The Lost Fleet (13 page)

F
EBRUARY
1683
T
HE
G
ULF OF
H
ONDURAS

I
f Laurens de Graff represented the best of the buccaneers, Nikolaas Van Hoorn represented the worst. In December 1681, Van Hoorn had sailed from London in command of the ship
Mary and Martha
of four hundred tons, forty guns, and a crew of one hundred fifty men. He also took with him his son, who was around ten or twelve years old. Instead of straightforward slave trading, which would have been bad enough, Van Hoorn went on a sixteen-month rampage through the Bay of Biscay, the Canary Islands, the African coast, and finally the Caribbean.

Van Hoorn was a vicious drunk, brutal and utterly without regard for the nationality or circumstance of those whom he attacked. He was too much even for his own men. As sailors from his ship later reported, Van Hoorn “was forced by weather into a French port in the Bay of Biscay, where twenty-five of his men, seeing what a rogue he was, ran away.”
¹
In Cádiz, he forced ashore thirty-six more, abandoning them without their wages. Before sailing he stole four patararoes of English ownership, despite the fact he was sailing under
an English flag at the time. While in Cádiz, Van Hoorn whipped to death an Englishman named Nicholas Browne for no apparent reason.

In the Canaries, Van Hoorn rustled a herd of forty goats. From there, he went on to the Cape Verde Islands, where five more of his men deserted. He then sailed to the Guinea Coast, where he sold some of his guns and powder for gold.

Soon after, he fell in with two of his countrymen, Dutch ships trading in Africa. These he plundered of all they had, a rich take of thirty thousand dollars' worth of booty. In the same area, he stopped an English ship and stole a slave from her, as well as a canoe from Cape Coast, which he plundered, killing three of the black men who crewed her.

With the capital he had raised through indiscriminate plundering, Van Hoorn purchased more than one hundred slaves for export and
sold the rest of his take for a hefty sum of gold. He sailed to the coast of Capa and involved himself in one of the many tribal wars that plagued Africa. Van Hoorn's artillery helped his allies prevail in their fight, and he sailed away with six hundred more captives, presumably the men and women of the vanquished tribe.

The former sailors from the
Mary and Martha
give a good sample of Van Hoorn's tactics.

Van Hoorn crossed the Atlantic and called at St. Thomas and Trinidad, where he sold a number of his slaves. At the end of November 1682, he sailed into Santo Domingo in the present-day Dominican Republic. He had approximately three hundred of the blacks he had brought from Africa; the rest either had been sold or had died during the horrendous voyage.

Van Hoorn planned to sell what remained of his cargo at Santo Domingo, but he arrived to find a hornet's nest. The Spanish were enraged by de Graff's capture of the payroll ship. Van Hoorn's cargo was confiscated, and Van Hoorn and his crew were detained.

It was some months before Van Hoorn was able to somehow escape with the
Mary and Martha,
which he now called
St. Nicholas
(patron saint of sailors and thieves), making his way to Petit Goâve. His only thought was to make the Spanish pay for having the audacity to take vengeance on him, and he was looking for men who would join him in that effort. Petit Goâve was the right place to be.

Petit Goâve was teeming with men who enjoyed nothing more than plundering the Spanish. It was also a good place to obtain official sanction for such an enterprise. Van Hoorn found both.

The governor at Petit Goâve was M. de Pouançay, the same man who had organized the buccaneer contingent that joined Admiral d'Estrées in his ill-fated expedition to Curaçao. Once again, he rallied the buccaneers, putting nearly three hundred men aboard Van Hoorn's ship to aid him in his reprisals.

De Pouançay issued Van Hoorn a privateer's commission, using as his pretext the complaints of Jamaican governor Sir Thomas Lynch
concerning the pirates and interloping planters at Ile à Vache. Van Hoorn, however, was all set for a cruise of revenge against the Spanish. Apparently not trusting the vicious Dutch captain completely, De Pouançay put the Chevalier de Grammont on board as second in command.

