The Lost Fleet (3 page)

F
ALL
1997
P
ROVINCETOWN,
M
ASSACHUSETTS

T
he Las Aves expedition began with a call from Max Kennedy, son of the late Robert Kennedy.

I met Max in Colorado in the late seventies while skiing in Aspen. He must have been twelve or thirteen at the time. His mother, Ethel Kennedy, introduced me as a diver and a shipwreck explorer. That's all Max needed to hear. He followed me around the rest of the day, wanting to learn about everything I had ever done, everything I planned to do in the future, and, most important, could he go with me when I went to do it?

I'd bump into Max on occasion over the years. He never lost his fascination for what lay at the bottom of the sea, or his enthusiasm for shipwreck exploration. In fact, he called me late one night while he was in college and asked if I'd help him plan an expedition to Colombia to hunt for Spanish galleons.

I heard from him again in the fall of 1997. He told me a story about cannon lying on a shallow reef one hundred miles off the coast of Venezuela. He wanted to know if I would help him plan an expedition to find out where they came from.

Although my team and I discovered the wreck of the
Whydah
off Wellfleet, Massachusetts, in 1984, we are still bringing up large quan
tities of artifacts more than fifteen years later. But the excavation season for 1997 was over when Max called. Diving off Cape Cod is severe in the best of conditions. The water is cold, visibility limited, and the currents so fierce that excavation pits are filled with sand almost as soon as they are opened. Tropical reef diving off Venezuela sounded good.

Max is a strong swimmer and a good diver. If he had been alive in 1492, he would have been the first to volunteer for the Columbus expedition. And, if that expedition had learned that the world was indeed flat, Max would have dangled his toes over the edge just for the fun of it. That's what I like best about Max.

We also share great admiration for the work of historians such as Stephen Ambrose and the late Samuel Eliot Morison—scholars and teachers who follow the routes of early explorers in order to test the accuracy of the primary source record of historically significant events.

After speaking with Max, I consulted with Ken Kinkor, one of the foremost authorities on the history of piracy, who has been the
Whydah
project historian for the past fifteen years. Ken pursues pirates through the past the same way the famous manhunter Charles Siringo
pursued the Wild Bunch through the Old West. I occasionally sense that he's looking for something special, but I've never asked him what it is. Tall, infuriatingly deliberate in speech, and with a pipe that emits nearly as much smoke and ash as Mount Saint Helens, Ken might be the perfect model for an especially rumpled classical research professor, were it not for the fact that his chosen subject is far bloodier and far less dignified.

Because Ken is generally familiar with the colonial and maritime history of the West Indies, it didn't take him long to mention some possible wrecks with which the cannon might have been associated. He had certainly heard of the wreck of d'Estrées' fleet, but had not looked into it in detail. With the
Whydah
project at the height of its season, he was too harried to immediately come up with many specifics about the history of the place. As a result, none of us had a full grasp of the enormous potential the reef offered.

Compared with the way we usually do things, we were going in practically blind, but the trip that Max proposed was just reconnaissance in any case. Organized by Max and me, the team consisted largely of Max's friends: Pedro Mezquita, a native Venezuelan who received his law degree from Harvard; film producer Michael Mailer, son of novelist and my Provincetown neighbor Norman Mailer; Michael Karnow, son of historian Stanley Karnow; and Kent Correll, another of Max's friends who is an attorney in New York City.

I hired Chris Macort, a diver who had worked with me for a season on the
Whydah.
Chris was still relatively green, and this would be an important learning experience for him. I put him in charge of packing all the gear for the trip. This is a responsibility that no one really enjoys, but it's essential to the success of any mission. When you are one hundred miles from the nearest hardware store or pharmacy, you had better be sure you have everything you need with you—and multiple items of the most essential equipment. Packing is a fine art, one that is at least as important to me as being a certified diver.

I told Chris, “We're going to explore a reef called ‘the Birds,' one hundred miles off the Venezuelan coast.” He had a million questions; I told him they would all be answered when we got there, and that I didn't know much more about the place than he did.

Since we weren't sure what we would be up against, we brought everything: standard regulators, Aga masks with regulators, metal detectors, communications gear, bags of spare batteries, and, as always,
lots of sharp knives. We also brought tents, sleeping bags, hatchets, and cooking equipment. If we had to camp on the island, we would be prepared.

