The Lost Fleet

by Barry Clifford

  This was not entirely a matter of luck. I had spent a lot of time talking to local people about what time of year we would be least likely to encounter that kind of wind again. There is no guidebook or weather forecast that can beat local knowledge, especially the local knowledge of people like fishermen, whose livelihood depends on the weather.

  The first time I had been over the reefs, we had anchored inside and fought our way out underwater against the terrible current. Not this time. With no seas breaking on the reefs, and the dive boat’s flat bottom and shallow draft, we were able to motor right over them out to the open water. The man in the bow used hand signals to direct Ron around the bigger coral heads, those close enough to the surface that they threatened to rip out the boat’s bottom. In that way we threaded our way to open water.

  Ever since I first returned from Las Aves I had been studying the charts of the area and overlaying them with d’Estrées’ map to try to get a sense of where we might begin to search for the wrecks. The night before I had gone over them once more, making my final decision of where to begin the search.

  The ships of d’Estrées’ fleet had struck all along the reef, from the southernmost end to the north. In theory we would find wrecks anywhere along the four-mile length. I aimed for midway along the reef, thinking that would put us in the best position to find one. We could then use that as a jumping-off point.

  We motored over the shallow water that swirled over the reef. The sea was green when you looked out over the surface, and absolutely clear when you looked straight down. Below us, the mottled blues and browns and yellows of the coral passed slowly under the boat as we headed for the wreck site. And then the reef began to drop away as we passed over to the seaward side and the open ocean.

  Without the magnetometer, we had no way to remote-scan for the wrecks. It would be a visual survey. We would pick a spot at random and begin searching north and south until we located the artifacts that would indicate where a ship went up on the reef.

  Ron stopped the boat on the seaward side. Before we went in, we took the first logical step in hunting for a shipwreck.

  We looked over the side of the boat.

  And there it was.

  It was that simple. In the clear, shallow water on the reefs of Las Aves, we simply looked down and just below us, on the bottom, fifteen feet or so down, were the ghostly, coral-encrusted shapes of cannons, anchors, the unmistakable signs of a shipwreck. Hidden among the organic shapes of the reef were obviously man-made objects, shapes with right angles, unnatural lumps, things that did not belong. From our seats aboard the Aquana we were shouting, “Look! A cannon! There’s an anchor!” It was a thrill, all the pleasure of discovery with hardly any of the frustration and setbacks. After years of working the cold, murky waters of Cape Cod, it was a magnificent treat.

  Over the side we went to take a closer look. The seas weren’t a washing machine this time; we weren’t tossed against the unforgiving reef. The water was absolutely calm as we kicked down to the site of the wreck on the seabed.

  The wrecks at Las Aves are not what most people think of when they think of shipwrecks. They are not like wrecks in the movies—a ghostly stove-in hull resting on the bottom, broken masts tilted at crazy angles, shreds of rigging draped around. A year or two after they struck the reef the sunken ships might have looked like that, but no more. There is no rigging, no masts, no hulls.

  The French men-of-war had been underwater for 320 years by the time we showed up to look for them. That’s a long time. The tropical ocean may be a great place to dive, but it is a bad place to be a shipwreck. The very things that make the diving so great—the warm water and abundance of sea life of all kinds—are exactly the same things that quickly destroy whatever is on the bottom.

  All of the organic material, the wood hulls and masts, the canvas sails, the hemp and manila rigging, was long gone. What we found were inorganic objects, for example, the stones that had once formed the ballast in the bottom of the ship. These stones tend to be clustered in an arrangement shaped roughly like a football, but narrower. This is how they were when they were piled into the very bottom of the ship. A ballast pile stands out from the rest of the ship bottom because of its shape.

  Of the man-made objects, the largest pieces of metal last the longest, and among the biggest artifacts on board these ships were cannons. Cannons were scattered all around. If a ship crumbled straight down, you would expect to see the cannons in a line, as they had once been on the ship’s deck. But that is not how these ships fell apart. No doubt some wrecks were lying on their sides and the guns toppled one way or another as the decks rotted away. Most of the three-hundred-plus cannons aboard the fleet were bronze, many about six feet long, but some were bigger, huge guns that you would find on the biggest warships of the day.

  Bronze was the preferred metal for guns of that era, but it was enormously expensive. The bronze guns needed to arm a big man-of-war could cost as much as the ship herself, or more. Since they were such special weapons, they tended to be more ornate and beautiful as well.

  Bronze remains perfectly intact underwater, even after hundreds of years. The metal alone is quite valuable, but an intact seventeenth-century bronze gun is worth a fortune today, sometimes as much as $100,000. The bronze guns were the things that the treasure hunters had their eyes on, if gold was not to be found. We found no bronze cannons.

  We did find anchors, lots of them. A ship always carried more than one anchor. The largest ships might carry a half-dozen or more, each one of them a monster. The anchors we found were incredible, some with shanks as long as eighteen feet and eleven feet wide from fluke to fluke.