De Grammont had had poor luck in his filibuster career since his spectacular raid on La Guaira in 1680. During the summer of 1682, he commanded a fleet of eight pirate ships which had among its captains Pierre Bot, a Breton pirate who had sailed aboard the ships of the Knights of Malta, and Yankey Willems. For several months, they prowled Cuba's northern shore, hoping to snap up a treasure-laden galleon, but to no avail. They returned to Petit Goâve nearly empty-handed. Fortunately for them, Governor de Pouançay had a job for which their talents were eminently suited.

Van Hoorn, de Grammont, and the rest sailed aboard the
St. Nicholas
from Petit Goâve, in search of others to join their cause, most particularly the renowned Laurens de Graff. They called first at Jamaica to replenish their ship and to deliver letters to Governor Lynch.

Soon after Van Hoorn's departure from Jamaica, Sir Thomas Lynch wrote a fascinating letter that reveals much about the unofficial encouragement of piracy by government officials and the mutual desire of the French and English to covertly harass the Spanish.

The mere fact that the French governor de Pouançay and the English governor Thomas Lynch would happily do business with old reprobates like Van Hoorn and de Grammont says much about the official wink and a nod toward piracy. Lynch, of course, had referred to de Grammont as “an honest old privateer,”
³
a perfect example of how one man's privateer is another man's pirate.

Lynch goes on to say that the
St. Nicholas
“brought me letters from Mons. Poncay
[sic]
and Mons. Grammont…[that] assured me of their intentions to keep the peace, and…that Van Hoorn, the captain, had no other commission but to take pirates, nor other design here but to deliver his letters.”
⁴

By “keep the peace,” Lynch, of course, meant that Van Hoorn had no intention of attacking English shipping, which was reiterated by his assurance that Van Hoorn had “no…other design” in Jamaica but delivering letters and, as he went on, buying medicine and ship's stores.

Lynch is clearly aware that Van Hoorn is not on a peaceful mission. He knows that Van Hoorn's commission from de Pouançay gives the
Dutchman permission only to capture pirates, but Lynch is also certain that Van Hoorn has no such plans. He writes:

Lynch is equally aware of Van Hoorn and de Grammont's plans to link up with de Graff and form a powerful buccaneer army. He goes on to say:

Again, Lynch clearly regards robbery on the high seas as piracy only when it affects English shipping. Lynch refers to them all as “pirates,” but at the same time he writes a very businesslike letter to de Graff asking that the “pirate” who stole an English sloop (“a sloop of ours”) be punished and the sloop returned. He seemed to have had reason to believe de Graff would cooperate with that request.

Lynch's agenda becomes plain when he notes: “For I hope to bring
them [the buccaneers] to that pass that they will be content if we do not punish them for robbing the Spaniards….”

Lynch ends the letter with a humorous comment on how much of a Caribbean governor's time was spent dealing with the buccaneers. He writes, “You cannot blame me for being the historian of these rogues for this year, for I have business with few else….”

Sometime in mid-February 1683, Van Hoorn left Jamaica with his small fleet and three hundred buccaneers with the Chevalier de Grammont as his second in command. Governor Lynch's intelligence had been accurate. Instead of beating back to windward and capturing pirates at Ile à Vache, Van Hoorn ran downwind to the Gulf of Honduras to meet with Laurens de Graff, the man who was rapidly becoming the first among equals in the filibuster community.

On the way they met up with others, whom they persuaded to join in on their joint action. Together, their massive buccaneer army would stage one of the most brilliant, if bloody, raids in the history of the Spanish Main.

O
CTOBER
28, 1998
L
AS
A
VES

S
o there we were. All dressed up and no place to film.

Mike Rossiter began a furious series of communications with everyone who might do us some good. He called Antonio, he called the BBC, he called the Venezuelan ambassador whom he had previously contacted.

Communication with the outside was very difficult. We didn't have cell phone coverage. All calls had to be made via radio and ship-to-shore communications, which are primitive and awkward. Mike's job was to get the filming done, and he took every step. Somewhere out there, beyond the sharp line of the horizon, we knew that because of Mike's calls, dozens of people were mobilizing, trying to untangle this bureaucratic Gordian knot.

