky.

  But that didn’t keep capable people from trying.

  In the years after Clifford’s discovery, research teams claimed to have found the ships of two of history’s most famous pirates. Neither team, however, seemed able to prove the identity of its wreck.

  The first of the two discoveries had come in 1996 at Beaufort Inlet, just off the North Carolina coast. There, a shipwreck exploration firm discovered what appeared to be the wreck of Blackbeard’s flagship, Queen Anne’s Revenge, which had run aground and sunk in 1718.

  Almost immediately, the governor of North Carolina publicly announced that the notorious pirate’s ship had been found. Just as fast, some experts cast doubt on the wreck’s identity. Among their objections: The artifacts could have come from any merchant ship of the time; the Adventure, a ship that sank with Blackbeard’s, was nowhere to be found; and one of the cannons discovered seemed marked with a date of 1730 or 1737, at least twelve years after the loss of Queen Anne’s Revenge. Debate raged, a technical back-and-forth that never settled the matter. In 2005, experts wrote in The International Journal of Nautical Archaeology, “The incontrovertible fact remains that no single piece of evidence, or trend of circumstantial evidence, indicates that this wrecked vessel is actually the Queen Anne’s Revenge.” They also addressed the issue of money, noting that the project had received nearly one million dollars in grant funding to date, and was seeking almost four million dollars more. “One may speculate,” the authors wrote, “that the investments already made, plus the possibility of future financial gains, may indeed be the reason for a continued emphasis on the identification of the wreck, and a refusal to consider that the identification could be flawed.”

  None of that deterred North Carolina officials and entrepreneurs from opening exhibits, walking tours, historical reenactments—even Blackbeard’s Miniature Golf—and tourists flocked to the area.

  A second possible pirate ship was found in the Dominican Republic in 2007, when a team from Indiana University was led to a site they thought to be the Quedagh Merchant, the 1699 wreck of infamous pirate captain William Kidd. Media such as NPR, CNN, and The Times of London swarmed to the story, telling how the researchers had found the ship, exploring theories about Kidd’s possible innocence, and recounting how Kidd had been hanged by the British (the rope had broken on the first attempt; after the second did the job, his body was hung over the River Thames for three years as a warning to those who fancied the pirate life).

  Yet, even as plans were made with the Dominican government to turn the wreck site into an underwater national park, the Indiana University team didn’t seem willing to say it had definitive proof of the wreck’s identity. Charles Beeker, who led the expedition, said, “As an archaeologist, I cannot say conclusively that it’s Captain Kidd’s ship, but as a betting man, I am betting on the ship.”

  Four years later, Indiana University officials would be speaking in stronger terms about the identity of the wreck, though a smoking gun—proof-positive evidence—still hadn’t been found. Nonetheless, the discovery generated more than two million dollars in grants, a push by the Dominican government to promote the site for tourism, and a permanent exhibit, “National Geographic Treasures of the Earth,” at the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis.

  A few other pirate ship claims had been made over the years, all based on circumstantial evidence, not a smoking gun among them.

  But grants and exhibits and circumstantial evidence and miniature golf didn’t cut it for Chatterton and Mattera. Neither could imagine going through life thinking he’d probably found a pirate ship. Neither could imagine going to sleep at night wondering if he’d really done what he’d dreamed.

  But that was the rub with a pirate ship. No matter what anyone did, it was near certain he wouldn’t find proof of identity. Even if Chatterton and Mattera did find the Golden Fleece, even if historians wrote about them in books and curators gave them a museum exhibit of their own, without definitive proof there would always be doubt. And that was an outcome neither man could abide.

  —

  AS CHATTERTON AND MATTERA hung up the phone with their significant others, Ehrenberg walked onto the veranda at the villa holding his laptop high. The screen showed a Rorschach-like pattern, the hits detected by the magnetometer that day. The men had t
o look twice at what they were seeing. Several of the hits were clustered in an area the size of a large wooden sailing ship. Chatterton and Mattera had been around long enough to know things didn’t happen so perfectly with shipwrecks—no one found what they were looking for on the very first day. Still, staring at that beautiful blotch, they couldn’t help but think they’d done it, that they’d already discovered the Golden Fleece. Now they just had to go out the next morning and find her.

  CHAPTER THREE

  NONE OF THIS MAKES SENSE

  The men didn’t talk much during sunrise as they loaded the Deep Explorer and set out for the island, but inside, each was hoping he would be the first to pull up a hook or a cannon from the Golden Fleece. Even a handful of beads—the colorful and vivid trinkets that Golden Age pirates wove into their clothing, hair, and beards, and which terrified the pirates’ prey—would do.

  No one expected to find the pirate ship as she’d sunk, skeletons frozen in fighting positions, a skull-and-crossbones flag crumpled beneath shattered beams. If they got lucky, they would see a part of the shipwreck lying exposed—the fluke of an anchor, a cannon’s muzzle, broken wood from the hull. More likely, they would see small pieces, or even shadows, of the objects that had made their magnetometer react. But all they needed was one artifact, and that would lead to the rest.

  Not everyone would dive at once. Two of the men would remain on board the boat, securing it against drift and guarding against bandits who might steal electronics and guns. Firearms were necessary in these wilds; you didn’t leave home, or shore, without them.

  Arriving on site, Chatterton and Ehrenberg geared up and splashed. Carrying handheld metal detectors, they descended to a depth of twenty feet, to the first of the hits on their chart. In the sand, Chatterton saw a silver shape. Swimming toward the object, he could see it was box shaped—treasure chest shaped—which only made him swim faster, until he reached the container and discovered not pieces of eight or emeralds inside, but a parrot fish. He surfaced and shouted back to the boat.