The Lost Fleet (24 page)

In 1698, Thomas Paine was officially admitted as a freeman of the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations. What is most surprising is that he had not been admitted earlier. Many of the posts he had already filled—tax assessor, militia officer, member of the grand jury—were generally reserved for freemen. His final admission as a freeman seems to have been a mere formality.

Paine had finally arrived as a member in good standing in Rhode Island society. He was washed clean of the stain of piracy and its attendant scandal. And save for one uncomfortable incident in 1699, when he was accused, with good reason, of hiding loot for the notorious Captain William Kidd, he remained an upstanding citizen—at least by Rhode Island standards.

In 1701, when Kidd was executed, Thomas Paine was around sixty-eight years old, but he had a good thirteen years left in him. In 1706, during Queen Anne's War, he went to sea again, in joint command of an expedition consisting of two ships and 120 men, dispatched to hunt down a French privateer from that old pirate haunt Petit Goâve. The venture was successful, and they brought the privateer back to Newport as a prize. At age seventy-three or thereabouts, it was the old buccaneer's final venture in armed conflict at sea. While one wonders if this too was one of his old comrades, he had probably outlived all of “the Men of Aves.”

Paine lived out the rest of his years quietly in Jamestown. He died in the spring of 1715. He was in his eighties, a good long life for one who had lived so hard and fast, exposed himself to the dangers of sea and sword, fever and the rope, arrest and flying shot. His wife, Mercy, died three years later, and they are buried together on their property on Conanicut Island. Their house still stands to this day.

Thomas Paine, one of the last of the old-time buccaneers, was gone. His death came two years after the Peace of Utrecht, which ended the War of the Spanish Succession in Europe. That cessation of hostilities threw countless sailors and privateersmen out of work and sparked the last great wave of piracy in the Caribbean.

Paine did not live to see the high point of the eighteenth-century pirates, Blackbeard, Bart Roberts, Bellamy, and others. He was a man of an earlier era, and he was gone before this second great pirate awakening. Gone, but his fingerprints remained.

He and Mercy had no children. His namesake appears to be his nephew, Thomas Paine of Block Island. In 1718, Thomas became the second husband of Elizabeth (Williams) McCarty. Elizabeth was a sister of Palgrave Williams of Newport, Rhode Island. And, as readers of
Expedition Whydah
will recall, Palgrave Williams was the partner of Samuel Bellamy, pirate captain of the
Whydah Galley.

And so it had come full circle. From the brandished forearm of Cape Cod to the deadly scorpion-tail reef of Las Aves, a chain stretched four decades between two sunken graveyards. I could picture the old buccaneer by the fireside during the long nights of winter, filling the ears of two ambitious young men with stories of shipwrecks and sunken treasure. I remembered what Jim Hawkins said of Billy Bones's tales in
Treasure Island:
“Dreadful stories they were; about hanging, and walking the plank, and storms at sea, and the Dry Tortugas, and wild deeds and places on the Spanish Main. By his own account he must have lived his life among some of the wickedest men that God ever allowed upon the sea…”

That might serve well as epitaph for Thomas Paine.
²

N
OVEMBER
5, 1998
L
AS
A
VES

B
y the time we were scheduled to leave Las Aves, we were ready. We weren't arguing—not much, anyway—but we were still ready to leave.

On any expedition, when people are thrown together in close quarters night and day, in harsh and demanding conditions, they start to chafe against one another. This trip was no exception.

The accelerated schedule only raised the stress level. On a longer trip, there is more of an opportunity to get away from one another—if only for a few hours. If someone gets sick, they can take a break for a day or two. There is more time to satisfy different personal agendas and needs. But we did not have those luxuries.

As we moved into the last few days of the project, Margot and I moved from our cabin into one with better ventilation, and my flu symptoms disappeared.

The Venezuelan navy and coast guard were still dogging us. As the weather window closed, our fears of returning to the reef increased, adding to the general tension.

In the evenings we would sit around the
Antares,
discussing the day's work, studying videotapes for targets we may have overlooked, and swapping stories and tall tales. Charles is a natural raconteur and
he has picked up some prize stories in the course of his adventures in the jungle. Once he told us how he returned to camp with a band of Yanomami Indians after a day of cutting wood in the jungle. That night, while they were sitting around the fire, the sound of chopping hardwood still resonated eerily through the blackness. Charles, somewhat unnerved, asked his Yanomami companions, “Do you hear that chopping sound?” “Yes. That is the sound of us chopping wood tomorrow.”

“Ah, that explains it,” Charles said.

He told us another story of a woman from New York who was part of a group he was guiding through the jungle. He told her not to wander off, but she did not follow instructions, and soon got lost. For three days she wandered alone in the jungle. Charles and the others eventually found her hiding in a hollow log. She was unrecognizable from insect bites and nearly mad with fear.

The woman told them how a jaguar had stalked her. She claimed that at night the cat would lie down beside the log in which she was hiding and whisper to her in Spanish.

