The Lost Fleet (10 page)

O
CTOBER
21, 1998
C
ARACAS,
V
ENEZUELA

I
n Caracas we acquired last-minute supplies, organized our research and charts, and set up and tested our gear. For this we used the cafeteria in the hotel, which we called the Blue Room, for obvious reasons. We were lucky in our accommodations. If Caracas itself is generally unsavory, the hotel was lovely and the staff were very friendly and accommodating.

Cathrine gave a demonstration of underwater mapping and drawing techniques to the assembled team. We had worked together before, but I felt it was a good idea to make sure we were all on the same page before heading out into the field. We wanted to be as organized as possible so we could make the best use of our limited time.

Some of the communications gear was new, and we had to make sure to test it before we had to use it on the site. We went over the scuba gear and other equipment as well, to check that it was all in order. There would be no sending out for parts at Las Aves.

The equipment we would use fell into three basic categories: dive gear, communications gear, and search and mapping equipment.

Dacor, a company I have been using for thirty years, donated a good deal of gear to the expedition, wet suits and regulators and such, though some of the team preferred to wear their old, broken-in wet suits. In
truth, we would have preferred to wear no wet suits at all, the water was so warm. That was not an option, not with the sharp coral of the reef.

Communications are very helpful in underwater archaeology, and in my opinion they are one of the best safety tools you can have. If the person in the water can't communicate, he can't tell you he is in trouble. I have had several situations in which communications saved the life of the diver. Once, working in the East River in New York City, our diver got himself wrapped up in a shipwreck. His umbilical, which attached him to the ship, became so tangled that he could not get it undone, and he could not get out of the secure harness by which he was attached to the line. If he had not been able to call us, he might not have gotten out before the tide switched directions. As it was, we were able to send another diver down, who followed the umbilical to the trapped man and got him free.

The closest call we had was diving on the
Whydah,
when Chris Macort came within inches of getting killed. We had the
Vast Explorer
anchored near the shoreline. My smaller boat, a Boston Whaler named the
Andrew Crumpstey,
was anchored by the bow and tied by the stern to the
Vast'
s windlass. I was in the pilothouse, working on the computer. Chris was in the water, working at the bottom of a pit we had
excavated, and the rest of the crew were at the stern, monitoring his progress.

Suddenly, over the com, Chris began screaming as if he'd been scalded with boiling oil: “Help me! Help me! Something's got me! Help, before I'm killed!”

Cathrine is normally unflappable, but she came into the pilothouse in a sheer panic and screamed at me that Chris was trapped, that he was being killed.

They were due to leave for Scotland in a few days to be married.

A hundred thoughts rushed through my mind in less than a moment; the first being that the big white shark that had been rumored to have been killing seals in the vicinity had Chris. I ran below to get my gear on. Then, seeing the
Crumpstey
off the bow, I realized the anchor line on the
Vast
had parted. Held only by the smaller anchor of the
Crumpstey,
we were slowly drifting into the breakers less than fifty feet away.

The captain, a man who had worked with me many years before and was filling in for Stretch, was frozen in place, useless, with a look on his face as if someone had just stunned him with a rubber mallet. I tried to pull Chris in on the safety line, but he had been pulled out of the pit and swept into the current, and was now on the downcurrent side of the vessel.

I did not want to risk pulling him all the way under the boat, as the water was getting shallower every moment, threatening to crush Chris when she bottomed out. I tried to calm Chris over the com. I told him to get out of his harness and swim free. He could not do that. His hands were too cold to manipulate the nylon straps through the D rings. We were a couple of minutes from going ass-over-teakettle into the breakers…there could be no mistakes.

In the early seventies, I worked off Martha's Vineyard with the well-known swordfisherman Greg Mayhew. Greg had learned from his father to never go to sea without carrying at least one very sharp knife on his person at all times. Greg's brother, Skip, had been fouled in a line of lobster pots once and was nearly taken to the bottom. It was a lesson he never forgot.

I pulled Chris to the surface by his safety line, grabbed my Bench-made automatic knife from its sheath, and cut through the big straps of the harness as easily as if they were wet noodles. Communications, a sharp knife, and quick reactions saved Chris that day.

Safety aside, communications is also important to the work we do. The divers in the water have to be able to speak to one another to coordinate their work, and to the people in the boat above them to relay the data they are collecting on the seabed. On other dive sites, we use a surface-supplied diving system, meaning that the diver is physically attached to the boat via air hose. In those cases, we use a hardwired system. At Las Aves we would be using scuba, not connected in any way to the dive boat, which would be some distance away. For that, we would need a wireless system.

