The Lost Fleet

by Barry Clifford

  When HMS Drake was condemned, the Council of Jamaica was forced to dispatch its armed sloop to the Cayman Islands to protect the English turtling vessels working there. De Graff was also making for the Caymans. The Earl of Inchiquin, who was then governor of Jamaica, reported the incident to the Lords of Trade and Plantations:

  The Island has therefore fitted out a sloop, which lately went to Caymanos for turtle, where there were several of our craft lying. There Laurens, the great pirate of Petit Guavos, engaged the sloop, and the rest of the craft escaped. The firing was heard continuing till eleven at night, and as this was a month since and nothing has been heard of the sloop, we conclude that Laurens has taken her, he having two men against one in his barco longo. We have therefore no ships now except HMS Swan, which is so bad a sailor that she is little better than nothing.9

  It was one of the few occasions in which a pirate was able to defeat an English naval vessel. The sloop apparently put up a terrific fight before she was taken, fighting well into the night. Inchiquin’s complaint concerning a lack of ships reflects the ongoing problem of European nations’ unwillingness to dispatch their best ships to the West Indies and thus strip the home defenses. The naval forces in the Caribbean and the American colonies tended to be older, second-line ships.

  Thomas Lynch, the former governor of Jamaica, had carried on an amiable correspondence with de Graff, with the hope, of course, of luring him into the English fold. Now that de Graff was fully on the side of the French, the new governor had quite a different attitude. No matter what commission de Graff held or what title was given him by the king of France, he was always labeled a pirate by the English.

  After taking the English sloop in the Cayman Islands, de Graff returned to Saint-Domingue, having heard rumors of a joint English-Spanish raid on the island. De Cussy transferred de Graff’s base of operations from Ile à Vache to Cap François, as he did not wish to “risk further a person so zealous in his service in such a feeble quarter.”10

  COMBINED OPERATIONS

  In January 1691, de Cussy was ready to lead an offensive against the Spanish near Santo Domingo. With de Graff’s filibuster fleet for transportation, he landed with a small army at Saint-Domingue and marched inland. Past Spanish military performance in the region gave de Cussy and de Graff cause for optimism in their venture.

  This time, they met with something that de Graff had never seen: fierce and overwhelming Spanish force. The Armada de Barlovento landed 2,600 Spanish troops near Cap François. Another seven hundred made the march overland from Santo Domingo. They outnumbered the French three to one.

  Such odds had never been a problem for de Graff in the past. He had always come out on top. This time, however, the Spanish soldiers were not poorly trained and unmotivated militia or garrison troops, but well-disciplined and well-prepared line infantry.

  French and Spanish met on an open plain called Sabane de la Limonade, and what began as a battle soon became a rout. The Spanish killed as many as five hundred of the French troops, including Governor Pierre-Paul Tarin de Cussy.

  Laurens de Graff was the man the Spanish wanted most, but he managed to flee into the hills. In the weeks while the Spanish rampaged throughout the countryside before finally withdrawing, de Graff narrowly avoided capture. Arrogance and an underestimation of the fighting capability of the Spanish had resulted in the loss of the governor’s life and the filibuster’s greatest defeat yet. And there was more to come.

  Governorship of Saint-Domingue passed to Jean-Baptiste Ducasse, an energetic and able man. With the loss of so many officers in the disastrous battle at Sabane de la Limonade, de Graff now assumed an even more important role in French military activity in the West Indies. At this point, the former slave became Sieur de Graff, lieutenant du roi for the government of Ile la Tortue and coast of Saint-Domingue.

  In 1692, de Graff was busy recruiting, organizing, and maneuvering French forces against another possible Spanish invasion, but the Spanish never came. Despite de Graff’s three years of land fighting, Ducasse recognized that the filibuster would be far more effective afloat than he was leading ground troops. Having de Graff loose at sea would help keep the enemy off balance. By 1694, the governor was ready to employ de Graff in the manner in which he had been so effective for the past decade: leading a massive buccaneer army in an amphibious raid.

