Pirate Hunters: Treasure, Obsession, and the Search for a Legendary Pirate Ship (19 page)

And, most important of all:

—The sugar wreck is too deep.

“Excellent points, Tracy,” Chatterton said. Then, he spoke to each of Bowden’s objections, short and direct:

—It’s true that Cayo Vigia is not included in histories that mention the
Golden Fleece
, but neither is Cayo Levantado or any other specific location.

—The crowd is usually wrong.

—No one knows how much damage the
Golden Fleece
took—all that’s known is that she burned and sank.

—The Miss Universe jar could have fallen overboard from a passing ship of the era.

—The
Golden Fleece
could have come off the careen to fight the navy or attempt an escape.

—The French chart was drawn up in the early nineteenth century, more than one hundred years after the battle, by people who weren’t present for the fight.

—The sugar wreck is of the same period and culture as that of the
Golden Fleece;
to believe it unrelated to the battle would be, at best, relying on coincidence.

Bowden made notes on these points, nodding and saying “Oh, I see,” or “I hadn’t thought about that.” Then he pressed the men on the issue of the sugar wreck’s depth. Men working for treasure hunter William Phips, he reminded them, had seen the
Golden Fleece
sunk in twenty-four feet of water just months after the battle. By contrast, the sugar wreck lay in forty-four feet.

“That’s true,” Chatterton said. But he noted that Phips’s men never said whether it was twenty-four feet to the top or the bottom of the wreck. If he meant the top, one would expect the
Golden Fleece
, broken down by nature over more than three hundred years, to be in forty-four feet of water, exactly where the sugar wreck was.

Bowden put down his pencil and told the men they’d done inspired work. And, again, he told them they were wrong. The sugar wreck was not the
Golden Fleece.
It would be a good idea to go back to Cayo Levantado and keep searching for her there.

Chatterton looked ready to leap across the table and strangle Bowden, so Mattera leaned forward and spoke in a measured way, telling Bowden that, with all due respect, there was no way the
Golden Fleece
was at Cayo Levantado. But before Bowden could answer, Chatterton jumped in.

“All you want to do is look where everyone’s looked before, Tracy, where everyone’s already been. With that kind of thinking, you’re never going to find this wreck. You’re never going to find anything.”

Bowden’s face reddened. He looked disturbed by Chatterton’s tone, but calmly explained that little about the sugar wreck felt right—the depth, the location, the history.

“This is not about feelings!” Chatterton said. “It’s about evidence, hard work, and research.”

“That’s your opinion,” Bowden replied.

“No. It’s about evidence, hard work, and research. All of the pieces have to fit. I’ve found more than a wreck or two myself, Tracy, important ones. Not once did I do it by feelings or intuition or any other voodoo bullshit.”

Both Chatterton and Bowden looked ready to get up and leave—not just the table but the project. Before that could happen, Mattera told Bowden he wanted to discuss another issue, and was going to take his chances and speak frankly.

“We’ve got it on good information that other crews might be coming to Levantado to search for the
Golden Fleece.
As you know, we don’t think the wreck’s at that island. But sometimes all it takes is a bullshit story.”

Bowden nodded—he’d heard people tell those kinds of stories before. But Mattera wasn’t finished. He also said he’d heard that Cultura was looking to trim down every treasure lease in the country, including Bowden’s, and that the agency wanted to bring in new blood—young guns who could help cover the vast areas that, for years, had been underworked. Mattera judged by Bowden’s eyes that he’d heard the same. And feared it.

“So what do you suggest I do?” Bowden asked.

“Accept that the pirate ship ain’t at Levantado,” Chatterton said. “It’s at Cayo Vigia.”

“Work the sugar wreck,” Mattera said. “Pull up more artifacts. Prove it’s the
Golden Fleece.
”

But Bowden didn’t look eager to do any of that. If he blew time working at Cayo Vigia, and someone else found the
Golden Fleece
at Cayo Levantado, everything he’d worked for over a lifetime might be tainted: his reputation, his legacy, his honor. And he didn’t seem willing to go out like that—not on a mistake, not on anything less than sure. Instead, he thought Chatterton and Mattera should return to Cayo Levantado and prove conclusively that the
Golden Fleece
was not there before he committed to another theory.

Chatterton jumped up from his seat.

“You’re asking us to prove a negative! How can we show you something that’s not there?”

“Keep looking,” said Bowden. “Maybe you missed something. Maybe the mag’s not working right….”

“What about the four hundred other things we found there?” Chatterton said. “Are you saying we found every goddamn fish trap and license plate around all of Levantado, but somehow missed a one-hundred-foot pirate ship?”

“We just need to be sure.”

Chatterton, ready to explode, stormed off to the restroom.

