Pirate Hunters: Treasure, Obsession, and the Search for a Legendary Pirate Ship (12 page)

He was back on the boat and into the wreck the next day. Chatterton made a total of six dives that trip. The rebreather failed on three of them. He never did figure out why
Britannic
sank so fast, but he’d gone places on the wreck thought to be impossible to reach. And though magazines published pictures from the expedition, no photographer could capture a feeling like that.

I
N
N
OVEMBER
2000, PBS aired a two-hour special episode of its documentary series
Nova
devoted to the mystery U-boat. Chatterton and Kohler were its stars, and it became one of the highest-rated episodes in series history. One morning, not long after it aired, Chatterton felt an egg-sized lump on his neck while shaving. A surgeon did a needle biopsy, then called later that day and asked him to come back to the office. “I’m kinda busy, can we make it tomorrow?” Chatterton asked. He knew it was trouble when the doctor said no.

At the office, the surgeon told Chatterton he had a squamous cell carcinoma—cancer. He explained the pathology and recommended immediate surgery.

“You didn’t say if it was benign or malignant.”

“Malignant. You’re going to need chemotherapy and radiation. You have a fifty-fifty chance of survival.”

Chatterton went numb. He was just forty-nine years old. But as he got his coat to leave he thought, “I can live with fifty-fifty. I can come out on the right side of that.”

He started chemo shortly after the surgery, riding his Harley in the snow to the treatments, then going to his underwater construction job the same day despite being too weak to swim. Carla joined him at chemo. She teased him about the attention the gay pharmacist lavished on him. “I don’t think anyone else shows up here in black leather,” she joked, but inside she was trembling.

After chemo, Chatterton began radiation, five times a week for two months. By the end he could not lift his diving helmet. But doctors were cautiously optimistic. Fingers crossed, Chatterton would make it.

A few weeks later, he was supervising a big job in Battery Park City in downtown Manhattan. This work site was different from the usual water locations. It was underneath the World Financial Center, across West Street from the World Trade Center.

Chatterton was in his company’s trailer on September 11, 2001, when he heard a roar and then an explosion. He opened the door and looked up, where he saw an orange-and-black fireball shooting out of the side of the North Tower of the World Trade Center. He ran back into the trailer as debris began raining down on the corrugated tin roof. When those sounds finally stopped, he went back outside and into a world of mayhem and screams. He helped four Japanese tourists who were covered in blood. Dead bodies were everywhere.

Chatterton ran fifty yards to the communications shack and got on the radio—he had ten divers in the water and needed to get them out. He ordered the men to drop everything and return to the dive station. Then he ran back outside.

After all his divers got out of the water, one of them pointed to the South Tower.

“Here comes another one!”

Chatterton saw the second plane hit, and human shapes falling from the tower. By now, the fire department had taken over Chatterton’s trailer and made it their command post. A short time later, the South Tower fell onto the trailer, killing five of New York City’s top firefighters inside. Nearby, a man flailed in the river. Chatterton and his divers ran and pulled the man out.

For the next several hours, Chatterton helped people onto the ferryboats until there were no more boats coming in. He boarded the last one to leave that day, and looked back over a broken New York. In New Jersey, he found a ride to his condo and called Carla, who was in Argentina on business. She started crying and told him she
had watched it all on television. She had feared the worst but never got the sense that he’d died, only that he’d been helping people. And she told him she loved him.

C
HATTERTON RETURNED TO WORK
a few weeks later, but his heart wasn’t in it. The commute was bad, the memories bitter, and he was spending more time in management than in the water. He married Carla in January 2002. Then he hatched a plan.

He would become a history professor. He’d taken a few college courses after Vietnam, and had come to love the subject after diving so many historic shipwrecks. He enrolled at Kean University in New Jersey and quit his job as a commercial diver. It had been a twenty-year run, but for Chatterton the challenge was gone.

He got straight As his first semester, and was ready to start a second, when he received a call from cable television’s History Channel. They were developing a show about shipwrecks and were looking for hosts. Days later, he and Kohler—once the archest of enemies—found themselves auditioning as a team.

Producers liked them and ordered eight episodes. The show would be called
Deep Sea Detectives
, and the premise was simple: Each week, the two divers would investigate a shipwreck-related mystery, doing research on land and diving the wreck underwater. Chatterton’s powerful baritone would be perfect for the narration.

The show began airing in 2003 and was a hit from the start. Chatterton filmed between classes, but the schedule was tough on Kohler’s family and business, so Kohler quit after eight episodes. He was replaced by thirty-five-year-old Michael Norwood, a handsome and accomplished British diver who had on-screen chemistry with Chatterton.