Our communications gear for that expedition consisted of cordless microphones and headphones. Specifically we used the Aquacom SSB-2010 transceiver. It's a three-watt multichannel single-sideband underwater telephone designed with professional search and rescue teams in mind. The SSB-2010 can be used with virtually any style full face mask (ffm) or mouth mask and can also work as a portable radio on the surface. It has a transceiver box that we usually mount on the tank strap or buoyancy compensator. It feeds to our full face mask and has a special water-resistant microphone and two earphones that attach on the mask strap. With this the divers can transmit to the diving supervisor and archaeologist on the surface.

Headphones are called “bone phones” because the earpieces in these specialized headphones just touch against your head and transmit sound through bone conduction.

The mics and bone phones were essential, but of course they would not work if the diver could not talk because of a regulator in his mouth. A regulator is the device that controls the air coming from the tank to the diver's mouth. To get around that problem, the primary diving system that we have used for many years is the Aga, by a Swedish company called Interspiro.

The Aga system consists of a clear, fully enclosed face mask that looks like the masks explosives experts wear when they are dismantling a bomb. Instead of the traditional mouthpiece the diver holds in his teeth to breathe, the Aga has a cup called an oral-nasal mask that goes over the nose and mouth, like an oxygen mask, or the mask a fighter pilot wears over his face. The oral-nasal mask clears water out of the face mask automatically. The Aga was first developed for firefighters using supplemental air who needed to talk to one another. It was later modified for divers.

Aga is popular among commercial divers and is also used by police
departments. The New York City police like it because the diver's face is not exposed, which helps when working in contaminated water, like the East River. Aga is good in very cold water, too. Those were not our concerns, of course. We would be diving in pristine water the temperature of a warm bath, but the oral-nasal mask also keeps the diver's mouth free and allows for a two-way communications system. Since it is dry inside the mask, we can mount a mic in there. Underwater archaeology was considerably more difficult before Aga was developed. When we first used the system on the
Whydah
project it was revolutionary, but now it is fairly common.

The diving gear would get us down to the wrecks, and the com gear would allow us to talk. We also needed the tools necessary to do the job of finding and mapping wrecks we had set out to do. Over the years, we have used all types of archaeological equipment in our search for shipwrecks, some of it common, some esoteric, some we developed ourselves.

We coined a scientific term for one tool, the “aqua-probe.” A journalist who came out with us to the
Whydah
site was intrigued. She kept hearing us use the term and wanted to know how it worked, who had developed it, and how it was used. She was disappointed, I think, to find out that the aqua-probe was just a piece of rebar sharpened at the end, which we would push into the sand to see if there was anything solid underneath. Simple and effective, but it had to have a fancy name.

One of the best tools used in searching for shipwrecks is the magnetometer, which we had brought on the first trip to Las Aves but had never used, since we could never get a boat out over the reef.

Normally, the magnetometer would be towed behind a boat, using satellite navigation to set up a grid on which to steer. The person coordinating the search uses the satellite navigation equipment to determine a course to start the search pattern. He says something like “Okay, steer this line for five hundred meters and then come back,” and the boat is steered on the course indicated, towing the magnetometer behind. We call this “mowing the lawn.”

Doing this over and over sets up an overlapping pattern covering the ocean bottom. The magnetometer reads the magnetic fields of the earth, and it can pick up magnetic disturbances caused by the presence of ferrous metal. For our work, the metal is often iron in cannons or anchors, the largest artifacts generally left at the wreck site of a wooden ship.

The magnetometer is usually an essential tool, but I chose not to bring it on our second trip. Having seen the site and read the history of the wrecks, I did not think we could “mow the lawn” in the surf line. D'Estrées' fleet went up on the reefs, and that was where we would find them.

I probably would have brought it anyway, given my practice of bringing everything. But there was another problem. I had received several phone calls from Venezuelan officials asking specifically about the magnetometer. I didn't know why, but I didn't like the sound of things. The last straw was an e-mail from Charles Brewer. Apparently, they were asking him a lot of questions about it, too.

Frankly, I was concerned that the magnetometer would be confiscated as “a potentially subversive device” if we brought it. I opted to leave it in Provincetown.

We did bring two other types of metal detectors—both have either headphones or bone phones that buzz when metal is within a few inches. One type is the kind that people commonly use on the beach. They are used to make a general sweep of an area. We use White's of New England. Although they are relatively inexpensive, they have never failed us.

