These two sons of the French nobility faced off under the blazing Caribbean sun, on a desolate beach amid the ruins of the French fleet and surrounded by drunken, dispirited, angry, and dying men. The disgraced nobleman-turned-pirate held all the cards in those circumstances, which must have been the greatest irritant of all to d’Estrées. In the end, de Grammont and the filibusters would not be moved to continue in the service of France, and d’Estrées could do no more than sail away.
The Brethren of the Coast reveled for a time, enjoying the unintentional largesse of the French, until it was time to move on. No doubt there was a lively discussion as to where they should proceed, with nearly all of the Spanish Main under their lee. Though de Grammont, with his natural flair and qualities of command, was looked upon as the leader of the expedition, there was most likely a vote as well. That was the way of the buccaneers. They had not escaped European tyranny just to impose it on themselves in the Caribbean.
10
The Sack of Maracaibo
Thence we sailed against the Spaniard with his hoards of plate and gold,
Which he wrung with cruel tortures from Indian folk of old;
Likewise the merchant captains, with hearts as hard as stone,
Who flog men and keelhaul them, and starve them to the bone.
—“THE LAST BUCCANEER”
Charles Kingsley
JUNE 1678
VENEZUELA
Buccaneering in the seventeenth century consisted primarily of land-based raids. Treasure ships were hard to find on the great expanse of ocean. They sailed in large convoys that were hard to attack, and these “plate fleets” did not keep rigorous schedules, making it difficult to know when and where they might sail. On the other hand, the cities and towns where Spanish gold and silver were warehoused did not move. These cities contained wealth far beyond that intended for the royal coffers. It is likely that the men of Las Aves immediately focused on plans for the sack of some Spanish colonial town.
The pirates settled on an attack on Maracaibo, Venezuela, about four hundred miles to the west. This was a fair-sized Spanish city situated on the west side of a narrow channel through which Lake Maracaibo emptied into the Gulf of Venezuela, known to the pirates as the Bay of Maracaibo.
Alexandre Exquemelin, a buccaneer himself, two decades earlier described Maracaibo as
very pleasant to the view, by reason its houses are built along the shore, having delicate prospects everywhere round about. Here also one Parish Church, of very good fabric, well adorned, four monasteries and one hospital. The inhabitants possess great numbers of cattle and many plantations, which extend for the space of thirty leagues within the country, especially on that side that looks toward the great and populous town of Gibraltar.1
Though a raid on Maracaibo was potentially profitable, it was hardly an original plan. Henry Morgan and François L’Ollonais had both sacked the town years before. Of course, in the waning days of Spanish rule in the Caribbean, it was hard to find a city or town of any importance that had not been sacked at one time or another.
In early June 1678, de Grammont and his fleet of six large ships and thirteen smaller ones, manned by well over one thousand men, sailed from Las Aves to Maracaibo. De Grammont put half his force ashore, marching them along the San Carlos peninsula, intending a landward assault of the fortification there, a fortress aimed at defending against attack from the sea.
The Spanish troops garrisoned at Maracaibo held the filibusters off for a little while, but de Grammont managed to land heavy guns and bring them to bear on the fortress. It took no more than a brief cannonade to convince the Spanish that their situation was untenable. They surrendered the fort to the buccaneers. With the heavy guns of the Spaniards secured, de Grammont then took half the buccaneer fleet over the shallow bar and left the rest to blockade the approaches to the city.
Maracaibo flew into a panic. Those who could, including the new governor, Jorge Madureira Ferreira, abandoned the city and raced to the relative safety of the countryside or neighboring towns. De Grammont took the city with virtually no opposition, and he and his men set to plundering it with a will.
By the latter half of the seventeenth century, the Spanish cities of the Caribbean had been attacked again and again by sundry sea raiders in the same way that the towns of England had once been plundered repeatedly by Vikings. The Spanish people in that part of the world, like the English victims of the Vikings, had come to expect the most vicious kind of brutality: murder, rape, arson, torture. They had no reason to expect anything less from these new seaborne attackers. After all, it was precisely the same treatment they meted out to the Native Americans.
