The Lost Fleet

by Barry Clifford

  For three days, Paine and the pirate captains remained at the watchtower debating what they should do next. Paine was not a man to shed blood lightly. At last, on April 5, they brought their ships into St. Augustine inlet with the intention of taking the city from that direction. Once again, they got cold feet, daunted by the sight of the Castillo de San Marcos and recalling the reports that Ruíz had given of the castle’s preparedness. They decided that St. Augustine could not be taken, boarded their ships, and sailed away, with nothing but casualties to show for their efforts. The attempted sack of St. Augustine was one of the last of the pirate land raids in the territory of what would become the United States.

  The buccaneers sailed north along the coast, sacking a few smaller towns on the St. Johns River and Amelia Island. Stopping off at what is now Cumberland Island off the coast of Georgia, they careened their ships and buried the men who had died of wounds received in the ambush. There they released the prisoners they had taken, except for Private Ruíz.

  Paine, Markham, and Bréha returned to New Providence Island, but there was no welcome for them there. The governor, who had given them leave to capture Alonso de Avecilla, now professed every intention of arresting them, but could not muster enough men for the task.

  Paine returned to the wreck site he had initially intended to fish, but found that there were many others now working it. Later, when a large ship sailed into New Providence, the governor manned it with sufficient force to overcome Paine and dispatched it to the wreck site. By then, Paine and the rest were gone.

  Thomas Paine’s activities, and the friction thereby caused between England and Spain, caught the attention of the very highest levels of officialdom. About a year after the St. Augustine raid, no lesser figure than King Charles II of England wrote to the governor and magistrates of Massachusetts:

  In consequence of the Ravages of pirates in the territory of the King of Spain, we have thought fit, for the encouragement of the amity that exists between us and his Spanish Majesty, to give orders for the suppression of the pirates, and that you give no succor nor assistance to any, and especially not to one called Thomas Pain, who with five vessels under the command of Captain Breha, has lately sailed to Florida. Such pirates you will exterminate so far as in you lies, as a race of evildoers and enemies of mankind…. 2

  The awesome power of the king notwithstanding, it would take more than the colonial governors could muster to bring down Thomas Paine. If nothing else, Thomas Paine was a survivor.

  18

  A Homecoming for a Pirate

  Oh sweet it was in Avès to hear the landward breeze,

  A-swing with good tobacco in a net between the trees,

  With a negro lass to fan you, while you listened to the roar

  Of the breakers on the reef outside, that never touched the shore.

  —“THE LAST BUCCANEER”

  Charles Kingsley

  SUMMER 1683

  NEWPORT, RHODE ISLAND

  Though the English, French, and Spanish authorities routinely alternated between tolerating piracy and accusing one another of tolerating piracy, the English governors began to turn on one another as well. And with good reason. The leaders of the various colonies had very different levels of tolerance when it came to piracy. Sir Thomas Lynch had already complained about the amount of cooperation the pirates received in the North American colonies. After Paine used Lynch’s commission to launch his attack on St. Augustine, the Earl of Craven fired back:

  I have read what Sir Thomas Lynch has written you about the reception of privateers at Carolina…. At Providence, which Sir T. Lynch has complained of before now for harboring pirates, all imaginable care was taken to suppress them, and no attempt upon the Spaniards was made except by the instigation of a person whom Sir Thomas Lynch had sent to take pirates.1

  This was not the last time that Paine would be at the center of a storm.

  In the fall of 1683, Paine returned to Rhode Island. His name was well known there, as were his questionable activities of the past years. Government officials called for his arrest. Fortunately for Paine, the governor of Rhode Island, William Coddington, was not one of them. In fact, for unknown reasons, Coddington did everything he could to obstruct efforts to bring Thomas Paine to account.

