Unsolved Mysteries of the Sea

by Lionel

  The ship now appears to have strong connections with North Africa, and the most likely possibility is that she had come to buy European slaves. The gold itself was from North African or Middle Eastern sources, and tests on the ship’s remaining piece of timber also pointed that way. But Dutch artifacts were also found among the wreckage. Does this suggest a Dutch vessel, chartered by North African merchants, or a Barbary corsair commanded by a skilful Dutch captain? During their long period of ascendancy, many of the Barbary corsairs were content to sail under the guidance of experienced European mariners.

  To understand the mystery more deeply, it’s necessary to delve into the history of the Barbary Coast pirates. In medieval times the four traditional Barbary States of the North African coast were listed as: Algiers, Morocco, Tunis, and Tripoli. Their main source of income was derived from officially (and un officially!) selling foreign ships the right to pass through Barbary waters to trade with local ports. Those who didn’t pay promptly, regularly, and generously were likely to be abducted and held for ransom or sold as slaves.

  During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries many European ships ventured into Barbary waters carrying pilgrims and crusaders. Those who were protected by the indomitable Knights Templar usually got through: even the hardest and most aggressive Barbary corsairs were reluctant to tangle with any ship of the Templar fleet, or with any vessel carrying a significant number of the formidable Templar warrior-priests as guardians. But many pilgrims and would-be crusaders were not so fortunate and were consequently sold into slavery.

  Ottoman Turkey and Habsburg Spain were locked in a long, bitter struggle for supremacy in the Mediterranean. Piracy was a richly rewarding dimension of this struggle, and it lured many a red-blooded adventurer into the long-drawn-out war. One such adventurer was the Turkish corsair Khair ad Din, who had a beard that matched his wild blood and was accordingly known as Barbarossa. (No connection with the famous twelfth-century Holy Roman emperor, Frederick, who was also called Barbarossa for the same reason!) Khair ad Din was born circa 1483 and died in 1546. He and his equally able brother, Aruj, took Algiers from Spain and put it under Turkish control. Barbarossa then went on to conquer the rest of the Barbary States, which subsequently took their name from their conqueror’s red beard. Such men were typical of the later Barbary Coast pirates.

  As a result of the American War of Independence, American merchant ships no longer came under the protection of the British navy when sailing in Barbary waters, and, consequently, a great many Americans were captured and sold as slaves in the Barbary States. Joseph Hoffman’s screenplay Yankee Pasha was based on Edison Marshall’s excellent historical novel, and although the details of the story were fictional, they could well have been based on fact. Jeff Chandler and Rhonda Fleming starred in Joseph Pevney and Howard Christie’s highly acclaimed 1954 production, which told the story of a daring American adventurer who risked everything to go to the Barbary Coast to rescue his beautiful fiancée, Roxana, who’d been white-slaved while on her way to France.

  Outraged by so many real-life incidents on which the fictional Roxana’s ordeal was based, the United States navy sailed in force to the Mediterranean and blasted the Barbary Coast ports from which the pirates came. They also engaged them in devastating bombardments and fierce hand-to-hand battles at sea. Gunboat squadrons under the overall command of Commodores Preble and Dale shattered the pirates.

  The famous British admiral Lord Nelson praised one superb piece of American action led by Lieutenant Steve Decatur on February 16, 1804. Seventy-four volunteers under his command raided Tripoli harbour to burn the American frigate Philadelphia, which had recently been captured by the Barbary corsairs. Tough, all-action hero Ruben James was serving as a bosun’s mate at the time he joined Decatur’s raiding party. Badly wounded in the hand-to-hand skirmishing, James nevertheless flung himself between Decatur and a savage pirate during their next piece of action. Thanks to his unselfish bravery, Decatur remained unscathed. Rock-hard Ruben James recovered from his wounds and served valiantly in the U.S. navy for over thirty years.

  A year later, the triumphant American marines stormed the Barbary pirates’ stronghold at Derna in Tripoli, and apart from a further visit to the Mediterranean by Commodores Decatur and Bainbridge in 1812, the centuries-old menace of the Barbary Coast pirates had been qualitatively and quantitatively reduced. Yet, like strange and eerie whisperings of the wind in a derelict graveyard, vestigial traces of them lingered on — such corsair remnants might even have been responsible for the mystery of the Mary Celeste more than half a century after Decatur and Bainbridge did their highly effective work.