The pirates from Las Aves were brutal and efficient. Some went after the governor and other refugees who had managed to escape, chasing them farther into the back country. The others robbed the city of everything they could find. Then they began to torture the citizens to discover if there was anything else secreted away.
Once they had finished with Maracaibo, a contingent of the buccaneers crossed to the eastern shore and fell on the city of Gibraltar. Again, it took only a short bombardment to induce the twenty-two Spanish soldiers defending the city to give it up to the pirates. Gibraltar, unlike Maracaibo, had not been taken by surprise. Having had the benefit of the two weeks the buccaneers had spent sacking Maracaibo, the citizens of Gibraltar had packed their valuables and abandoned the town.
The buccaneers did what they always did—they followed the money. De Grammont marched his men inland fifty miles for the town of Trujillo, to which the refugees of Gibraltar had fled. This was no easy stroll, but rather fifty hard miles through the deadly pestilence of the South American jungle, one of the reasons the buccaneers preferred to strike from the sea. Many of de Grammont’s men died along the way.
At last they reached Trujillo, which was defended by a fort sporting four artillery pieces and 350 Spanish soldiers. Exhausted from the march, outnumbered, and vastly outgunned, the filibusters nonetheless attacked.
De Grammont and his band of pirates stormed the fortification, coming at it from the rear, as one defender put it, “by some hills where it seemed impossible to do so.” The Spanish again fled before this invading force, refugees struggling to get to the next town, Mérida de la Grita, seventy-five miles away.
A study of such buccaneer raids reveals how often the pirates won against overwhelming odds in the most unlikely situations. Greatly outnumbered by regular Spanish troops, desperate and beyond caring, the pirates threw caution to the wind and attacked. Despite the odds against them, their attack succeeded.
No doubt this was due in part to the ferocity and determination of the pirates, and perhaps to a lack of motivation among the Spanish troops, who sensibly chose to run for their lives rather than die defending the wealth of the Spanish aristocracy. The buccaneers’ unorthodox tactics played a role as well. While regular troops were accustomed to fighting European-style battles, the pirates employed guerrilla-style tactics, making it hard for defenders to predict when, where, or how they would attack. Further, the buccaneers, many of them former hunters from Hispaniola, were better marksmen than the Spanish troops. Whatever the reason, the pirates continued to succeed, time and again, against overwhelming odds.
De Grammont had not only taken a succession of Spanish towns but in fact had made himself master of the entire Lake Maracaibo region, with no local force to challenge his supremacy and no need to rush his looting. After taking what they could from Trujillo, de Grammont’s men returned the way they had come, once again occupying Gibraltar. For a week or more, they continued to plunder the town. When they had taken everything they could lay their hands on, they burned it.
In all, de Grammont spent nearly half a year on Lake Maracaibo, raiding, debauching, looting, and burning. It was not until December 3, 1678, that the Chevalier and his fleet, heavy-laden with all the wealth wrung out of the Lake Maracaibo region, left the Gulf of Venezuela.
They did not return
to Tortuga. Rather, they made for Petit Goâve, a hell town in Hispaniola, fifty miles west of present-day Port-au-Prince. Petit Goâve was beginning to challenge Tortuga as the chief gathering spot for the buccaneers. De Grammont and his men arrived as heroes.
It was no matter that the war in Europe, which had been the root cause for collecting together the buccaneers in the first place, was winding down. The pirates were barely interested in such formalities. Their hatred of Spain and their disdain for treaties between nations went far deeper than that. They had, in fact, only just begun.
Vast armadas of buccaneers were not a new thing in the region. L’Ollonais, Morgan, and others had already used that weapon as a tool of colonial policy. But something had begun on those hot sands of Las Aves that would not easily be stopped. With no sort of legal authority, the most charismatic leaders of the buccaneer community had come together, had led a great army in half a year’s raid on Spanish settlements, and had come away rich for their efforts.