  For the first time in his career, de Graff would be leading his filibuster army against the English, not the Spanish. The target was Jamaica. In June 1693, de Graff and Ducasse organized an armada consisting of twenty-two ships and more than three thousand filibusters. Among these men were English and Irish Jacobites, supporters of the recently deposed James II as the true king of England. With this powerful force, de Graff fell on the eastern tip of Jamaica.

  This attack had not even a tinge of piracy. De Graff was a legitimate military officer, a knight of the Order of St. Louis, leading French troops. The sanction of legal authority did not make the former pirate any less effective. He and his men landed at Cow Bay and Point Morant and ravaged the eastern part of the island, then made a feint toward the capital of Jamaica, Port Royal. When the English sent columns of troops to meet them, the seaborne raiders returned to their ships and stood out to sea.

  They reappeared on the night of July 28, landing fifteen hundred men at Carlisle Bay. The next day de Graff and his men advanced against a garrison of 250 men. Boldly holding their fire until the last moment, the filibusters were able to deliver a devastating volley that drove the English defenders from their trenches and sent them fleeing.

  Unfortunately for the buccaneers, Jamaica is considerably smaller than the Yucatán, towns were not so isolated, and, since the island was the capital of the English West Indies, there also were significant forces stationed there. Reinforcements were sent from Port Royal and arrived after a hard forced overnight march. Only their arrival prevented de Graff from laying waste to the entire area. For nearly a week he maintained control of the ground he had taken, sending his filibusters out to scour the countryside.

  The Jamaican plantation houses, however, were each built like mini-fortresses, and the filibusters had no artillery to take them on. They satisfied themselves with whatever loot they could find, as well as nearly sixteen hundred slaves. On August 3, 1694, de Graff and his men reembarked and left Jamaica behind.

  It was the last time De Graff led a seaborne raid at the head of a buccaneer army.

  The following spring found Laurens de Graff again in command of a small land-based force near his new home at Cap François on the north shore of modern Haiti. On May 24, 1695, the enemy came.

  Not just a raid but a major combined operation landed near de Graff’s plantation. The British Commodore Robert Wilmot and Colonel Luke Lillingston had arrived in the West Indies and formed a joint operation with their opposite numbers in the Spanish naval and land forces. They completely overwhelmed de Graff and his small army, forcing the French to retreat in the face of their onslaught. De Graff abandoned his home to the invaders. His wife, Marie-Anne Dieu-le-Veut, and their two daughters were captured and made prisoners.

  De Graff sent word to Governor Ducasse calling for reinforcements, but they did not come, probably because Ducasse had none to send. The combined English and Spanish troops pushed the French defenders back as far as Port-de-Paix, which the invaders overran more than a month after landing. Having taken Port-de-Paix, the English and Spanish withdrew, leaving behind the kind of destruction that de Graff had once brought to the Spanish.

  Once the fighting was over, the finger-pointing began. De Graff bore the brunt of it, with some even suggesting that he had colluded with the enemy, since Holland, de Graff’s native land, was allied with the English and Spanish. Laurens was relieved of his command and sent to France to face a court-martial.

  The subsequent trial of the Sieur de Graff, lieutenant du roi, completely exonerated him from any wrongdoing. He returned to his home in the West Indies, but by then the war was over, and his stan
ding was greatly diminished, despite having been cleared by the court-martial. De Graff’s wife was held captive by the Spanish until the very last prisoner exchange in October 1698, possibly out of Spanish vindictiveness toward its former tormentor.

  Laurens de Graff’s fighting days were over. By the time the famed buccaneer returned to Saint-Domingue from his court-martial, it had been twenty-one years since the great wreck at Las Aves. Twenty-one years of near constant warfare, of pirate raids and bloody land battles. No doubt, de Graff was weary and ready for a change.

  AN OLD PIRATE MOVES ON

  A the end of the year 1698, an explorer named Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville stopped off at Saint-Domingue. He was en route to Louisiana with an eye toward establishing a colony there. De Graff, now around fifty years old, agreed to accompany him as translator and guide.

