The Lost Fleet

by Barry Clifford

  The Spanish squadron was not able to close with de Graff that day, but the following afternoon he was spotted again by the Spanish frigate Nuestra Señora del Honhón near Alacrán Reef, about eighty miles north of the Yucatán Peninsula in the Gulf of Mexico. The eight-gun vessel Jesús, María y José, under the command of Andrés de Pez, was sent to beat back to windward and advise the admiral. It was not until four o’clock the following afternoon that the lumbering flagship and vice-flag were able to run downwind and locate Neptune.

  De Graff was effectively trapped. The Spaniards had the weather gauge, meaning that they were upwind of his position and could drop down on him, while he was hard pressed to tack up to them, and harder pressed to get past them to windward. It was easiest to continue to flee downwind, but eventually he would pile up on the coast of Mexico. The Armada de Barlovento at last had Spain’s “Public Enemy Number One” right where it wanted him.

  As the two big Spanish ships closed with him, de Graff tried desperately to work his way to windward of them, jettisoning everything he could, just as Bot had done. It was no use. There was no passing the big Spaniards to run away upwind. Night fell before the battle was joined.

  At dawn on September 14, the Spanish opened up on de Graff and Neptune, and the buccaneer returned fire. The fight lasted all day long, with Neptune, Santo Cristo, and Concepción exchanging broadsides, circling and maneuvering for advantage. The Spanish ships were big and powerful, but they were also slow and clumsy, and de Graff handled Neptune brilliantly. All day long, he evaded the killing broadsides of the Spanish with their superiority in weight of metal.

  The Spanish flagship fired fourteen full broadsides into Neptune, and Concepción expended sixteen hundred rounds. This was met by devastating fire from Neptune’s great guns and muskets. For all the iron the Spaniards hurled at de Graff, they managed only to shoot away a few of Neptune’s spars, none of which crippled the pirates’ ship.

  By dusk, there was still no winner in the exhausting battle, thanks to de Graff’s uncanny seamanship and gunnery. Admiral Ochoa was not well. Too weak to stand, he had directed the battle from a canvas chair on his quarterdeck. As the sun began to set Ochoa’s condition worsened, and he was given the last rites. Command of the squadron was turned over to Vice Admiral Astina of the Concepción.

  De Graff was still fighting for his life. In the darkness, he threw everything over the side, including his cannons. This was the last toss of the dice. He gambled that rendering himself defenseless would allow him to claw to windward of the big Spanish ships. If that failed, he would no doubt have blown himself up.

  The gamble paid off. When dawn broke the next day, Neptune was to windward of the Spaniards and sailing away from them. The Spanish put up their helms in a halfhearted attempt to chase, but it was futile. There would be no overtaking the lightened, well-handled ship. The wind filled in from the southeast and Santo Cristo’s superstructure, battered in the previous day’s fight, collapsed. When Concepción hove to to stand by her damaged companion, Neptune made a clean getaway. It was a remarkable feat for de Graff and a humiliation for the Armada de Barlovento.

  Admiral Andrés de Ochoa died a few days after the battle. By the end of September, the Armada de Barlovento had returned to Vera Cruz. For the admiral, death at sea was undoubtedly preferable to enduring the further humiliation of the court-martial that followed that debacle, at which most of the officers were found guilty of misconduct.1

  The armada did have one thing to show for its efforts: Pierre Bot and his men. Reneging on their promise of quarter, the Spanish tried them for piracy and found them guilty. Bot and his officers were executed, along with six Spanish subjects who had joined Bot’s crew. As was usual in such cases, the remaining prisoners were probably enslaved.

  De Graff made his way to Cuba. The close call had not dampened his enthusiasm for making war on Spain.

  THE LAST OF DE GRAFF, PIRATE

  The sack of Campeche had been the Chevalier de Grammont’s piratical swan song. De Graff had more left in him.

  In February 1686, the Spanish staged a raid on French Saint-Domingue on the island of Hispaniola. De Graff was now so prominent a citizen that he owned a plantation on that island. The Spaniards raided his plantation and carried off one hundred of de Graff’s slaves. His wife, Marie-Anne, and their two young daughters narrowly escaped capture. In retaliation, de Graff organized another of his trademark raids. This time he gathered together seven ships and more than five hundred filibusters.