The French had brought the buccaneers together. The destruction of the fleet at Las Aves had ended the mission for which they had organized. Rather than return to port, however, the pirates had stuck together and had launched a raid of their own choosing.
With the raid at Maracaibo they had set a new precedent, formed a loose alliance, an army that would split and come together again at will, like quicksilver. These buccaneers would become the dominant force in the Caribbean, and remain so for years to come. Governments, despairing of stopping them, would instead try to lure them into their service.
The wreckage of the French fleet on Las Aves, as it turned out, was the starting point for some of the greatest piratical careers in Western history.
11
Curiosity Sparks Expedition
SUMMER 1998
PROVINCETOWN, MASSACHUSETTS
The more Ken and I dug into the history of the wrecks on Las Aves, the more we understood how the disaster had kicked off a wave of buccaneering from which emerged some of the leading names among the seventeenth-century pirates, and the more eager I became to get back there. During our brief stay on the island, I had seen enough to convince me there was a mystery to be solved at this site. What had the filibusters left behind? What couldn’t they find? That was one thing that interested me. Given the magnitude of the disaster, it seemed impossible to me that a longer, more systematic search would not reveal much, much more.
The second thing that interested me was the map d’Estrées had made. The admiral, intending to go back one day and salvage what he could of the wrecks, had made a meticulous drawing of the island, the reefs, and the ships that went up on them.
I was curious to see how accurate d’Estrées had been. If his map was indeed accurate, then it would be a useful tool for discovering wrecks. Sometimes you get lucky, but more often you have to prod your luck along though tremendous research and hard work. We had labored over maps and other documents to find the Whydah, but it all turned out to be right there, waiting to be unearthed. I have found other wrecks as well by finding documents and following their lead. Perhaps d’Estrées’ map would be one of those.
Of course, I was excited by the “filibusters’” ships. Pirate ships generally disappeared with little fanfare. Clever pirates, like Thomas Paine, did not keep records. But in my hands was an official map, made by an admiral of the French navy, noting the location of two of them. It was a chance to be the first person in three hundred years to set eyes on a pirate vessel of the Spanish Main, to see how it might differ from the Whydah, a pirate ship of forty years later. And I wanted to be the first to swim, see, and touch another pirate ship.
I called Mike Quatrone of the Discovery Channel, who has the nose of a truffle hound when it comes to sniffing out a good story. We discussed organizing a full-scale survey and exploration of the reefs at Las Aves, of going back and shooting a documentary about the wrecks. Soon our talk evolved into a plan: with the Discovery Channel, in tandem with the BBC, underwriting the exploration and producing a show about the expedition.
With some of the other people involved in the project, Pedro Mezquita and Charles Brewer and their contacts in Venezuela, we talked about a major excavation and a museum in Caracas dedicated to the wrecks of d’Estrées’ fleet. We began to develop plans for a conservation center and discussed training Venezuelans as conservators. With high hopes and the best intentions we envisioned an important project.
Charles took the lead in Caracas, talking to everyone he knew, which seemed to be a lot of people. I was afraid he was overstepping his bounds, but the phone calls and e-mails I received from him seemed to indicate that we were all on the same page. As we were making preparations, Charles (who writes English exactly as he speaks it) sent me an e-mail, addressed to “Dear friend Barry,” discussing how he was allaying some of the Venezuelans’ fears about what we intended. He wrote, “I am dealing here with people that are full of fears and complexes of underdevelopment (mentally). Questions as Who are these guys?, Are they coming here to smuggle items? Should we put the police to follow them?” He closed by assuring me that he would be “solving problems” for me in Venezuela.
It was an awkward situation. The BBC and the Discovery Channel had agreed to film a documentary about the exploration based on our work with them in Scotland on the King Charles I site. But Charles seemed to have contacts within the Venezuelan government. Still, I wondered if I was being given “the ether.”