  At first, de Graff’s reputation proved to be a hindrance to the expedition. The five ships of d’Iberville’s squadron anchored off of Pensacola, Florida, in January 1699 and called for a pilot to bring them into the harbor. The Spanish officer in charge of the local garrison there was not happy to see ships belonging to his recent enemy just offshore. When he went aboard he was even less happy to find that d’Iberville’s translator was none other than the famed “Lorencillo.” Entrance to the harbor was refused, and a few days later, at the request of the Spanish, the squadron put to sea again.

  The French squadron sailed west, eventually landing at what is now Biloxi, Mississippi. With them went de Graff, who settled there with the official function of clerk for the king. Five years later, it was reported that he was dead.

  Just as de Graff’s beginnings were shrouded in mystery, so too was his end. One source states he died near Biloxi, but another says he is buried at Axis, Alabama, a suburb of Mobile. The governor of Cap François (modern Cap Haitien, Haiti) wrote that he had died there on May 25, 1704.

  The end of the seventeenth century saw the end of the great buccaneers of the Caribbean. The piracy that pitted English and French against the Spanish Empire in the New World was over, and the filibusters of Tortuga and Petit Goâve, who were looked upon by colonial governors as both a plague and a resource, were gone. Some retired, most were dead. The Carribean had no place for them anymore.

  The piracy that would spring up to take its place, piracy based from Madagascar and the Bahamas and colonial America, would be something very different.

  The greatest of the true buccaneers, Laurens de Graff, died peacefully in a quiet backwater colony. In his tumultuous lifetime he had gone from slave to knight of the realm, a black man who rose higher than any other filibuster ever did, in a world in which slavery was an integral and unquestioned way of life. Of all the pirates of the Spanish Main, de Graff was the best of them. The world has never since seen his like. Nor is it likely to.

  36

  From Good to Bad to Ugly

  NOVEMBER I, 1998

  LAS AVES

  At first, I was not sure what to do about the pirate wrecks for fear word might leak out to the wrong people. News that we had found a pirate shipwreck with intact metal-laden barrels would bring swarms of treasure hunters.

  It should be remembered, of course, that d’Estrées’ fleet was on its way to sack Curaçao, not on its way back. There would have been no captured booty on board, and filibusters seldom carried their personal fortunes with them. Still, it conjured up the kind of images to tempt what Billy Bones in Treasure Island called “lubbers as couldn’t keep what they got, and want to nail what is another’s.”

  After a few hours, I did tell the others of our discovery. They were as excited as I was, and I told the story of de Grammont and de Graff, and how they led the buccaneers of Las Aves on their rampage at Maracaibo.

  The next day we went back with the whole team to map and film the site of the second pirate shipwreck. The wind was building, but it was not so bad as to keep our dive boat from getting over the reef. We knew, however, that it was only a matter of time before we would be blown off the site.

  We found even more artifacts, including cannons and some odd, concreted shapes, the identity of which we could not even guess at. We also found clear glass liquor bottles embedded in the coral. That was the only wreck where we saw that. It was another identifier: I would expect to see more gin or rum bottles aboard a pirate vessel than a man-of-war. We swept the barrels again, and again the metal detectors sang. Most likely they held gun parts or nails, but one couldn’t help thinking, Silver?…

  The barrels were camouflaged with coral and a fantastic array of other sea growth. They had become a part of the living reef, and to remove them would have taken a lot of brute force that would have irreparably damaged the reef. Even if our permit would have allowed for excavation and retrieval, there would be the question of whether or not to leave them in situ.

  As at all of the other wreck sites, there were also cannon balls and lead shot scattered everywhere. We couldn’t fan our hands over the sand without seeing them. The shot were in little pockets where the canvas bags that once held them had rotted away. Stored in shot lockers, big wooden bins belowdecks, the cannon balls had scattered all over the reef when the ships broke up. Using the metal detectors became almost pointless because they were going off constantly.

  I was still thrilled about the wreck, even as we went through our ordinary mapping routine the next day. We had found two pirate-ship wrecks and used an old map to do it. It doesn’t get much better than that for pirate hunters.

