The Lost Fleet

by Barry Clifford

  The next morning, a Spanish merchant ship sailed right into the harbor, unaware that the city was in the hands of the filibusters and that pirate ships lay at anchor there. Along with a rich cargo, the merchantman carried in her hold 120,000 pesos in silver, all of which the pirates liberated.

  It was not a great buccaneer army that had taken Campeche, but a rather small contingent, and the pirates knew that it was only a matter of time before they would be overwhelmed. Soon after emptying the hapless merchant ship, they abandoned the city. By the time a relief column from Mérida de Yucatán arrived at Campeche, the buccaneers were long gone.

  Though the Spanish claimed that the 1672 Campeche raid was in part the work of de Graff, there is no other documentation to prove it. De Graff, like the outlaws of the old west, might have received credit for more crimes than he actually committed. More to the point, no other record exists of de Graff’s activities for the next five or six years, which casts some doubt on the likelihood of his involvement there.

  While the details of his rise through the ranks to command are unknown, Laurens de Graff probably acquired ships in the same manner as most pirates. He started small, first commanding a modest bark and using that to capture a larger ship, and then a larger one after that. His ship was almost certainly part of d’Estrées’ squadron. In the fall of 1679, a year after Maracaibo, de Graff captured a Spanish frigate of some twenty-four to twenty-eight guns, the frigate Tigre. Ironically, Tigre was a part of the Armada de Barlovento, the very squadron from which de Graff had escaped. The former slave must have been especially gratified by the capture of that vessel.

  CRIME PAYS BIG

  By 1682, de Graff was so successful a pirate that he garnered special attention from the authorities, who made special efforts to stop him. Sir Henry Morgan dispatched the frigate HMS Norwich, commanded by a Captain Peter Heywood (himself a future governor of Jamaica), specifically to hunt down de Graff. Morgan worried about the threat that de Graff presented, and the real possibility that de Graff might instead capture the Norwich. Writing to the Lords of Trade and Plantations, Morgan said:

  And that the frigate might be better able to deal with him [de Graff] and to free him [Heywood] from the danger of being worsted or taken, I have put forty good men with commanders aboard her…. I doubt not but your Honors will allow this charge, it being necessary for the King’s service and the preservation of the frigate….4

  There is no record that Heywood ever managed to find de Graff. Instead, de Graff made one of the grandest conquests of his career.

  In July 1682, near Puerto Rico, de Graff’s Tigre intercepted the Spanish frigate Princesa, a fine ship the Spanish had taken from the French and incorporated into the Armada de Barlovento. Princesa mounted twenty-six great guns, ten smaller swivel guns called patararoes, and carried 250 men. She was very much a match for de Graff and his company.

  Hollywood scenes of pirate ships battling it out with men-of-war on the high seas rarely happened in reality. The fight between Tigre and Princesa was one of those rare instances of a ship-to-ship duel, rather than a ground assault. The ships fought for hours, never grappling but rather dueling with their long guns. No doubt the Spanish captain was wisely not eager for hand-to-hand combat with the fierce buccaneers.

  It was a one-sided battle all the same. When the Princesa struck her colors, de Graff had lost eight or nine men killed, another sixteen or seventeen wounded. The Spanish lost fifty men killed or wounded, including the captain, who was wounded in his upper thigh and had “his belly somewhat torn by a great shot from one of Laurence’s quarter-deck guns.”5 Typical of de Graff’s humanity, he had the wounded captain immediately put ashore, along with a surgeon and a servant to attend him.

  De Graff had hit the jackpot. Along with a variety of valuable goods, the ship was carrying the payroll for the garrisons at Puerto Rico and Santo Domingo, around 122,000 pesos in Peruvian silver. Symon Musgrave, an Englishman who frequented Spanish territory, reported to Governor Sir Thomas Lynch in Jamaica:

  It is said the pirates made one hundred and forty shares and shared seven hundred pieces-of-eight per man. Laurence himself is now at Petit Guavos; his ship and prize are refitting.6

  “Petit Guavos,” or Petit Goâve, rather than Tortuga, was de Graff’s preferred port of call.

