The Lost Fleet (6 page)

I was ready to go back to Las Aves.

J
UNE
1678
L
AS
A
VES

T
he Brethren of the Coast were not men who took orders easily. Power and influence could shift radically and quickly within their community. Leaders emerged, had their moment of power, and then fell victim to any of the many fates that awaited such men—death in battle, shipwreck, or at the end of a noose, their men turning on them, losing face for a bad decision or a momentary act of perceived cowardice. Many buccaneers rose to power and fell. At the time of the Las Aves disaster there was only one undisputed leader of the filibusters: the Chevalier de Grammont.

One of the most popular Hollywood pirate themes is the banished nobleman turned pirate, the aristocratic gentleman forced to flee his ancestral home and turn buccaneer. Such was the case with de Grammont.

The Chevalier was a small, swarthy man in his late twenties or early thirties at the time of Las Aves. His father, who died when de Gram
mont was quite young, had served in the King's Guards. Though the family was not of the uppermost strata of French society, they did enjoy a certain status and the favor of the royal court. As it turned out, that was fortunate for the Chevalier.

Little is known of de Grammont's earlier years. Indeed, even his Christian name is in some doubt, given variously as Michel, Nicolas, or François. He was born some time before 1643, during the reign of Louis XIII. The story (perhaps “legend” is a more apt term) of his road to piracy is the perfect pedigree for the swashbucklers of fiction.

From an early age, de Grammont displayed all of the pride that came with being a member of French nobility. With his father gone, the young man considered himself head of the family, even if others did not necessarily consider him so.

When de Grammont was in his early teens, his mother remarried. Her new husband, like de Grammont's father, was a military officer.
At some point after becoming de Grammont's stepfather, he introduced de Grammont's sister to a fellow officer, who he thought might make a suitable match.

The young Chevalier did not agree. He felt his sister's suitor was below the family's station, and he made that opinion well known. His sister's opinion of the suitor is unknown, but was probably considered inconsequential. Marriages among the French nobility were made on the basis of considerations other than those of the heart.

To de Grammont, it was a matter of family honor. Once, when the Chevalier's stepfather was not at home and the suitor came to call, de Grammont had the servants forcibly eject the man.

Despite this insult, the suitor continued his courtship and continued to treat de Grammont like a child, making light of the Chevalier's objections. To be thus dismissed must have been infuriating to the proud young man.

It came to a head at last when de Grammont informed the officer that if he were a little older, they would cross swords. Far from being intimidated, the officer continued to mock the Chevalier until, in a fit of rage, de Grammont snatched up a sword and went for his tormentor.

The young officer, not wishing to hurt his beloved's brother, did no more than fend off the attack, but de Grammont was out for blood. Twice he managed to wound his adversary. Thrown off by the wounds and the intensity of de Grammont's assault, the suitor failed to turn the final thrust aside. The Chevalier de Grammont delivered a fatal wound.

Fatal, but not immediately so. De Grammont's servants carried the dying officer away to his house, where he lingered on for two more days. The king sent a major of the Guards to visit the man to determine what had happened and who was guilty of this crime.

Generously, the wounded officer explained that the fault was his, that he had provoked the affair and that it had been carried out with honor. Even more impressive, he sent the Chevalier de Grammont enough money for him to escape France rather than be tried for murder. Finally, he bequeathed to de Grammont's sister, whom he would not live to marry, the sum of ten thousand livres.

As it happened, between the officer's deposition and the influence that the de Grammont family enjoyed in court, the Chevalier escaped banishment and complete disgrace. With the scandal hanging over his head, however, it was thought advisable for de Grammont to absent
himself from Paris, so he was given a commission in the Marine Regiment. In that service de Grammont first saw the West Indies.

The Chevalier de Grammont was bold and fearless, and he served with distinction. After several years, he was given command of a frigate. Near Martinique he captured a Dutch convoy worth more than 400,000 livres. The prizes were taken to the French colony in Saint-Domingue (Haiti). De Grammont had to give up a goodly portion of the prize money to the king, but he did receive one-fifth, an enormous sum, as a first taste of the possibilities that sea robbery offered.