  I kept thinking about how Ken Kinkor was going to react to these discoveries. With the Whydah, he was studying artifacts from the first pirate shipwreck ever authenticated. If this project moved from “reconnaissance and survey” to “archaeological excavation and recovery,” there would be data from the second and third to be scrutinized and interpreted as well. While these vessels might never be identified by name, they could still serve as a potentially valuable pool of information about a subculture of men whose lives are seriously misunderstood by both scholars and the general public.

  From the very onset of my research on the Whydah nearly two decades ago, I had noticed the international character of her crew. Ken had taken these perceptions and built further on them. We learned that pirates of the early eighteenth century had practiced an amazingly high level of tolerance among themselves: national, religious, and racial. When compared with European societies and their colonies, buccaneers were also extraordinarily democratic and egalitarian. Now we had the chance to see if their forebears by three decades had held similar beliefs.

  Analysis of shipwreck artifacts produces a sense of the men who used those objects. We believe that Sam Bellamy and his crew of the period 1715–25 held most of the same beliefs as the Brethren of the Coast of the period 1678–1700. However, those buccaneers operating prior to the disaster at Las Aves were more closely tied to their respective governments than were the freebooters who followed in their wake. The later freebooters and pirates were far more self-reliant, which led to a different form of social organization. In practical terms, Laurens de Graff would have found himself at home aboard the Whydah in ways that Henry Morgan would not have. Without the disaster at Las Aves, which severely weakened French naval power, the freebooters and pirates of the post-1678 period would not have risen to power.

  Having read the history of d’Estrées’ fleet and seen the wrecks, I had a good sense for the scale of the disaster in terms of the human cost. And I had already fought my own battle with the reef. In full daylight, knowing exactly what I was up against, with cutting-edge equipment and a lifetime of underwater experience, I had still been nearly knocked out of the ring by the reef.

  I thought of those men, the French soldiers and sailors and the buccaneers, who in one instant went from the solid deck of a sturdy man-of-war into the cauldron, half-drowned, dashed against staghorn and fire coral, dragged over the reef by crashing waves in the dead of night. Most people in the seventeenth century could not swim. Swimming would not have done them
much good anyway, not on that reef.

  No doubt some managed to cling to wreckage and drift to the beach. Others must have walked through the rushing waters across the reef to shore—though the trek would have cut their feet to pieces. In some places they would have had to swim across gaps in the coral. In some instances, the ordeal might have stretched almost four miles. I am amazed that anyone got to shore alive. Many of them, of course, were so cut up by the coral that they wished they were dead. It appears that about half of them were granted their wish.

  As they reached the sandy beach at Las Aves, they must have collapsed in exhaustion, relieved to be on dry land. Yet many would have been in agony from the beating they had taken in the turbulent water on the reef and their wounds from the fire coral.

  Each time I looked at the island I felt something of the despair these sailors must have experienced. It is one of the most inhospitable, windswept, arid pieces of real estate I have ever seen in the Caribbean. There is virtually no vegetation aside from scrub brush and mangrove, and no shelter from the welding-rod bright sun.

  I can only imagine what those castaways thought. Some of them probably gave up hope and died as soon as the rising sun revealed what a godforsaken place they had ended up on.

  The sores and lacerations on the sailors’ hands, knees, and feet would have started growing septic, hour by hour, day by day. Fire coral leaves a painful red welt that feels as if you are being jabbed with hot matches. The bugs on the island are intolerable. When we were anchored in the lagoon with the breeze blowing we didn’t notice them, but, once ashore, they came swarming—flies, no-see-ums, and sand fleas—just as they must have come swarming to the smell of fresh blood from the survivors’ wounds more than three centuries ago.

  The sun would have beaten down on them and their thirst would have quickly become overpowering. Wine and brandy were their staples, but alcohol would have further dehydrated them, making the agony worse. For food, they had either salt-meat fished from casks drifting in from the ships or conch, which is also very salty. They would have required enormous amounts of water to avoid complete dehydration, and so they must have been going mad with thirst.