Chatterton and Norwood became fast friends. In December 2003, the show went to Palau, an island nation in the west Pacific, to investigate the USS
Perry
, a World War II warship sunk in 270 feet of water.
The hosts would be joined by cameraman Danny Crowell, an experienced diver and a veteran of the U-boat adventure.

At the wreck site, Crowell moved down the anchor line, followed by Norwood and Chatterton. Near the bottom, Norwood motioned with his hand across his throat—the out-of-air signal—which seemed strange to Chatterton; they’d been in the water for just a few minutes.

A moment later, Norwood’s regulator fell out of his mouth. Chatterton immediately replaced it with his own backup regulator. Norwood started breathing the gas, but he was lethargic and his eyes were confused. Chatterton began trying to help Norwood up the line. He signaled and waved and pulled on him, but nothing he did got through.

Chatterton and Crowell struggled to get Norwood back to the surface. They began dragging him up the line, but Norwood’s left hand was clenched so tight on the rope it was difficult to move him. They pried his fingers loose, muscling Norwood up a few feet at a time. A minute later, he stopped breathing, and this time his eyes stayed open, no fear or panic in them, just staring straight into forever. A moment later Norwood began sinking, his lungs filling with water.

Norwood’s life now depended on reaching the surface. Rushing him up would likely inflict a lethal case of the bends, but he was drowning, so Chatterton inflated his friend’s buoyancy compensator and sent him streaking up toward the boat. He and Crowell dropped back down to allow nitrogen to dissipate from their bodies, an agonizing but necessary wait. Chatterton prayed that when he surfaced he would find Norwood drinking a beer and telling a joke, the guy could really tell a joke, but he’d seen Norwood’s eyes, and men didn’t wake up from that.

When Chatterton finally reached the boat, Norwood was lying on deck, still in his gear, but dead. A rescue swimmer had tried to administer CPR but could do nothing to help him. Norwood was thirty-six years old and fit, a nonsmoker, vibrant.

Chatterton stared across the water, replaying events in his mind, searching for an explanation or justification or someone to blame, but
there was no blame. Norwood had done everything right. This was the ninth diving fatality Chatterton had witnessed, nine human beings who had plans and people who loved them, and he began asking himself questions, right there on the boat.
Do I want to do this anymore? Have I grown too hardened to these fatalities to see what’s really going on? Is diving worth dying for?
But by now, he knew how he’d answer once the shock lifted.
No one lives forever. A person has to be who he is. I’m a diver.

The authorities in Palau attributed the death to a heart attack, but that was just a guess. When Chatterton returned to the States, he and Carla agreed that they should move to Maine to keep an eye on Norwood’s widow, Diana.

Christmas felt different that year. In less than three years, Chatterton had battled cancer, watched the World Trade Center towers collapse around him, and lost a close friend in his arms. As revelers rang in 2004, he made an addendum to his principles for living:

—Do it now. Tomorrow is promised to no one.

T
O
C
HATTERTON
, N
ORWOOD
’
S PASSING
meant the end of
Deep Sea Detectives
, but the History Channel renewed the series, eventually bringing Kohler back as cohost. In the summer of 2004,
Shadow Divers
(my book about Chatterton and Kohler’s efforts to identify the U-boat) became a bestseller and was published in several languages.
Deep Sea Detectives
continued to earn excellent ratings, and the
Nova
episode ran often on PBS. In less than two years, Chatterton and Kohler had gone from working-class unknowns to world famous scuba divers.

The television series continued into late 2005, when the History Channel decided not to renew. The show had run for five seasons and fifty-seven episodes, but its end left Chatterton, for the first time in more than twenty years, with no job. Friends and colleagues urged him to relax, catch his breath, and get out of the dive game. He was
fifty-four now, still just four years removed from cancer and the World Trade Center, and too old in any case to keep making the life-risking dives he had trademarked.

Instead, he devised a plan with Kohler to go to
Titanic.
Work on that project wrapped up in 2006. Again, friends urged him to cash in his chips and stop risking. Use your money to purchase a future, they told him. Buy a Laundromat or an apartment building, something you’ll just have to watch.

He looked into these ideas and others. All of them made sense. None of them made him feel like John Chatterton. But what was left for a diver who had identified a mystery U-boat, done groundbreaking work on
Titanic
, explored the
Lusitania
and
Britannic
, mastered the
Andrea Doria
? Was he to dive those wrecks again? He was fifty-five now. If his body held up he might have one more great adventure inside him.

