The Lost Fleet (15 page)

M
AY
17, 1683
V
ERA
C
RUZ

I
t was not an easy decision to reach. Vera Cruz was a well-fortified city, nearly as strong as Havana or Cartagena. It had not been attempted since the Elizabethan sea dog John Hawkins, mentor to Francis Drake, had staged an impromptu raid in 1568. That had gone badly for the attackers. With de Grammont's eloquent assurance that no Spanish force could resist their onslaught, however, the buccaneers agreed.

Vera Cruz held a great deal of potential, along with possible danger. It was to that city that much of the wealth of Mexico and Central America was shipped, before being sent to Spain. Every year a fleet of massive galleons, known as the plate fleet, arrived to transport the accumulated wealth across the Atlantic. With luck, the pirates would hit while the treasure still lay in the storehouses, and before the great men-of-war arrived to carry it back to Spain.

About the same time that their old compatriot Thomas Paine was leading his attack on St. Augustine, the pirates sailed en masse from Roatán Island, making their way due north to weather the Yucatán Peninsula. On April 7, 1683, they went ashore at Cabo Catoche, the
northernmost point of the Yucatán, to make their final arrangements before descending on Vera Cruz.

Command of the venture was never firmly set. The ultimate authority seemed to rest with Laurens de Graff, though some accounts list Van Hoorn as “General”
¹
in command of the main body of men. It nonetheless became clear that de Graff was calling the shots.

This was only reasonable. No one, not even his own men, could stomach Van Hoorn. Almost two months earlier, Lynch had written that “the French abhor him [Van Hoorn] for his insolence and passion, and they…will desert him at the first land or make Grammont captain….”
²

Lynch was wrong only in thinking that the Chevalier was the heir apparent to the leadership of the buccaneers. He was not. It would soon become clear that de Graff had ascended to that lofty place. The torch had been passed.

Soon the pirate armada was under way again. Among the vessels in the fleet were two ships captured from the Spanish, the
Nuestra Señora de Regla
—the ship that Van Hoorn had whisked from de Graff's trap—and a prize taken by Yankey Willems. These ships were filled with a large contingent of buccaneers, certainly no fewer than two hundred, with some accounts setting the number as high as eight hundred. With de Graff in command of the
Regla
and Yankey in command of his prize, the two former Spanish ships took the lead, leaving the rest of the fleet just below the horizon.

In the late afternoon of May 17, the two erstwhile Spanish vessels appeared off the harbor mouth of Vera Cruz. To the buccaneers' relief, there was no sign of the plate fleet. The twelve large, heavily armed men-of-war were due at any time on their annual voyage to fetch the precious metals of the New World and to carry them back to Spain. They would have been a formidable enemy, but fortunately for the pirates, they had not yet arrived.

Just as fortunate for the pirates, the lookouts in the port of Vera Cruz thought the strange vessels were part of the plate fleet, which was afraid to make their way into the harbor in the failing light.
³
Rather than sending a vessel to confirm that this was in fact the case, the lookouts lit fires on shore to help guide the ships safely in. De Graff made good use of the Spaniards' courtesy and stood in the harbor, anchoring near shore. His disguise had worked, and the wolves were in among the sheep.

In the early hours of May 18, de Graff and Yankey slipped ashore
with the large force of buccaneers they had aboard their two ships. They silently reconnoitered the town, trying to get a feel for its defenses. Vera Cruz was a city of around six thousand inhabitants. Of those, four hundred were civilian militia and another three hundred regular troops, with three hundred more garrisoned on the island fort of San Juan de Ulúa. The pirates were evenly matched. If the Spaniards mounted any sort of decent defense, it would be a hard fight.

De Graff and Yankey's force, as the “forlorn,” also known as the “forlorn hope,” was to be the first over the wall, the first through the breach, while Van Hoorn and de Grammont landed their men some distance away and marched in support. The job of “forlorn hope” was potentially as bad as it sounded.

