The Lost Fleet

by Barry Clifford

  In a sort of Bunker Hill don’t-fire-until-you-see-the-whites-of-their-eyes strategy Paine and his men waited patiently while the piragua closed with them. Unfortunately, Paine’s gunner was overly eager to have at them. He urged Paine to let him fire, arguing that he could put a cannon ball right down the length of the piragua, from bow to stern, doing terrible damage.

  Paine argued that they were better off letting the enemy get closer still. With the kind of town hall atmosphere that could only exist among an ad hoc crew of Rhode Islanders, the gunner persisted in his arguments. Finally Paine allowed him his shot, since the gunner was “certain (as he said) he should rake them fore and aft.”

  The gunner fired and missed, and Picard realized that he was not dealing with an unarmed merchantman. The piragua turned on its heel and headed back to the large privateers, robbing Paine of his chance to dispose of a good portion of the enemy’s crew with a single broadside.

  The men in the piragua put their backs into their oars to flee the Loyal Stede’s broadsides. Once out of range, they waited for the squadron of privateers to sail up to them and then reembarked. The battle would now be ship to ship.

  Picard, in command of the bark, led the attack, as the three French vessels approached in line-ahead formation. The bark swept down on the anchored Rhode Island vessels. Coming up with them, the three ships exchanged murderous broadsides of great guns and small-arms fire as Picard sailed slowly past.

  Next in line was Captain Trimming, in command of the larger of the two sloops. He went about his business like a true pirate and died the same way. Eyewitnesses reported, “He took a glass of wine to drink, and wished it might be his damnation if he did not board them [the Rhode Island sloops] immediately. But as he was drinking, a bullet struck him in his neck, with which he instantly fell down dead….”

  The death of Trimming did nothing to quell the fury of the battle. The fighting was fast and furious. Samuel Niles, an eyewitness, reported:

  [T]he large sloop proceeded, as the former vessel [Picard’s bark] had done, and the lesser sloop likewise. Thus they passed by in course, and then tacked and brought their other broadsides to bear. In this manner they continued the fight until the night came on and prevented their farther conflict. Our men valiantly paid them back in their own coin, and bravely repulsed them, and killed several of them.

  The battle lasted for several bloody hours, but the English gunnery proved superior to the French. Picard lost fourteen men killed, including Trimming, which he considered a serious blow. He was reported to have claimed that he would rather have lost thirty men than his valuable second in command.

  In comparison, Paine lost only one man killed, a Native American, and six were slightly wounded. The French had aimed high, and a majority of their shot passed over the anchored sloops, so that the thrifty Yankees were able to collect musket and cannon balls on the shore beyond Paine’s fleet.

  As night fell, the French moved offshore and anchored for the night, not far from Paine. The English had nearly exhausted their powder and shot during the long engagement. Paine, expecting the battle to resume at first light, sent for whatever supplies might be found on Block Island.

  Pierre le Picard, however, had no more stomach for the fight. Rather than engage the English again, his squadron weighed their anchors at dawn and sailed off, heading out to sea. Certainly the results of the previous day’s fight would have been enough to discourage him, but Niles offers another possibility:

  [O]ne reason might be this (as was reported) that their Commodore understood by some means that it was Captain Paine he had encountered, said, “He would as soon choose to fight the devil as with him.” Such was their dialect.

  For once, Paine’s unsavory reputation did him some good.

  Seeing the Frenchmen making their escape, Paine and Godfrey went in pursuit of them, “with the valor and spirit of true Englishmen,” according to Niles. The privateers were fast and weatherly ships, however, and Paine could not overtake them.

  Picard also had in his company a small prize he had captured during his attacks on Long Island Sound, a merchantman loaded with wine and brandy. This ship was a dull sailor compared to the privateers, and Picard knew that she would not be able to outsail Paine. Rather than let the English recapture her, the French blew a hole in her bottom with a cannon and allowed her to sink. It must have been heartbreaking for a French crew to see a cargo of wine and brandy go to the bottom.