The other type is called a probe. It consists of a straight shaft, about one foot long, coming out of the control box that the diver carries in his hand. This is used to pinpoint exactly where a metal object is buried. The probe is an essential piece of gear, but it has not been manufactured to withstand the rigors of commercial work and frequently breaks down. More than once, I've wanted to throw probes into the sea in frustration. We always end up bringing four or five detectors with us.

Tape measures and underwater writing pads, along with a very sophisticated Trimble satellite navigation system to use in determining the exact location of the wrecks, completed the equipment we had brought.

We had a simple mission statement for this expedition. There would be no excavation, no disturbance of any of the artifacts we found. Our plan was to identify as many wrecks as we could, using d'Estrées' map, and to bring a little better technology to map the
site. The BBC would also be making a documentary about the project.

All our plans—the museum, the conservation center, the training program for locals—they would be for the future. We had two weeks to do what we could. I told Todd that he was going back to boot camp.

S
PRING
1683
S
T.
A
UGUSTINE,
F
LORIDA

P
aine left Jamaica with his commission from Lynch and his bark,
Pearl,
of eight guns and sixty men, sometime in late 1682 or early 1683. In March 1683 he arrived in the Bahamas. Instead of apprehending pirates, however, he began to search for the wreck of a Spanish galleon that had gone down in those waters with a fortune in silver.

“Wrecking” was a favorite occupation of many who sought their fortunes at sea in the seventeenth century. It afforded the freedom of the pirate's life, with less danger and with considerably less chance of being hung if caught. Nonetheless it was the first step toward full-fledged piracy for many men, including “Black Sam” Bellamy, captain of the
Whydah.

As it turned out, Paine never did fish for silver, at least not on that outing.
Pearl
arrived in the Bahamas to find four other pirate
vessels that had rendezvoused there for the same purpose. Three were commanded by Captains Conway Woollerley, John Markham, and Jan Corneliszoon. They must have been small-time pirates, as few records of them prior to that meeting exist. The fourth ship was commanded by a Frenchman known as Bréha, possibly a nickname for Michiel Andrieszoon, whose story will come later. Together they decided that there were more profitable ventures in which to be involved.

Paine later claimed that his commission from Lynch had considerable leeway in it. In the spring of 1683, Paine and his newfound consorts decided that it could be stretched from pirate hunting to piratical raids on Spanish settlements.

It is unlikely that Lynch had such activities in mind when he gave Paine permission to “seize, kill and destroy pirates,”
¹
but Paine and the others chose to interpret the commission that way. They decided that nearby St. Augustine, Florida, was a fine place to start.

T
HE
M
OVE ON
S
T.
A
UGUSTINE

Plans to sack St. Augustine had apparently been circulating in the pirate community for some time. In January 1683, a Spanish privateer had caught a vessel near Havana that had come from the Bahamas to fish a wreck. From the captured wreckers the Spanish authorities learned they had planned to move on St. Augustine after working that wreck. The Cuban authorities warned the governor of St. Augustine, Juan Márquez Cabrera, of the impending attack, and the governor tried his best to make preparations.

The walls of the city and the defensive works, the Castillo de San Marcos, were woefully inadequate. Márquez drove the men of St. Augustine to repair and build up the castillo. He even petitioned the church for permission to make the men work on holy days, but the church officials refused, in part because they did not like the governor. It was only after the governor went over their heads that he received permission.

Along with strengthening the walls of the city, the governor had two watchtowers built, one above the town and the other about twenty-one miles away at the water approaches. These were to warn St. Augustine of the pirates' approach.

Paine and the others were making preparations of their own. On the English island of New Providence, where the modern resort town of Nassau is located, they found an old native of St. Augustine, one Alonso de Avecilla. The pirates attempted to secure Avecilla as pilot and guide for their mission. When Avecilla sought refuge in the house of a Quaker on the island, the pirates, interestingly enough, got permission from the governor to seize him. The governor might not have been aware of the pending attack on St. Augustine, but if so, he was probably the only person in New Providence who didn't know.

The pirates' plan was simple. They would arrive off the Florida coast with one large vessel and three smaller ones. From there, a majority of the freebooters would take to smaller canoes, known as
pirogues,
and work their way up the Matanzas River, taking the watchtower and any Spanish outposts along the way.

On March 29, 1683, the flotilla arrived at Matanzas Inlet, south of St. Augustine. They disembarked, took to their
pirogues,
and made their way upriver in the dark, passing the lower watchtower and then coming ashore above it. The pirates hid themselves on the beach and made a stealthy approach on the tower at dawn.

As it happened, the Spanish troops stationed in the tower were all asleep. The pirates took them without a fight.

