The Lost Fleet

by Barry Clifford

  Mike Rossiter maintained his barrage of phone calls. People in London and Caracas were telling him that it would be straightened out, whatever problem had arisen would be solved, and that we would get our permits recognized. We only had food and water and a budget for two weeks. We could not sit on our hands waiting for the bureaucratic mess to untangle. We suited up and loaded our gear onto the Aquana.

  Our goal was to find and map a wreck a day. It was a brutally demanding plan, so tiring that Carl compared it to basic training with the SEALs. It would not have been possible if our team had not been so experienced and used to working together. During the planning stage of the expedition, Charles had wanted to hire local divers. While there are plenty of very good divers in Venezuela—Ron Hoogesteyn, for example—it would have been impossible to finish as much work as we did without a team that had experience and time together. As it was, we were able to maintain that pace for nearly the entire expedition.

  I suspect that Charles wanted to staff the project with people who answered to him, not me.

  Before leaving Provincetown, Todd Murphy and I had determined how we were going to run the operation, what equipment and techniques we would use. But you can’t plan everything until you see the site. Although I had been there before, the wind and seas had prevented me from the kind of reconnaissance that would have allowed for more meticulous planning. We knew what we wanted to accomplish, and we determined how we were going to execute the operation once we were there.

  Once at Las Aves, Todd and I would get together in the evening and work out the plan for the next day. Todd, as director of operations, would then plan who would be diving, what equipment they would need, when we would leave.

  That freed me to set the sequence we would follow in exploring the reef, to study d’Estrées’ map, and generally to keep the expedition on track toward achieving the goals we had laid out.

  Todd and I were both doing the kind of work we love. Todd, in particular, loves the logistics, the planning and the coordination and the teamwork. I’m not sure if he feels that way because he is in Special Forces, or if he is in Special Forces because he feels that way. The end result is the same. He loves his work and he is good at it.

  I enjoy the logistical side of expeditions as well. There is something about planning for a trip that whets one’s appetite for the journey itself and prepares one for the rigors to come. I imagine Columbus might well have been the same way when he was preparing to set out for Cathay. And, if you are at all attuned to problem solving as I am, I can recommend no better exercise than working up the details of an expedition. More than logistics, I love hands-on exploration; being in the water with the wrecks and seeing them for the first time.

  Different explorers have different interests. Some, like Bob Ballard of Titanic fame, specialize in deep-water, heavily mechanized exploration. He does his work with submarines and remote operated vehicles (ROVs), and he is good at it. But it is exploration performed from a control room, looking at a video monitor, entirely apart from what is being explored. It’s like being an astronaut who is allowed to orbit the moon but not land.

  Ballard has made some impressive finds without ever getting wet. That kind of exploration is just not my cup of tea. I enjoy the physical aspects of diving, being my own, human-powered vehicle. The feel of a site is as important to me as its look.

  People have often asked me what is the deepest I’ve ever dived. The answer is not very. There seems to be a mystique about deep diving, but I explain—half tongue in cheek—that going deep consists of nothing more than strapping on a weight belt and sinking. No special skill involved in that.

  My real objection is that bottom time on a deep dive is severely limited, making it very impractical for archaeological work. Deep diving for its own sake strikes me as a macho thing and no more. There is an element of danger and unpredictability to it that fall outside of what I consider reasonable and prudent boundaries—especially since the physiological changes that occur at such depths are not fully understood by medicine.

  For me the real thrill is the hands-on exploration; going down through the water to see what is there. Fighting the currents to get over the reef at Las Aves was a job for a human being. A machine could not do that. We were powering ourselves, hauling our own equipment. We pride ourselves on our swimming ability, on being our own ROVs. I insist on all our expedition team members being in top physical condition, which is not just a matter of conditioning the physique but also a matter of conditioning the mind-set.

  Our daily routine was simple. In the morning we would have a breakfast meeting to inform the rest of the crew about the plan for that day. Since we had all worked together so long, and since we were doing essentially the same work at every wreck site, we were very informal. Sometimes we would issue a “frago,” short for fragmentary order, which is a change to an already issued order. The needs of the BBC crew obviously often played a part in our decisions regarding the work of the day.

  With the workplan set, we loaded up the Aquana and motored over the reef to the dive site. Each member of the team had a specific job, and we kept with those assignments for the duration of the expedition.

  We knew the wrecks were strewn along the reef, so we would form teams of two or three divers and swim in tandem along the edge of the reef, searching for artifacts. Ideally we would find the point of impact, the place where the ship first hit. Knowing the size of the vessels, we looked for that point in about fifteen to twenty feet of water. If we found where the ship hit first, we could then look for the scatter pattern of the artifacts. That would tell us a great deal about how violent the impact was and how the ship broke up.

  Unfortunately, after more than three hundred years, things have become obscured. More often we would find only the usual signs: ballast piles, cannons, anchors, sometimes parts of the rudder assembly, barely discernible among the coral.

  Debris fields were everywhere. Some looked as if the ships had broken apart. Some looked as if they had sunk fairly intact and rotted in place. There was only one thing that was consistent: the wrecks all showed that the magnitude of the disaster at Las Aves was stunning.

