The Lost Fleet

by Barry Clifford

  They were right, to a point. In the Gulf of Honduras they encountered two large Spanish ships, the Nuestra Señora de Consolación and Nuestra Señora de Regla. These ships, riding at anchor, were part of the regular shipping that moved between Cádiz and the West Indies, bringing wealth and supplies back and forth.

  The two vessels had arrived some months before and discharged their cargo, which had been taken overland to Guatemala. Now they were preparing for the return trip to Spain, waiting for the profits from the sale of the cargo to come back from the inland city, along with the goods that they would carry back to the Old World, including valuable indigo and gold.

  De Graff, unlike many of the buccaneers, was not a rash or impulsive man. He understood that the ships he found in the Gulf of Honduras were of little value, empty as they were, but in a month or so they would be crammed with treasure and valuable cargo. He and Michiel Andrieszoon left the gulf and sailed to nearby Bonaco Island, where de Graff could careen his ship while their Spanish plum ripened.

  Neither de Graff’s presence in the Bay of Honduras nor his intentions were much of a secret. Lynch reported that “Laurens…lies by to intercept a ship of forty-four guns and four hundred men, with another just half her strength, that are loading goods and money at Guatemala.”1 If a royal governor was privy to this information, it is a good bet that the buccaneers knew it as well. And clearly they did, for Nickolaas Van Hoorn sailed directly from Jamaica to the Gulf of Honduras in search of de Graff.

  Instead he found the same two ships de Graff had discovered. Van Hoorn was unable or unwilling to see the sense in waiting until the ships were loaded with cargo. Instead, he attacked.

  As it happened, the Spanish were also aware of de Graff’s presence and had little of value aboard the ships. It will never be known whether the Spanish would have eventually concluded that de Graff was gone and then sailed into his trap. Long before that could happen, Van Hoorn moved in and captured the empty ships.

  Going aboard the larger of the two vessels, Van Hoorn was furious to find barely thirty chests of indigo in her hold. In a rage, he burned the larger ship and took the smaller as a prize. From there, he sailed off to find de Graff.

  De Graff and Andrieszoon were still at anchor at Bonaco Island, waiting for the Spanish ships. During that time, a small privateer unwittingly sailed into the harbor and was taken by Laurens and company, who treated them as prisoners. Some time later Robert Dangerfield, a sailor on board that ship, described what happened when Van Hoorn arrived:

  [S]eeing two sailes, supposing them to be Spaniards, they [de Graff and his men] gave us our Armes on Condition yt. wee should Waite on Capt. Lawrence and Ingage wth him & undr. his Comand and if they toock a prize wee should have a share wth. them but Comeing up wth them wee found it was Van Horne wth his Spanish Prize and soe Lawrence being Disapointed, wee were afraid of being served soe again and soe in the night left them….2

  It might be an understatement to say that Laurens was “disappointed.” He was so angry that Dangerfield feared that de Graff would vent his fury on them.

  Sir Thomas Lynch, the self-styled historian of pirates, heard the same story. According to the reports he received, “Van Hoorn…boards the larger of the two ships, finds but thirty chests of indigo, burns her in a rage, and bringing off the smaller vessel joins Laurens who was violently enraged at having thus lost his prize.”3

  Van Hoorn was for joining forces—indeed, he had sought out de Graff for just that purpose—but de Graff was not interested, particularly after Van Hoorn had upstaged him. De Graff had men and ships enough; he did not need the help of a violent drunk like Van Hoorn. Again Lynch summed it up, saying, “He [Van Hoorn] has tried to draw the privateers together, but it 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.”4

  A GATHERING OF BUCCANEERS

  Despite de Graff’s reluctance, the men in his company believed it was a good idea to join forces with Van Hoorn, and de Graff finally relented. Perhaps Van Hoorn’s second in command, the venerable old Chevalier de Grammont, 5 played the part of peacemaker, using his reputation and commanding presence to bring about an accommodation, grudging though it might be.

