The Lost Fleet

by Barry Clifford

  I would guess that Charles is in his early sixties, with the good looks and charm of a successful Rolls-Royce dealer. He is, however, Venezuela’s best-known jungle explorer and adventurer.

  I am looking a little scruffy at our first meeting aboard the Bertram. “Ah, you look worse than your reputation,” he said, introducing me to his wife and kids as “the famous American pirate.” Not knowing how I would react, he tried to make it a half-joke with a bad impression of Long John Silver. The contest had begun.

  Educated as a dentist, Charles has impressive credentials. In fact, when he faxed me his résumé, my fax machine ran out of paper after a hundred sheets. Later, he e-mailed me a heavily edited version of twenty-five pages. It started with:

  Curriculum Resume of Charles Brewer-Carius, Explorer and Naturalist Considered the Humboldt of the 20th century by some German publications because of his vast knowledge and experience (in “Inseln in der Zeit p. 275 Uwe George-GEO, 1988), he has developed an overall knowledge of nature, but never the less is very proficient in various fields and has been honored by his fellow scientists naming 26 new species of animals and plants with his name.

  It was humbling, especially when I handed him my old business card with a scratched-out phone number. The fact that I “didn’t know the difference between a sponge and a gorgonian”—as he would point out later—added to my insecurity.

  But it was very easy to like Charles, in spite of his air of superiority, and I remember thinking at the time what great friends we would become if we could get past the testosterone battles. I thought Charles, with his knowledge of the jungle, would be the perfect guide to lead an expedition to the Amazon for a lost Elizabethan shipwreck that I was investigating for the Discovery Channel.

  We got under way the next morning. Michael Karnow asked if he could come with us. He knew he was prone to seasickness, and someone had told him that the powerboat would be a smoother ride, although they hadn’t factored in the overpowering smell of rotten eggs mixed with fermenting urine in the bilge.

  No sooner had we left the protection of the harbor than we were hit by an easterly with the swiftness of a backhand from a cruel stepmother. The little Bertram would climb a wave and then slam down in a great spray of foam. It would be a long hundred miles to the “the Island of Birds.”

  Not having slept since leaving Cape Cod, I went below, stuffed some cotton soaked in mouthwash in my nostrils, jammed myself between two berths, and took a catnap.

  When I woke, I found Michael wandering below deck in a state of stupefied agony. I have actually seen dead men with better complexions. He whispered, “I think I’m going to die…. No, let me rephrase that: I want to die. Would you kindly put me out of my misery?”

  I tried to comfort him by reassuring him that almost everyone survives seasickness. He tried to laugh, then asked me if I had given his proposal any serious consideration.

  The trip took ten hours, and, if given the choice between having a spinal tap or making that crossing again, I’d take the spinal.

  Las Aves is a wind-lashed speck of mangroves, bulrushes, and short, coarse grass. It rises from the ocean like a scorpion’s tail at the end of a four-mile stretch of deadly reef. As we motored in, it was clear that this island was not a place to camp. Bilge reek notwithstanding, we would stay aboard the little cruiser.

  Looking as ghastly as the crew of the Flying Dutchman, Max and his group arrived aboard a fifty-foot ketch, even more seasick than our crew. The sailboat had taken the strong easterly on her beam, causing her to wallow with the indignation of an old sow in a muddy ditch.

  I arrived aboard the sailboat in the middle of a discussion concerning Charles Brewer. Charles had apparently crossed paths with some of the party before.

  “Who invited him along?”

  Pedro, ever the lawyer, made a commendable defense on Charles’s behalf, and the subject was dropped. But I was left with a lingering suspicion that there was something more to the veteran explorer than I’d seen on his vita.

  I took Pedro aside and asked him what the problem was. He hemmed and hawed for a while, but I pressed. Finally, he told me the story.

  Some years before, Charles Brewer had led a Kennedy family river expedition in South America that turned into a nightmare and nearly killed Lem Billings, the best friend of the late president John F. Kennedy.