We also decided to bring along a magnetometer, a long, torpedo-shaped device that is towed behind a boat and detects ferrous anomalies lying on the sea floor. It's clumsy and weighs more than two hundred pounds. This seemed like too much heavy-duty gear for a simple recon. I have found, however, that any equipment you leave behind inevitably proves to be the exact piece of equipment you will need most once you are on-site. In the end, we had nine hundred pounds of gear between the two of us. We were ready for anything—except for the conditions we found.

J
ANUARY
1998
V
ENEZUELA

W
e arrived in Venezuela on January 8, 1998, and were met by Pedro Mezquita, a big man with a kind face who seemed to laugh, talk, and smile all at the same time. He drove us to a hotel in Caracas, where we stayed before departing for the island.

Max had chartered a boat for us. It was a forty-two-foot Bertram, a power yacht common in marinas in the United States. The term “yacht,” with its connotation of luxury, is a little deceptive in this instance, since the stench from the bilge brought vomit to the top of your throat each time you went below.

Las Aves is about a hundred miles off the mainland. It would be a long trip for the little Bertram, Charles Brewer, his wife, their two young children, Chris, and me.

I would guess that Charles is in his early sixties, with the good looks and charm of a successful Rolls-Royce dealer. He is, however, Venezuela's best-known jungle explorer and adventurer.

I am looking a little scruffy at our first meeting aboard the Bertram. “Ah, you look worse than your reputation,” he said, introducing me to his wife and kids as “the famous American pirate.” Not knowing how I would react, he tried to make it a half-joke with a bad impression of Long John Silver. The contest had begun.

Educated as a dentist, Charles has impressive credentials. In fact, when he faxed me his résumé, my fax machine ran out of paper after a hundred sheets. Later, he e-mailed me a heavily edited version of twenty-five pages. It started with:

It was humbling, especially when I handed him my old business card with a scratched-out phone number. The fact that I “didn't know the difference between a sponge and a gorgonian”—as he would point out later—added to my insecurity.

But it was very easy to like Charles, in spite of his air of superiority, and I remember thinking at the time what great friends we would become if we could get past the testosterone battles. I thought Charles,
with his knowledge of the jungle, would be the perfect guide to lead an expedition to the Amazon for a lost Elizabethan shipwreck that I was investigating for the Discovery Channel.

We got under way the next morning. Michael Karnow asked if he could come with us. He knew he was prone to seasickness, and someone had told him that the powerboat would be a smoother ride, although they hadn't factored in the overpowering smell of rotten eggs mixed with fermenting urine in the bilge.

No sooner had we left the protection of the harbor than we were hit by an easterly with the swiftness of a backhand from a cruel stepmother. The little Bertram would climb a wave and then slam down in a great spray of foam. It would be a
long
hundred miles to the “the Island of Birds.”

Not having slept since leaving Cape Cod, I went below, stuffed some cotton soaked in mouthwash in my nostrils, jammed myself between two berths, and took a catnap.

When I woke, I found Michael wandering below deck in a state of stupefied agony. I have actually seen dead men with better complexions. He whispered, “I think I'm going to die…. No, let me rephrase that: I
want
to die. Would you kindly put me out of my misery?”

I tried to comfort him by reassuring him that
almost
everyone survives seasickness. He tried to laugh, then asked me if I had given his proposal any serious consideration.

The trip took ten hours, and, if given the choice between having a spinal tap or making that crossing again, I'd take the spinal.

Las Aves is a wind-lashed speck of mangroves, bulrushes, and short, coarse grass. It rises from the ocean like a scorpion's tail at the end of a four-mile stretch of deadly reef. As we motored in, it was clear that this island was not a place to camp. Bilge reek notwithstanding, we would stay aboard the little cruiser.

Looking as ghastly as the crew of the
Flying Dutchman,
Max and his group arrived aboard a fifty-foot ketch, even more seasick than our crew. The sailboat had taken the strong easterly on her beam, causing her to wallow with the indignation of an old sow in a muddy ditch.

I arrived aboard the sailboat in the middle of a discussion concerning Charles Brewer. Charles had apparently crossed paths with some of the party before.

“Who invited him along?”

Pedro, ever the lawyer, made a commendable defense on Charles's
behalf, and the subject was dropped. But I was left with a lingering suspicion that there was something more to the veteran explorer than I'd seen on his vita.