  28

  Mapping

  OCTOBER 28, 1998

  LAS AVES

  The first thing we did at each wreck site was to establish a datum point. Then we would determine the geographic location of the datum using the DGPS. As soon as the datum was set, the measuring would begin.

  Todd Murphy and Carl Tiska did the bulk of this work. They made a great team despite (or perhaps because of) the inherent rivalry between the Green Berets and the SEALs. Using a one-hundred-foot tape measure, they measured from the datum point to each of the artifacts they could observe. Since we had the Agas and the com system, they could relay this information immediately to the field archaeologist, Cathrine Harker.

  Cathrine Harker was aboard the Aquana, which, if the seas permitted, was anchored as close to the wreck site as possible. Cathrine has fair skin, and the tropical sun was dangerous. She wisely dressed herself in oversized white men’s dress shirts, with turned-up collars and long sleeves. These, a floppy hat, and industrial-strength sunblock kept her protected while she worked all day under the brutal rays.

  Along with bringing her aboard the Whydah project and the Las Aves expedition, I was responsible for another big change in Cathrine’s life. Not long after she came to help out on Whydah, I told myself, “Cathrine, I’m going to introduce you to the man you are going to marry.”

  Then I took Chris Macort aside. “Chris, I am going to introduce you to the woman you are going to marry.” In 2000, Chris and Cathrine were married in a castle in Scotland.

  Once the datum point was established, Todd and Carl would begin to systematically measure the site. They would measure from the datum to the cascabel, the round knob at the end of each cannon, and from the north end of the ballast pile to the south end. They would measure from the datum to each anchor. They would communicate every measurement t
o Cathrine through the single-sideband radio mics in their Agas. Their conversation would sound something like this:

  “From the datum to anchor number one is fifteen and a half meters….”

  Carl would roll up the long tape measure, then he and Todd would start in on the anchor itself.

  “Cathrine…the width of the fluke of the anchor at the widest part is…one point eight inches….”

  “Cathrine…the fluke on the second anchor is…one foot, nine inches…”

  “Circumference of the shaft is…one foot, seven inches….”

  As Todd and Carl measured each artifact, they would give the artifacts numbers and tag them. Then Chris Macort, working with waterproof paper and marker and a compass, would make a crude drawing of each of the objects, noting the orientation in which it lay.

  Chris was originally designated as safety diver for Eric Scharmer, the underwater videographer, meaning that he would work with Eric and make sure Eric didn’t have any problems. Chris has a strong artistic streak, however, and that, combined with his experience in archaeological diving, not to mention his unusually close working relationship with the archaeologist, made him the perfect choice for the rough mapping work.

  Chris would swim from artifact to artifact and draw stick-figure cannons and anchors, making sure to get their orientation exact. He would do the same with the ballast piles and anything else on the site, like parts of a rudder or clusters of cannon balls and musket balls. When he was done, they would remove all of the numbered tags.

  We measured as accurately as we could under the conditions, but there were inherent problems. For example, each cannon was measured from the cascabel to the muzzle. But the cannons were heavily encrusted with coral, built up over the centuries. Aiming at “zero site trauma,” we did not want to disturb the coral, so we had to estimate where, under all that growth, the cascabel began and the muzzle ended.

  We did the best we could, and as much as we could within the mission parameters. We did three trips a day to the reef. After breakfast we would go out and work all morning. We would come back for lunch and fresh tanks, then go out again. When those tanks ran out, we would return for more fresh ones and make our last trip of the day.

  Max and his friends, including Paul Ryan, Kent Correll and Pedro Mezquita, also proved helpful. Max’s energy and enthusiasm were infectious. He was having a lot of fun, and I was glad he was able to do so. I would not have heard about Las Aves, and certainly would not have been there looking for wrecks, had it not been for Max. But he and his friends went further. They assisted Todd and Carl in some of the measurement work, and Paul Ryan did a lot of underwater photography.

  We never spent more than one day on any one wreck. By the end of the first week we had thoroughly mapped five sites.

  In the evenings, while Todd and I discussed the targets for the next day, Chris and Cathrine made revised maps from the data she had collected and the crude drawings that Chris had made underwater. By setting the datum point on the center of a paper grid they could use the measurements to position the drawings of cannons, anchors, and other large artifacts on the map. Chris’s notes gave them the exact orientation and size. With the data collected during the day, they were able to produce an exact map of the wreck site every evening. You could look at their finished product and say, “Yes, that is exactly what it looked like.” These maps were among the most valuable research that we took from Las Aves.

  We started about midpoint on the reef and worked our way north. We would swim along with snorkels to conserve air. Looking down through the shallow water we could see the wrecks from the surface. As the reef fell off toward deeper water, we had to go down on air to find them.

  When we found the first wreck, I compared its location to d’Estrées’ map. There was a wreck marked on the map very close to where we had found the artifacts. Interesting, but not enough to prove anything.

  The second wreck we found, on the second day, also had a corollary on the French admiral’s map. By the third day and the third wreck, I was starting to feel confident that my hypothesis was correct: d’Estrées’ map was not just a burst of artistic fantasy but in fact a very accurate reproduction of the reefs and the positions where his ships met their ends.

