The Lost Fleet (5 page)

J
ANUARY II,
1998
L
AS
A
VES,
V
ENEZUELA

I
was not thinking of treasure when I asked the conch divers to show us where the “sewer pipes” were. I had no idea what to expect, no real sense of the magnitude of the disaster that had taken place on the reef. For all I knew, I was going to find piping for a sewage treatment plant.

One of the divers cheerfully volunteered to lead the way through the reef. His name was Angel. Angel was perhaps seventeen years old and had been diving at Aves since he was twelve. He had become a creature of the sea: tall and lean, with tremendous legs that propelled him through the water with the grace and speed of a dolphin. Angel came back with me to the boat.

Later that morning, when the entire team was assembled and ready to go, Angel led the way. He was wearing just a pair of tattered briefs and dime-store mask and fins. We followed in complete dive gear.

It was just as rough on the second day as it had been on the first, but this time we had Angel's local knowledge. While we had spent the whole day before banging against the reef, running into a brick wall over and over again, trying to find a way through, Angel knew where the door was. Or, more precisely, where to find a narrow passage leading
through
the reef, not over it.

This is not to say that it was easy. Among our group were several strong swimmers. Still, the seas over the reef were nearly too much for any of us. It was like being trapped in the spin cycle of a washing machine. Experience and physical strength let you stay on the reef a little longer before you were swept away, but that was all.

Foot by foot, we fought our way against the current and out toward the sea; one by one, we were peeled off by the current. Some lost their grip and were thrown backward into the staghorn and fire coral.

Max was another story. Once, when he was learning how to windsurf, he hopped on his board and headed out to sea. He had not yet learned how to turn around, but he was having so much fun that he just kept on going until he lost sight of land. Eventually he managed to get his board going in the opposite direction and got home after dark.

Max took off after Angel without the slightest concern for the return trip. There was no way I was going to let Max go out there without me. If he was drowned, not only was I not going back to Cape Cod, but there were also serious bragging rights at stake.

Hand over hand, we pulled ourselves through the passage in the coral, trying to keep ourselves streamlined while hugging the bottom. The water was very shallow. If you lifted up at all, the current would
peel you off the bottom and fling you backward into the staghorn. My mask was ripped off by the rushing waters so many times, I finally pulled it down over my neck.

We crawled along about fifty yards, our faces in the sand, glancing up to catch glimpses of Angel leading the way, unencumbered by diving equipment. Then, as if we had entered the stillness of a millpond, we slid over the edge of the reef onto a plateau at the edge of an abyss that seemed to drop away forever off the edge of the earth.

The change was breathtaking—and we had little breath left—from the spin cycle of a washer to a colossal aquarium teeming with schools of iridescent fish in a profusion of color that was so overwhelming I had to sit on the bottom for a moment to collect my senses.

Looking up, I saw the underside of the waves steamrolling harmlessly overhead. The calm was so peaceful, however, that I nearly forgot about the return passage and sat there for a moment like the Cowardly Lion in the poppy fields of Oz. At the surface, I could see Angel and Max. Angel began to wave and point down. Max was beneath the waves in a flash. He emerged, yelling with excitement, “Cannons! Cannons! Right under me!”

By now, I was nearly out of air.

The euphoria of the coral shelf quickly vanished, and I was suddenly hit with the grim prospect of getting back in one piece. But I had to see the cannon. Against both logic and instinct, I swam to Max, and, hoping I could squeeze a last breath of air from my tank, I descended for a final look.

I thought I saw a couple of crisscrossed cannon, but cannon submerged for three centuries become so encrusted that they are hard to spot at a glance. It takes a long hard look to be sure that what you are seeing really are cannon and not, say, sewer pipes. I wanted to see cannon. I thought what I was seeing were cannon, but there was no time to be sure.

Back to the surface; back to the lagoon. It was time to pay the fiddler for a dance I didn't want.

Angel led the way, though the passage through the reef was not a big help on our return to the lagoon. Working against the current on our way out was exhausting, but it was relatively safe since we were moving slowly into the flow of water. Coming back was something else again, however.