So, he researched other shipwrecks and called divers from around the world, and over the months assembled a list of potential dive projects, each of which would have been challenging and interesting, not one of which would have been great. He passed his days lifting weights, eating salads, and running long distances at sunrise, doing all he could to be ready when his moment came. He tried to be polite when his financial adviser suggested buying a Dunkin’ Donuts franchise.

Months passed that way, until he met Mattera in the Dominican Republic and heard stories about the great Spanish galleons—treasure ships of unimaginable value and rarity and beauty, ships no one had been able to find. To search for one, he would be required to pledge every dollar he’d saved, join forces with a virtual stranger, work in a third-world country, embark on a mission that had crushed centuries of men. But as he reached over the breakfast table to shake hands with Mattera, he had only one idea in his mind: Do it now. Tomorrow is promised to no one.

CHAPTER EIGHT

A PLACE EQUAL TO THE MAN

D
riving over the speed limit and stopping at roadside gas stations for fill-ups and heat-lamp cheeseburgers, Carla Chatterton made it from Maine to New York in time to join her husband for the last day of the dive show he was attending. Carla was always a magnet at these events, calling to passersby to introduce them to John, manning the booths of friends (and sometimes strangers) to help pitch their products. Carla had just hours with John at the dive show, and she would do all she could to enjoy the time they had together. The months apart hadn’t been easy for her.

Carla and John squeezed in an hour for dinner at the hotel; his flight back to the Dominican Republic left in just a few hours. In the seven months since the search for the
Golden Fleece
had begun, the couple had seen each other only a few times. Even
Titanic
had taken him away from home for just a month.

Near the end of the meal, a young boy and his father walked up to Chatterton’s table. They were fans and wanted to know what Chatterton was working on.

“Can you keep a secret?” Chatterton asked.

When the kid nodded, Chatterton said he was looking for a pirate ship that belonged to one of the great swashbucklers of all time. When he signed an autograph for the boy, he inscribed it, “Stay inspired.”

Chatterton landed in Santo Domingo early the next morning, then set out for Samaná. The road, like so much else in the Dominican Republic, was beautiful and treacherous all at once, an obstacle course of mud slides, stray dogs, and, occasionally, a body lying beside an overturned motorbike (scooter and motorcycle accidents were common here). By the time Chatterton pulled up to Tony’s to meet his friends for lunch, all he wanted was a cold beer. But the cooler at Tony’s had fried during a blackout, and as Chatterton sat down at the table, Mattera delivered sour news to go with the place’s warm ale.

The lower end of one of the
Deep Explorer
’s engines had been damaged while Chatterton was away, a five-thousand-dollar repair. It would take a week or more to get a replacement part. And there was more. The magnetometer cable had shredded again. A new one had been ordered for just under four thousand dollars.

Chatterton stared at his menu. To Mattera and the others, it was clear that these expenses, and these frustrations, were becoming too much for Chatterton, and they wondered whether this latest financial blow might push him out of the project.

“I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about our operation,” Chatterton said. “I’ve gotta be honest with myself. And I’ve gotta be honest with you guys.”

Hearts sank around the table. At least Chatterton had been man enough to come back and quit in person.

“We’ve been looking in the wrong place,” Chatterton said. “We’ve been thinking about this all wrong.”

The wreck of the
Golden Fleece
, he insisted, would never be found near Cayo Levantado, the island where they’d been searching for months. It didn’t matter if history said she’d sunk there. It didn’t matter if Bowden believed she’d sunk there. History and Bowden were wrong.

“Everyone’s been looking for a pirate ship,” Chatterton said. “But this isn’t about finding a ship. It’s about finding a man.”

Chatterton asked the others to think hard about Joseph Bannister.
In just a few years, the captain had stolen his own ship, outmaneuvered two governors of Jamaica, evaded an international manhunt, and then, despite being outmanned and outgunned, defeated the Royal Navy in battle. To do any one of those things, a man had to plan meticulously, prepare relentlessly, and demand the highest level of excellence of those around him. To do them all, he had to be great.

“So we need to look for a place that’s worthy of this guy,” Chatterton said.

And that wasn’t Cayo Levantado. Which is why Chatterton knew no one would ever find the
Golden Fleece
there. To him, Bannister had been on the mission of a lifetime. His life was at stake. He would not have chosen to put himself or his men anywhere less than perfect.

“So our job is to find that perfect place.”