  It is little wonder he felt comfortable there, given the official cooperation available. Musgrave goes on to report, “The Governor of Petit Guavos has received his share underhand but resolves to grant no more commissions….” De Graff was clearly operating under some type of sanction by the governor at Petit Goâve. The Spanish, however, were being pushed to the breaking point and the governor feared reprisals. This was, after all, one of those rare windows of peace in Europe amid the almost constant warfare of the seventeenth century.

  The robbery of their payroll ship infuriated the Spanish authorities. To make matters worse, it had been conducted by one of their own former slaves, who had then converted the captured Princesa to his new flagship. Unable to take vengeance on de Graff, Spanish authorities took it out on another freebooter of Dutch descent, Nikolaas Van Hoorn, who was in Santo Domingo attempting to sell a cargo of slaves. In retaliation for de Graff’s actions, the slaves were confiscated by the Spanish authorities. Van Hoorn managed to escape with no more than twenty of his men.

  Once again, the Spanish had picked the wrong man for an enemy.

  22

  Nikolaas Van Hoorn

  [I]t is said that Laurens, having two good ships and four hundred men, will not join him, and that his [Van Hoorn’s] own people and the other French abhor his drunken insolent humor.

  —Sir Thomas Lynch

  FEBRUARY 1683

  THE GULF OF HONDURAS

  If Laurens de Graff represented the best of the buccaneers, Nikolaas Van Hoorn represented the worst. In December 1681, Van Hoorn had sailed from London in command of the ship Mary and Martha of four hundred tons, forty guns, and a crew of one hundred fifty men. He also took with him his son, who was around ten or twelve years old. Instead of straightforward slave trading, which would have been bad enough, Van Hoorn went on a sixteen-month rampage through the Bay of Biscay, the Canary Islands, the African coast, and finally the Caribbean.

  Van Hoorn was a vicious drunk, brutal and utterly without regard for the nationality or circumstance of those whom he attacked. He was too much even for his own men. As sailors from his ship later reported, Van Hoorn “was forced by weather into a French port in the Bay of Biscay, where twenty-five of his men, seeing what a rogue he was, ran away.”1 In Cádiz, he forced ashore thirty-six more, abandoning them without their wages. Before sailing he stole four patararoes of English ownership, despite the fact he was sailing under an English flag at the time. While in Cádiz, Van Hoorn whipped to death an Englishman named Nicholas Browne for no apparent reason.

  In the Canaries, Van Hoorn rustled a herd of forty goats. From there, he went on to the Cape Verde Islands, where five more of his men deserted. He then sailed to the Guinea Coast, where he sold some of his guns and powder for gold.

  Soon after, he fell in with two of his countrymen, Dutch ships trading in Africa. These he plundered of all they had, a rich take of thirty thousand dollars’ worth of booty. In the same area, he stopped an English ship and stole a slave from her, as well as a canoe from Cape Coast, which he plundered, killing three of the black men who crewed her.

  With the capital he had raised through indiscriminate plundering, Van Hoorn purchased more than one hundred slaves for export and sold the rest of his take for a hefty sum of gold. He sailed to the coast of Capa and involved himself in one of the many tribal wars that plagued Africa. Van Hoorn’s artillery helped his allies prevail in their fight, and he sailed away with six hundred more captives, presumably the men and women of the vanquished tribe.

  The former sailors from the Mary and Martha give a good sample of Van Hoorn’s tactics.

  He did everything under English colors, burning all the houses a
nd destroying all the negroes’ crops and stores. A month later he captured a canoe with twenty negroes, shot one and took the rest.2

  Van Hoorn crossed the Atlantic and called at St. Thomas and Trinidad, where he sold a number of his slaves. At the end of November 1682, he sailed into Santo Domingo in the present-day Dominican Republic. He had approximately three hundred of the blacks he had brought from Africa; the rest either had been sold or had died during the horrendous voyage.

  Van Hoorn planned to sell what remained of his cargo at Santo Domingo, but he arrived to find a hornet’s nest. The Spanish were enraged by de Graff’s capture of the payroll ship. Van Hoorn’s cargo was confiscated, and Van Hoorn and his crew were detained.

  It was some months before Van Hoorn was able to somehow escape with the Mary and Martha, which he now called St. Nicholas (patron saint of sailors and thieves), making his way to Petit Goâve. His only thought was to make the Spanish pay for having the audacity to take vengeance on him, and he was looking for men who would join him in that effort. Petit Goâve was the right place to be.