  The pirates retired to the nearby island of Roatán, there to decide upon which unhappy Spanish town they would descend. This gathering at Roatán was one of those extraordinary events in pirate history, like the wreck at Las Aves, five years earlier, which had initiated this wave of large scale pirate action. On the sandy, jungle-covered island were gathered more than one thousand buccaneers, among them the most influential and feared in all the New World.

  Here was the Chevalier de Grammont, once the most powerful of the buccaneers, now relegated to vice-admiral status. Here was the mulatto Laurens de Graff, whose very name filled people of the West Indies with terror, and would continue to do so for decades. Here were the vicious killers Nikolaas Van Hoorn, Yankey Willems, Michiel Andrieszoon, Pierre Bot, and Jean Foccard.6 It was one of the largest gatherings of buccaneers ever, a prime example of the fluid alliance that existed among the Brethren of the Coast.

  The Gulf of Honduras offered little opportunity for the buccaneers. Their presence was well known, and every city and naval vessel in the area was on the alert. With reinforcements on their way from Cartagena, they knew they had to leave the area and fall on some unsuspecting city before word of this massive gathering spread.

  They decided on Vera Cruz.

  26

  The Sack of Vera Cruz

  [I]t is not right to behead any surrendered man who has been granted quarter.

  —Laurens de Graff to Nikolaas Van Hoorn

  MAY 17, 1683

  VERA CRUZ

  It was not an easy decision to reach. Vera Cruz was a well-fortified city, nearly as strong as Havana or Cartagena. It had not been attempted since the Elizabethan sea dog John Hawkins, mentor to Francis Drake, had staged an impromptu raid in 1568. That had gone badly for the attackers. With de Grammont’s eloquent assurance that no Spanish force could resist their onslaught, however, the buccaneers agreed.

  Vera Cruz held a great deal of potential, along with possible danger. It was to that city that much of the wealth of Mexico and Central America was shipped, before being sent to Spain. Every year a fleet of massive galleons, known as the plate fleet, arrived to transport the accumulated wealth across the Atlantic. With luck, the pirates would hit while the treasure still lay in the storehouses, and before the great men-of-war arrived to carry it back to Spain.

  About the same time that their old compatriot Thomas Paine was leading his attack on St. Augustine, the pirates sailed en masse from Roatán Island, making their way due north to weather the Yucatán Peninsula. On April 7, 1683, they went ashore at Cabo Catoche, the northernmost point of the Yucatán, to make their final arrangements before descending on Vera Cruz.

  Command of the venture was never firmly set. The ultimate authority seemed to rest with Laurens de Graff, though some accounts list Van Hoorn as “General”1 in command of the main body of men. It nonetheless became clear that de Graff was calling the shots.

  This was only reasonable. No one, not even his own men, could stomach Van Hoorn. Almost two months earlier, Lynch had written that “the French abhor him [Van Hoorn] for his insolence and passion, and they…will desert him at the first land or make Grammont captain….”2

  Lynch was wrong only in thinking that the Chevalier was the heir apparent to the leadership of the buccaneers. He was not. It would soon become clear that de Graff had ascended to that lofty place. The torch had been passed.

  Soon the pirate armada was under way again. Among the vessels in the fleet were two ships captured from the Spanish, the Nuestra Señora de Regla—the ship that Van Hoorn had whisked from de Graff’s trap—and a prize taken by Yankey Willems. These ships were filled with a large contingent of buccaneers, certainly no fewer than two hundred,
with some accounts setting the number as high as eight hundred. With de Graff in command of the Regla and Yankey in command of his prize, the two former Spanish ships took the lead, leaving the rest of the fleet just below the horizon.

  In the late afternoon of May 17, the two erstwhile Spanish vessels appeared off the harbor mouth of Vera Cruz. To the buccaneers’ relief, there was no sign of the plate fleet. The twelve large, heavily armed men-of-war were due at any time on their annual voyage to fetch the precious metals of the New World and to carry them back to Spain. They would have been a formidable enemy, but fortunately for the pirates, they had not yet arrived.

  Just as fortunate for the pirates, the lookouts in the port of Vera Cruz thought the strange vessels were part of the plate fleet, which was afraid to make their way into the harbor in the failing light.3 Rather than sending a vessel to confirm that this was in fact the case, the lookouts lit fires on shore to help guide the ships safely in. De Graff made good use of the Spaniards’ courtesy and stood in the harbor, anchoring near shore. His disguise had worked, and the wolves were in among the sheep.

