Pirate Hunters

by Robert Kurson

  French chart of Samana Bay, circa 1802. Cayo Levantado is called “Cayo Banistre.”

  Bowden sipped at his coffee. He put the cap back on his pen. Then, he pulled another paper from his shirt pocket, this one a photocopy of an old chart of Samaná Bay. It had been drawn during the French rule of Hispaniola, likely around 1802, and its labels were in French. But as he pushed it across the table, neither Chatterton nor Mattera needed help translating the name the French had given to Cayo Levantado. Clear as day, in big letters, it read “Cayo Banistre”—Bannister Island.

  The men could only stare at the paper. This chart was more than a feeling or a best guess. This chart was real evidence, drawn by people from long ago who knew.

  “I don’t know what to say, Tracy,” Chatterton said.

  Bowden smiled.

  “Maybe you guys missed something. We all do in this business.”

  —

  FLYING BACK TO THE Dominican Republic, neither Chatterton nor Mattera could remember feeling so lost. They had found every fence and fish trap within two miles of Cayo Levantado, yet couldn’t locate a one-hundred-foot pirate ship with iron muskets, cannonballs, and maybe even cannons. During the six-hour drive back to Samaná, they tried to brainstorm other areas to search near the island, but all that remained were places that didn’t have beaches in Bannister’s day. They geared up and went to those places anyway, spending weeks mowing the lawn around rocky cliffs and jagged reefs and every other place the Golden Fleece never would have gone.

  That left a single option: Redo the surveys they’d already done, as they believed Bowden implied that they should. None of them had the stomach for that. They knew they weren’t perfect at mowing the lawn, but they also knew there was no way they’d missed a giant sunken sailing ship in an area as small as Cayo Levantado. But no one knew what to do next. It came as a welcome break to everyone when Chatterton flew back to the States to honor a commitment he’d made to attend a dive show.

  It was there that he met up with Richie Kohler, his partner in the U-boat discovery. At dinner one night, he told Kohler about his quest for the Golden Fleece and her great captain, that he was throwing every part of himself at the problem, that he was willing to risk anything and lose everything to make it happen. That’s how he and Kohler had broken through on the U-boat. That’s how he’d always gone where others couldn’t go.

  “You’re fifty-seven now, John,” Kohler said.

  “Exactly,” Chatterton replied. “So I can’t give an inch.”

  “You have a Plan B?”

  Chatterton shook his head.

  “I don’t do Plan Bs.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  JOHN CHATTERTON

  Tomorrow Is Promised to No One

  John Chatterton seemed born to a storybook life. His father was a handsome, Yale-educated aerospace engineer, his mother an international fashion model. His family lived in Garden City on Long Island, New York, a privileged community where professionals built lives of big potential, and children could follow their dreams. John was smart, funny, and good-looking. Yet, nearly from the day he was born in 1951, he seemed indifferent to much of the world.

  Kids seemed like kids to him. He had no beloved books, no special television shows, no favorite teams. He played with other children but had no best friend. Even at age eight the ordinary bored him, and so much of what he saw in Garden City seemed ordinary to him.

  But all of that changed when he met the ocean.

  Nearly every summer day, John’s mother drove him and his younger brother to a beach on Long Island’s south shore. There, looking out over the horizon, he saw a world that stretched forever, a place that looked different and endless every day no matter where he happened to stand. When people asked why he liked the beach so much, he told them he went there to see things.

  John began exploring the beach. He built labyrinths in sand, hunted flounder with spears he made from scratch, tried to walk so far he couldn’t remember his way back. Kids in Garden City hardly knew what to make of his summertime stories. He stabbed fish? He looked out over the ocean? He tried to get lost?

  When John was nine, his parents bought him a diving mask and snorkel. He spent the summer using it to explore the ocean. Wherever he turned he saw something unexpected, unknown. When school resumed in the fall, academics could not compete. The ocean was an alien world—his world—and now John knew how to get inside it.