  One of the governors who called for Paine’s arrest was Edward Cranfield of New Hampshire. In October 1683, he related that Paine had come in “with a counterfeit commission from Sir Thomas Lynch styling him [Lynch] one of the Gentlemen of the King’s Bedchamber, instead of his Privy Chamber, whereby I knew it to be forged. Colonel Dongan [governor of New York] and I asked the government to arrest [him], but they refused.”2 A few months later, Paine’s ship Pearl was briefly detained in Boston but was soon released. For the moment, Paine was safe.

  The next spring, Paine’s past once again came back to haunt him. Just when it seemed royal officials were losing interest in prosecuting Paine, the declaration from the king of England arrived, specifically naming him as one of the worst offenders of that “race of evildoers” to be exterminated.

  The deputy tax collector of Boston, T. Thacker, attempted to impound Paine’s ship at Newport and have Paine arrested. Like any government official, Thacker filed an extensive report:

  By seven or eight at night I had satisfied myself as to the character of the ship, waited on Governor William Coddington, and shewed him my Commission and demanded his assistance in seizing her. He put me off, promising to answer me next morning, by which time the pirates had time to arm themselves against arrest.3

  Thacker does not hesitate to call Paine a pirate. Rather, it was the governor who equivocated, and would continue to do so. Like Governor Dongan of New York, Governor Cranfield of New Hampshire was also in Newport, and they too joined in the fray. Cranfield had already called for Paine’s arrest the year before, and still wanted to see the pirate locked up. Thacker continues:

  I went to the governor the next morning, but instead of giving assistance he avouched her [Paine’s ship] a free bottom as having a commission from Sir Thomas Lynch…. I asked to see it, and it was presented by Paine, in the presence of Governor Dongan and Cranfield of New Hampshire and others. It appeared to be a forgery, Governor Cranfield and others affirming that it was not Sir Thomas Lynch’s hand, nor were his titles correctly given, but Governor Coddington was of other mind and declared her a free bottom.4

  The next day, Thacker continued to urge the governor to seize the ship and men, “especially Thomas Paine, as the Commission was certainly false, and the ship had not been to Jamaica but on a piratical cruise, and had plundered the town of St. Augustine,” giving Paine more credit than he was due.

  Coddington continued to refuse to arrest Paine and informed Thacker that if he wished, he could prosecute Paine through the courts. Thacker said he would be happy to, if Coddington would arrest him. Not only did Coddington refuse to do so, he would not supply Thacker with a copy of Paine’s commission from Sir Thomas Lynch.

  As soon as Thacker returned to Boston, he tried one last time to convince Coddington that Paine’s commission was a fake by sending off a sample of Lynch’s handwriting to the governor. In frustration he later reported, he “…sent him [Coddington] one of Sir Thomas Lynch’s passes to convince him, but he would not see with eyes like other men.”5

  Why Coddington went to such lengths to protect Thomas Paine is something of a mystery. It might have been rivalry. Coddington and Cranfield had their own problems. Just days after the affair with Thomas Paine, the two men engaged in a bitter and acrimonious fight concerning unsettled claims of land and jurisdiction in the Narragansett area, with Cranfield at the head of a royal commission looking into the matter.

  It is entirely possible that this dispute had already started, and the land question was the reason that Cranfield was in Newport at the time. Perhaps Coddington was feeling protective of his fellow Rhode Islander, especially in light of the fact that the two governors and the tax collector were representatives o
f the Crown, New Hampshire and New York being Crown colonies. Coddington might have felt it his duty to protect his fellow Rhode Islander against such tyranny. It was the attitude of independence that would lead to the American Revolution nearly a century later.

  Some of the problems may have stemmed from the character of Rhode Island in those days. Unlike other areas of New England, Rhode Island was a uniquely liberal and tolerant colony, a freewheeling little place, founded by religious dissenters and iconoclasts. Nor was it a particularly wealthy colony; enough money distributed in the right directions could generally quash curiosity as to the origins of a man’s personal fortune. In 1657, a Dutchman writing from “New Amsterdam” (modern New York) noted that Rhode Island was “the Receptacle of all sorts of riff-raff people, and is nothing else than the latrina of New England. All the cranks of New England retire thither.” While this observer was certainly exaggerating, Rhode Island was a nursery for smugglers and pirates during the 1680s and 1690s.