  I also heard whispers from some of the boat’s crew about Charles, unsettling stories about his time with the Yanomami Indians and other misadventures they had read in the press.

  On our first day of the expedition, however, we had problems much greater than personality conflicts. In the Atlantic Ocean, the winds blow in a great clockwise direction, out of the West Indies, up the coast of North America, across the Atlantic to Europe, then down the coast of France, Spain, and Africa. Then, just north of the equator, they return across the Atlantic to the West Indies. These are the trade winds, so called because their predictable direction dictated the trading routes of the old wind-driven ships. When one recalls how d’Estrées tried for an entire day to sail just a few miles into the wind to fetch Nevis, it is obvious why the sailing ships always kept the wind astern.

  These steady easterly trade winds, the same winds that drove d’Estrées’ fleet relentlessly up on the reefs, were now howling at nearly sixty miles an hour. The wind knocked the boats around, screamed across the cabins, and made even talking in the open difficult. High wind makes everything more complicated and dangerous; it exaggerates all of the potential problems associated with boat work and diving.

  Wind generally does not make much difference to a diver under the surface. But the trade winds are relentless. There is nothing between Africa and the coast of Venezuela to slow them down. As the wind blows, it pushes big waves ahead of it, and they smash against the reefs of Las Aves, creating violent waters and strong currents.

  The island of Las Aves, the barren hump of land, is to the westward, downwind of the reefs. The reefs stretch out eastward from the bottom corner of the island, completely undetectable to the passing vessel, except for surf. But in these winds, the big seas crash up against the coral, sending spray high into the air, outlining the reefs with a four-mile arc of dangerous breakers.

  Stranded atop the reef is a freighter that wrecked fifteen years ago, much like the French fleet. Unlike the wooden men-of-war, however, the freighter did not break up. It is a big ship, perhaps five hundred feet long. The seas that morning were slamming into the side of her decaying hull sixty or seventy feet in the air.

  This was not a good situation. In order to get to the wrecks, we had to leave the tranquillity of the lagoon and swim across the reef. The water over the reef was about four feet deep—but there were waves. Not the slow, graceful waves you might see in Hawaii, but large, irregular, mutant ones, the size of three-story brownstone houses, which came sporadically and without rhythm, crashing down on the tabletop of poisonous coral.

  We took smaller boats to the edge of the reef. After anchoring, my first thought was “There’s no way I’m going out there…. I’m getting too old for this BS.”

  And there stood Max, his eyes wide with excitement, as game as my old Labrador to break ice for a crippled goose; some instinct in his blood was calling.

  So off we went, one by one, into the stream of rushing water cascading over the reef. The water was only waist deep, but we had to pull ourselves along the bottom, holding on to the coral, to make any progress. It was impossible. The water was just too turbulent. I was carrying a metal detector to use once I had reached the other side of the reef. It had earphones to signal if metal was detected. The earphones were being ripped off my head, and, if I turned the detector sideways, the force of the water threatened to tear it out of my hand.

  We spent that whole first day banging ourselves against the reef, trying to get over to its seaward side. Disheartened, exhausted, and cut up, we headed back to our boats.

  On the morning of the second day, Max and I went out in one of the small
boats to take another look. As we were cruising across the lagoon, we saw a small group of men who seemed to be standing on water. As we approached, it became clear that they were conch divers standing on a postage-stamp-size spit of sand. They were happy to see us, as the mother ship that had dropped them off was a week overdue. They were low on food and water, and there was a change of weather in the air.

  One of the secrets in finding shipwrecks is local knowledge. These men, if anyone, would know if there were old shipwrecks along the reef. I began to question them in my rudimentary Spanish.

  “Cañones?” I asked. “Have you seen any cannons?”

  “No, no cañones, no cañones,” they replied. I was disappointed until they went on to explain that, although there were no cannons, they had seen what they described as very large sewer pipes piled up on top of one another.

  Sewer pipes. Max and I exchanged glances. While it was possible that they were sewer pipes, these men had probably seen a pile of cannons, all that was left of some ancient shipwreck.