  As time progressed, we saw how that theory was really coming together. Every time we found a wreck, we could see it on d’Estrées’ map, right where it was supposed to be. Bourbon, Bellinguer, Defenseur, and the rest—there were wrecks at the site where each was marked on the map. By the end of the expedition, we were no longer using the wrecks to determine the accuracy of the map but rather using the map to determine where to look for wrecks.

  That was important. It meant that d’Estrées’ map could be considered an accurate and reliable primary source document when describing the history of the wrecks at Las Aves. It also meant that we could be fairly certain that the wrecks named on the map were the wrecks we were finding. In other words, when looking at a scattering of guns and anchors, we could identify which ship they had once belonged to.

  That was most important to me because of the two wrecks identified only as flibustier, the pirate ship wrecks. Now that the good admiral had proved himself a reliable map maker, it was a different story. If I found wrecks noted as flibustier exactly as d’Estrées had marked them on the maps, I could be reasonably sure I had found more pirate shipwrecks.

  I was waiting for my chance to go and look.

  29

  War and Peace

  While you behave with such respect to the justice and friendship that exist between the French and the English crowns, I am always your friend.

  —Sir Thomas Lynch to Laurens de Graff

  1683

  THE SPANISH MAIN

  Ironically, the pirates more than three centuries ago seemed to get more government cooperation than we did. And all we wanted to take was pictures.

  The unofficial sanction that the buccaneers enjoyed, however, was going to come to an end, at least temporarily. The guns of Vera Cruz reverberated all around the Caribbean, and echoed through the centers of government in England, France, Spain, and Holland.

  In 1678, the Treaty of Nijmegen had been signed in the Netherlands, bringing to an end the third of the seventeenth-century Dutch Wars, the conflict in which d’Estrées had lost his fleet on Las Aves and marking the beginning of the great wave of piracy that followed in the wake of that disaster.

  During the five years of peace, five years of suspicious, uneasy, brittle peace in Europe, the shifting alliances and balances of power left everyone waiting for the next, inevitable conflict. Far from the eyes and control of their home governments, the power brokers of the Caribbean continued to play their clandestine games.

  By the time of the Vera Cruz raid, Spain was an old, worn-out lion, lacking the strength and skill of its youth. Insulted repeatedly, it could do little more than growl and swat at its tormentors. But Vera Cruz was one insult too many, and Spain fought back.

  Spanish efforts at retaliation met with mixed results. The Armada de Barlovento did manage to capture two of the lesser pirate captains who had been at the sack of Vera Cruz. Pierre d’Orange and Antoine Bernard were French filibusters who commanded, respectively, the Dauphin and the Prophète Daniel, tiny pirate ships mounting two guns each. When they heard of the great buccaneer gathering at Roatán they abandoned their plans to go turtle hunting and instead joined in with Van Hoorn and de Grammont.

  The Armada de Barlovento captured the two pirates at Little Cayman Island on August 4, 1683. Spanish law dictated that pirate leaders be tried at the scene of their crimes. The two men were returned to Vera Cruz, where they were confronted by plenty of witnesses, especially d’Orange, who had been responsible for keeping the prisoners locked in the cathedral, where so many had died. D’Orange was asked at his trial how a Catholic such as he could have looted and defiled a cathedral and participated in such horrendous crimes. His answer, to the effect that “everyone else was doing it,” did little for
his defense.

  D’Orange was found guilty. Presumably Bernard was as well, though there is no record of what became of him. On November 22, 1683, d’Orange was marched through the streets of Vera Cruz and, by way of example to other pirates, hanged, then decapitated. His head was put on a spike at the wharf.

  Understanding the potential diplomatic ramifications of the sack of Vera Cruz, Sir Thomas Lynch wrote to the governor of Havana, protesting his innocence regarding anything having to do with the event. He explained that he had, in fact, attempted to warn the Spanish of the impending attack. It was only Spanish bungling, he claimed, that had caused the warning not to arrive. The letter is a masterpiece of artistic smoke-blowing. Lynch writes:

  One of our men-of-war at St. Domingo demanded Vanhorn as a rebel and a pirate, to bring him here, where he would have received the reward due to such ruffians; but the President [Pouancay] thought fit to protect him, and afterwards released him, having taken 20,000 pieces of eight from him on pretense of the six patararoes he took in Spain.1

  It seems odd that Lynch would go to the trouble of sending a man-of-war all the way to Santo Domingo to arrest Van Hoorn when six months earlier Van Hoorn had come calling at Jamaica with letters from de Pouançay to Lynch. Lynch had been perfectly aware of Van Hoorn’s intentions. Nonetheless, Lynch contends, “I have at my own charge chased out of the Indies all the pirates that prey on us or on your nation. I have done all in my power to serve the Spanish nation.”2 This from the man who six months earlier wrote that he hoped to placate the pirates by not punishing them for robbing the Spaniards!

  Lynch goes on to bemoan the fact that for all the help he has given the Spanish, “I have received neither thanks nor civility, nor have the English received any privilege. Not one of our ships, that the Spaniards meet with, will they fail to take and plunder if they can.”3