With his knowledge of the reef, and no cumbersome dive gear, Angel was able to simply glide over the top of the coral, but we could
not do that. Once we committed ourselves to the current, we were its captives. I used what little air I had to go underwater and get whatever protection I could from the few feet of depth. But when that air was gone, it was up to Lady Luck to get me home again.

Indeed, there would be no problem getting back in. The hard part was getting back in alive. Over the reef we went. We didn't know where we were going in that white foaming chute of water, and there was virtually no way to slow down.

We tried to control our path as best we could, but there was almost nothing we could do. We were smashed into staghorn coral, dragged over fire coral, and bounced off the reef. The coral slashed wet suits and skin, bruising us as we bounced along.

And that is how we got back across the reef. My legs and ankles were badly lacerated. My forehead had been stabbed by a piece of staghorn coral. Max hadn't fared much better.

Michael Mailer, badly lacerated early on, and I went to the tiny coast guard station on the island for treatment. We had got the worst of the reef. But the reef failed to get the best of us.

That night, sleepless with my skin burning from fire coral, I wondered if what I saw were really cannon, or if my imagination had been playing tricks.

J
ANUARY II,
1998
L
AS
A
VES,
V
ENEZUELA

M
ax and I returned from the windward side of the reef, looking as if we had been thrown through a plateglass window. Other than Angel, we were the only people who had made it over the reef. When we began to describe to the others what we had seen, Charles chimed in, “Ah, yes, I saw them, too, they were beautiful!”

Max and I looked at each other. Chris was with Charles when the current washed them out; after that they had spent the entire time together in the shallows looking for pottery shards. Chris confirmed this.

It was a minor triumph to have made it over the reef; no big deal, a few bragging rights, no more. But Charles had not been able to take even so small a one-upping. The former Olympic swimmer had not made it out of the lagoon, so he lied. Was this just an error in judgment, a silly fib to protect a fragile ego? Or was it a clue to the darker side of Charles Brewer-Carius? Indeed, I was reminded of the lesson James Bond learned when he caught Goldfinger cheating at golf, thus exposing the true character of Mr. Goldfinger.

Any vessel come to grief on Las Aves would, of course, have gone down on the seaward side of the reef. The next day, however, the surf was even worse, and there was no going over the reef for anyone.
Max and I had had a glimpse of what we had come looking for anyway. Although I was not sure that what I had seen were cannon, I was sure that they were concretions—encrusted masses of metal that could only have come from an old shipwreck.

We decided to look around in the relative shelter of the lagoon. We were rewarded almost immediately. Like Chris and Charles, we discovered heaps of smashed pottery. Only one pot was intact, but they all appeared to be of the same design. They had round bottoms and apparently had once been sealed on top—perhaps to hold liquids such as wine, olive oil, or even water. It was an exciting moment—the first tangible evidence that we might be onto something. It was unquestionably the detritus of a shipwreck, and an old one.

The shards were scattered everywhere. Unfortunately, many of them were in waist-deep water on the reef, so once again we were fighting the current. To keep in place, we would anchor the small boat and trail astern safety lines with large plastic balls fastened to the ends. If a diver “washed out,” he could grab the line before being carried away by the current. And that is how we examined the evidence before us, looking at as many of the shards as we could. With every shard we found, it looked more and more as if we had stumbled on a major find. I began to think that we were dealing with more than one wreck.

At many wreck sites, most of the artifacts are in situ, remaining close to where they fell. And, by carefully noting their location on the bottom, one can get a good idea of how the ship was built, and how life aboard was organized. But that was not the case at Las Aves. It was clear that what we would find on the windward side of the reef would be heavy objects such as anchors, cannon, and ballast stones, the rocks stored at the bottom of a ship to keep it upright. Everything else would have been swept away. While wooden barrels would have drifted into shore relatively soon after the wreck, the pots, full of liquid, must have initially sunk straight to the bottom. Then, through the years, the current pushed them over the reef. With our experience so far of the currents, it was not hard to believe that the sea had carried the artifacts into the lagoon, breaking them on the way, just as we had nearly been broken.

We measured and photographed the single intact pot. Charles took the pot and said he was going to present it to the Ministry of Culture, although I argued with him to leave it where it lay—that it wasn't worth the risk of a smuggling charge if he were caught with it before
he could get it to the ministry. But there was no arguing with Charles once he had made up his mind.