  Just as de Cussy had been trying to bring de Grammont under government authority, so he was trying to recruit de Graff. In the fall of 1686, de Cussy wrote to Governor Molesworth of Jamaica, “It is uncertain whether [Laurens de Graff] is gone, but certainly my letter offering him terms has never come to his hands.”2 Or perhaps de Graff simply chose to ignore de Cussy’s terms, opting instead for one last raid he knew would never receive official sanction.

  De Graff sailed for familiar territory. Once again he went to leeward and the Yucatán, anchoring in Bahía de la Ascención, just over one hundred miles south of their old rendezvous of Isla Mujeres. This time, their target was not a port city. Instead, de Graff’s object was the city of Tihosuco, sixty miles inland.

  Five hundred buccaneers under the mulatto leader marched against the town, but there was no chance of surprise with so big a band traveling so far. The townspeople fled before the pirates arrived, and de Graff and company looted and burned what was left.

  From Tihosuco the pirates continued to push inland toward the town of Valladolid, about thirty-five miles north. As was generally the case, a great army of refugees rushed on ahead of the buccaneers, trying to save themselves and their valuables. Soon there were only thirty-six Spanish soldiers left to defend Valladolid. The buccaneers were virtually unopposed. Then, six miles from the city, de Graff ordered his men to turn and go back the way they came.

  No one knows why de Graff retreated with the city right before him and essentially undefended, but a fine legend has grown up around the incident. As the story goes, the refugees, fleeing before the pirates, littered the ground with whatever they could no longer carry. The pirates in turn eagerly gathered up the items left behind.

  A quick-thinking mulatto named Núñez saw this and planted a set of fake instructions in one pile of cast-offs. The instructions, per the legend, were supposed to be from the local military commander, Luis de Briaga, ordering that the pirates be lured farther inland and into a trap.

  If this is a true story, perhaps the mulatto Núñez missed his calling. De Graff had proved that for a person of color in those days the pirate community was the best place for advancement, and a man who could outwit de Graff would have gone far.

  De Graff abandoned the Yucatán and made his way to his other frequent hideout, Roatán. From there he sailed back toward Petit Goâve, but had the bad luck to wreck his ship off Cartagena while chasing a fourteen-gun Spanish bark.

  De Graff was not the kind to let a simple shipwreck stand in his way. As de Cussy explained to Molesworth, “Laurens was wrecked off Cartagena while in pursuit of a small bark, but nevertheless took her with his boat and saved his people.”3 In October 1686, he sailed into Petit Goâve, aboard the unfortunate bark.

  DE GRAFF—A KING’S MAN

  There is some question as to when de Graff made the shift from pirate to French officer. Certainly he had for most of his career carried some commission or other from the various French governors in the West Indies, but that alone hardly granted him unquestioned legitimacy. As we have seen, nearly everyone carried some sort of a commission, including de Grammont and the notorious Van Hoorn.

  In October 1687, Molesworth reported that de Cussy had informed him that “the French King had made Grammont (whom we took to be lost) his second lieutenant, and Laurens his third major.”4

  It is interesting to note that de Cussy does not seem to be very forthcoming about de Grammont, who had disappeared a year and a half before, and was unwillin
g to confirm rumors of de Grammont’s disappearance. Perhaps the French governor did not want to admit to his English counterpart that so effective a leader as de Grammont had been lost. That being the case, perhaps de Graff really was not on the French payroll at that time, and de Cussy was just engaging in a bit more disinformation. Whatever the case, de Graff’s activities were moving more in line with official French policy in the Caribbean.

  Under the heading “too little, too late,” the Spanish dispatched a squadron of Basque privateers from the Bay of Biscay in 1687 for the express purpose of hunting pirates and other interlopers in the Spanish West Indies. The commander of the squadron promised “to go in search of the pirate Lorencillo before anything else.”5

  In May of that year, a single frigate from that squadron encountered de Graff on the southern coast of Cuba. As the two ships engaged, the Biscayan frigate promptly ran aground. The situation looked bad for the pirate hunter until a small fleet of Cuban coast guard vessels sortied out from the shore in support of the stranded ship. Rather than abandon the fight, however, de Graff turned on the coast guard vessels, inflicted terrible casualties, sank a piragua, and took a small vessel as a prize.