  It was around this time that his parents divorced. More than ever, his mother relied on her father as a role model for her sons. Rae Emmett Arison was a retired rear admiral who had been awarded the Navy Cross during World War II. When John asked his grandfather about being heroic, Arison told him he had not done anything special, just what he thought was right. When John asked if he could be brave someday, his grandfather assured him he could.

  During middle school John began to hitchhike, sometimes for thirty or forty miles in a random direction, until he arrived at an old abandoned house or a shuttered factory, and he would explore inside, even when getting inside was dangerous, imagining the lives of the people who’d lived and worked there. To John, this was history—better than textbook stories of presidents and kings, because he could stand there; he could feel these places for himself. To John, the feeling of a place was the reason to go.

  In 1965, John entered Garden City High School, and it was more of the same—memorizing, regurgitating, accepting the story. He cut classes and did just enough to get by. And while he never became a serious problem, teachers said his problem was the most serious of all—he had a good mind but didn’t use it the right way.

  John’s father warned that this was no way to get into Yale, yet by junior year John wondered whether he should attend college at all. The biggest questions of the day were about Vietnam, but few who claimed to have answers had been there. He considered enlisting, but had little interest in fighting before he had judged the war for himself. As the grandson of a hero, he could have landed a navy desk job, but what could he see from there? Then he came up with a plan.

  He could be a medic, the guy who helped wounded soldiers in the field. That way, no matter what he discovered, he could be helping people rather than killing them, all from a place front and center, a place where he could see. School counselors tried to talk him out of it; go to college, they told him, ride the war out. But the world was on fire and there were people and places to know—how was he to know them if he didn’t jump off from somewhere? Vietnam was his somewhere, and he intended to go.

  —

  IN EARLY 1970, CHATTERTON reported to the 249th General Hospital in Asaka, Japan. It was more than two thousand miles from Vietnam, but he saw the faces of war every day. They arrived by the busload, young American soldiers missing the backs of their heads or with shattered spines or torn-away faces—men who’d once had lives. Sometimes, as Chatterton washed them, they asked him what kind of husband a cripple might make, or if their parents could stand to look at them now. Chatterton had joined the army to find answers, but all he could say was, “I’m so sorry, buddy. I just don’t know.”

  But he had to know. After six months in the neurosurgical ward, he requested a transfer to the front lines in Vietnam. The wounded at Asaka begged him to reconsider. “Don’t fuck things up,” they said. “You have a life.” But with every arrival he believed he knew less about how human beings could do this to one another, not more. And one day, in June 1970, he wasn’t there anymore. When patients asked about Private Chatterton, they were told he was on an airplane bound for Chu Lai in South Vietnam.

  Chatterton was taken to a firebase near the Laotian border. Minutes later, he was told a medic had been killed. “Get your gear,” an officer told him. “You’re up.” Chatterton had been part of the 4th Battalion 31st Infantry of the Americal Division for all of an hour, and already it was his turn to go.

  None of the men in Chatterton’s platoon seemed happy to see him. Not one of them shook his hand. They just told him, “Let’s go,” and
started walking, never turning to see if he followed, never believing he’d put his ass on the line. The platoon’s other medic wouldn’t even grunt at him. “They don’t know me,” Chatterton thought, but his legs shook so badly he wondered if they knew something he didn’t. For miles, across crocodile-infested rivers and bombed-out villages, he tried to remember if his grandfather had believed he could be brave.

  Near a village, the platoon stopped walking. To Chatterton, these men looked more like Hells Angels than soldiers, all long hair and dirty beards and ripped pants. Suddenly, shots rang out and everyone fell to the dirt, returning fire from wherever they could. When the bullets stopped the men went back to walking, no change in their expressions at all. Chatterton could hardly breathe. As he ran to catch up, he worried that he could never go for a wounded man now that he knew how much he wanted to live.

  The next morning, as the men crossed a rice paddy, sniper fire rang out from a hillside. Two rounds ripped through the hips of squad leader John Lacko, a twenty-eight-year-old paperhanger from New Jersey. Bleeding, Lacko lay in the grass to hide himself while the others took cover behind a dirt mound. Someone yelled for the medic.