  In any event, the chief legal point was the validity of Paine’s commission. Though it is unlikely that Sir Thomas Lynch intended to give Paine permission to sack St. Augustine, it does appear that he gave the filibuster some sort of commission. That much is indicated in his letter to Sir Leoline Jenkins, in which he states he “accepted the offer”6 to grant Paine a commission to hunt pirates.

  Knowing that Paine went to Florida on the strength of the commission that he, Lynch, had issued, Lynch must have been shaken to read the king’s proclamation, stating, “You will permit no succor nor retreat to be given to any pirates, least of all to Thomas Pain, who…is lately arrived in Florida.”7 Perhaps this is why little evidence exists concerning Paine’s commission, beyond Lynch’s letter to Jenkins.

  The fact is that Cranfield was right in his assessment of the commission that Paine produced. Lynch was not a Gentleman of the King’s Bedchamber, as the commission apparently stated, but was in fact a Gentleman of the Privy Council. The Bedchamber was reserved for peers of the realm, not men with mere knighthoods. Confusing the two was not a mistake that Lynch would have made.8 Paine had shown the governors a forged document.

  So what was the truth behind Paine’s commission? If Lynch was prepared to issue Paine a commission, why did Paine end up with a forgery? Perhaps Lynch changed his mind before actually issuing the document, leaving Paine to write his own. Perhaps Paine lost the original and tried to re-create it from memory.

  Perhaps Lynch was not so innocent in the affair as he should have been. It is worth noting that he was posthumously accused of irregular practices in connection with a later pirate raid.

  One of the perpetrators died at Port Royal shortly after the raid, and his effects, including treasure, were seized by the government. While most were forwarded home to London, as was right and proper, the attorney for the pirate’s widow claimed that a parcel of “Spanish Jew-ells” somehow managed to end up in the possession of Governor Lynch’s wife. It was also alleged that the wife of the Jamaican admiralty agent had received a ring from a Dutch freebooter, and that Lynch had taken bribes from assorted French pirates who were fearful of returning to Petit Goâve and sought asylum at Port Royal.

  We know only that Thomas Paine had a piece of paper with the name Sir Thomas Lynch on it. He used it to justify his attack on St. Augustine, and he used it later to avoid the possible repercussions of his actions. It was authentic-looking enough to satisfy Governor Coddington, though Coddington was apparently eager to let Paine off. Wherever it originated, Paine certainly got a lot of mileage out of that document.

  Despite Coddington’s protection, Paine remained the subject of official badgering and Coddington remained under pressure for protecting him. In September, royal agent William Dyer wrote, “I have also caused Thomas Paine the arch-pirate, to be secured, and charged the Governor of Rhode Island with him and with his own neglect for not assisting the Deputy Collector to seize him and his ship.”9 Once again, however, Paine somehow managed to avoid prosecution and gave the gallows the slip. Thomas Paine had a lot more fight left in him.

  19

  In the Wake of Jean Comte d’Estrées

  OCTOBER 26, 1998

  LAS AVES

  After setting up and testing all of our gear in the Blue Room, we packed it all up again and loaded it on a plane, this time a small island-hopper that took us to Los Roques, the nearest inhabited land to Las Aves. That is not to say it is densely populated. Los Roques is a smattering of low brown-and-green islands that seem to float in the light-bluish-green water. It was once a hangout for my old friend Captain Sam Bellamy of the Whydah. We landed on an airstrip that looked like a straight gray scar across one of the larger islands, running from one shore to the other.

  There we met our dive boat, the Antares, an eighty-five-foot cruiser that would be our home and work platform for the next two weeks. The Antares is a PADI dive boat. (PADI stands for Professional Association of Diving Instructors. It is a parent organization for sports diving instructors.) PADI rates dive boats like hotels, and the Antares was rated five stars. By the standards of American or European hotels, she might not have been five stars, but compared to the Vast Explorer, the boat we used for the Whydah project, a no-frills workboat, the Antares was the height of luxury.