For the remaining two days of the trip, the wind never let up, and we never made it over the reef again. I took the opportunity to explore the island of Las Aves itself with a metal detector. Chris came along with me. Though we did not yet understand the scope of what had happened here, we did know that there had been castaways on the island, and we were curious to see if we could find any evidence.

Las Aves has attracted few settlers through the years. The only structure there is a small Venezuelan coast guard station at the south end of the island. It's an odd building, shaped like an igloo. A half-dozen coastguardsmen patrol the inshore waters in a large open boat. They and the conch divers are the only people who work on the island, and they are all transients. We would soon see why.

From the boat, the island had not looked like a place where I would like to camp, but once ashore I realized just how brutal a place it truly was. The grass is short and stiff and makes walking barefoot painful. It is very hot, and there is no shade. There are no trees other than swamp mangroves. The place is infested with bugs and swarming with flies. The only ponds on the island are small salt ponds, and, when they dry, they look like the tortured surface of a distant planet.

We explored the northern tip of the island. We didn't find much of interest except for a series of stone-lined depressions in the ground. After a few sweeps with the metal detector with no results, we concluded that the depressions were old wells. We would later read in Dampier's
A New Voyage Round the World
that the wells had been dug by privateers who had put into the island to water their ships. They did not look as if they would have been able to supply any significant number of castaways, even in their best days.

We also found chunks of thick green glass from broken bottles. These were the heavy green “onion” bottles that were in common use in the late seventeenth century. So called because of their shape, there must have been hundreds of them. We wondered if perhaps this was a spot where survivors had sat to drink away their sorrows. I picked up the neck of a bottle, its fat lip still attached. I imagined the pirate or
sailor who last held it to his parched lips, and saw what for a thousand suffering souls had not changed in three centuries—or thousands of years before that.

We also found more of the same terra-cotta pottery we were finding on the reef. That was tantalizing evidence that we had found a campsite.

We continued to look around inside the lagoon, but we couldn't do much more than dive down and look at things and confirm our suspicions that we had found a wreck site.

Of course, that initial trip to Las Aves had not been undertaken as a major expedition, just some fun and occasionally life-threatening diving in the tropics. We poked around for four days, and then the expedition came to an end. It was time to go.

Leaving Las Aves by air is perhaps more dangerous than by sea.

A Cessna 210 was piloted by a local, who had made the trip many times before. He was arguing with the passengers about the extra baggage being loaded aboard as the wind lashed across the small grass strip. Tiny cyclones of dust whirled in the hot air.

The runway appeared short to me, especially considering the large earthen embankment at its end. I was debating whether I should insist that the plane not leave. But, as you often do in those situations, you simply pray.

The pilot took the Cessna to the far end of the runway—so far that her tail extended into the brush. He wanted every inch he could get for his takeoff.

There was not a trace of apprehension in the faces of Max and Pedro, who had “beeg Coobans” between their grinning teeth. The pilot revved the engine and popped the brake. But rather than take off like a hot rod, the little plane hesitated. Then, in the most undignified manner she began to waddle down the runway, wheels spread and engine grunting. The pilot had to use every speck of runway to get the speed he needed to get his ship airborne, and a wheel kissed the embankment, leaving a puff of dust as they flew off.

I am happy to report that our departure was somewhat less dramatic.

Back in Caracas, Charles Brewer called a press conference to announce the extraordinary find we had made on the reefs. The conference was held at an exclusive country club, of which he and his family were members. The club was original Spanish Colonial, at least three hundred years old, with a panoramic view of Caracas.

Among the press corps in attendance was the Associated Press correspondent in Venezuela, Bart Jones, an American. I was tired and ready to go back home. Charles had set up an interview for me with Bart, however, and he insisted I do it, so I relented.

Bart was wary. He had a poor opinion of Charles—especially his reputation for manipulating the press. He assumed that I was part of the Brewer publicity machine, and he was prepared to inhale a lot of ether.

Bart and I talked for some time, and, the more we talked, the more he realized that I was
not
going to hype the find as a treasure wreck as Charles intended to do. Finally, Bart asked, “What do you know about Charles Brewer?”

I equivocated a bit, suppressing an impulse to tell Bart about our experience on the reef with Charles. I told him I didn't really know much, which was true.