Paine's men tied them up and continued on their way, taking with them one of the Spanish prisoners to act as a guide on the river. The guide deliberately strayed, slowing the pirates' approach.

Paine and the rest were quickly losing any chance for surprise. The sentinels in the second tower spotted them and abandoned their post to spread the alarm. They met a man on horseback who brought word quickly to the governor at St. Augustine. At the same time, a soldier passing near the Matanzas River spotted the pirates, and swimming to safety, further spread the alarm.

Thus warned of the pending attack, Governor Márquez had the civilians brought inside the still-unfinished walls of the castillo, where they found some degree of security, but no facilities for housing or cooking. The governor mobilized all of the regular troops as well as the militia and dispatched two small units to lie in ambush for the pirates before they reached the city. He also posted lookouts at the outskirts of the city to alert him of the pirates' approach.

With that accomplished by late afternoon, Governor Márquez turned his attention to the castillo's walls. With considerable energy
and a decided lack of diplomacy, the governor drove the people inside the city to work, cursing and swearing as they labored.

Church officials claimed that Márquez's behavior was so offensive that the people's fear of the pirates was soon replaced with anger at their governor, and only through the intervention of a priest was a mutiny avoided.

In the end, the walls were never needed. Governor Márquez showed considerable skill in defending the approaches to the city, and Paine and his consorts did not display the determination of a de Grammont. On the morning of the 31st, the scouts reported to Márquez that about forty pirates were approaching the city. The governor dispatched another ambush party that hid a mile or so southeast of the castillo.

The pirates in fact numbered around two hundred men, but they weren't expecting the initiative displayed by Márquez. They marched boldly into the ambush and were greeted with a devastating musket volley. After a brisk firefight, the pirates fell back, thwarted in their advance a mile from the city. The only thing they had to show for their efforts was a prisoner, private Francisco Ru
z, but even he would ultimately contribute to their failure.

The pirates retreated some distance and halted to reevaluate their position. They tortured Ruíz to discover the strength of the city, but Ruíz fed them disinformation. He claimed the castillo was ready for them and well manned, and that there were ambushes laid out along the way. The governor had rounded up all available carpenters to build carriages for the castillo's cannons and to fully repair the walls.

The pirates then turned on their unwilling guide, Alonso de Avecilla, and threatened to kill him for not telling them about the new watchtower, but Ruíz interceded. He told the pirates that Alonso could not have known about the tower, since it was built after his departure from St. Augustine. At last, the pirates made Ruíz agree to guide them back to the city. This Ruíz agreed to do, but he told them that there were no guarantees, as the governor had set ambushes at unknown locations along their route.

That was too much for the pirates. They abandoned their overland attack on St. Augustine and retreated back to the captured watchtower at Matanzas Inlet, dragging the unfortunate Ruíz with them. It would be another two and a half years before Ruíz was back in Spanish territory as a free man.

For three days, Paine and the pirate captains remained at the watchtower debating what they should do next. Paine was not a man to shed blood lightly. At last, on April 5, they brought their ships into St. Augustine inlet with the intention of taking the city from that direction. Once again, they got cold feet, daunted by the sight of the Castillo de San Marcos and recalling the reports that Ruíz had given of the castle's preparedness. They decided that St. Augustine could not be taken, boarded their ships, and sailed away, with nothing but casualties to show for their efforts. The attempted sack of St. Augustine was one of the last of the pirate land raids in the territory of what would become the United States.

The buccaneers sailed north along the coast, sacking a few smaller towns on the St. Johns River and Amelia Island. Stopping off at what is now Cumberland Island off the coast of Georgia, they careened their ships and buried the men who had died of wounds received in the ambush. There they released the prisoners they had taken, except for Private Ruíz.

Paine, Markham, and Bréha returned to New Providence Island, but there was no welcome for them there. The governor, who had given them leave to capture Alonso de Avecilla, now professed every intention of arresting them, but could not muster enough men for the task.

Paine returned to the wreck site he had initially intended to fish, but found that there were many others now working it. Later, when a large ship sailed into New Providence, the governor manned it with sufficient force to overcome Paine and dispatched it to the wreck site. By then, Paine and the rest were gone.

Thomas Paine's activities, and the friction thereby caused between England and Spain, caught the attention of the very highest levels of officialdom. About a year after the St. Augustine raid, no lesser figure than King Charles II of England wrote to the governor and magistrates of Massachusetts:

The awesome power of the king notwithstanding, it would take more than the colonial governors could muster to bring down Thomas Paine. If nothing else, Thomas Paine was a survivor.