  “Fuck it, I’m not going out there,” the other medic told Chatterton.

  Lacko lay exposed in the open field. Anyone who helped him would be an easy target for the enemy. “By killing a medic they demoralize a platoon,” a friend had told him, and now the Vietcong were waiting to do just that.

  Chatterton’s chest heaved. He could not swallow. His body went light.

  And then he ran.

  He ran with everything he had, into the open field and straight for Lacko. Bullets shredded dirt and grass all around him but Chatterton kept going, his legs burning and his aid pack thrashing while the platoon returned fire to cover him. He kept waiting to die—maybe he was dead already—but his legs kept moving and the world went silent except for his breathing, until he slid beside Lacko in the grass.

  “Hang in there,” Chatterton said.

  He checked Lacko for a severed artery, then looked back over the field to the platoon.

  “We gotta get back,” he told Lacko. “We gotta go.”

  Chatterton was six foot two, but at 165 pounds he could not hope to carry the heavier man over his shoulders. Instead, he scooped his arms under Lacko’s from behind and began to drag him into the open field. Shots rang out; mud and grass spit up. Chatterton knew he would die now but kept dragging, trying to cover fifty yards that stretched over all Vietnam. All the while, he kept waiting to fall but his legs kept pushing, and even when he could no longer feel his body he kept pulling and digging until he was back to the platoon and behind the dirt mound. Dehydrated and exhausted, he hardly heard the Cobra attack helicopters as they arrived and unloaded on the enemy. But he felt the men in the platoon rub his shoulder and move dirt from his eyes, and he heard them call him “Doc.”

  For the next two weeks, Chatterton made every patrol. The men warned him that this was a fast ticket to a body bag, but he didn’t hear them. All he knew was that he was good at his job and that the work was important. He kept volunteering, not just to join the platoon but to walk point—to be first in line during patrols—unheard of for a medic. It exposed him to booby traps, land mines, and sniper fire, but it also put him out front, where a person could see. Time and again, he ran to pull his men out. The world came alive when a person got a chance to be good.

  It took just a week or two for Chatterton to find the answers he’d come for: America didn’t belong in Vietnam. The soldiers were heroes. Human beings were animals. Yet he still kept walking point, still kept looking to see how people lived and died, how they made decisions, and the accountings they gave of themselves when things mattered. Over the months, he compiled a short list of truths he saw reflected in the lives and the dying around him—his principles for living:

  —If an undertaking was easy, someone else already would have done it.

  —If you follow in another’s footsteps, you miss the problems really worth solving.

  —Excellence is born of preparation, dedication, focus, and tenacity; compromise on any of these and you become average.

  —Every so often, life presents a great moment of decision, an intersection at which a man must decide to stop or go; a person lives with these decisions forever.

  —Examine everything; not all is as it seems or as people tell you.

  —It is easiest to live with a decision if it is based on an earnest sense of right and wrong.

  —The guy who gets killed is often the guy who got nervous. The guy who doesn’t care anymore, who has said, “I’m already dead—the fact that I live or die is irrelevant and the only thing that matters is the accounting I give of myself,” is the most formidable force in the world.

  —The worst possible decision is to give up.

  After a year, mostly in the field, Chatterton went back to Garden City on leave to see what the army would do with him next.

  He could hardly speak, and spent most of every day on the floor. Sometimes, he broke down sobbing. Then he would turn silent. He never made it back to Vietnam. Instead, he served out his obligation at Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn, telling shrinks what they wanted to hear, marrying and divorcing a woman he hardly knew, wondering what had become of a person who once had needed to know.

  —

  FOR FIVE YEARS, CHATTERTON moved between hourly jobs, never staying anywhere long, never really connecting. By 1978, it occurred to him that his life could slip away like this, bound up in anger and dark memories, and that it dishonored the men who hadn’t come back from Vietnam to be pissing away life this way.