Bart knew quite a lot about Charles Brewer, and he told me a few things—most of which Charles had
not
mentioned in his résumé.
¹
Charles Brewer was more well known in Venezuela than I had imagined. He had been Minister of Youth, and he had been a partner of the controversial anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon. Brewer and Chagnon had worked with the mistress of impeached Venezuelan president Andrés Pérez in an effort to take control of huge tracts of
land on which the primitive Yanomami tribe live. According to Bart, Charles had been caught in illegal gold strip-mining ventures.

From what Bart was telling me, I could see that, at the very least, Charles was playing the same game here, working himself into the center of things so that he could exploit a situation. For a guy who was essentially a sports diver, he was already posturing himself as a great maritime explorer and underwater archaeologist. Even before I left Venezuela, I knew that if I had any interest in further exploration at Las Aves, Brewer would make sure that he was going to be in control.

I wasn't so sure about some of Bart's other allegations. I had not known him long enough to tell what his particular biases might be, and some of his information simply staggered the imagination. It almost sounded as if one of the early Spanish conquistadors had been somehow reincarnated at the very brink of the second millennium. At the back of my mind was also the Elizabethan river wreck of which I had heard. I know the sea; someone like Charles would be needed for a jungle river expedition. I decided to be wary of Charles, but to keep an open mind.

Bart wrote the Las Aves story for AP, and it went out over the wire. Soon the whole world was aware of what we had found at Las Aves.
Those stories were read with great interest in certain treasure-hunting circles.

Just a few days after the interview, I was back at my home in Provincetown, at the tip of Cape Cod. Looking out over the frigid, blue-gray Atlantic, as an icy wind kicked up rows of whitecaps, it was hard to believe that this was the same ocean in which I had been diving just a week before.

What we had found continued to tantalize me. There are, of course, thousands of wrecks scattered across the ocean bottom. Most are not worth the trouble to find. But Las Aves seemed to hold promise. I wanted to know more.

I gave Ken Kinkor a full account of what we had found on the reefs and asked him to look into what ship, or ships, might have been there. With the work on the
Whydah
wrapped up for the season, Ken had time to dig deeper into the history of Las Aves. What he found fascinated us.

Ken unearthed primary source documents, reports, and letters from English sources describing the magnitude of the disaster that had befallen d'Estrées' fleet, and the catastrophe it represented to French designs on the Caribbean. In the course of phone conversations with other historians and archaeologists, I gathered more material. Others who had seen the AP reports chimed in with what they knew.

The most important discovery was a map d'Estrées had made of the wreck site before departing Las Aves. It was an incredible document. The admiral's drawing of the reef system looked very much like modern charts of the area. All along the reef line were drawings of French men-of-war positioned at the places where they had struck. Next to each of the carefully drawn pictures was the name of that unfortunate vessel—except for two. Next to those drawings was only a single word:
flibustier.

Flibustier.
A French word derived from the Dutch
vrijbuiter;
in English, it is “filibuster.” All are terms for the same root concept, “freebooter,” defined by the
Oxford English Dictionary
as “one of a class of piratical adventurers who pillaged the Spanish colonies in the West Indies during the 17th century.”

With that one word, my interest in the wrecks at Las Aves skyrocketed.
Filibusters.
Pirates have always been my main area of interest. At that time, the
Whydah
was the only known pirate shipwreck ever discovered and authenticated. Now, here were the locations of two more. Not eighteenth-century pirates like Bellamy, but seventeenth-century buccaneers of the Spanish Main.

More research revealed the French recruitment of the buccaneers of Tortuga, at least fourteen hundred pirates on fifteen ships. Knowing that Tortuga was the central gathering point for the Caribbean pirates of that era, and knowing that the French must have recruited nearly every major crew in the West Indies to have put together a flotilla of that size, Ken suspected that some of the famous figures in the annals of seventeenth-century piracy might well have been among those men of Las Aves.

It was an extraordinary prospect. D'Estrées had lost some of the largest warships of his time on the reefs at Las Aves. The buccaneer contingent represented one of the largest mobilizations of those men ever recorded. And here were to be found the remains of ships from that event, artifacts from the beginning of a great wave of piracy that would plague the Caribbean for decades.