  When Paine reached the scuttled merchant ship, he found her hanging in the water. The bow had settled onto the bottom, but her stern was still held above water by a line made fast to a longboat that the merchantman had been towing astern. With the ship in that odd situation there was no way to salvage any of the cargo. When the Englishmen cut the line, the ship sank immediately. The Frenchmen were heading for the horizon with no chance that they would be overtaken. Paine and Godfrey had only the longboat as a prize.

  But prizes were not the issue here. Commodore Paine had attacked and beaten off a superior enemy, an enemy that had already caused tremendous harm to the coast and threatened to cause even more. Paine the “archpirate” was now Paine the hero, the savior of Rhode Island.

  THE GOLDEN YEARS

  During the next decade, Thomas Paine continued to grow in wealth and respectability. Only two months after driving off Picard and his squadron, Paine and his father-in-law Caleb Carr were made tax assessors for their hometown of Jamestown.

  Two years after that, in 1692, Paine was appointed by the general assembly to the rank of captain of militia. Generally such appointments are made by the town from which the militia is mustered. In this case Jamestown had failed to do so, letting the job fall to the assembly. The fact that it was the colonial government, not the town government, that selected him is evidence that Paine’s reputation was not only good but also widely known, even at the level of the colony’s general assembly.

  Paine’s reputation and notice were much enhanced in 1695 when Caleb Carr was elected governor of Rhode Island. Rhode Island politics was (and still is) raucous and colorful. Nepotism was an art form. Even by the standards of the seventeenth century, when nepotism was not nearly as frowned upon as it is today, Rhode Islanders were notorious for the practice. Having a father-in-law as governor could not have hurt Paine’s community standing.

  In 1698, Thomas Paine was officially admitted as a freeman of the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations. What is most surprising is that he had not been admitted earlier. Many of the posts he had already filled—tax assessor, militia officer, member of the grand jury—were generally reserved for freemen. His final admission as a freeman seems to have been a mere formality.

  Paine had finally arrived as a member in good standing in Rhode Island society. He was washed clean of the stain of piracy and its attendant scandal. And save for one uncomfortable incident in 1699, when he was accused, with good reason, of hiding loot for the notorious Captain William Kidd, he remained an upstanding citizen—at least by Rhode Island standards.

  In 1701, when Kidd was executed, Thomas Paine was around sixty-eight years old, but he had a good thirteen years left in him. In 1706, during Queen Anne’s War, he went to sea again, in joint command of an expedition consisting of two ships and 120 men, dispatched to hunt down a French privateer from that old pirate haunt Petit Goâve. The venture was successful, and they brought the privateer back to Newport as a prize. At age seventy-three or thereabouts, it was the old buccaneer’s final venture in armed conflict at sea. While one wonders if this too was one of his old comrades, he had probably outlived all of “the Men of Aves.”

  Paine lived out the rest of his years quietly in Jamestown. He died in the spring of 1715. He was in his eighties, a good long life for one who had lived so hard and fast, exposed himself to the dangers of sea and sword, fever and the rope, arrest and flying shot. His wife, Mercy, died three years later, and they are buried together on their property on Conanicut Island. Their house still stands to this day.


  Thomas Paine, one of the last of the old-time buccaneers, was gone. His death came two years after the Peace of Utrecht, which ended the War of the Spanish Succession in Europe. That cessation of hostilities threw countless sailors and privateersmen out of work and sparked the last great wave of piracy in the Caribbean.

  Paine did not live to see the high point of the eighteenth-century pirates, Blackbeard, Bart Roberts, Bellamy, and others. He was a man of an earlier era, and he was gone before this second great pirate awakening. Gone, but his fingerprints remained.

