Pirate Hunters

by Robert Kurson

  “Heiko!” Chatterton called, his butt still showing, “Give me a hug!”

  With that Chatterton reached for Kretschmer, who ran as fast as he could. Chatterton began chasing him, bottomless and hot on his heels.

  “Run, Heiko!” the others called out.

  “I have a gun!” Kretschmer warned, and now he was laughing, too, but Chatterton would not stop chasing him. His only means of escape was into the water, and that’s where he leaped.

  Chatterton called out over the side.

  “Heiko! Give me a hug!”

  —

  IT HAD BEEN TWO MONTHS since the team started work at the island. As much as either man hated to do it, Chatterton and Mattera agreed it was time to bring Bowden up to date. It would be easy, since Bowden was in the area doing work on his dive boat.

  They met him the next evening at Tony’s, a restaurant on Samaná’s main street fancy enough to serve ice with its sodas. Bowden looked like a kid about to open a birthday present, which made the disappointing report even harder to deliver. But deliver it they did. If the Golden Fleece had sunk anywhere near the western beach at Cayo Levantado, they assured Bowden, they would have found her by now.

  Bowden asked about the other parts of the island. Chatterton explained the team’s thinking—that no other area at the island had been suitable for careening in the seventeenth century, and in any case, no pirate captain, no good one, at least, would have left himself exposed in those parts.

  Bowden ordered a glass of wine. He seemed, in the most gentlemanly of ways, to be annoyed.

  “Are you sure you guys didn’t miss something? Would it help to go try again?”

  Mattera could see Chatterton’s face reddening. He jumped in before his partner could answer.

  “Absolutely, Tracy. Don’t worry. We’ll get it.”

  The rest of the dinner was spent telling old war stories about the early days of East Coast wreck diving. Between laughs and refills on drinks, Bowden spoke about the importance of patience in hunting shipwrecks. During these moments, it was all Chatterton could do to hold his tongue.

  Driving home that evening, Chatterton and Mattera talked about how much they liked Bowden. He was warm and engaging, and his stories were often speckled with pearls of wisdom about salvage, instinct, and life. Still, there was no point in redoing their search at the island, as Bowden had suggested. Mattera said he didn’t think they had to. He’d been thinking, and it had occurred to him that neither he nor Chatterton knew anything about Joseph Bannister. Perhaps there was something in the pirate captain’s story that might help. They were getting nowhere in their search for the Golden Fleece, so maybe it was better to search for the man than the ship.

  Chatterton loved that kind of thinking. He asked what Mattera needed to make it happen.

  “Just time to hit the books,” Mattera said.

  The men pulled into the entrance of the villa’s zigzag driveway.

  “I can’t wait to see what you find out about our pirate,” Chatterton said.

  “Me, too,” Mattera replied. “Because you know what, John? I’ve had good street instincts all my life. And I’ve got a feeling about this guy.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  A WELL-RESPECTED ENGLISHMAN

  Santo Domingo, the capital city of the Dominican Republic, looked like Manhattan, London, and Hong Kong rolled into one when Mattera arrived to start his research. After living in Samaná for the previous two months, he needed a while to adjust to the sights and sounds of modernity.

  He stopped first at home, where he picked up Carolina for a breakfast date. He could not have hoped for a more supportive fiancée. Rather than hurry him to finish his pirate hunt, she had been sending home-cooked barbecued chicken and macaroni salad to the villa, and promising to help with research when needed. Today, he would take her up on that offer. Carolina had earned a master’s degree in economics from the Sorbonne in Paris, spoke fluent English, Spanish, and French, and was proficient in Italian and Mandarin. She was also a beauty, elegant and curvaceous, with long black hair and wide dark eyes. Best of all, she liked shipwrecks.

  After breakfast, the couple headed to the Museo de las Casas Reales, one of the country’s finest museums and archives, located in Santo Domingo’s historic Colonial Zone. Mattera and Carolina checked hundreds of sources there for references to the pirate Joseph Bannister. But for a few scant mentions, they could find nothing more about him than what Mattera already knew. If he were to learn more, he would have to expand his search.