We were both eager to get back to Las Aves to see what we could find. We had to figure out how to work with each other.
Then, from left field, came another problem. A high-powered insurance salesman from Florida had invested money with a fly-by-night Florida treasure hunter. The initial ill-conceived project was to locate a sunken German U-boat off Venezuela, allegedly filled with stolen Jewish gold. One of the investors’ former employees told me that $600,000 had been put up but nothing was ever found: no U-boat and certainly no gold. The treasure hunters needed a big find to keep their investors on the hook.
The Florida businessman had two Venezuelan partners with a lot of influence. At some point prior to our going down to Las Aves they secured a contract with the Venezuelan navy to do “archaeological” salvage work in that country. They claimed they had only to ask for permission and they would be allowed to conduct underwater archaeological digs wherever they wanted.
When one of the Florida treasure hunters read Bart Jones’s article in the newspaper, he fired off an angry letter to me, informing me that I had no right to explore their wrecks, that Las Aves was their permit area, and that the right to explore Las Aves was exclusively theirs. He claimed that the Venezuelan navy, having known about the wrecks at Las Aves, had asked that his team go out there and conduct archaeological work.
To this day, I still don’t know how valid those claims were. I certainly wasn’t going to jump someone’s permit. I have been on the receiving end of that game too many times, with the Whydah and other projects. To complicate matters, we had also heard rumors that a notorious wrecker had been bragging that he had taken a cannon from the site and was making plans to do his own salvage, with or without a permit. Business as usual on the treasure-hunting front.
The question was, could we legally document these sites before they were lost forever? In a place like Venezuela, when one government agency gives you “exclusive” rights it doesn’t necessarily mean it has the authority to do so. On the one hand, I had this guy claiming exclusivity, but I also had Charles Brewer assuring us that he had all of the necessary permits in order for us to return to the reefs. After considering it all, I decided that we had as much right as the Florida group to work Las Aves. After all, we were only going down to map and film the site, not excavate. We decided to press on.
An interesting sidebar to all of this was the reaction of the archaeologist Dr. John de Bry, whom the Florida group had hired. De Bry, who grew up in France, is an expert at researching historical documents. At the urging of the group’s backer, h
e did a great deal of work on the Las Aves site. He even spent time at Las Aves, several months after our visit, exploring the wreck sites. He ended up leaving the project when he discovered that his employers were more interested in treasure hunting than archaeology.
John de Bry had heard plenty of stories about me from the people on his Las Aves venture, and his impression was that I was Genghis Khan in a wet suit, determined to loot every site I could find. So it didn’t sit very well with him when a friend told him to watch a report on CNN about our Las Aves explorations and he saw, on television, his own research material in my hands!
Maps and other archival material are public domain, but taking research that someone else has done is theft of intellectual property. De Bry called his lawyer and had him write to me, demanding that I stop using his material.
I certainly understood that. Copies of the material had been sent to us by way of the Boston Herald. It turned out that these copies had been sent to the Herald by a diver who was a disgruntled employee of the Florida group, and who, as part of the team, had been given copies of de Bry’s work. I wrote to John’s lawyer, explaining this. But the fact is, I had previously found a copy of the same map de Bry had located, independent of the Herald copy. I found mine published in a French history book. I sent a photocopy of the page from the book to de Bry’s lawyer with an admittedly sarcastic note attached. Then I braced for a good fight. Knowing the people with whom de Bry was associated, I looked forward to it.
More letters went back and forth, and as John read them he started to sense that perhaps I was not just an unscrupulous treasure hunter. My side of the story as to our research made sense to him. So one day, out of the blue, he called. We ended up talking for some time, since we obviously have a lot of mutual interests, and we developed a friendship over the phone. The National Geographic Society was staging an exhibit of Whydah artifacts in Washington, D.C. John mentioned that he would like to see it and I invited him.
The Lost Fleet Page 6