  He and Mercy had no children. His namesake appears to be his nephew, Thomas Paine of Block Island. In 1718, Thomas became the second husband of Elizabeth (Williams) McCarty. Elizabeth was a sister of Palgrave Williams of Newport, Rhode Island. And, as readers of Expedition Whydah will recall, Palgrave Williams was the partner of Samuel Bellamy, pirate captain of the Whydah Galley.

  And so it had come full circle. From the brandished forearm of Cape Cod to the deadly scorpion-tail reef of Las Aves, a chain stretched four decades between two sunken graveyards. I could picture the old buccaneer by the fireside during the long nights of winter, filling the ears of two ambitious young men with stories of shipwrecks and sunken treasure. I remembered what Jim Hawkins said of Billy Bones’s tales in Treasure Island: “Dreadful stories they were; about hanging, and walking the plank, and storms at sea, and the Dry Tortugas, and wild deeds and places on the Spanish Main. By his own account he must have lived his life among some of the wickedest men that God ever allowed upon the sea…”

  That might serve well as epitaph for Thomas Paine.2

  39

  The Legacy of Las Aves

  NOVEMBER 5, 1998

  LAS AVES

  By the time we were scheduled to leave Las Aves, we were ready. We weren’t arguing—not much, anyway—but we were still ready to leave.

  On any expedition, when people are thrown together in close quarters night and day, in harsh and demanding conditions, they start to chafe against one another. This trip was no exception.

  The accelerated schedule only raised the stress level. On a longer trip, there is more of an opportunity to get away from one another—if only for a few hours. If someone gets sick, they can take a break for a day or two. There is more time to satisfy different personal agendas and needs. But we did not have those luxuries.

  As we moved into the last few days of the project, Margot and I moved from our cabin into one with better ventilation, and my flu symptoms disappeared.

  The Venezuelan navy and coast guard were still dogging us. As the weather window closed, our fears of returning to the reef increased, adding to the general tension.

  In the evenings we would sit around the Antares, discussing the day’s work, studying videotapes for targets we may have overlooked, and swapping stories and tall tales. Charles is a natural raconteur and he has picked up some prize stories in the course of his adventures in the jungle. Once he told us how he returned to camp with a band of Yanomami Indians after a day of cutting wood in the jungle. That night, while they were sitting around the fire, the sound of chopping hardwood still resonated eerily through the blackness. Charles, somewhat unnerved, asked his Yanomami companions, “Do you hear that chopping sound?” “Yes. That is the sound of us chopping wood tomorrow.”

  “Ah, that explains it,” Charles said.

  He told us another story of a woman from New York who was part of a group he was guiding through the jungle. He told her not to wander off, but she did not follow instructions, and soon got lost. For three days she wandered alone in the jungle. Charles and the others eventually found her hiding in a hollow log. She was unrecognizable from insect bites and nearly mad with fear.

  The woman told them how a jaguar had stalked her. She claimed that at night the cat would lie down beside the log in which she was hiding and whisper to her in Spanish.

  “New Yorkers,” Charles said with more than a hint of repugnance. “She should have listened to me. Ah, but she learned a good lesson.”

  Charles’s ability to spin a tale made it obvious why he was such a popular lecturer with organizations like the New York Botanical Society. But there was darkness in his stories, a menacing darkness that made me thankful that we were in my element, the sea, rather than deep in the Amazon jungle.

  Near the end of the expedition, Charles’s adult daughter from a previous marriage and some of her friends came out for a visit, and our crew and those aboard Charles’s boat had a rare get-together. Charles’s daughter owns a horse farm in the country. I found her delightful and charming.

  Some of Charles’s friends had come out as well. They were all from the upper crust of Venezuelan society. Like Charles, they were pleasant and affable.

  Conversation flowed from rock stars to the relative toxicity of sea snakes to Nazis living in South America. But when the topic changed to politics, a shadow seemed to drift over our dinner guests, like the silhouette of a giant condor circling a flock of spring lambs. Indeed, our guests spoke of the prospect of Hugo Chávez as president as if he were planning to feature them as the main course at his inaugural dinner.