Ron Hoogesteyn took a more direct, pragmatic approach. The navy ship was some way off and could not see what we were doing on board the
Antares.
Once we were out on the reefs, we would be out of its sight. Ron felt that as long as we were discreet, we might as well start filming.

I was dubious. Could the navy crew really be so oblivious, or so lackadaisical? All they had to do was to come out in their boat and
they would see what we were doing. But Ron was a local. As captain of a boat that earned her living in those waters, he knew better than I what to expect from Venezuelan officials, and he knew we were within the law. I figured it was worth a try, but issues of filming were Mike Rossiter's call, not mine.

Mike was torn. As a representative of the BBC, the last thing he wished to do was to embarrass a government agency by ignoring its orders. On the other hand, it was his job to make a documentary. The BBC had already invested quite a lot in getting us out to the site and ready to dive. We had valid permits. No one wanted to see all that money and effort thrown away.

Those things considered, Mike decided we should go for it. I am sure that he would not have made that decision if he had not felt in good conscience that he had done everything required of him to secure the necessary permits. Whatever snafu or bureaucratic meddling had led to the navy's refusal to recognize our permits was not the result of any oversight on Mike's or Antonio's part. While the people in Caracas and London whom Mike had mobilized to straighten this mess out began making calls of their own, banging on doors and cutting through red tape, we prepared to do some diving.

The
Antares
carried a smaller dive boat called the
Aquana,
which was twenty feet long or so. It was capable of carrying a surprising amount of gear. A canopy top provided shade to a small portion of the boat. She was steered from a center console and powered by twin seventy-five-horsepower Yamaha outboards. While their best days were long gone, they could still move us right along with the skiff's flat bottom.

The flat bottom and shallow draft also allowed the boat to get over the reef if the seas were not too high, a great advantage. Still, whenever we approached those treacherous reefs, we had one of the
Antares'
s crew stationed on the bow, warning us of coral heads that even the shallow dive boat would not clear. We did not want to share d'Estrées' fate.

That first morning we loaded our dive equipment and crew aboard the
Aquana,
and then, more discreetly, the video gear. Ron took the wheel, and one of his native crew perched at the bow to keep an eye out for coral. We motored for the reef.

For Chris Macort and me, it was a shock. The last time we had been to Las Aves, the wind had been howling at forty knots and more and the seas had been breaking over the reefs in great showers of
foam, flinging spray fifty and sixty feet in the air and preventing us from getting close. This morning, it was as still as a mountain lake. There was no surf breaking, nothing to indicate that the reef was even there. The surface of the ocean was a flat, unbroken plane, from where we sat in the
Aquana
clear to the far horizon. We hardly recognized the place.

This was not entirely a matter of luck. I had spent a lot of time talking to local people about what time of year we would be least likely to encounter that kind of wind again. There is no guidebook or weather forecast that can beat local knowledge, especially the local knowledge of people like fishermen, whose livelihood depends on the weather.

The first time I had been over the reefs, we had anchored inside and fought our way out underwater against the terrible current. Not this time. With no seas breaking on the reefs, and the dive boat's flat bottom and shallow draft, we were able to motor right over them out to the open water. The man in the bow used hand signals to direct Ron around the bigger coral heads, those close enough to the surface that they threatened to rip out the boat's bottom. In that way we threaded our way to open water.

Ever since I first returned from Las Aves I had been studying the charts of the area and overlaying them with d'Estrées' map to try to get a sense of where we might begin to search for the wrecks. The night before I had gone over them once more, making my final decision of where to begin the search.

The ships of d'Estrées' fleet had struck all along the reef, from the southernmost end to the north. In theory we would find wrecks anywhere along the four-mile length. I aimed for midway along the reef, thinking that would put us in the best position to find one. We could then use that as a jumping-off point.