“What about the chart Tracy showed you, where Levantado is called Bannister Island?” Kretschmer asked.

“Forget it,” Chatterton said. “Wreck’s not there.”

“What about the Miss Universe jar?” Ehrenberg asked.

“Forget it. Wreck’s not there.”

“So where is it?” Kretschmer asked.

The pirate ship, Chatterton explained, was in Samaná Bay, that much was certain from the treasure hunter Phips, whose crew had spotted the
Golden Fleece
there just months after her sinking. But if Chatterton was right in his thinking, it would be somewhere far from Levantado. Somewhere almost impossible to see.

But the bay was about twenty-five miles wide. There could be a hundred good places for a pirate ship to careen in an area that large. To survey all of them could take years. But that didn’t worry Chatterton. The team wouldn’t need to search every viable location—only the great ones, those that were nearly invisible.

“Great,” Ehrenberg said. “Now we’re looking for places we can’t see.”

“Bannister got there,” Mattera said. “Anyone here saying we can’t?”

No one wanted to say that.

But that still left the matter of how to handle Bowden, who seemed convinced that the
Golden Fleece
had sunk at Levantado, and didn’t appear eager to entertain suggestions to the contrary. And Bowden was boss—his lease, his water, his pirate ship.

“This is bigger than Tracy,” Mattera said. “If we keep doing things his way we’ll still be scratching our asses at Levantado when we’re all in Depends. Chatterton’s right. We have to change our thinking. This is on us now.”

So the men made a plan. Chatterton and Mattera would scout for new locations away from Cayo Levantado, but still inside Samaná Bay. Ehrenberg and Kretschmer would work on repairing the
Deep Explorer.
And none of them would stop until they found a place that reflected Bannister’s genius, a place equal to the man.

At the end of lunch, as everyone walked to their cars, Mattera called out to Chatterton.

“John,” he said. “I’m glad you’re back.”

T
HE NEXT MORNING
, C
HATTERTON
and Mattera walked down to the small, stony beach area beneath the villa and pushed their inflatable Zodiac boat into the bay. The twelve-foot rubber craft, with its hard fiberglass bottom, was much like the ones used by U.S. Navy SEALs, and was capable of maneuvering in depths of less than one foot. It was the perfect quick-hit vessel with which to zip around Samaná Bay, and a fine substitute while the
Deep Explorer
was in repair.

The partners’ job now was to look beyond the practical and toward the beautiful. For months, they’d limited their searches to well-hidden areas near Cayo Levantado that had good beaches for careening, excellent places for cannon defenses, and waters roughly twenty-four feet deep. This time, they dispensed with criteria. Instead, they would go strictly by feel.

They explored inlets and bays and tiny islands on the first day, each place more scenic and unspoiled than the last. Not one of them
measured up. Near sundown one day, they could see Garcia-Alecont standing in the sand and waving to them in the distance. When they reached him, he delivered some news.

A government contact had warned him that at least one group of treasure hunters was gearing up to search Samaná Bay for the
Golden Fleece.
Details were sketchy, but the source said he believed these rivals to be heavy hitters who had deep pockets and government contacts of their own.

“Where in Samaná Bay?” Mattera asked.

“Cayo Levantado. Someone watched you working out there. They think you left too early.”

“You’ve gotta be shitting me.”

“No. And that’s not all. They think the
Golden Fleece
could be one of the greatest shipwrecks ever found.”

“They’re not going to find shit at Levantado,” Chatterton said. “But I still don’t want anyone in our area.”

“Not on our watch,” Mattera said.

Garcia-Alecont asked how the men intended to stop it.

“I don’t know yet, Victor,” Chatterton replied. “I can put up with a lot, but I can’t put up with thieves. No one is going to steal the
Golden Fleece
from Tracy. And no one is going to steal her from us.”

That evening, Garcia-Alecont threw a party at the villa for family and friends, as he often did on the weekends. Guests partied past midnight. The next morning, Chatterton announced that he, Ehrenberg, and Kretschmer were moving out. He gave little explanation other than to say they’d already overstayed their welcome and did not wish to take advantage of Garcia-Alecont’s kindness. They would be moving into a small apartment in downtown Samaná, four thousand pesos (about one hundred dollars) a month, no hot water. When Mattera pressed for a better explanation, Chatterton told him the all-night parties at the villa were distracting and not good for their business, which was to find the
Golden Fleece
.