“Your partner is a hothead,” Bowden said. “I don’t know if I can work with him anymore.”

Mattera leaned forward.

“Listen, Tracy. I’ve got an idea. Why don’t we mag the sugar wreck? Do some serious salvage on her. Come up with proof. It wouldn’t take long.”

But Bowden didn’t seem convinced. If claim jumpers were coming, if Cultura was taking back leases, this was not the time to abandon Cayo Levantado, where everyone else would claim the pirate ship sank, and he told Mattera that as he paid the check and left for home. When Chatterton returned from the restroom, he didn’t even ask where Bowden had gone.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

I HOPE WE CAN STAY FRIENDS

C
hatterton and Mattera spent the rest of the day buying supplies in Santo Domingo. Neither spoke of the lunch with Bowden, but each knew what the other was thinking—that this arrangement with the old treasure hunter could not continue.

Carolina cooked dinner for them at her apartment. The men steered the conversation away from business, but when she asked how things had gone that afternoon, Chatterton couldn’t stay quiet. Bowden, he said, was never going to give up his belief that the
Golden Fleece
was at Levantado.

“The wreck’s not there and I’m not wrong,” Chatterton said. “I’m done with this guy.”

Mattera could hardly believe what he was hearing. Chatterton was a lot of things, but he was not a quitter. After dinner, Mattera pulled Chatterton into the study, where he urged his partner to be patient. “Tracy is a stubborn old man,” he said, “but he’s not dumb. You’ve gotta let him come to the sugar wreck himself. You’ve gotta let it be his idea, too.”

That only frustrated Chatterton more, and he let it be known at high volumes. Mattera didn’t always put up with his partner’s yelling, but he knew Chatterton was really yelling at Bowden. And that his partner was right.

“Hang in there with me, John,” Mattera said. “This is not about Tracy.”

But Chatterton wasn’t buying it. To him, Bowden could have been standing inside the Lost City of Atlantis, and he wouldn’t have believed it if he’d already made up his mind he was somewhere else.

After brushing his teeth that night, Mattera poured a handful of Advil into his mouth, then washed it down with Mylanta, the same kind of concoction he’d used to endure the twenty-hour days at his security company, when a single misstep could have cost him his future.

He awoke the next morning to a voice mail message from Bowden, who wanted to talk. Without Chatterton.

“That’s it,” Mattera told Carolina. “Tracy’s quitting. He’s done with us. The whole thing is falling apart.”

The two men met for coffee an hour later. But Bowden didn’t talk business. Instead, he told Mattera about his life.

T
HE SCUBA DIVING CRAZE
hit America in the 1950s, and Bowden found it fast. After graduating from Abington High School near Philadelphia in 1957, he bought his first piece of gear—a wet suit with a wide yellow stripe that had to be glued on by hand—and headed to the creeks and quarries in the Pocono Mountains. There was little in the way of scuba instruction then; a person tried to teach himself enough to survive, then went underwater to see if it worked out.

To make a living, Bowden worked as an apprentice electrician, earning a good salary and with excellent prospects for the future. His mind, however, was on diving, not diodes. When someone told him there were hundreds of shipwrecks off the New Jersey coast, he loaded his car full of gear and didn’t stop driving until he got to the ocean. There, he pushed his way into fallen ships; some of them hadn’t been seen since the day they’d gone down. Each year, he added more wrecks to his résumé. But he distanced himself from other divers. To him,
they were secretive, petty, and cliquey: the same complaints Chatterton would have about the same kinds of people nearly two decades later.

So Bowden went it mostly alone. He dreamed of finding something old—not World War old, but epochs old, from the days that shaped civilizations. But how to do it? There were no classes or instruction manuals for finding those kinds of ships in those days, no mentors looking for protégés. Bowden had to figure things out for himself, and that wouldn’t be easy while carrying a full-time job. By now, he’d become a master electrician, but more than ever, his heart wasn’t in it. Even the blueprints he carried to electrical jobs looked like nautical charts to him.

In 1969, when Bowden was thirty, he told his boss he was taking a two-week vacation to go look for the HMS
De Braak
, an eighteenth-century shipwreck thought to have sunk at the mouth of the Delaware River, and with possible treasure onboard. His boss tried to talk him out of it, but Bowden was already out the door.

He didn’t find treasure. He didn’t even find the wreck. But the rush of having looked stayed with him. In 1976, he set out for the Dominican Republic, where great galleons lay, and was granted exclusive rights to search for ships in a wide-ranging area, the first such arrangement ever made by the country. But officials said they’d be watching him. Any missteps and he was finished. Any breaches of trust and he would be gone.