I took Pedro aside and asked him what the problem was. He hemmed and hawed for a while, but I pressed. Finally, he told me the story.

Some years before, Charles Brewer had led a Kennedy family river expedition in South America that turned into a nightmare and nearly killed Lem Billings, the best friend of the late president John F. Kennedy.

I also heard whispers from some of the boat's crew about Charles, unsettling stories about his time with the Yanomami Indians and other misadventures they had read in the press.

On our first day of the expedition, however, we had problems much greater than personality conflicts. In the Atlantic Ocean, the winds blow in a great clockwise direction, out of the West Indies, up the coast of North America, across the Atlantic to Europe, then down the coast of France, Spain, and Africa. Then, just north of the equator, they return across the Atlantic to the West Indies. These are the trade winds, so called because their predictable direction dictated the trading routes of the old wind-driven ships. When one recalls how d'Estrées
tried for an entire day to sail just a few miles into the wind to fetch Nevis, it is obvious why the sailing ships always kept the wind astern.

These steady easterly trade winds, the same winds that drove d'Estrées' fleet relentlessly up on the reefs, were now howling at nearly sixty miles an hour. The wind knocked the boats around, screamed across the cabins, and made even talking in the open difficult. High wind makes everything more complicated and dangerous; it exaggerates all of the potential problems associated with boat work and diving.

Wind generally does not make much difference to a diver under the surface. But the trade winds are relentless. There is nothing between Africa and the coast of Venezuela to slow them down. As the wind blows, it pushes big waves ahead of it, and they smash against the reefs of Las Aves, creating violent waters and strong currents.

The island of Las Aves, the barren hump of land, is to the westward, downwind of the reefs. The reefs stretch out eastward from the bottom corner of the island, completely undetectable to the passing vessel, except for surf. But in these winds, the big seas crash up against the coral, sending spray high into the air, outlining the reefs with a four-mile arc of dangerous breakers.

Stranded atop the reef is a freighter that wrecked fifteen years ago,
much like the French fleet. Unlike the wooden men-of-war, however, the freighter did not break up. It is a big ship, perhaps five hundred feet long. The seas that morning were slamming into the side of her decaying hull sixty or seventy feet in the air.

This was not a good situation. In order to get to the wrecks, we had to leave the tranquillity of the lagoon and swim across the reef. The water over the reef was about four feet deep—but there were
waves.
Not the slow, graceful waves you might see in Hawaii, but large, irregular, mutant ones, the size of three-story brownstone houses, which came sporadically and without rhythm, crashing down on the tabletop of poisonous coral.

We took smaller boats to the edge of the reef. After anchoring, my first thought was “There's no way I'm going out there…. I'm getting too old for this BS.”

And there stood Max, his eyes wide with excitement, as game as my old Labrador to break ice for a crippled goose; some instinct in his blood was calling.

So off we went, one by one, into the stream of rushing water cascading over the reef. The water was only waist deep, but we had to pull ourselves along the bottom, holding on to the coral, to make any progress. It was impossible. The water was just too turbulent. I was
carrying a metal detector to use once I had reached the other side of the reef. It had earphones to signal if metal was detected. The earphones were being ripped off my head, and, if I turned the detector sideways, the force of the water threatened to tear it out of my hand.

We spent that whole first day banging ourselves against the reef, trying to get over to its seaward side. Disheartened, exhausted, and cut up, we headed back to our boats.

On the morning of the second day, Max and I went out in one of the small boats to take another look. As we were cruising across the lagoon, we saw a small group of men who seemed to be standing on water. As we approached, it became clear that they were conch divers standing on a postage-stamp-size spit of sand. They were happy to see us, as the mother ship that had dropped them off was a week overdue. They were low on food and water, and there was a change of weather in the air.

One of the secrets in finding shipwrecks is local knowledge. These men, if anyone, would know if there were old shipwrecks along the reef. I began to question them in my rudimentary Spanish.

“Cañones?”
I asked. “Have you seen any cannons?”

“No, no
cañones,
no
cañones,
” they replied. I was disappointed until
they went on to explain that, although there were no cannons, they had seen what they described as very large sewer pipes piled up on top of one another.

Sewer pipes. Max and I exchanged glances. While it was possible that they were sewer pipes, these men had probably seen a pile of cannons, all that was left of some ancient shipwreck.

I told them I was very eager to see the sewer pipes.