  The Antares was a big, boxy vessel. Her hull and deckhouses were white. The lower deck was made up of cabins. The next deck, at the level of the open afterdeck, included a big salon and galley. The salon was decorated in the unfortunate earth tones of the mid-1970s, but what it lacked in taste it made up for in roominess and light. It had a wide parquet floor over which we were strictly warned we could not drag dive equipment or even walk with shoes. The salon became the central gathering place for the entire expedition. We met there, ate there, partied there, and argued there.

  The Antares was set up as a dive boat, and that made her ideal. Carrying divers was her purpose in life, so she had on board everything we needed for that part of the expedition. She had air compressors and storage for tanks and gear. Todd Murphy had carefully figured the number of air tanks we would need, and the captain of the Antares had seen to it that they were all aboard.

  The captain was Ron Hoogesteyn. In his late thirties, he is an imposing figure at six foot two and 260 pounds. He is from a well-known Dutch family in Venezuela. A diver himself, Ron understood what was needed for our expedition and he made certain that his boat was fully equipped.

  I liked Ron right off and really came to appreciate his understanding of Las Aves, everything from the flora and fauna to the protocol of dealing with the coast guard. Ron’s love for the environment at Las Aves is evident, and he helped me appreciate what a beautiful and fragile ecosystem exists there.

  Before setting out, we discussed some of the potential problems we might encounter. Ron knew Las Aves, having taken sports divers out there, and he knew that there might be problems with big surf and difficulty getting to the dive sites. He knew we might face other problems as well—sharks. Las Aves is a favorite hangout for lone hammerheads. Hammerheads are most dangerous when they are by themselves.

  “You have tigers down here, too, don’t you?” I asked.

  “Yeah. Nasty ones,” Ron said, by way of encouragement.

  Later in the expedition, when my own spirits were low and I was sick as a dog, Ron proved to be so eager to help it was irritating. If that is the worst problem a guy presents, then that’s fine with me. We were lucky to have him.

  The next morning we were under way, steering west toward Las Aves, plowing the sixty miles to the atoll through that beautiful blue-green ocean with the trade winds at our back. We were all aboard and the spacious afterdeck was crammed with our gear. It was the last leg of the trip to the site, and we could all feel the excitement. The weather was fine but the seas were up and the trip was somewhat reminiscent of the bone-jarring ride we had had months before on our first boat ride to Las Aves. But despite that, we were all in good spirits for the upcoming explorations.

  It was
interesting to think that we were sailing close to the same course d’Estrées had been sailing on that terrible night more than three hundred years before. We, of course, enjoyed many advantages that d’Estrées did not. Foremost among them, we knew that the reefs were there.

  As we approached Las Aves, we saw that we were not the only ones who knew about the reefs and the potential wealth they held. Another vessel, about the size of the Antares, was also making for Las Aves. As I mentioned before, there are fishing boats that go out to the island, and the occasional sports diver. There is also a Venezuelan coast guard base. But this boat did not look as if it was any of the above.

  Ron and I took turns examining the stranger through the binoculars as she and the Antares drew closer.

  I asked Ron, “Do you know what boat that is?”

  Ron did not. He said, “We heard them on the radio, talking to the navy. They are going to dive at Las Aves.”

  Everything about her—the size, the type of vessel, her apparent destination—suggested that she was heading for the reefs for a little treasure hunting, or was I being paranoid?

  “This is a treasure-diving boat,” I said. “They’re treasure hunters.”

  Once word of an old shipwreck gets out, it can set off a gold rush. The ones who usually show up are the amateur treasure hunters who have never found anything of their own. They arrive off your site like the wild dogs of Africa, sniffing the air and circling, waiting for a chance to grab a few scraps and run. It was like that with Whydah and other projects. Never mind the fact that the wrecks at Las Aves probably did not have anything that would interest a real treasure hunter.