  I told them I was very eager to see the sewer pipes.

  5

  “Beasts of Prey”

  MAY 11, 1678

  LAS AVES

  DEATH ON THE REEF

  I may have been eager to get out to the reef, but the sailors and pirates who ended up there three hundred years ago—those who lived through the night—certainly wished they had never seen the place.

  Le Terrible piled up on the reefs of Las Aves and instantly became a total loss. Comte d’Estrées tried desperately to prevent the rest of his fleet from meeting the same fate. If he could keep enough of them from running aground, he might still drive the Dutch from Curaçao, even with the loss of the seventy-gun flagship.

  Night was fully on them. D’Estrées ordered Le Terrible’s guns fired and a lantern lit in the main top, the fastest means of signaling the other ships and warning them of the danger. Gunfire proved to be a sadly ambiguous warning. The captains of the great men-of-war astern thought the cannon blasts meant that the admiral was engaged with the enemy.

  Their duty was clearly to get up with the flagship and support her. They ordered more sail set and closed as quickly as they could. As Dampier later reported, the captains “hoisted up their topsails, and crowded all the sail they could make, and ran full sail ashore after him, all within a mile of each other. For his light being in the Main-Top was an unhappy Beacon for them to follow….”1

  One after another, the great ships ran up on the reef; Le Tormant with her four hundred men, Le Bellseodur with a complement of four hundred fifty, and Le Bourbon, Le Prince, and Le Hercule, each with three hundred aboard, all broke their backs on the unseen rocks.

  Along with the gunfire, d’Estrées managed to dispatch a boat, which was able to warn the left wing of the fleet in time for those vessels to veer off.2 But for the ships following in the admiral’s wake it was too late.

  No doubt some of the men aboard those doomed ships realized the danger before they actually struck the reef, but the unweatherly men-of-war of the late seventeenth century were helpless to sail clear once they had the reefs right under their lee.

  Though the process of rigging and dropping the huge anchors was time-consuming, some ships might have managed to do so. But it did not help. The anchors found nothing to grab on the reefs and just dragged along behind. The mariners aboard the French fleet could have done nothing but endure the horror of waiting for the inevitable.

  In all, ten French men-of-war were wrecked on Las Aves, the largest ships in d’Estrées’ fleet. Lost with the ships were approximately five hundred men and 490 guns. Even in a major naval engagement, it was rare to see such complete destruction.

  Dampier suggests that the buccaneers fared better in this disaster, though the record is unclear. As a renegade mercenary force, the freebooters, 3 as they were called, were of no official concern to the French navy, as long as they did as ordered and aided d’Estrées in his designs. As a result, the navy took no official notice of the number of pirate vessels that were wrecked, and the pirates themselves were not much given to record-keeping.

  Some reports that made their way to the colonial governors indicate that as many as eight buccaneer vessels went up on the reef. It is certain that at least three were lost with the men-of-war. The accounts of the aftermath reveal that a number of buccaneers were stranded on the beach along with the survivors from the naval force. Enough of the buccaneer ships escaped, however (many no doubt thanks to their shallow draft), to become a power in their own right.

  NIGHTTIME AND BREAKING SEAS

  One can only imagine the horror that the shipwrecked mariners suffered through the night of May 11 and 12, with the great men-of-war grinding themselves to bits on the reefs, held there by the trade winds and the steady pounding of the sea.

  The air was filled with the sounds of wooden hulls crushing against rock, tons of masts, spars, and rigging collapsing, panicked orders as the officers tried to maintain discipline and salvage what they could of men and ships, the screams of the drowning men, the shudder of waves breaking on the stranded vessels.

  Dawn revealed a chaotic scene, with the men-of-war, stove in but still largely intact, stranded on the half-moon reef. The clear blue-green water and the white sand beaches of Las Aves were covered with debris and the bodies of the men who had drowned.