  Once Napoleon had been finally defeated, the European naval powers also had time and energy to devote to keeping down the Barbary corsairs.

  The hypothetical “slavers’ gold” found with the Barbary wreck near Gara Rock in Devonshire was intriguing enough, but it represents only a minute fraction of the hidden treasure associated with piracy worldwide over the centuries.

  Piracy is almost as old as history itself, going back at least three or four millennia. The Roman historian Polybius seems to have been one of the first to use the word pierato to describe pirates well over a century before Christ. The young Julius Caesar — long before he came to power — was once captured by pirates and held to ransom. His first act on getting home was to organize a formidable band of his contemporaries, track the pirates down, and execute them. There was also a sense in which some Anglo-Saxon chroniclers regarded the Norse sea kings and Viking raiders as pirates.

  A semi-legendary fifth-century adventuress, a character not unlike Robin Hood’s famous Maid Marian of Sherwood, was Princess Alwilda from Gotland in Sweden. Alwilda turned to piracy in order to stay free when her royal father attempted to arrange a marriage for her with Alf, Prince of Denmark, which she didn’t want. The romantic twist to the story came about when Alf, whom she had hitherto been trying to avoid, defeated her pirates in a sea battle. As he had risked his life during the fierce fighting in order to marry her, Alwilda decided that he was the right kind of man after all and changed her mind about him. The rest of their history fades into the mists of time — but tradition says that they lived long and happily together, and Alwilda ended her days as queen of Denmark. If only Shakespeare had known about her, she might have featured as one of Hamlet’s ancestors!

  Other highly successful and courageous women who were pirates in the Alwilda tradition included an Irish girl, Grace O’Malley, born in 1530. She was also known as “Granuaile” (meaning bald) because she cut her hair short so it didn’t get in the way when she was fighting. After a long and adventurous career at sea, Grace fell foul of Sir Richard Bingham, who was governor at the time. He impounded her fleet and arrested her son. Grace — never lacking in audacious courage — went to present her case to Queen Elizabeth herself. Elizabeth ordered Bingham to release Grace’s ships and granted her an annual pension so that she did not have to resort to piracy any longer. In return Grace and her son — who became her fleet commander — remained loyal to Britain and fought the Queen’s enemies at sea whenever necessary.

  Grace was a successful enough pirate in British and Irish waters, but even her exploits were eclipsed by the amazing Madame Cheng, who took over her husband’s fleet when he died in 1807.

  Time after time the authorities attacked her Red Flag Pirate Fleet — and came off second best. When all else had failed, they declared a general amnesty, and Madame Cheng accepted it — on condition that her second husband, Chang Pao, who had been Cheng’s deputy, was given an officer’s commission in the Chinese army!

  Typical Chinese junk with shallow draft of the type used by Madame Cheng’s Red Flag Pirate Fleet.

  Mary Read was another well-known female pirate, and a companion of Ann Bonny, also spelled Bonnie. They sailed with Calico Jack Rackham until he and most of his crew were captured and hanged. Both women were spared because they were pregnant, but Mary died of fever shortly afterwards, and Ann va
nished from pirate history — either she escaped, or her rich family paid some heavy bribes to get her safely back home to Ireland.

  Among other famous pirates who almost certainly left their hidden treasure somewhere in the world were Henry Avery (Long Ben), a particularly cruel and savage English pirate who took delight in wreaking havoc on Mogul ships in the Arabian Sea; Jean Bart from Dunkirk, who may well have buried his treasure near Plymouth; Roche Brasiliano, a Dutch pirate based in Brazil who preyed on Spanish treasure galleons and may well have hidden his loot in Jamaica when he turned up there in 1670; Nick Brown, who enjoyed a great reputation among other pirates, but whose head was pickled and taken back to the authorities so that his captor could claim his reward. There was also the highly successful and widely travelled Chris Condent, who retired in peace and luxury to St. Malo, France, after plundering ships from Africa, Arabia, Madagascar, and Mauritius.