  During the course of more than three centuries, these objects have slowly become a part of the living reef. The wreck sites we found each consisted of a long, narrow pile of ballast stones, and nearby, a few anchors, and scattered around the area, some cannons lying at odd angles. That was it.

  And that is all that is left of the mighty men-of-war and pirate vessels of d’Estrées’ fleet.

  24

  Where the Wrecks Are

  OCTOBER 28, 1998

  LAS AVES

  A diver floating in the water above and looking down at one of the wrecks at Las Aves, a diver not accustomed to finding artifacts underwater, would not see much at all. It is very likely that he would not realize he was looking at a wreck. It’s like looking at a black cat in a coal bin. The ballast piles are inconspicuous and the cannons and anchors are covered with coral, so that they tend to blend in with the coral reefs, as if they were camouflaged, hiding from would-be salvors.

  It takes years of practice to train your eye to see the man-made object among the rest of the debris, but eventually you can see right off when something just does not look right. I can watch thousands of stones tumbling down a sluiceway and I’ll pick out a silver coin that’s black and concreted. I don’t know how. It’s as if my mind sees it before my eyes do and my hand will just reach for it. It’s the same swimming along a reef. I have spent so much time looking at the ocean floor that when something unnatural is there I can usually spot it. Sometimes it is the shape, sometimes it’s the color of the coral, which is different because it is growing on something organic, like a wood hull, or something metal. But mostly it is subconscious.

  I think the difficulty of recognizing man-made objects on the bottom became a source of frustration for Charles Brewer. He wanted desperately to see what we were seeing, but he just couldn’t. He was out of his element.

  If we had been in the jungle, Charles’s lair, the situation would have been reversed. Charles would have seen a thousand things that I would never notice. The difference is, I would have said, “Hey, Charles, what’s that?” I am happy to be a professional in my own field; I don’t feel the need to appear to be an expert at everything. But Charles was different, and his inability to find wrecks chaffed at him.

  Disguised as they might have been, the artifacts we saw from the boat were as obvious to me a
s if they had been labeled. Neither the Venezuelan navy nor the coast guard seemed to take any interest in what we were doing, so we went to work. We had located a wreck site, and there was no reason not to start mapping.

  Since we had all worked together on the Whydah and other projects, and since we had reviewed our techniques while in Caracas, we had the drill down. In fact, many of the mapping techniques we used at Las Aves had been developed for the Whydah site, especially by Todd Murphy.

  Todd’s background in exercise physiology gave him experience in statistics, and his military training taught him a lot about electronic navigation systems, which we used extensively. What Todd brought to the system was an effort to simplify it, since doing anything underwater is much more difficult than doing it on land. Very often—and this was really true with the Whydah—conditions were so bad you simply had to do the best you could as quickly as you could.

  Mapping any site begins with what is known as a datum point. This is a fixed reference point, what would be the 0–0 point on a graph. Todd would choose the datum for each site, some point just off to the side of the bulk of the wreck. This is the 0–0 point for local reference—in other words, the starting point for that particular site. Everything we find on that particular site is measured in terms of distance and direction from the datum point. This is the standard grid system right out of “Underwater Archaeology 101.”

  Once the datum point was chosen, we would physically mark it. If it was in sand we would stick in a pole and that would be our point. If it was on coral we would tie a line to the coral with a buoy attached. As long as there was no current or tide running, the line would stay straight up and down.

  The next step was to determine exactly where on the globe the datum was located—in other words, the exact latitude and longitude. Modern technology has made that considerably simpler, particularly the advent of Global Positioning System satellites, or GPS. The system is very common now, but for any who might not be familiar with it, here is a simple explanation.

  A GPS receiver on earth picks up signals from multiple satellites in orbit over the earth. From those signals it is able to triangulate the exact position of the receiver, down to centimeter accuracy. When GPS was first available for civilian use in the 1980s, the receivers were bulky, expensive, and unreliable. Now for $300 you can pick up a handheld GPS that is reasonably accurate and about the size of a conventional telephone receiver. We used a highly accurate Trimble Navigation GPS as our primary unit. We also used a British OmniStar GPS.

  GPS was developed by the military. Its potential uses are obvious, from navigation on land or sea to running the guidance systems on missiles. Only after the military had fully integrated it to their needs was it released for civilian applications. But the military version was considered too accurate for civilian use. It would have created a serious risk to national security if anyone could walk into a marine supply store and pick up an electronic navigation device accurate enough to drop intercontinental ballistic missiles into American missile silos.

  To deal with that problem, the government built into civilian GPS “selective availability.” Essentially, they threw in an error. For nonmilitary applications, the government would periodically degrade the signal, so that rather than being accurate within a few centimeters it would be accurate to within one hundred feet. That’s good enough to find the harbor if you’re aboard your yacht, but not good enough for some enemy nation to use as a missile guidance system.