  The survivors began the task of getting themselves off the stranded, wrecked ships, which were beginning to break up, and onto the dubious safety of the beaches on Las Aves. The work was difficult. The boats were hampered by large seas that made the generally dangerous task of approaching an unstable wreck even more treacherous.

  The scene on the beach at Las Aves and on the wrecks still clinging to the reef must have been one of the strangest in all the history of the Caribbean, no small feat in a country where the bizarre and outrageous is a standard part of regional history.

  The survivors were divided into two distinct groups: the men of the French navy and the buccaneers. Of the two, the men of the navy had by far the worst time of it.

  Most of those killed in the wrecks seem to have been sailors aboard the French men-of-war. This is hardly surprising. Common sailors made up the majority of casualties in any conflict at sea, whether by gunfire or rocks.

  All through the day the survivors poured onto the sands of Las Aves. They were frightened and dispirited, and many had been injured in the wreck or cut up by coral in getting ashore. Many more, no doubt, fell victim to the fire coral that grows in those waters.

  With the water filled with blood, sharks and barracuda began to school. We saw enough of both, diving at Las Aves, even without the attraction of fresh blood to lure them. The predatory sharks came, silent and unseen, and claimed their own screaming victims.

  Once they were on the beach, the sailors’ suffering was intensified by the fact that Las Aves was little more than a barren stretch of sand and shrub, just twelve degrees north of the equator, with no shelter from the elements. The European sailors, unused to such conditions, “died like rotten sheep.”4

  There was at least no shortage of food and drink. As the ships broke up, they began to disgorge their holds full of supplies—casks of beef and pork, water and wine and brandy—all floating free of the wrecks and washing up on the beaches of Las Aves.

  Some of the shipwrecked Frenchmen were overcome with despair and reached for the bottle. Forty or so French sailors found themselves aboard a wreck with a good supply of liquor. Rather than trying to save themselves, they chose to get dead drunk. When at last the after part of the ship in which they had settled broke away and floated off, the men could be heard singing merrily as they drifted out to sea, never to be heard from again.

  Most of the French naval officers survived but would have to answer for the destruction of the ships under their command. That would not be a pleasant prospect for any of them, least of all Admiral Jean Comte d’Estrées, whose record as a naval commander was mediocre at best. One can imagine d�
��Estrées looking out over the wreckage and working out the explanation he would give to the Sun King. It must have been the worst moment of his life.

  6

  A Change of Plans

  There were forty craft in Avès, that were both swift and stout,

  All furnished well with small arms and cannons round about;

  And a thousand men in Avès made laws so fair and free

  To choose their valiant captains and obey them loyally.

  —“THE LAST BUCCANEER”

  Charles Kingsley

  MAY 12, 1678

  LAS AVES

  No doubt the officers thrown up on the beach were concerned with more than just their personal reputations and careers. In just a few hours, the bulk of the French naval presence in the Caribbean had been wiped out more completely than any enemy in those waters (least of all the Dutch) could have ever hoped to achieve. Any man of insight could have realized that that single event probably meant the end of any chance for French domination over the West Indies. The Caribbean was, and would continue to be, one of the major sources of European wealth. The loss of the fleet was a major blow to France, the repercussions of which would be felt for nearly a century.

  Soon after the disaster, the end of French designs on the region was welcomed with ill-concealed glee among the English colonists in the West Indies. The governor of Barbados, Sir Jonathan Atkins, wrote, “[T]here is little danger now from the French fleet under the command of Count d’Estrées, the greatest part of it having been ‘ruined almost to a miracle.’” Atkins went on to add, facetiously, that “d’Estrées is like to give his master a good account of his fleet. I wish them luck at home if we have a war with them.”1

  Comte d’Estrées, true to his character, had lost neither his courage nor his sense of duty. He still held out hopes of driving the Dutch from Curaçao. As a French nobleman, he no doubt cared deeply for French glory and understood the importance of France gaining supremacy in the region. It might also have occurred to him that the blame he would bear for the loss of the fleet could be somewhat mitigated if he could still manage to complete his mission.