  Petit Goâve was teeming with men who enjoyed nothing more than plundering the Spanish. It was also a good place to obtain official sanction for such an enterprise. Van Hoorn found both.

  The governor at Petit Goâve was M. de Pouançay, the same man who had organized the buccaneer contingent that joined Admiral d’Estrées in his ill-fated expedition to Curaçao. Once again, he rallied the buccaneers, putting nearly three hundred men aboard Van Hoorn’s ship to aid him in his reprisals.

  De Pouançay issued Van Hoorn a privateer’s commission, using as his pretext the complaints of Jamaican governor Sir Thomas Lynch concerning the pirates and interloping planters at Ile à Vache. Van Hoorn, however, was all set for a cruise of revenge against the Spanish. Apparently not trusting the vicious Dutch captain completely, De Pouançay put the Chevalier de Grammont on board as second in command.

  De Grammont had had poor luck in his filibuster career since his spectacular raid on La Guaira in 1680. During the summer of 1682, he commanded a fleet of eight pirate ships which had among its captains Pierre Bot, a Breton pirate who had sailed aboard the ships of the Knights of Malta, and Yankey Willems. For several months, they prowled Cuba’s northern shore, hoping to snap up a treasure-laden galleon, but to no avail. They returned to Petit Goâve nearly empty-handed. Fortunately for them, Governor de Pouançay had a job for which their talents were eminently suited.

  Van Hoorn, de Grammont, and the rest sailed aboard the St. Nicholas from Petit Goâve, in search of others to join their cause, most particularly the renowned Laurens de Graff. They called first at Jamaica to replenish their ship and to deliver letters to Governor Lynch.

  Soon after Van Hoorn’s departure from Jamaica, Sir Thomas Lynch wrote a fascinating letter that reveals much about the unofficial encouragement of piracy by government officials and the mutual desire of the French and English to covertly harass the Spanish.

  The mere fact that the French governor de Pouançay and the English governor Thomas Lynch would happily do business with old reprobates like Van Hoorn and de Grammont says much about the official wink and a nod toward piracy. Lynch, of course, had referred to de Grammont as “an honest old privateer,”3 a perfect example of how one man’s privateer is another man’s pirate.

  Lynch goes on to say that the St. Nicholas “brought me letters from Mons. Poncay [sic] and Mons. Grammont…[that] assured me of their intentions to keep the peace, and…that Van Hoorn, the captain, had no other commission but to take pirates, nor other design here but to deliver his letters.”4

  By “keep the peace,” Lynch, of course, meant that Van Hoorn had no intention of attacking English shipping, which was reiterated by his assurance that Van Hoorn had “no…other design” in Jamaica but delivering letters and, as he went on, buying medicine and ship’s stores.

  Lynch is clearly aware that Van Hoorn is not on a peaceful mission. He knows that Van Hoorn’s commission from de Pouançay gives the Dutchman permission only to capture pirates, but Lynch is also certain that Van Hoorn has no such plans. He writes:

  Everyone here concludes that Van Hoorn is also gone to Laurens (the man who, as I wrote to you, took 122,000 pieces of eight off Porto Rico). Van Hoorn has provisions for six months. Nobody thinks he would carry this to capture pirates, nor that he would come to leeward after them when he knows they are to windward.5

  Lynch is equally aware of Van Hoorn and de Grammont’s plans to link up with de Graff and form a powerful buccaneer army. He goes on to say:

  The pirates are all joining Laurens in the Bay of Honduras where he is said to have two great ships, a barque and a sloop of ours and five hundred men. Three days ago I gave the master a letter to Laurens requesting him to punish the pirates and deliver the sloop, which I believe he will do.6

  Again, Lynch clearly regards robbery on the high seas as piracy only when it affects English shipping. Lynch refers to them all as “pirates,” but at the same time he writes a very businesslike letter to de Graff asking that the “pirate” who stole an English sloop (“a sloop of ours”) be punished and the sloop returned. He seemed to have had reason to believe de Graff would cooperate with that request.

  Lynch’s agenda becomes plain when he notes: “For I hope to bring them [the buccaneers] to that pass that they will be content if we do not punish them for robbing the Spaniards….”