They were soon back on the Zodiac and into the bay. This time,
they steered toward the outer edge of their search area, several miles west of Cayo Levantado along the northern coast. Still they could find no perfect place for Bannister to careen, and that is how it went for the next few weeks: moving their boat into places that looked to be great, but never finding anything better than good.

One afternoon, Chatterton cut the Zodiac’s engine and let the boat drift on the waves. Neither he nor Mattera was the type to feel sorry for himself. But each now wished for just a little of the luck that William Phips had when he parked in Samaná Bay and stumbled onto Bannister’s ship.

And that got the men to thinking.

Phips had gone to Samaná Bay to trade with locals on his way to search for the lost galleon
Concepción.
That meant there had to be hundreds of natives living in the area at the time, and it was near certain that some—or even most—of them had witnessed the battle between Bannister’s pirates and the Royal Navy. Since Hispaniola belonged to the Spanish at the time, reports of the battle might have been filed with authorities back in Spain.

“I know where to get those reports,” Mattera told Chatterton. “Buy me dinner at Fabio’s and I’ll tell you.”

A few hours later, Mattera laid out his plan. A few days after that, he was on a plane headed for Madrid.

M
ATTERA ENJOYED FEW LUXURIES
more than Europe’s high-speed trains, and he spent most of the two-and-a-half-hour ride from Madrid to Seville gazing out the window, watching olive plantations and rust-colored soil fly past him at nearly two hundred miles per hour. In the deliberate rhythms of a speeding train, he did his best thinking, and his thoughts now were that he’d done the right thing to come looking for his English pirate in Spain.

In Seville, Mattera caught a taxi to the General Archive of the Indies. Standing at the entrance to the grand building, which dated to
1584, he imagined couriers arriving on horseback, delivering documents written by explorers, conquistadors, and shipwreck survivors. He’d been here before, researching treasure ships and dreaming of gold.

He was lost within moments of walking in the door. The grand building contained hundreds of thousands of documents comprising more than eighty million pages of original papers, each of which seemed as likely a starting place as any other. He drifted like a boat cut from its line until an attractive woman in her thirties tapped him on the shoulder. She introduced herself as an archivist, and asked, in good English, if she could help.

“Yes, I’m looking for—”

Mattera’s voice boomed off the cavernous interior. He toned down to a whisper.

“I’m looking for any reports from Samaná Bay, on the northern coast of Hispaniola, from June 1686 to around June 1688. It can be from merchants.”

Mattera figured that any account of the battle would have reached Spain before a year had passed. He added an extra year to make sure he didn’t miss anything.

“Are you a treasure hunter?” she asked.

No one had ever asked Mattera that question.

“I guess I am,” he replied.

The archivist smiled, then led Mattera through the building, taking him past floor-to-ceiling shelves of documents and papers. Only a small part of the collection, she said, had been cataloged on computer or copied to microfiche; the rest was available only by hand, as it had been for hundreds of years. The secrets to the galleons were here, yet Mattera saw little security, and he always noticed security—it had been his life’s work until now.

The woman helped Mattera comb through old books and folders. She parked him at a table that looked as long as a football field and left
him alone with the documents, some of which hadn’t been handled in centuries.

For hours, Mattera worked at that table, searching for mention of Bannister or pirates or a battle involving navy ships. The archivist checked on him often, translating strange and curlicued words written in old Spanish, bringing him more binders. She read passages aloud to him: an account of a passenger making a confession to clergy as a hurricane pummeled her ship; a navigator’s doubts about his captain’s decision; a crewman’s fear that nearby lands were inhabited by cannibals. All dramatic and fascinating, but not what Mattera was looking for.

The next morning, Mattera was first in the door, but his friend hadn’t yet arrived, so he made a journey—and it was a journey in this place—to a section he’d visited the last time he was here, when he was researching lost galleons that he and Chatterton might pursue. That was in the early days of their partnership, when they dreamed in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and sunken Spanish treasure ships called to them from across oceans. Retracing his previous steps, he found his way to a binder that contained information on his favorite of all the lost Spanish galleons, the
San Miguel.

She’d sunk in a storm in 1551, one of the earliest of Spain’s great treasure ships to go down, and was carrying mostly gold, not silver. That, alone, had been enough to capture Mattera’s attention. But it was the contraband that gripped him. According to Mattera’s earlier research, it was likely that the
San Miguel
also hauled priceless Inca and Aztec treasures, to be sold on the lucrative European black market by the conquistadors who’d stolen them. That didn’t surprise Mattera; he’d grown up among thieves and smugglers, some of them legendary. He knew what it meant to have a license to steal.