Pirates were men apart from society. As such, many chose to engage in excess in all aspects of their lives. Though de Grammont was a reliable and capable officer, he seems also to have been a man who enjoyed a good time. Just eight days after coming ashore with his prize money, de Grammont found himself once again at sea, having in that short time blown nearly all of his newfound fortune on gambling, prostitutes, and other debauchery. Though he was still in the king's service, he was already acting more like a buccaneer than a marine officer.

De Grammont's second cruise for France was not so successful. Before taking any prizes, his ship was driven by storm onto a reef, where she broke up. It was then that the Chevalier turned to piracy.

F
IRST
A
MONG
E
QUALS

Why, exactly, this member of French society, this well-respected officer, turned to buccaneering is not quite clear. There is no indication that he was out of favor with the military, or that the loss of his ship would end his career. Perhaps de Grammont did not care to labor under the eye of superior officers. Perhaps his brief taste of wealth from the Dutch convoy had whetted his appetite for more, and he did not care to share any further good fortune with the king. Whatever his reasons, the Chevalier de Grammont turned pirate, and it proved to be a job for which he had a natural talent, and one in which he rose quickly among his brethren to command.

The pirates of the later seventeenth century were not looked upon in the same way as were the pirates of the early 1700s—Blackbeard, Bartholomew Roberts, and their kind—who were despised as outlaws and the great villains of the age. In the Chevalier's time, the situation
was somewhat different. Pirates of the late 1600s were often called “privateers,” meaning that they actually had legal authority to plunder the wealth of enemy nations—a license to steal.

Such distinctions often became a bit hazy. A good deal of what these “privateers” did was genuine piracy. Still, the buccaneers were not shunned as the later pirates were, and freebooting could even be a stepping-stone to respectability and power.

The early buccaneers may have called themselves “the Brethren of the Coast” as a rejection of the authority of formal government, but they still held national and religious loyalties that would be rejected by pirates four decades later.

The later pirates declared war on the whole world, but the early buccaneers focused on the Spaniards. For pirates of English descent and the French Huguenots, the fight was in part religious. Catholicism infused every part of the Spanish national character, and that was unacceptable to most Englishmen, who would soon exile James II, their last overtly Catholic monarch.

For the French, it was a matter of Spain's attempts to dominate the West Indies. Spain at this time was like the USSR after Afghanistan, a superpower on the decline, a shell of what it had been, but still trying to exert its influence, still trying to keep the Caribbean a Spanish lake. That attitude was resented, and it was becoming untenable.

For these reasons, it was easy for the legitimate governments of England, France, and Holland to tolerate the buccaneers and, indeed, to recruit them when needed.

Having brought his captured Dutch convoy to Saint-Domingue, de Grammont was well respected by the filibusters there, who were apt to be impressed by such things. From Saint-Domingue, the Chevalier proceeded to Tortuga, the epicenter of pirate activity in the West Indies. There, with the last of his money, he fitted out a fifty-gun ship.

The Chevalier de Grammont, a natural leader, quickly rose to prominence among the Brethren of the Coast. As a modern writer would put it, “grace, eloquence, a sense of justice and a distinguished courage soon caused him to be regarded as the chief of the filibusters”
¹
Buccaneers swarmed to him, eager to take part in any exploit he had in mind.

And so, in April 1678, when Governor M. de Pouançay, acting on the orders of King Louis XIV, called for the buccaneers of Tortuga to join in an expedition against the Dutch at Curaçao, de Grammont found himself de facto leader of the filibuster contingent. When they
found themselves thrown up on the sands of Las Aves, their plans of sacking Curaçao as shattered as the French fleet, the Brethren of the Coast looked again to de Grammont for leadership.

No doubt it was to de Grammont that d'Estrées appealed in hope that his fellow Frenchman would persuade the pirates to continue with the attack on the Dutch outpost.

One has to wonder what these two men must have thought of each other. D'Estrées was a generation older than de Grammont and from a somewhat better family, but still they were both from the upper strata of French society. Did d'Estrées look with disdain on the Chevalier, who had brought scandal to his family and had left the honorable service of the king to turn pirate? Did de Grammont sneer at d'Estrées as a king's toady who could not even keep his fleet intact?