  In the early hours of May 18, de Graff and Yankey slipped ashore with the large force of buccaneers they had aboard their two ships. They silently reconnoitered the town, trying to get a feel for its defenses. Vera Cruz was a city of around six thousand inhabitants. Of those, four hundred were civilian militia and another three hundred regular troops, with three hundred more garrisoned on the island fort of San Juan de Ulúa. The pirates were evenly matched. If the Spaniards mounted any sort of decent defense, it would be a hard fight.

  De Graff and Yankey’s force, as the “forlorn,” also known as the “forlorn hope,” was to be the first over the wall, the first through the breach, while Van Hoorn and de Grammont landed their men some distance away and marched in support. The job of “forlorn hope” was potentially as bad as it sounded.

  On the landward side of the town stood two forts that were de Graff’s target. There sand dunes had drifted up against the stockade fences, making it a simple matter for the pirates to slip over that first line of defense. Once in the forts, the pirates encountered the usual degree of alertness among the Spanish troops and sentinels: they were all asleep.

  During the night, Van Hoorn and his forces joined up with de Graff, and at dawn they attacked. The pirates fired wildly and indiscriminately and set the entire city in a panic. They kicked in doors, fired at anyone who showed his face, cut down any armed men who appeared. The soldiers and militia fled. After half an hour, the buccaneers held Vera Cruz. They had lost only four men, three of them de Graff’s men who had been accidentally shot by Van Hoorn’s contingent.

  Fearing the possibility of a Spanish counteroffensive, de Graff and de Grammont saw to organizing a defense. In a move that was perhaps a throwback to his “chevalier,” or knightly, heritage, de Grammont organized a buccaneer cavalry using horses from the stables of Vera Cruz.

  The buccaneers herded as many people as they could—several thousand—into the cathedral and held them prisoner there for three days, with little food or water, while they set about plundering the city. Packed in, with barely room to sit, many prisoners perished, particularly children, as the pirates ransacked the town.

  The take was disappointing, and the filibusters reckoned that there was more to be had, hidden in the countryside.

  On their second day of sacking Vera Cruz, the plate fleet appeared on the horizon, tipping the balance of force to the Spanish. Also that morning, a line of Spanish irregular cavalry appeared at the western end of the city. De Grammont charged with his mounted buccaneers, flags waving and trumpets blowing. The Spanish were so startled by this unorthodox and bizarre attack that they scattered without a fight.

  With the appearance of the Spanish cavalry and the plate fleet, the buccaneers knew that time was running out. Fast and hard “persuasion” would have to be used to locate the hidden wealth of the holdouts.

  The raiders turned their attention back to their prisoners in the cathedral. They selected any prosperous-looking citizens, and their servants, and dragged them from the crowd of prisoners. One by one, they began their systematic torture, using well-tested methods to extract the location of hidden treasure. The pirates threatened to burn down the cathedral, prisoners and all, if more loot and ransom was not forthcoming.

  The people of Vera Cruz had no doubt that they were serious in their threat. As one writer put it:

  [T]hough at this time [by the third day] they got abundance of Jewels, Plate, etc. and about three hundred and fifty Bags of Cochenelle, 4 each containing one hundred and fifty or two hundred pound weight, as they say; yet were they not satisfied, but put the considerable people to ransom, and threatened to burn the Cathedral and Prisoners in it, which were five thousand and seven hundred, if they did not immediately discover all they had; so that the fourth day they got more than the other three…. 5

  The pirates also garnered an additional seventy thousand pieces of eight for the ransom of Governor Don Luis de Córdoba. De Córdoba was discovered hiding in a pile of hay in a stable by a pirate captain named George Spurre, one of the few English captains in the pirate fleet and a man who had been an active buccaneer for about ten years. It was only on Spurre’s urging that the governor was ransomed at all and not killed outright by several of the French buccaneers who had once been held prisoner there. As it happened, Spurre’s protection only bought de Córdoba a little time. Soon after, he was sentenced to beheading by his own government for allowing the city to be so easily taken by pirates.