  It also wasn’t accurate enough for our purposes when it came to geographically locating our datum points. Fortunately, there are ways around the selective availability problem, ways that we had used with Whydah. They involve using two GPS receivers rather than one.

  Here is how it works. First, you have to know where you are—exactly, down to the fraction of a second in latitude and longitude. This has to be done on land, since a boat moves too much to establish a fixed point.

  We pick a station on shore for which we know the precise location, generally by locating it on a chart of the area. Since we know the exact latitude and longitude of the shore station, we feed that information into the GPS at that location. The shore GPS knows exactly where it is. If it then gets a signal collected from the satellites that tells it that its location is, say, twenty meters north of where it knows itself to be, then the GPS knows the selective availability error at that time. It can figure out the error built into the satellite signal.

  Out in the boat, right above the datum point, we have what is called a differential GPS, or DGPS. The DGPS is capable of receiving a differential signal—in other words, a signal that will allow it to correct its own reading.

  The DGPS over the datum point tells us where it thinks it is, within one hundred meters. But it is also receiving the signal from the shore GPS, and the shore GPS, which knows exactly where it is and what the satellite error is, is saying to the DGPS, in essence, “Hey, the satellite is telling you that you are twenty meters north of where you really are. Correct for that.” The DGPS makes those corrections, and the resulting position is accurate not within meters but within centimeters.

  That is how we do it at the Whydah site, but at Las Aves there was an additional problem. There is only a little landmass associated with the reefs at Las Aves, and we anticipated problems in getting an exact geographical location for the land GPS. Also, we didn’t know if we would be allowed to set up a land station. The Venezuelan coast guard station on the island might not want foreign civilians wandering around with sophisticated electronic equipment. For Las Aves we had to work out another way.

  The other way was to get the differential signal from a satellite. In an effort to provide extremely accurate GPS data, a number of government organizations, including the U.S. Coast Guard, broadcast differential signals for use with DGPS units. There are also a number of commercial providers. The differential signal is via radio waves, broadcast from radio navigation beacons, commercial FM transmitters, and geostationary satellites.

  Along with maritime navigation, one of the primary uses for DGPS is in farming. Farmers use this technology to map their fields and plot where, when, and how they will plant. If you are in the United States or Canada, you can generally pick up one of the government signals for free. Unfortunately, we were using it for a very different purpose, and at a very remote location. We would not have access to one of the U.S. government signals. So we contracted with a private satellite firm for the use of their differential signals. With the satellite sending the correction to the DGPS unit over the datum point, we were able to pinpoint exactly where on earth each of d’Estrees’ ships came to rest.

  Now, just a few years later, all this effort is unnecessary. With the technology and the ability to correct the signal so easily accessible, the government has removed the selective availability in civilian GPS. Now GPS receivers all have military accuracy, and our work has become that much easier. But we did not have that luxury in 1998.

  Ideally, we would have set up a whole network of datum points for each site. In a best-case scenario we would set up a boundary around the whole site and have some datum points inside the boundary and some outside the main circumference. We would map those datum points relative to each other and then start mapping in artifacts relative to those datum points.

  In a perfect world, we try to fix each artifact relative to three datum points. That way you can triangulate each artifact and check your measurements, which is much more accurate. But this was not a perfect world, and it only got worse.

  With the time constraints and the conditions at Las Aves, we had to go with one datum point and take strikes and measurements from that. We wanted to find as many wrecks as we could, to survey and map them all. We had two weeks. And that was only if the navy did not get serious about enforcing its orders.

  We decided to work quick.

  25

  Unwelcome Intrusions

  I would believe [an attack on Vera Cruz] almost impossible,

  exce
pt for the experience and valor of those who hear my words.

  —The Chevalier de Grammont

  SPRING 1683

  THE GULF OF HONDURAS

  The pirate wrecks we have found, the Whydah and others, bear silent witness to the brutal end that met so many buccaneers. It was not a career from which many retired peacefully.

  Yet not all pirates finished their lives swallowing a lungful of salt water or dancing at the end of a rope. There were a few who managed to hit it big and retire, a lucky handful who went ashore with their fortunes and became wealthy and respected citizens. Laurens de Graff would become one such man. In the summer of 1682, however, he still had years of buccaneering left in him, many bloody conflicts, and many wild, audacious acts.

  The capture of the Princesa and her 122,000 pesos in Spanish payroll money was not enough to tempt him to stop. After the capture of that ship, and the subsequent conversion of the Princesa into his new flagship, de Graff sailed for Cartagena to see what might be found there. Sailing in company with him was yet another Dutch filibuster, Michiel Andrieszoon, who would work with de Graff on a number of pirate ventures.

  Cartagena was disappointing. The two Hollanders found nothing but small coasting vessels. The Princesa, one might imagine, was a hard act to follow. The buccaneers were looking for far more than what they found off the South American coast. Still in company, they sailed off to the northwest for the Gulf of Honduras, where they had reason to believe that the hunting might be more fruitful.