Certainly d'Estrées could not have been pleased with de Grammont's men's looting of whatever washed up from the wrecks, and must have resented the Chevalier's mercenary attitude toward an attack for the greater glory of France. For his part, de Grammont was not impressed by d'Estrées' exhortations to continue on to Curaçao and clearly thought that the admiral had no realistic chance of taking the island.

These two sons of the French nobility faced off under the blazing Caribbean sun, on a desolate beach amid the ruins of the French fleet and surrounded by drunken, dispirited, angry, and dying men. The disgraced nobleman-turned-pirate held all the cards in those circumstances, which must have been the greatest irritant of all to d'Estrées. In the end, de Grammont and the filibusters would not be moved to continue in the service of France, and d'Estrées could do no more than sail away.

The Brethren of the Coast reveled for a time, enjoying the unintentional largesse of the French, until it was time to move on. No doubt there was a lively discussion as to where they should proceed, with nearly all of the Spanish Main under their lee. Though de Grammont, with his natural flair and qualities of command, was looked upon as the leader of the expedition, there was most likely a vote as well. That was the way of the buccaneers. They had not escaped European tyranny just to impose it on themselves in the Caribbean.

J
UNE
1678
V
ENEZUELA

B
uccaneering in the seventeenth century consisted primarily of land-based raids. Treasure ships were hard to find on the great expanse of ocean. They sailed in large convoys that were hard to attack, and these “plate fleets” did not keep rigorous schedules, making it difficult to know when and where they might sail. On the other hand, the cities and towns where Spanish gold and silver were warehoused did not move. These cities contained wealth far beyond that intended for the royal coffers. It is likely that the men of Las Aves immediately focused on plans for the sack of some Spanish colonial town.

The pirates settled on an attack on Maracaibo, Venezuela, about four hundred miles to the west. This was a fair-sized Spanish city situated on the west side of a narrow channel through which Lake Mara
caibo emptied into the Gulf of Venezuela, known to the pirates as the Bay of Maracaibo.

Alexandre Exquemelin, a buccaneer himself, two decades earlier described Maracaibo as

Though a raid on Maracaibo was potentially profitable, it was hardly an original plan. Henry Morgan and François L'Ollonais had both sacked the town years before. Of course, in the waning days of Spanish rule in the Caribbean, it was hard to find a city or town of any importance that had not been sacked at one time or another.

In early June 1678, de Grammont and his fleet of six large ships and thirteen smaller ones, manned by well over one thousand men, sailed from Las Aves to Maracaibo. De Grammont put half his force ashore, marching them along the San Carlos peninsula, intending a landward assault of the fortification there, a fortress aimed at defending against attack from the sea.

The Spanish troops garrisoned at Maracaibo held the filibusters off for a little while, but de Grammont managed to land heavy guns and bring them to bear on the fortress. It took no more than a brief cannonade to convince the Spanish that their situation was untenable. They surrendered the fort to the buccaneers. With the heavy guns of the Spaniards secured, de Grammont then took half the buccaneer fleet over the shallow bar and left the rest to blockade the approaches to the city.

Maracaibo flew into a panic. Those who could, including the new governor, Jorge Madureira Ferreira, abandoned the city and raced to the relative safety of the countryside or neighboring towns. De Grammont took the city with virtually no opposition, and he and his men set to plundering it with a will.

By the latter half of the seventeenth century, the Spanish cities of the Caribbean had been attacked again and again by sundry sea raiders in the same way that the towns of England had once been plundered
repeatedly by Vikings. The Spanish people in that part of the world, like the English victims of the Vikings, had come to expect the most vicious kind of brutality: murder, rape, arson, torture. They had no reason to expect anything less from these new seaborne attackers. After all, it was precisely the same treatment they meted out to the Native Americans.

The pirates from Las Aves were brutal and efficient. Some went after the governor and other refugees who had managed to escape, chasing them farther into the back country. The others robbed the city of everything they could find. Then they began to torture the citizens to discover if there was anything else secreted away.