  Bartholomew Roberts — Black Bart to his friends — flourished in the early years of the eighteenth century. A wild, fearless, adventurous Welshman like Morgan, Black Bart captured at least 350 ships during his many piratical operations in the Caribbean and off the coast of West Africa. One of his greatest successes was taking the Portuguese treasure ship Sagrada Familia, which was carrying a vast fortune in diamonds when he captured her.

  There were also well-educated and highly intelligent men among the pirates, like Dr. Basil Ringrose, an English surgeon who sailed with Bartholomew Sharp and his crew. Ringrose was killed in action in Mexico in 1686. Another highly intelligent pirate was Bill Dampier from Somerset. He was a brilliant navigator who escaped in a canoe after being set down on the Nicobar Islands in the Indian Ocean, like poor old Ben Gunn in Stevenson’s Treasure Island. Dampier proved that he had the survival skills of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, a character based on the real-life desert island survivor Alexander Selkirk — with whom Dampier was not on the best of terms. Despite his high intelligence and brilliance as a navigator, there were a lot of important interpersonal skills that were a closed book to Dampier.

  Selkirk was born in Fife in Scotland in 1676, son of the village cobbler and tanner in Largo. Alexander had no intention of joining the family business and went to sea instead. At the age of twenty-seven, he joined Dampier as first mate on the Cinque Ports. They struggled around Cape Horn and reached an island in the Juan Fernandez archipelago. Dampier and Selkirk quarrelled over whether the Cinque Ports was seaworthy enough to continue, and Selkirk decided to stay on his island until another, sounder ship called there. He had a lonely four-year wait — during which time he almost lost the power of speech — but he was eventually rescued by Captain Woodes Rodgers of the Duke. By an odd coincidence, Dampier was sailing with Rodgers as the Duke’s pilot and navigator.

  But piracy is far from confined to ancient history, or to the so-called Golden Age of Piracy with characters like Teach, Morgan, Kidd, and Ann Bonnie. It is still flourishing dangerously today. The International Maritime Bureau based in London, England, still receives hundreds of contemporary reports of pirate activity. As recently as 1996, a British couple were attacked with grenades and assault rifles while cruising near the Greek Island of Corfu. Contemporary pirates operate in the South China Seas, where entire ships and their cargos are likely to vanish. The waters off the coast of Brazil are also vulnerable to pirate activity, as are the seas off West Africa. Today’s pirates use a wide variety of armaments and equipment: dugout canoes and bladed weapons in one area, and the latest automatic machine pistols in another.

  It remains a political unsolved mystery of the sea why modern governments — and the especially the United Nations — with all the latest air power, naval technology, and hardware cannot make piracy obsolete.

  In the Golden Age of Piracy, which began in the sixteenth century, there was high-level government involvement. English privateers (pirates with licences) were encouraged (overtly or covertly) to attack Spanish treasure galleons. North African pirates were licensed to attack the English. Pirates from Madagascar were operating for the benefit of France. There were so many wheels within wheels and so many changing allegiances that at times it was almost impossible to distinguish friend from foe on the high seas.

  It was the War of the Spanish Succession, fought over the first decade of the eighteenth century, that brought the concept of the buccaneer to the fore. Hired by various governments of the day to fight their rivals, their name came from the French word boucan, which was a device used to smoke the dried meat used on board ships. The buccaneers had a safe refuge in Tortuga for a while and then in Jamaica. The great swashbuckling Welshman Sir Henry Morgan, Deputy Governor of Jamaica, had started his career as a buccaneer, a field in which his outstanding organizing abilities had enabled his followers to capture not only Portobello, but Panama as well.

  Less well known in the western world were the outstanding Chinese pirate leaders who flourished at broadly the same time as Morgan. Pinyin made the most of his opportunities during the power vacuum that separated the Ming and Ch’ing emperors. Piracy always exploits a power vacuum. Another outstanding Far Eastern pirate named Cheng captured Formosa and defended it vigorously for several years. His wife, Madame Cheng, took over his Chinese Red Flag Pirate Fleet when he died and became even more successful and powerful than he had been. The power vacuums that favoured the pirates there ended with the rise of Tokugawa in Japan and the firm establishment of the Ch’ing Dynasty in China.