On the landward side of the town stood two forts that were de Graff's target. There sand dunes had drifted up against the stockade fences, making it a simple matter for the pirates to slip over that first line of defense. Once in the forts, the pirates encountered the usual degree of alertness among the Spanish troops and sentinels: they were all asleep.

During the night, Van Hoorn and his forces joined up with de Graff, and at dawn they attacked. The pirates fired wildly and indiscriminately and set the entire city in a panic. They kicked in doors, fired at anyone who showed his face, cut down any armed men who appeared. The soldiers and militia fled. After half an hour, the buccaneers held Vera Cruz. They had lost only four men, three of them de Graff's men who had been accidentally shot by Van Hoorn's contingent.

Fearing the possibility of a Spanish counteroffensive, de Graff and de Grammont saw to organizing a defense. In a move that was perhaps a throwback to his “chevalier,” or knightly, heritage, de Grammont organized a buccaneer cavalry using horses from the stables of Vera Cruz.

The buccaneers herded as many people as they could—several thousand—into the cathedral and held them prisoner there for three days, with little food or water, while they set about plundering the city. Packed in, with barely room to sit, many prisoners perished, particularly children, as the pirates ransacked the town.

The take was disappointing, and the filibusters reckoned that there was more to be had, hidden in the countryside.

On their second day of sacking Vera Cruz, the plate fleet appeared
on the horizon, tipping the balance of force to the Spanish. Also that morning, a line of Spanish irregular cavalry appeared at the western end of the city. De Grammont charged with his mounted buccaneers, flags waving and trumpets blowing. The Spanish were so startled by this unorthodox and bizarre attack that they scattered without a fight.

With the appearance of the Spanish cavalry and the plate fleet, the buccaneers knew that time was running out. Fast and hard “persuasion” would have to be used to locate the hidden wealth of the holdouts.

The raiders turned their attention back to their prisoners in the cathedral. They selected any prosperous-looking citizens, and their servants, and dragged them from the crowd of prisoners. One by one, they began their systematic torture, using well-tested methods to extract the location of hidden treasure. The pirates threatened to burn down the cathedral, prisoners and all, if more loot and ransom was not forthcoming.

The people of Vera Cruz had no doubt that they were serious in their threat. As one writer put it:

The pirates also garnered an additional seventy thousand pieces of eight for the ransom of Governor Don Luis de Córdoba. De Córdoba was discovered hiding in a pile of hay in a stable by a pirate captain named George Spurre, one of the few English captains in the pirate fleet and a man who had been an active buccaneer for about ten years. It was only on Spurre's urging that the governor was ransomed at all and not killed outright by several of the French buccaneers who had once been held prisoner there. As it happened, Spurre's protection only bought de Córdoba a little time. Soon after, he was sentenced to beheading by his own government for allowing the city to be so easily taken by pirates.

By the fourth day of their sack of Vera Cruz, the buccaneers knew
it was time to go. The powerful plate fleet was slowly bearing down on the harbor. There was also reason to suspect that reinforcements were on their way from Los Angeles, a city ninety miles away.

Having not received all of the ransom due them, the buccaneers marched their prisoners, whom they made carry their loot, and fifteen hundred blacks and mulattos back on board their ships. They sailed from the town of Vera Cruz to a nearby island, there to await the rest of the ransom. The island, home of an ancient Aztec temple, was called Los Sacrificios, giving one a good idea of what could happen there.

The pirates waited nearly a week for the ransoms to be delivered. Van Hoorn, growing impatient with the delay, decided to send ashore a dozen of their prisoners' heads as incentive for the Spaniards to expedite matters.

De Graff, who had the reputation of being more humane than Van
Hoorn—more humane, in fact, than most filibusters—would not allow this. He and Van Hoorn quarreled, and Van Hoorn pulled his sword. The two buccaneers went for each other with cold steel.

De Graff drew first blood, a slash across Van Hoorn's wrist that was not serious, but did put an end to the dispute. The prisoners kept their heads.