“New Yorkers,” Charles said with more than a hint of repugnance. “She should have listened to me. Ah, but she learned a good lesson.”

Charles's ability to spin a tale made it obvious why he was such a popular lecturer with organizations like the New York Botanical Society. But there was darkness in his stories, a menacing darkness that made me thankful that we were in my element, the sea, rather than deep in the Amazon jungle.

Near the end of the expedition, Charles's adult daughter from a previous marriage and some of her friends came out for a visit, and our crew and those aboard Charles's boat had a rare get-together. Charles's daughter owns a horse farm in the country. I found her delightful and charming.

Some of Charles's friends had come out as well. They were all from the upper crust of Venezuelan society. Like Charles, they were pleasant and affable.

Conversation flowed from rock stars to the relative toxicity of sea snakes to Nazis living in South America. But when the topic changed to politics, a shadow seemed to drift over our dinner guests, like the silhouette of a giant condor circling a flock of spring lambs. Indeed, our guests spoke of the prospect of Hugo Chávez as president as if he were planning to feature them as the main course at his inaugural dinner.

Charles bragged, “I can hold them off forever with a small, well-trained force and escape out my back door—the Amazon jungle is my backyard.” He went on, “You Americans, you just don't know how to treat your blacks. Here, we know how to treat them. They know their place.”

The room went silent. The ship's crew, all of whom were of African origins, looked at Charles—and us—with that faraway gaze that comes from generations of studied endurance in the face of calculated dehumanization.

I searched for words to defend my new friends but could only shake my head, too taken aback to open my mouth.

As our allotted time on the reefs dwindled, it was evident that we would not have time to locate and map every site as meticulously as we had been doing. The reef was four miles long and we could not cover it all. The best we could hope for was to make a quick visual survey, to see how closely the physical location of the remaining wrecks matched d'Estrées' map. The accuracy of ancient mapmakers has always been of interest to me. The exactitude of cartographers has often aided our efforts to find historic shipwrecks. For example, the precision of Captain Cyprian Southack's map of Cape Cod had played an important part in our discovery of the
Whydah.

For our test of d'Estrées' map we decided to use the sled.

Basically a product of 1950s backyard technology, the sled, or hydroplane, looks like a large wooden cutting board with two grips that are essentially an upscale version of what a water skier holds on to when he is being towed behind a boat. And that is exactly the sled's function. The boat tows a sled through the water with a live passenger who is facedown, scanning the bottom.

Since the sled is hydrodynamic, it gives the person being towed a lot of maneuverability. The rider takes a big breath of air, then tilts the sled down to fly toward the bottom. He can tilt it up to fly back to the surface. With a turn of the wrist we could dive down or shoot back up.

Being almost laughably low-tech, the sled is often underutilized, but, even with limitations, it's a great way to check out large, shallow-water areas to get an overall picture of the seabed. It provided us with an extra day of searching that we otherwise would not have had—and let some of the team have a good time doing it.

Todd, Carl, Chris, and big Ron Hoogesteyn set out in the
Aquana
to search the north end of the reef with the sled.

There is a type of magnetometer called a proton precession magnetometer. The men referred to the sled as the “protein magnetometer,” because, trolling along behind the boat, they felt like fish bait. In fact, Ron was wearing some jewelry around his neck that flashed in the sunlight coming down through the water and drew unwanted attention. When he discovered that a barracuda was trailing him as he trolled along on the sled, he quickly took it off. Ron had eaten plenty of barracuda in his life, and he did not want the roles reversed. For my part, I was impressed with the barracuda's appetite; Ron weighs about 260 pounds!

The crew spent an entire day searching the reef from the northernmost wreck we had located. Riding the sled is exhausting, but they liked that. They would take turns on it, switching at twenty-minute intervals. It became a competition, as most things did. The sled is a perfect arena for the endless competition between salvage divers, SEALs, and Special Forces divers to blow off steam and test one another's capacity for pain endurance.

At least they had fun, because the search was not successful. They combed the entire northern part of the reef and did not find a thing. It is quite likely that the wrecks were too embedded in the coral, too camouflaged, to spot by a quick glance from a towed diver. It would require a slower, more meticulous search to find the four wreck sites d'Estrées noted at the northern end of the reef.

For my part, I selfishly wanted to swim alone around the pirate shipwrecks. For me, the process of discovery is not exclusively scientific observation. The experience of simply being there
with
the wrecks was a window into the past in a way that is difficult to explain.

Each artifact from a wreck has its own story to tell of what life aboard that ship was like. And each artifact will tell its fascinating story as a part of the scientific process. But viewing an entire wreck in situ speaks volumes about life aboard ship—and the final moments of that ship.

Sometimes the whole
is
more than the sum of its parts. Hard science alone does not do justice to the cause of fully preserving the past. For that, you also need
heart,
a capacity for appreciating the drama and tragedy of a ship's dying moments. For an explorer, it is nearly as important to get at the meanings behind the data, as it is to gather the data itself.