We motored over the shallow water that swirled over the reef. The sea was green when you looked out over the surface, and absolutely clear when you looked straight down. Below us, the mottled blues and browns and yellows of the coral passed slowly under the boat as we headed for the wreck site. And then the reef began to drop away as we passed over to the seaward side and the open ocean.

Without the magnetometer, we had no way to remote-scan for the wrecks. It would be a visual survey. We would pick a spot at random and begin searching north and south until we located the artifacts that would indicate where a ship went up on the reef.

Ron stopped the boat on the seaward side. Before we went in, we took the first logical step in hunting for a shipwreck.

We looked over the side of the boat.

And there it was.

It was that simple. In the clear, shallow water on the reefs of Las Aves, we simply looked down and just below us, on the bottom, fifteen feet or so down, were the ghostly, coral-encrusted shapes of cannons, anchors, the unmistakable signs of a shipwreck. Hidden among the organic shapes of the reef were obviously man-made objects, shapes with right angles, unnatural lumps, things that did not belong. From our seats aboard the
Aquana
we were shouting, “Look! A cannon! There's an anchor!” It was a thrill, all the pleasure of discovery with hardly any of the frustration and setbacks. After years of working the cold, murky waters of Cape Cod, it was a magnificent treat.

Over the side we went to take a closer look. The seas weren't a washing machine this time; we weren't tossed against the unforgiving reef. The water was absolutely calm as we kicked down to the site of the wreck on the seabed.

The wrecks at Las Aves are not what most people think of when they think of shipwrecks. They are not like wrecks in the movies—a ghostly stove-in hull resting on the bottom, broken masts tilted at crazy angles, shreds of rigging draped around. A year or two after they struck the reef the sunken ships might have looked like that, but no more. There is no rigging, no masts, no hulls.

The French men-of-war had been underwater for 320 years by the time we showed up to look for them. That's a long time. The tropical ocean may be a great place to dive, but it is a bad place to be a shipwreck. The very things that make the diving so great—the warm water and abundance of sea life of all kinds—are exactly the same things that quickly destroy whatever is on the bottom.

All of the organic material, the wood hulls and masts, the canvas sails, the hemp and manila rigging, was long gone. What we found were inorganic objects, for example, the stones that had once formed the ballast in the bottom of the ship. These stones tend to be clustered in an arrangement shaped roughly like a football, but narrower. This is how they were when they were piled into the very bottom of the ship. A ballast pile stands out from the rest of the ship bottom because of its shape.

Of the man-made objects, the largest pieces of metal last the longest, and among the biggest artifacts on board these ships were cannons. Cannons were scattered all around. If a ship crumbled straight down, you would expect to see the cannons in a line, as they had once been on the ship's deck. But that is not how these ships fell apart. No doubt some wrecks were lying on their sides and the guns toppled one way or another as the decks rotted away. Most of the three-hundred-plus cannons aboard the fleet were bronze, many about six feet long, but some were bigger, huge guns that you would find on the biggest warships of the day.

Bronze was the preferred metal for guns of that era, but it was enormously expensive. The bronze guns needed to arm a big man-of-war could cost as much as the ship herself, or more. Since they were such special weapons, they tended to be more ornate and beautiful as well.

Bronze remains perfectly intact underwater, even after hundreds of years. The metal alone is quite valuable, but an intact seventeenth-century bronze gun is worth a fortune today, sometimes as much as $100,000. The bronze guns were the things that the treasure hunters
had their eyes on, if gold was not to be found. We found no bronze cannons.

We did find anchors, lots of them. A ship always carried more than one anchor. The largest ships might carry a half-dozen or more, each one of them a monster. The anchors we found were incredible, some with shanks as long as eighteen feet and eleven feet wide from fluke to fluke.

During the course of more than three centuries, these objects have slowly become a part of the living reef. The wreck sites we found each consisted of a long, narrow pile of ballast stones, and nearby, a few anchors, and scattered around the area, some cannons lying at odd angles. That was it.

And that is all that is left of the mighty men-of-war and pirate vessels of d'Estrées' fleet.