  He took a job as a scallop fisherman in Cape May, on the southernmost tip of New Jersey. At sea, the fishermen combed through piles pulled up by dredges, keeping the scallops and kicking the garbage over the side. To Chatterton, it was the garbage that mattered. “Mind if I keep that?” he’d ask. Soon, his house was overflowing with cannonballs, muskets, broken china, and flintlock pistols.

  Scallops were gold until 1981, when the market for the mollusks collapsed, but by that point Chatterton knew he wanted to earn his living from the water. He enrolled in a commercial diving school in Camden. When his girlfriend, Kathy, asked what the profession entailed, Chatterton confessed he had no idea.

  To be good at commercial diving, the instructor said, a person had to do underwater construction, welding, and repairs. To be great, he had to improvise in hostile environments, find a way when things seemed impossible, solve problems that changed by the minute. “That’s what I did in Vietnam,” Chatterton thought. “That’s where I’m at my best.”

  After graduating in 1982, he landed a job with a commercial diving company that was doing work in New York Harbor. There, he demolished concrete, welded support beams under South Street, and installed pile wrap beneath the Port Authority Heliport. Every hour demanded muscular expression and a nimble touch, often in caves or tunnels made black by swirling silt and sediment. Supervisors could see that Chatterton was different—not just because he slithered into difficult places or refused to quit even after his body went numb from the cold, but because of the way that he saw. During times of zero visibility, he used his body, helmet, and even his fins to decipher the contours of his work space, assembling the shapes he encountered into three-dimensional diagrams in his mind. By freeing himself from vision he came to see with his imagination, and that meant there was nowhere Chatterton couldn’t go.

  Even at home his mind was submerged. In the shower, he contemplated how objects fell through water; over breakfast he planned escape routes on blueprints he’d borrowed from work. By the time he splashed into the Hudson each morning, he seemed incapable of panic. It’s not that he believed the worst wouldn’t happen—he knew from Vietnam that it would. He just knew that when he became buried in sludge or could no longer breathe or got pinned to a wall, he would come out okay, because in his mind he’d already been there; in his mind he knew the way out.

&
nbsp; The next few years passed happily for Chatterton. He married Kathy, and his career flourished. For the first time in his life, he was earning an excellent salary, had steady work, and enjoyed generous benefits, all at a job he loved.

  Chatterton began showing up for recreational shipwreck charters run by local dive shops. Dive charters were populated by rugged men (and a few sturdy women) who carried sledgehammers and crowbars, and wore a knife on each leg. You didn’t work with a buddy down deep—that was resort stuff for tourists—and you never touched another guy’s shit. These divers studied deck plans of ships sunk by great violence; every weekend they swam among the bones of souls who had died at sea.

  Soon, he was pressing deeper into the ocean, but charters to these places were rare, and there was a reason for that. At depths past 130 feet, people started to die—from the bends, nerve damage, deepwater blackout, hallucinations, panic, and fear. Sometimes the bodies were never found. Captains shunned greenhorns like Chatterton, wannabes who didn’t understand how the deep could kill. Chatterton showed up anyway. But he was in small company. Of the ten million certified scuba divers in the United States, only a few hundred dove deeper than 130 feet—the true deep.

  Chatterton loved the wrecks. Twisted and bent—some collapsed on their sides—they were snapshots of moments when men had lost hope, when plans and futures and families had changed. Each wreck was different, sometimes by the day, changing with the temper of the ocean. Many divers lived for the artifacts these wrecks surrendered—teacups, dishes, portholes, a bell—but to Chatterton the stuff hardly mattered. To him, shipwrecks were puzzles that rewarded a man in exactly the measure to which he challenged himself. The farther a person swam into a wreck, the more of its secrets she revealed. Before long, Chatterton was seeing things no one had seen before.

  Much of what made him special happened before he arrived at the dock. He prepared relentlessly, studying deck plans, rehearsing scenarios, and imagining the shipwreck not as a structure but as a story—one with a beginning, a middle, and an end. By seeing the ship’s final moments unfold in his mind, he could see how she broke, and that meant he could move into places that had ceased being places, he could reach areas accessible only to those who could see backward in time.