The day before we were scheduled to wrap things up, we got some good news. Our permit from the navy had come through.

The BBC already had the film in the can. We had located and mapped nine of thirteen wrecks and proved the accuracy of d'Estrées' map. An adventure that began with Max Kennedy's tale of lost cannon had yielded a rich and rewarding prize: a lost fleet that virtually changed Caribbean history. That we had found two pirate vessels from the age of the buccaneers in the process was a bonus, especially for me.

Now it was time for us to go, and for the Venezuelan government to decide the fate of the sites we had found.

As we prepared to leave, Charles asked Mike if the
Antares
would take him and his gear back to Los Roques. This would save him the trouble of loading it all back on his own boat. It was a reasonable request: Los Roques was the
Antares'
s destination as well, and we had plenty of room, but Mike refused outright.

I was surprised that Charles would ask Mike if he could come along, after all that had come between them. It was like Bill Clinton asking George W. Bush if he could hitch a ride to Arkansas on Air Force One's next trip to Texas. I tried to change Mike's mind, but he had had enough of Charles, and that was that.

We left Las Aves and cruised back to Los Roques. Yankey Willems had made the same trip three years after the loss of the French fleet. He had shown up at Las Aves, fished up two cannons off one of the wrecks, and brought them back to Los Roques, where he had careened. These had been Sam Bellamy's waters as well. So, once again, we were sailing in the wake of the buccaneers.

From Los Roques we took a plane back to Caracas. I spent a day there with Bart Jones, the AP reporter, before heading back to the United States. Timing is everything when you're south of the border. It was the day before the election, and the atmosphere was extremely tense. Bart took Margot and me to an overcrowded bar popular with foreign journalists and novelists such as Gabriel García Márquez. It was like stepping into the Hemingway novel
For Whom the Bell Tolls,
which is set on the eve of the Spanish Civil War.

Our explorations at Las Aves created quite a bit of attention in the press. Bart wrote several articles about the expedition, as did Charles Brewer. Charles's articles were in stark contrast to Bart's. Charles was out to lambaste Mike and me in the press, and, since Bart wouldn't join in, Charles declared war on Bart as well.

He also sent an e-mail to Max Kennedy describing me as “a good performer. A medicine man.” Disappointed that I had not allowed the expedition to degenerate into a treasure hunt, he called me “an opportunistic pirate” and characterized my desire to see the integrity of the reef preserved as a ploy to cleanse myself “in front of the international opinion.”

And so it goes….

From Pinzón versus Columbus, through Speke versus Burton, to all the Mount Everest tiffs and
Darkness in Eldorado,
there are no rivalries in this world like the rivalries among explorers.

Mike Rossiter, in the meantime, tried to find out what had happened to delay the permits. He was concerned about what had taken place and wanted to be certain that there had been no official problems, nothing that would reflect badly on the BBC. He learned that virtually every claim Charles had made about the permits he had supposedly secured was untrue. It was like learning that a weather forecaster who knew a hurricane was on its way had nonetheless given “clear sailing” advice to a regatta.
¹

We learned that many people in the Venezuelan government had worked hard to overcome the problem. High-level government people had lobbied for us in Caracas. They had dealt mostly with Antonio Casado, who spoke Spanish and had led the way since he was in the city. When we returned to Caracas, we asked him what had happened, and how permission had been finally secured. It was a mystery to him as well: “I never really did understand. Suddenly I was told fine, the permit is granted.”

Ironically, when our story hit the press, it was a perfect opportunity for the competing Venezuelan company to take the heat off their failed Nazi U-boat project by touting the Las Aves wrecks as a treasure fleet worth over $100 million. Some months later, after learning how well our expedition was conducted, one of their principals came to Cape Cod and asked me to lead another expedition to Venezuela for their company.

In any case, we were packed and headed for the airport and home. It was election day in November 1998, and soldiers with automatic weapons were everywhere, inspecting each car on its way to the airport. “A good day to get out of Venezuela,” I thought.

And that ended my involvement with the wrecks on Las Aves. I like
to think we managed to make some significant advances for maritime history. We identified nine wrecks—confirming the fundamental accuracy of d'Estrées' map. We had also made very accurate drawings of the wreck sites, recording a great deal of information that might otherwise be lost.

We also agreed, once the dust from the election settled, to lobby the Venezuelan government to protect Las Aves from vandals and to preserve it as a marine sanctuary where well-supervised sport divers could tour the site of one of the most interesting maritime disasters in the history of the Americas, on one of the most beautiful reefs in the world.

My entire background and experience is in locating wrecks, and in recovering, preserving, and displaying their remains. That's how I make my living—not by selling artifacts. But it is my opinion that the wrecks of the reef of Las Aves should be left untouched.

There has been no official decision concerning the disposition of the wrecks. But, with so many of its citizenry hungry and in rags, preserving ancient shipwrecks is not a priority of the Venezuelan government.