  A few days later, Mattera was on a plane by himself to New York. He didn’t bother checking into his hotel when he arrived. Instead, he took a taxi to one of his favorite places: the main branch of the New York Public Library on Forty-Second Street. Since boyhood, he’d loved the iconic Beaux Arts building and its massive, seemingly endless collection of resources, manuscripts, and even old baseball cards. Like many, Mattera considered it to be the world’s greatest library.

  He began in the maritime section, as he always had during high school. He hadn’t been to this place for years, but the smell was the same—a perfume atomized from the must of old books, oils from wooden bookshelves, and bleach from freshly scrubbed floors. Even in the 1970s, when New York City seemed to many to be dirty and neglected, this place remained spotless, a repository of history impervious to time.

  Standing on tiptoe, Mattera began pulling volumes from the stacks, and he spent the rest of the day, and the next, pushing into the farthest colonies of the library, making copies of whatever documents made the slightest mention of Bannister.

  The next morning, he was first in line at the Strand, a famed bookstore at Twelfth Street and Broadway. It had opened in 1927 and advertised eighteen miles of new, used, and rare titles, and Mattera came ready to look through them all. He estimated that he’d spent a month of his life at the Strand already, going back to his purchase of Robert Marx’s Shipwrecks of the Western Hemisphere when he was twelve. For the next several hours, he scoured every section that related to pirates, maritime history, Hispaniola, the Caribbean, shipwrecks, and the Royal Navy. He found only one or two volumes that made reference to Bannister, but they added more to the narrative he was building.

  That night, Mattera met a childhood friend for dinner at a Staten Island diner. They talked of old times and reminisced about the pirates they’d known growing up. Only at dawn, when the friends needed to return to work, did they hug each other good-bye.

  Mattera spent that day visiting rare map dealers, then he rented a car and began driving south and west, dropping in at libraries and used bookstores. A few days later, he was at the archives in Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia, where he found letters from English officials describing their pursuit of the pirates. Then it was on to London to visit various archives, where he discovered important papers and correspondence that dated to the seventeenth century. None of it provided more than a glimpse of Bannister, but taken together, the information he gathered over his journey told a singular story.

  —

  JOSEPH BANNISTER BEGAN HIS CAREER not as a pirate but as its opposite: a well-respected English merchant sea captain responsible for carrying valuable cargo like animal hides, logwood, indigo, and sugar, and sometimes well-to-do passengers, on the profitable trade route between London and Jamaica. By 1680, he was making the transatlantic trip perhaps twice a year at the helm of a ship called the Golden Fleece, an expensive and heavily armed vessel owned by wealthy merchants who were likely based in London. These owners must have had great faith in Bannister—every cargo was worth a fortune, the Golden Fleece many times more.

  Their trust seemed well placed. Before a man became a merchant captain, he spent years proving himself, starting perhaps as a ship’s boy and, if capable and reliable, working his way up to officer of the watch or even first mate. If he were truly exceptional, he might make captain. By then, he likely would have been in his thirties, and would have shown himself time and again to be loyal to the masters of his shi
p.

  Only the best captains were entrusted with a transatlantic route. The trip could take between three weeks and three months, depending on weather and how accurately one made landfall. In charge of a crew of perhaps sixty or seventy, a captain like Bannister needed to be a leader of men as much as a first-rate sailor. Often, a ship like the Golden Fleece found herself in peril, at the mercy of hurricanes or reef systems that could smash the sturdiest vessels, or vulnerable to pirates, who prowled the oceans looking for prey. To avoid being ruined by nature, a captain like Bannister would draw on years of experience with weather and cartographic charts. To evade pirates, he’d best learn to think like one, in order to stay one step ahead.

  Given Bannister’s trade, it is likely he hailed from near London or another of the English ports, perhaps Bristol or Liverpool. The ship he captained was impressively large, near one hundred feet long and carrying as many as twenty-eight cannons, roughly equal in size and power to a small Royal Navy warship. A pirate who chose to attack her did so at his peril.