  What did the pirates of golden ages of piracy do with their ill-gotten gains? Where did they hide their treasure? And how much of it is still lying around waiting to be dug up? No matter how hard they tried to keep their treasure locations secret, there were often strangely persistent rumours about their hiding places. Connecticut River runs through Northfield Massachusetts. Clarke Island, which occupies a significant place in that river, not far from Pine Meadow, is steeped in legends of pirate gold. According to one legend, Kidd and his men made their way upstream searching for somewhere to hide their loot. The place had to be so distinctive that they would always remember it and recognize it again easily — even if it was years before they could get back there to collect it. Their chosen site had to be a spot that would be unlikely to change, somewhere that was also unlikely to have a road driven across it or buildings raised on it. It had to be well hidden, well clear of the beaten track, not too conspicuous — but just conspicuous enough for them to recognize it again with absolute certainty.

  Kidd and his men lived at a time when most minds were bedevilled by superstitions of various kinds; seafaring men were often highly superstitious, and pirates seem to have been the most superstitious of all. It was widely believed that treasures needed watchful, vengeful guardian spirits to protect them. The ghost of a murdered man was regarded as ideal for the purpose. According to the legend of Clarke’s Island, Kidd’s men drew straws to see who was going to be killed and buried with the treasure to keep it safe until the others returned to share it out. Wherever there’s a protective guardian spell, there’s also a counter-spell in such legends. If three men came together to the treasure site at midnight when there was a full moon and stood around their excavation like the legs of a tripod, they would be able to retrieve the treasure — provided that no one spoke.

  It was said that a determined treasure hunter named Abner Field and two staunch companions attempted to follow the counter-spell and dig for Kidd’s gold. After hours of heavy, silent excavation, they saw one corner of an old sea chest. A spade struck the chest as they dug harder and faster, and just as it made contact, one of the three excited hunters forgot that silence was essential. He cried out exultantly, “We’ve hit it!” Then all three watched in horror as the chest sank out of reach.

  An interesting parallel legend of an elusive buried treasure centres on the village of Southwood in Norfolk, England, where a thatcher and his friend risked all to extract a treasure from the centre of Callow Pit, a deep pool that legend said was guarded by a powerful evil spirit. In demonic legend, As
modeus is the evil spirit that protects such treasures. Just as the two friends were lifting the chest from the deep mud, one of them shouted triumphantly, “We’ve got it now! Not even the Spirit of the Pit could take it from us!” A huge black claw came up out of the mud and seized the chest. To give the thatcher and his friend their due, they clung grimly to one handle of the treasure chest, which finally came off in their hands. The chest itself vanished down into the mud — never to be seen again by mortal eyes. The handle was for many years on the door of the local church, which, itself, eventually fell into ivy-covered dereliction.

  In order to analyze whether or not Kidd had anything worth burying anywhere — let alone on Clarke’s Island — it’s necessary to consider the links between politics, economics, and piracy. When pirates, privateers, and buccaneers in the era of Drake, Jean Fleury, and Morgan, for example, were sent out with letters of authority from their respective governments, it was in the interests of those governments to protect their adventurers in return for a large share of their loot.

  Jean Fleury sported a wide range of names and aliases. He was a dare-devil Italian swashbuckler in charge of a squadron of French privateers and buccaneers who referred to him as El Francés, Juan Florentino, and Giovanni da Verrazano. He and his French crew were legally working for the King of France when they captured and looted the Aztec treasures that Cortes had sent to Madrid. Despite his unassailable legality, however, he was arbitrarily executed for piracy when the Spanish caught him in 1527.

  There may be much more to Fleury, however, than piracy and privateering alone. He could tie in with the mysterious Arcadian treasure associated with Rennes-le-Château and Shugborough Hall and the mystery of circumnavigators like Admiral Anson. On the wall of the Church of Saint Mary Magdalene, which the enigmatic priest Bérenger Saunière refurbished and filled with strange, cryptic clues, there is a very puzzling painting showing Christ and the disciples standing on a hill covered with flowers: the terrain fleury. Is Saunière hinting at a connection with Jean Fleury and the treasure that supposedly came from his piratical adventures, but may have come — at least in part — from something far older and stranger?