At last, having wrung from Vera Cruz all that they were likely to get, the pirates loaded their plunder, hostages, and slaves, weighed anchor, and set sail, with only the plate fleet of twelve heavy men-of-war between themselves and freedom.

Though Van Hoorn raved and yammered about attacking the plate fleet, de Graff refused outright, and the men concurred. Braced to fight their way out of the harbor, the pirate flotilla set sail. To their surprise, the Spanish admiral, Diego Fernández de Zaldívar, did not engage them, but rather let them sail right on by. Why he failed to attack is not known. Sir Thomas Lynch would later ironically suggest that the admiral and vice admiral who had commanded the plate fleet “deserve to be made grandees for allowing these pirates to escape when they had them in a net.”
⁶

The buccaneers left Vera Cruz with a fortune in loot, with only four of their own men dead in exchange.

Two weeks later, the Vera Cruz raid claimed its fifth and final casualty. The wound that Van Hoorn had received in his duel with de Graff was barely a scratch. But the scratch turned gangrenous and the infection spread. About fifteen days after sailing safely out of Vera Cruz harbor, Van Hoorn died, leaving his son his share of the take, an estimated twenty thousand pounds sterling. A year later, Governor Lynch reported that Van Hoorn's son, too, had died, at Petit Goâve, and the French buccaneers had divided his inheritance among themselves.

On June 24, 1683, the Dutch pirate's men rowed his body ashore at Isla Mujeres and buried him in an unmarked grave, bringing to a close the short and vicious piratical career of Nikolaas Van Hoorn.

O
CTOBER
28, 1998
L
AS
A
VES

W
e had another official visit our second day at Las Aves, but this time it was the coast guard. I imagine that there was some interdepartmental rivalry going on, that the coast guard would not allow the navy to do all the passport and permit checking, especially not at a place that was home to a coast guard station. It might have been simple curiosity as well.

The coasties came out in the big open boat that they used around the island. They threw us a line, and we tied their boat up. They climbed up to the afterdeck of the
Antares,
about ten in all. They were young men; I doubt that the officer in charge had seen thirty. We invited them into the salon.

The coastguardsmen were pleasant, even apologetic. They tried to be official, but the effect was lost since their “uniforms” consisted of brown pants, white undershirts, and ball caps. If there was interservice rivalry, they definitely lost to the navy in the uniform department.

Uniform or not, they did have authority. Once again, we produced our papers, passports, film and expedition permits—all of the paperwork we had. The coastguardsmen took it all and examined it carefully, then reiterated the navy's position that we could not film.

Charles tried his best with them. We also had several lawyers on
board, including Max's friend Pedro Mezquita, and they jumped into the fray, too. The coasties' position was as intractable as the navy's. No filming. We thanked them, shook hands, escorted them back to their boat, then got ready for another day of shooting.

Mike Rossiter maintained his barrage of phone calls. People in London and Caracas were telling him that it would be straightened out, whatever problem had arisen would be solved, and that we would get our permits recognized. We only had food and water and a budget for two weeks. We could not sit on our hands waiting for the bureaucratic mess to untangle. We suited up and loaded our gear onto the
Aquana.

Our goal was to find and map a wreck a day. It was a brutally demanding plan, so tiring that Carl compared it to basic training with the SEALs. It would not have been possible if our team had not been so experienced and used to working together. During the planning stage of the expedition, Charles had wanted to hire local divers. While there are plenty of very good divers in Venezuela—Ron Hoogesteyn, for example—it would have been impossible to finish as much work as we did without a team that had experience and time together. As it was, we were able to maintain that pace for nearly the entire expedition.

I suspect that Charles wanted to staff the project with people who answered to him, not me.

Before leaving Provincetown, Todd Murphy and I had determined how we were going to run the operation, what equipment and techniques we would use. But you can't plan everything until you see the site. Although I had been there before, the wind and seas had prevented me from the kind of reconnaissance that would have allowed for more meticulous planning. We knew what we wanted to accomplish, and we determined how we were going to execute the operation once we were there.