  No doubt de Graff had racked up any number of enemies over the years, but the slaughter he inflicted on the Cuban guarda del costa produced an unusually determined foe. Blas Miguel, a Cuban filibuster and perhaps himself a mulatto, had lost his brother in the fight with de Graff. Blas Miguel swore revenge.

  AN ACT OF ILL-CONCEIVED VENGEANCE

  During the dark morning hours of August 10, 1687, Blas Miguel stood into the harbor at Petit Goâve with eighty-five men and two small vessels, a brigantine and a piragua. August 10 is the feast day of St. Lawrence, de Graff’s patron saint, and Blas Miguel hoped to catch him celebrating and off guard.

  The attack began well. The Cubans stormed ashore at first light and caught the town by surprise. Raging through the streets as wildly as Laurens de Graff ever did, they hacked the mayor to death and bayonetted his pregnant wife. They looted a number of homes and took the small fortress without resistance.

  In the growing light of day, it became clear to the residents of Petit Goâve that the invaders were few in number. In fact, of the eighty-five men that Miguel had with him, twenty had remained aboard the vessels, and those ashore were not particularly well armed.

  Reinforcements poured in from the countryside. Blas Miguel and those of his Cuban raiders who were still alive retreated to the small fortress. In the harbor, his brigantine abruptly departed in a hail of French cannon fire. De Graff himself waded out through the surf sword in hand and captured the piragua.

  Trapped and surrounded, Blas Miguel made a laughable offer: to return all the booty he had taken if he and his men were allowed to sail away. Instead, the buccaneers of Petit Goâve stormed the fortress and took Miguel and forty-seven of his men.

  The next day, forty-eight surviving raiders were tried, with predictable results. Miguel and two of his officers were sentenced to be “broken alive on the wheel.” Two were found to have been forced into the Cubans’ service, and they were released. The rest were sentenced to hang.

  The punishments were carried out the next day. Attacking the buccaneer stronghold of Laurens de Graff with sixty-five lightly armed men had not been a prudent move.

  35

  A Naval Officer at War

  Laurens with a ship and 200 men touched at Montego Bay the other day and did no harm….

  —Sir Francis Watson

  SUMMER 1687

  ILE À VACHE

  By summer 1687, de Graff was no longer an outlaw, taking ships and sacking towns on his own authority, but rather was taking his orders from de Cussy. In September, the French governor dispatched him to Ile à Vache, under the guise of reinforcing the French claim to that island off the southern coast of Hispaniola. In fact, an old Spanish shipwreck had recently been uncovered there and de Graff’s presence was meant to discourage any but the French from working the wreck.

  Laurens was appointed a major, or royal adjutant, of Ile à Vache. De Cussy reported that the former pirate promised “to acquit himself with the same zeal and fidelity as he had done during the ten years he has served under the French standard.”1 That was exactly what he did.

  The British were quickly informed that Ile à Vache was now off limits. Molesworth was not concerned, as his intelligence assured him that the island was of no great value. Not everyone agreed with that. Nearly a year later, the Duke of Albemarle, who succeeded Molesworth as governor of Jamaica, wrote to the Lords of Trade and Plantations saying that

  the Isle of Ash [Ile à Vache], once dependent on Jamaica, and valuable for turtle fishing, has for the past two years been taken by the pirate Laurens, and British subjects have been prohibited from hunting or fishing. The place is of importance, and in case of a war would, in French hands, be very prejudicial to us…. 2

  From fall 1687 to fall 1689, Laurens de Graff seems to have lived an unusually peaceful existence, at least by his standards.

  After asserting French dominance over Ile à Vache, de Graff received a new mission from Governor de Cussy. Information from a captured Spanish captain alerted them to the presence of a valuable wreck on the Serranilla Bank, a submerged mountain on the ocean floor, nearly equidistant from Jamaica and the east coast of Nicaragua. De Cussy suggested that de Graff work the wreck.