  By the fourth day of their sack of Vera Cruz, the buccaneers knew it was time to go. The powerful plate fleet was slowly bearing down on the harbor. There was also reason to suspect that reinforcements were on their way from Los Angeles, a city ninety miles away.

  Having not received all of the ransom due them, the buccaneers marched their prisoners, whom they made carry their loot, and fifteen hundred blacks and mulattos back on board their ships. They sailed from the town of Vera Cruz to a nearby island, there to await the rest of the ransom. The island, home of an ancient Aztec temple, was called Los Sacrificios, giving one a good idea of what could happen there.

  The pirates waited nearly a week for the ransoms to be delivered. Van Hoorn, growing impatient with the delay, decided to send ashore a dozen of their prisoners’ heads as incentive for the Spaniards to expedite matters.

  De Graff, who had the reputation of being more humane than Van Hoorn—more humane, in fact, than most filibusters—would not allow this. He and Van Hoorn quarreled, and Van Hoorn pulled his sword. The two buccaneers went for each other with cold steel.

  De Graff drew first blood, a slash across Van Hoorn’s wrist that was not serious, but did put an end to the dispute. The prisoners kept their heads.

  At last, having wrung from Vera Cruz all that they were likely to get, the pirates loaded their plunder, hostages, and slaves, weighed anchor, and set sail, with only the plate fleet of twelve heavy men-of-war between themselves and freedom.

  Though Van Hoorn raved and yammered about attacking the plate fleet, de Graff refused outright, and the men concurred. Braced to fight their way out of the harbor, the pirate flotilla set sail. To their surprise, the Spanish admiral, Diego Fernández de Zaldívar, did not engage them, but rather let them sail right on by. Why he failed to attack is not known. Sir Thomas Lynch would later ironically suggest that the admiral and vice admiral who had commanded the plate fleet “deserve to be made grandees for allowing these pirates to escape when they had them in a net.”6

  The buccaneers left Vera Cruz with a fortune in loot, with only four of their own men dead in exchange.

  Two weeks later, the Vera Cruz raid claimed its fifth and final casualty. The wound that Van Hoorn had received in his duel with de Graff was barely a scratch. But the scratch turned gangrenous and the infection spread. About fifteen days after sailing safely out of Vera Cruz harbor, Van Hoorn died, leaving his son his share of the take, an estimated twe
nty thousand pounds sterling. A year later, Governor Lynch reported that Van Hoorn’s son, too, had died, at Petit Goâve, and the French buccaneers had divided his inheritance among themselves.

  On June 24, 1683, the Dutch pirate’s men rowed his body ashore at Isla Mujeres and buried him in an unmarked grave, bringing to a close the short and vicious piratical career of Nikolaas Van Hoorn.

  27

  The Search Continues

  OCTOBER 28, 1998

  LAS AVES

  We had another official visit our second day at Las Aves, but this time it was the coast guard. I imagine that there was some interdepartmental rivalry going on, that the coast guard would not allow the navy to do all the passport and permit checking, especially not at a place that was home to a coast guard station. It might have been simple curiosity as well.

  The coasties came out in the big open boat that they used around the island. They threw us a line, and we tied their boat up. They climbed up to the afterdeck of the Antares, about ten in all. They were young men; I doubt that the officer in charge had seen thirty. We invited them into the salon.

  The coastguardsmen were pleasant, even apologetic. They tried to be official, but the effect was lost since their “uniforms” consisted of brown pants, white undershirts, and ball caps. If there was interservice rivalry, they definitely lost to the navy in the uniform department.

  Uniform or not, they did have authority. Once again, we produced our papers, passports, film and expedition permits—all of the paperwork we had. The coastguardsmen took it all and examined it carefully, then reiterated the navy’s position that we could not film.

  Charles tried his best with them. We also had several lawyers on board, including Max’s friend Pedro Mezquita, and they jumped into the fray, too. The coasties’ position was as intractable as the navy’s. No filming. We thanked them, shook hands, escorted them back to their boat, then got ready for another day of shooting.