  Lynch ends the letter with a humorous comment on how much of a Caribbean governor’s time was spent dealing with the buccaneers. He writes, “You cannot blame me for being the historian of these rogues for this year, for I have business with few else….”

  Sometime in mid-February 1683, Van Hoorn left Jamaica with his small fleet and three hundred buccaneers with the Chevalier de Grammont as his second in command. Governor Lynch’s intelligence had been accurate. Instead of beating back to windward and capturing pirates at Ile à Vache, Van Hoorn ran downwind to the Gulf of Honduras to meet with Laurens de Graff, the man who was rapidly becoming the first among equals in the filibuster community.

  On the way they met up with others, whom they persuaded to join in on their joint action. Together, their massive buccaneer army would stage one of the most brilliant, if bloody, raids in the history of the Spanish Main.

  23

  The Documentary That Officially Wasn’t

  OCTOBER 28, 1998

  LAS AVES

  So there we were. All dressed up and no place to film.

  Mike Rossiter began a furious series of communications with everyone who might do us some good. He called Antonio, he called the BBC, he called the Venezuelan ambassador whom he had previously contacted.

  Communication with the outside was very difficult. We didn’t have cell phone coverage. All calls had to be made via radio and ship-to-shore communications, which are primitive and awkward. Mike’s job was to get the filming done, and he took every step. Somewhere out there, beyond the sharp line of the horizon, we knew that because of Mike’s calls, dozens of people were mobilizing, trying to untangle this bureaucratic Gordian knot.

  Ron Hoogesteyn took a more direct, pragmatic approach. The navy ship was some way off and could not see what we were doing on board the Antares. Once we were out on the reefs, we would be out of its sight. Ron felt that as long as we were discreet, we might as well start filming.

  I was dubious. Could the navy crew really be so oblivious, or so lackadaisical? All they had to do was to come out in their boat and they would see what we were doing. But Ron was a local. As captain of a boat that earned her living in those waters, he knew better than I what to expect from Venezuelan officials, and he knew we were within the law. I figured it was worth a try, but issues of filming were Mike Rossiter’s call, not mine.

  Mike was torn. As a representative of the BBC, the last thing he wished to do was to embarrass a government agency by ignoring its orders. On the other hand, it was his job to make a documentary. The BBC had already invested quite a lot in getting us out t
o the site and ready to dive. We had valid permits. No one wanted to see all that money and effort thrown away.

  Those things considered, Mike decided we should go for it. I am sure that he would not have made that decision if he had not felt in good conscience that he had done everything required of him to secure the necessary permits. Whatever snafu or bureaucratic meddling had led to the navy’s refusal to recognize our permits was not the result of any oversight on Mike’s or Antonio’s part. While the people in Caracas and London whom Mike had mobilized to straighten this mess out began making calls of their own, banging on doors and cutting through red tape, we prepared to do some diving.

  The Antares carried a smaller dive boat called the Aquana, which was twenty feet long or so. It was capable of carrying a surprising amount of gear. A canopy top provided shade to a small portion of the boat. She was steered from a center console and powered by twin seventy-five-horsepower Yamaha outboards. While their best days were long gone, they could still move us right along with the skiff’s flat bottom.

  The flat bottom and shallow draft also allowed the boat to get over the reef if the seas were not too high, a great advantage. Still, whenever we approached those treacherous reefs, we had one of the Antares’s crew stationed on the bow, warning us of coral heads that even the shallow dive boat would not clear. We did not want to share d’Estrées’ fate.

  That first morning we loaded our dive equipment and crew aboard the Aquana, and then, more discreetly, the video gear. Ron took the wheel, and one of his native crew perched at the bow to keep an eye out for coral. We motored for the reef.

  For Chris Macort and me, it was a shock. The last time we had been to Las Aves, the wind had been howling at forty knots and more and the seas had been breaking over the reefs in great showers of foam, flinging spray fifty and sixty feet in the air and preventing us from getting close. This morning, it was as still as a mountain lake. There was no surf breaking, nothing to indicate that the reef was even there. The surface of the ocean was a flat, unbroken plane, from where we sat in the Aquana clear to the far horizon. We hardly recognized the place.