  The ship’s name, the Golden Fleece, would have been understood by many in the late 1600s. The classic Greek story, in which Jason and his band of heroes, the Argonauts, set sail in search of a magical ram’s golden coat, was familiar to educated people in the seventeenth century. Such names were common, too, in Jamaica and other parts of the West Indies, where slaves often received classical names such as Cassius or Hercules or Brutus.

  By 1680, Bannister was running the London–Jamaica route and, as a prominent captain, making a handsome salary. He even might have shared in the ship’s profits. If he managed to stay healthy and continue sailing without falling to nature or pirates, he could expect to work into his fifties or sixties, perhaps retiring to a small house in England, where he could live out his days looking out over the sea.

  Bannister seemed well on his way to that sort of soft landing when he anchored in Port Royal, Jamaica, in March 1680. There, while being scrubbed by her crew, the Golden Fleece rolled out of control, her masts crashing into the water. Bannister, aloft in the sails, managed to save himself, but eight other men drowned. Crew from the Hunter, a small Royal Navy warship, moved to the scene and helped Bannister refloat and repair the Golden Fleece.

  Soon, the ship had been restored and, for the next four years, Bannister continued making the London–Jamaica run. The westward trip terminated at Port Royal, the epicenter of trade and shipping in the Caribbean, where captains often waited weeks, or months, for enough sugar and other cargo to carry back to England. Few complained, however, about laying over in Port Royal. In the late seventeenth century, there might not have been a more lively and lusty place in all the world. And it would be the place where Bannister’s life changed.

  —

  IN 1655, ENGLAND INVADED Jamaica and captured it from the Spanish. The conquest planted the English into the heart of the Caribbean, well positioned to disrupt Spanish shipping and attack her colonies.

  But just a year later, many of the warships that had captured the island had been retired or returned to England. Left vulnerable, the English governor of Jamaica needed to figure out another way to defend the island. And he had to do it fast.

  So he turned his attention three hundred miles northeast to Tortuga, a wild island inhabited by English, French, and Dutch cutthroats who made their livings by attacking Spanish ships. People called these bandits buccaneers, from the French word boucan, for the wooden cooking frame used by area hunters to smoke meats. The governor made the buccaneers an offer: Protect English interests in Jamaica with your heavily armed ships and you can use Port Royal’s harbor as a base for your pirating operations.

  Tough men, from Tortuga and elsewhere, lined up to accept. Some secured official commissions from the English Crown and were known as privateers. Others worked independently, answering to no one but themselves; they were called pirates. No matter the title, these men lit into their jobs, harassing and plundering Spanish shipping, launching operations against Spanish settlements, and keeping Jamaica safe for the English. Many got rich. The best of them, including the legendary pirate Henry Morgan, became wealthy beyond imagination.

  City of Port Royal, Jamaica, as it may have appeared in 1690

  All seemed to spread their good fortune across Port Royal, and, in turn, many people in the town became rich. Merchants, government officials, and townsfolk profited by dealing in vast quantities of stolen goods. The town expanded, its crooked wharf-side streets filling with markets that offered anything, legitimate or lurid, that a person desired. Weekly, it seemed, new pirates and privateers arrived with prizes in hand. Every one of them needed a place to spend his money, and Port Royal obliged them on this account, too.

  Brothels, taverns, and gambling joints sprang up everywhere. Of Port Royal, one visiting Englishman wrote: “The port indeed is very loose in itself, and by reason of privateers and debauched wild blades…’tis now more rude and antique than was Sodom, filled with all manner of debauchery….It is infected with such a crew of vile strumpets and common prostitutes that ’tis almost impossible to civilize it.”

  Some of the prostitutes at Port Royal became known across oceans. Mary Carleton, perhaps the most famous, was said to be “as common as a barber’s chair: no sooner was one out but another was in.” In a town of fewer than three thousand inhabitants, one brothel alone, run by a man named John Starr, employed twenty-three prostitutes.