  When de Graff sailed for the Serranilla Bank, no one in the Caribbean knew that the nations of Europe were once again at war. This time it was the War of the Grand Alliance, also known as King William’s War, pitting France against England and its allies. Even though they did not know that de Graff was officially their enemy, the English kept a wary eye on the filibuster. The acting governor of Jamaica, Sir Francis Watson, wrote, “A number under Laurens have left Petit Guavos [sic] after a wreck, as they give out.”3

  Though Watson does not appear entirely convinced that de Graff was on so benign a mission as fishing an ancient Spanish wreck, that was exactly what he was doing. Using grappling hooks and Indian divers, the filibuster worked the site with limited success for a month or so. When the ship de Graff had dispatched for more supplies failed to return in a reasonable time, he was forced to up-anchor and to search out supplies himself on the southern coast of Cuba.

  The former pirate soon learned of the new conflict in Europe, and he knew that he would be called upon to join the fight. He touched at Jamaica, but rather than raid the island, he left a brazen and terrifying promise to return. Watson reported to the Lords of Trade and Plantations:

  Laurens with a ship and 200 men touched at Montego Bay the other day and did no harm, but said he would obtain a commission at Petit Guavos and return to plunder the whole of the north side of the Island. The people are so affrightened that they have sent their wives and children to Port Royal.4

  De Graff was either exhibiting a concern for protocol that had been quite lacking during his days of wanton piracy or perhaps was simply displaying his customary panache.

  When Pierre-Paul Tarin de Cussy first took office, he maintained what amounted to a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy toward the filibusters, recognizing their importance in the defense and prosperity of the French West Indies. By 1687, in part as a result of the sack of Campeche, the French court ordered de Cussy to reverse that policy and, against his better judgment, he reined in the buccaneers.

  As war came upon them, it became clear that de Cussy’s initial policy would, in fact, have been the best course. The governor wrote bitterly that if he had been allowed to continue the wink-and-a-nod attitude toward the pirates, “there would be ten or twelve stout ships on this coast, with many brave people aboard to preserve this colony and its commerce.”5 De Cussy understood that maintaining a large fleet of privateers gave the government a navy of sorts at no expense.

  Fortunately, de Cussy still had Laurens, now Major Laurens de Graff, Knight of the Order of St. Louis, and de Graff had not forgotten his promise to the people
of Jamaica.

  DE GRAFF RETURNS

  In the beginning of December 1689, de Graff returned to Jamaica, having called at Saint-Domingue to receive official orders from de Cussy and to recruit a small fleet of French filibusters. Despite de Graff’s earlier threat, official word of the hostilities in Europe had not reached Jamaica. De Graff was able to scoop up eight or ten unwary English ships as prizes, as well as to stage a raid on at least one coastal plantation.

  The English hurriedly assembled a fleet under the command of Captain Edward Spragge of HMS Drake. The minutes of the Council of Jamaica reflect the hasty preparations. “On the report of the pirate Laurens, ordered that the Island’s armed sloop come to Port Royal to join the fleet against Laurens, and that a second sloop be fitted out…. Order for pressing a ship for the fleet against Laurens.”6

  The minutes also reflect the realization that it was no longer safe to venture out to sea with de Graff lurking offshore. Six days later the council ordered “the sloops not ready to accompany Captain Spragge against Laurens, not to leave the harbor.”7 And three days after that, “that the known trading sloops and no others be allowed to leave the harbor after the departure of the fleet against Laurens.”8

  Implicit in this order is the fear that spies might warn Laurens of the preparations being made against him.

  The little fleet had no effect against the pirate and his squadron. HMS Drake was in such poor shape that she was condemned early the following year, so it is hardly surprising that Spragge could not drive the filibuster away.

  In March 1690, a second attempt was made to expel Laurens from the Jamaican coast, with similar results. In fact, it was not until the end of May that he finally sailed from that island. Laurens de Graff had terrorized the coast of Jamaica for half a year and had held it under the thumb of his blockade.