Once at Las Aves, Todd and I would get together in the evening and work out the plan for the next day. Todd, as director of operations, would then plan who would be diving, what equipment they would need, when we would leave.

That freed me to set the sequence we would follow in exploring the reef, to study d'Estrées' map, and generally to keep the expedition on track toward achieving the goals we had laid out.

Todd and I were both doing the kind of work we love. Todd, in particular, loves the logistics, the planning and the coordination and
the teamwork. I'm not sure if he feels that way because he is in Special Forces, or if he is in Special Forces because he feels that way. The end result is the same. He loves his work and he is good at it.

I enjoy the logistical side of expeditions as well. There is something about planning for a trip that whets one's appetite for the journey itself and prepares one for the rigors to come. I imagine Columbus might well have been the same way when he was preparing to set out for Cathay. And, if you are at all attuned to problem solving as I am, I can recommend no better exercise than working up the details of an expedition. More than logistics, I love hands-on exploration; being in the water with the wrecks and seeing them for the first time.

Different explorers have different interests. Some, like Bob Ballard of
Titanic
fame, specialize in deep-water, heavily mechanized exploration. He does his work with submarines and remote operated vehicles (ROVs), and he is good at it. But it is exploration performed from a control room, looking at a video monitor, entirely apart from what is being explored. It's like being an astronaut who is allowed to orbit the moon but not land.

Ballard has made some impressive finds without ever getting wet. That kind of exploration is just not my cup of tea. I enjoy the physical aspects of diving, being my own, human-powered vehicle. The
feel
of a site is as important to me as its
look.

People have often asked me what is the deepest I've ever dived. The answer is not very. There seems to be a mystique about deep diving, but I explain—half tongue in cheek—that going deep consists of nothing more than strapping on a weight belt and sinking. No special skill involved in
that.

My real objection is that bottom time on a deep dive is severely limited, making it very impractical for archaeological work. Deep diving for its own sake strikes me as a macho thing and no more. There is an element of danger and unpredictability to it that fall outside of what I consider reasonable and prudent boundaries—especially since the physiological changes that occur at such depths are not fully understood by medicine.

For me the real thrill is the hands-on exploration; going down through the water to see what is there. Fighting the currents to get over the reef at Las Aves was a job for a human being. A machine could not do that. We were powering ourselves, hauling our own equipment. We pride ourselves on our swimming ability, on being our own ROVs. I insist on all our expedition team members being in
top physical condition, which is not just a matter of conditioning the physique but also a matter of conditioning the mind-set.

Our daily routine was simple. In the morning we would have a breakfast meeting to inform the rest of the crew about the plan for that day. Since we had all worked together so long, and since we were doing essentially the same work at every wreck site, we were very informal. Sometimes we would issue a “frago,” short for fragmentary order, which is a change to an already issued order. The needs of the BBC crew obviously often played a part in our decisions regarding the work of the day.

With the workplan set, we loaded up the
Aquana
and motored over the reef to the dive site. Each member of the team had a specific job, and we kept with those assignments for the duration of the expedition.

We knew the wrecks were strewn along the reef, so we would form teams of two or three divers and swim in tandem along the edge of the reef, searching for artifacts. Ideally we would find the point of impact, the place where the ship first hit. Knowing the size of the vessels, we looked for that point in about fifteen to twenty feet of water. If we found where the ship hit first, we could then look for the scatter pattern of the artifacts. That would tell us a great deal about how violent the impact was and how the ship broke up.

Unfortunately, after more than three hundred years, things have become obscured. More often we would find only the usual signs: ballast piles, cannons, anchors, sometimes parts of the rudder assembly, barely discernible among the coral.

Debris fields were everywhere. Some looked as if the ships had broken apart. Some looked as if they had sunk fairly intact and rotted in place. There was only one thing that was consistent: the wrecks all showed that the magnitude of the disaster at Las Aves was stunning.