  The pirates couldn’t get enough of it all. Leading lives dangerous and often measured in months, they spent money with abandon. Said one contemporary historian of the pirates of Port Royal: “Wine and women drained their wealth to such a degree that, in a little time, some of them became reduced to beggary. They have been known to spend 2 or 3,000 pieces of eight in one night and one gave a strumpet 500 to see her naked. They used to buy a pipe [105 gallons] of wine, place it in the street, and oblige everyone that passed to drink.”

  Even the birds at Port Royal imbibed. Dutch explorer Jan van Riebeeck is said to have described a scene in which the parrots of the island “gather to drink from the large stocks of ale with just as much alacrity as the drunks that frequent the taverns that serve it.”

  Alcohol was everywhere. One kind of island-made rum called Kill Devil was known to contain gunpowder, and was drunk from massive steins. “The Spaniards,” wrote Jamaica’s governor, “wondered much at the sickness of our people, until they knew the strength of our drinks, but then wondered more that they were not all dead.”

  Far from dying, the town and its people, strengthened by plunder, continued to thrive. Before long, one of every four buildings in Port Royal was either a whorehouse or a drinking establishment. Throwing his hands up, one clergyman wrote: “This town is the Sodom of the new World and since the majority of its population consists of pirates, cut-throats, whores and some of the vilest persons in the whole of the world, I felt my permanence there was of no use.”

  For all its wickedness, however, Port Royal seemed to tolerate everyone. Quakers, Catholics, atheists, Jews—all were free to worship and believe as they pleased, and they lived peacefully alongside one another as Port Royal became the richest town in the New World. Pirates and buccaneers continued to arrive, welcomed by a public that understood the wellspring of its good fortune, and who ate, drank, and lived among these fast-living men.

  For years, there were few better places for pirates or privateers than Port Royal. But in the early 1670s, as trade between Jamaica and the rest of the world grew, pockets of opposition formed against these bandits of the sea. Jamaica was becoming a major producer of sugar; anything that caused mayhem or interfered with trade came to be seen as a threat by powerful merchants and government officials. A peace treaty between England and Spain made the island less vulnerable. Antipiracy laws were enacted; those who didn’t abandon the trade could be prosecuted and hanged.

  The pirates did not go gently. But as London sent warships and sailors to Port Royal, the statistical life expectancy of a pirate dropped fur
ther. By 1680, the year Bannister nearly lost the Golden Fleece in Port Royal harbor, many pirates and privateers had been driven from the island. Those who continued to operate there did so at great peril.

  Still, opportunity beckoned. As transoceanic trade increased, ships crossed the Atlantic and Caribbean in greater numbers than ever, many loaded with valuable cargos, some with treasure. A man of a certain daring, able to secure a powerful ship and inspire a crew, could still make a fortune by hijacking these vessels on the open seas. The question, as the 1680s wore on, was whether such a man existed anymore.

  —

  BY 1684, BANNISTER HAD been making the London–Jamaica run for at least four years, delivering his cargos and building his reputation. In June of that year, however, the lord president of the Council of Jamaica received a disturbing letter from the island’s governor, Thomas Lynch: “One Bannister ran away with a ship, the Golden Fleece, of thirty or forty guns, picked up over a hundred men from sloops and from leeward [at Port Royal], and has got a French commission.”

  Bannister, in fact, had no commission, but he most certainly had stolen the Golden Fleece, and he’d done so with a single purpose—to turn pirate. His actions hardly could have been bolder. It was near unheard of for a transatlantic captain, especially one as well regarded and trusted as Bannister, to “go on the account,” as it was said of pirating. Even in Port Royal, where everything happened, few had seen anything like this.

  Lynch didn’t sit around and wait for Bannister to return to his senses. Instead, he ordered the Ruby, the biggest and deadliest warship in the Jamaica fleet, to go after the Golden Fleece. A monster rated at 540 tons, with forty-eight cannons and a crew of 150, the Ruby was a pirate killer down to her timbers.

  Bannister did not intend to make it easy for Lynch’s enforcers. Since stealing the Golden Fleece, he had picked up additional crew, robbed a Spanish vessel, and made his way to the Cayman Islands to take turtles and gather wood. But the Ruby surprised him there, and her captain, David Mitchell, and his crew captured Bannister and put an end to his six-week pirate career.