Once they had finished with Maracaibo, a contingent of the buccaneers crossed to the eastern shore and fell on the city of Gibraltar. Again, it took only a short bombardment to induce the twenty-two Spanish soldiers defending the city to give it up to the pirates. Gibraltar, unlike Maracaibo, had not been taken by surprise. Having had the benefit of the two weeks the buccaneers had spent sacking Maracaibo, the citizens of Gibraltar had packed their valuables and abandoned the town.

The buccaneers did what they always did—they followed the money. De Grammont marched his men inland fifty miles for the town of Trujillo, to which the refugees of Gibraltar had fled. This was no easy stroll, but rather fifty hard miles through the deadly pestilence of the South American jungle, one of the reasons the buccaneers preferred to strike from the sea. Many of de Grammont's men died along the way.

At last they reached Trujillo, which was defended by a fort sporting four artillery pieces and 350 Spanish soldiers. Exhausted from the march, outnumbered, and vastly outgunned, the filibusters nonetheless attacked.

De Grammont and his band of pirates stormed the fortification, coming at it from the rear, as one defender put it, “by some hills where it seemed impossible to do so.” The Spanish again fled before this invading force, refugees struggling to get to the next town, Mérida de la Grita, seventy-five miles away.

A study of such buccaneer raids reveals how often the pirates won against overwhelming odds in the most unlikely situations. Greatly outnumbered by regular Spanish troops, desperate and beyond caring, the pirates threw caution to the wind and attacked. Despite the odds against them, their attack succeeded.

No doubt this was due in part to the ferocity and determination of the pirates, and perhaps to a lack of motivation among the Spanish troops, who sensibly chose to run for their lives rather than die defending the wealth of the Spanish aristocracy. The buccaneers' unorthodox tactics played a role as well. While regular troops were accustomed to fighting European-style battles, the pirates employed guerrilla-style tactics, making it hard for defenders to predict when, where, or how they would attack. Further, the buccaneers, many of them former hunters from Hispaniola, were better marksmen than the Spanish troops. Whatever the reason, the pirates continued to succeed, time and again, against overwhelming odds.

De Grammont had not only taken a succession of Spanish towns but in fact had made himself master of the entire Lake Maracaibo region, with no local force to challenge his supremacy and no need to rush his looting. After taking what they could from Trujillo, de Grammont's men returned the way they had come, once again occupying Gibraltar. For a week or more, they continued to plunder the town. When they had taken everything they could lay their hands on, they burned it.

In all, de Grammont spent nearly half a year on Lake Maracaibo, raiding, debauching, looting, and burning. It was not until December 3, 1678, that the Chevalier and his fleet, heavy-laden with all the wealth wrung out of the Lake Maracaibo region, left the Gulf of Venezuela.

They did not return to Tortuga. Rather, they made for Petit Goâve, a hell town in Hispaniola, fifty miles west of present-day Port-au-Prince. Petit Goâve was beginning to challenge Tortuga as the chief gathering spot for the buccaneers. De Grammont and his men arrived as heroes.

It was no matter that the war in Europe, which had been the root cause for collecting together the buccaneers in the first place, was winding down. The pirates were barely interested in such formalities. Their hatred of Spain and their disdain for treaties between nations went far deeper than that. They had, in fact, only just begun.

Vast armadas of buccaneers were not a new thing in the region. L'Ollonais, Morgan, and others had already used that weapon as a tool of colonial policy. But something had begun on those hot sands of Las Aves that would not easily be stopped. With no sort of legal authority, the most charismatic leaders of the buccaneer community had come
together, had led a great army in half a year's raid on Spanish settlements, and had come away rich for their efforts.

The French had brought the buccaneers together. The destruction of the fleet at Las Aves had ended the mission for which they had organized. Rather than return to port, however, the pirates had stuck together and had launched a raid of their own choosing.

With the raid at Maracaibo they had set a new precedent, formed a loose alliance, an army that would split and come together again at will, like quicksilver. These buccaneers would become the dominant force in the Caribbean, and remain so for years to come. Governments, despairing of stopping them, would instead try to lure them into their service.

The wreckage of the French fleet on Las Aves, as it turned out, was the starting point for some of the greatest piratical careers in Western history.