  Charles bragged, “I can hold them off forever with a small, well-trained force and escape out my back door—the Amazon jungle is my backyard.” He went on, “You Americans, you just don’t know how to treat your blacks. Here, we know how to treat them. They know their place.”

  The room went silent. The ship’s crew, all of whom were of African origins, looked at Charles—and us—with that faraway gaze that comes from generations of studied endurance in the face of calculated dehumanization.

  I searched for words to defend my new friends but could only shake my head, too taken aback to open my mouth.

  As our allotted time on the reefs dwindled, it was evident that we would not have time to locate and map every site as meticulously as we had been doing. The reef was four miles long and we could not cover it all. The best we could hope for was to make a quick visual survey, to see how closely the physical location of the remaining wrecks matched d’Estrées’ map. The accuracy of ancient mapmakers has always been of interest to me. The exactitude of cartographers has often aided our efforts to find historic shipwrecks. For example, the precision of Captain Cyprian Southack’s map of Cape Cod had played an important part in our discovery of the Whydah.

  For our test of d’Estrées’ map we decided to use the sled.

  Basically a product of 1950s backyard technology, the sled, or hydroplane, looks like a large wooden cutting board with two grips that are essentially an upscale version of what a water skier holds on to when he is being towed behind a boat. And that is exactly the sled’s function. The boat tows a sled through the water with a live passenger who is facedown, scanning the bottom.

  Since the sled is hydrodynamic, it gives the person being towed a lot of maneuverability. The rider takes a big breath of air, then tilts the sled down to fly toward the bottom. He can tilt it up to fly back to the surface. With a turn of the wrist we could dive down or shoot back up.

  Being almost laughably low-tech, the sled is often underutilized, but, even with limitations, it’s a great way to check out large, shallow-water areas to get an overall picture of the seabed. It provided us with an extra day of searching that we otherwise would not have had—and let some of the team have a good time doing it.

  Todd, Carl, Chris, and big Ron Hoogesteyn set out in the Aquana to search the north end of the reef with the sled.

  There is a type of magnetometer called a proton precession magnetometer. The men referred to the sled as the “protein magnetometer,” because, trolling along behind the boat, they felt like fish bait. In fact, Ron was wearing some jewelry around his neck that flashed in the sunlight coming down through the water and drew unwanted attention. When he discovered that a barracuda was trailing him as he trolled along on the sled, he quickly took it off. Ron had eaten plenty of barracuda in his life, and he did not want the roles reversed. For my part, I was impressed
with the barracuda’s appetite; Ron weighs about 260 pounds!

  The crew spent an entire day searching the reef from the northernmost wreck we had located. Riding the sled is exhausting, but they liked that. They would take turns on it, switching at twenty-minute intervals. It became a competition, as most things did. The sled is a perfect arena for the endless competition between salvage divers, SEALs, and Special Forces divers to blow off steam and test one another’s capacity for pain endurance.

  At least they had fun, because the search was not successful. They combed the entire northern part of the reef and did not find a thing. It is quite likely that the wrecks were too embedded in the coral, too camouflaged, to spot by a quick glance from a towed diver. It would require a slower, more meticulous search to find the four wreck sites d’Estrées noted at the northern end of the reef.

  For my part, I selfishly wanted to swim alone around the pirate shipwrecks. For me, the process of discovery is not exclusively scientific observation. The experience of simply being there with the wrecks was a window into the past in a way that is difficult to explain.

  Each artifact from a wreck has its own story to tell of what life aboard that ship was like. And each artifact will tell its fascinating story as a part of the scientific process. But viewing an entire wreck in situ speaks volumes about life aboard ship—and the final moments of that ship.

  Sometimes the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Hard science alone does not do justice to the cause of fully preserving the past. For that, you also need heart, a capacity for appreciating the drama and tragedy of a ship’s dying moments. For an explorer, it is nearly as important to get at the meanings behind the data, as it is to gather the data itself.