In less than two years, Bowden located and identified the wrecks of two Spanish galleons in Samaná Bay, the
Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe
and, just eight miles away, the
Conde de Tolosa.
The ships carried more than twelve hundred passengers and crew between them, many of whom had planned to make lives abroad. Most had converted their worldly possessions into gold, jewelry, and coins, which traveled easily along with their dreams. After Bowden found the wrecks, much of their treasure became his.

In 1979,
National Geographic
ran a twenty-six-page feature,
“Graveyard of the Quicksilver Galleons,” about his work. Penned by famed marine historian Mendel Peterson, the piece took readers underwater with Bowden and showed, in glorious color, what a man could find if only he threw over his life to go look. It included a gold medallion bearing the cross of the Order of Santiago, framed by twenty-four diamonds, which Peterson later called the greatest artifact ever pulled from the sea. Mattera had read the
National Geographic
story as a teenager, imagining himself as Bowden.

Many presumed Bowden to be in it for the money, but he seldom sold what he found. He told people he was chasing a feeling—the moment when, after years of struggle, and after a thousand people say you’re crazy, you see something sparkle in the water and grab on to it. Treasure. A person is never the same after that.

Bowden worked his lease area for the next several years, doing groundbreaking work on the eighteenth-century French warship
Scipion
and other important wrecks, but often finding nothing at all. That didn’t stop others from envying his life—one in which they imagined him cruising the Caribbean, wind in hair and cognac in hand, in search of the next lost treasure. Few thought about the life he lived every day.

He was away from home almost all the time, which made a normal existence impossible and his marriage a challenge. It was hard for him to have a meaningful conversation about his job—almost no one in the world did what he did, or could even imagine it. Even the treasure itself had a tragic patina: Much of it came from wrecks in which people had died violently at sea.

Still, he could not dream of doing anything else. So he kept working, and in the late 1980s, he struck again, this time on
Concepción
, one of the greatest treasure wrecks of them all.

William Phips had arrived there first, in 1687, and cleaned out as much of the ship’s silver as seventeenth-century technology allowed. Soon, the wreck became lost to the ages, and it stayed lost for almost three hundred years, until Jack Haskins’s research helped lead treasure
hunter Burt Webber to the wreck in 1978, in an area about eighty miles offshore dubbed the Silver Bank. Webber salvaged what he could, after which the government awarded the rights, briefly, to Carl Fismer, and then to Bowden. Although he hadn’t found the wreck, Bowden’s touch on it made all the difference. Soon,
Concepción
was showing more of her silver: thousands of coins worth millions of dollars that no one had seen since 1641.

But it came at a lonely price. Radios and television didn’t work in the Silver Bank. There were no movies or videos aboard Bowden’s salvage vessel, just old newspapers. No one could get away for a jog or even a smoke by themselves. During these two-week trips, over and over again for years, it was just eight or nine men together on a sixty-five-foot boat, alone and crowded, inescapably, all at once.

And that was just during the day. At night, it became difficult for Bowden to push away the idea that he was anchored over a mass grave site. More than three hundred people had perished aboard
Concepción
, along with countless others who had died nearby in ships broken by the Silver Bank through the ages. Sometimes, he would awaken at two or three in the morning to go out and check his boat’s lines, not because he believed they hadn’t been tied well, but because he knew anything could happen out there, especially on moonless nights.

On one trip, an elderly investor who’d come along shook Bowden awake in the middle of the night. “Tracy,” he said. “I was standing on the back deck. I heard voices. I heard so many voices.” Bowden told him to keep away from the railings but didn’t argue with the man. “Most of these ships wrecked in hurricanes,” Bowden told him. “I can’t imagine what those people went through.”

For years, Bowden kept working the
Concepción
, bringing up silver and selling little of it, fighting off hurricanes and solitude. Filmmakers put him in documentaries. His artifacts went into museums. In 1996,
National Geographic
ran another feature, this one written by Bowden himself, about his experiences on the
Concepción
. And he kept working the galleon, taking treasure and artifacts others never could reach.
He thought a lot about Phips during those long stretches out on the Silver Bank, about what it meant for an ordinary guy to go after something great.

Bowden could have told these stories to Mattera for hours, but he stopped himself.

“I’ve taken too much of your time already, John,” he said. “What I really wanted to say is that I hope we can all stay friends.”

C
HATTERTON SPENT THE NEXT
several days reading books about the conquistadors, especially Francisco Pizarro, who showed up in Peru with fewer than two hundred men and vanquished thousands of the enemy—an empire seized in moments.

At the same time, Mattera typed up ads to place in scuba diving magazines on behalf of Pirate’s Cove, his once-thriving dive charter business. It was time, he told Carolina, to face reality. The
Golden Fleece
likely would never be found, not because it wasn’t there, but because his partners couldn’t come together. Chatterton seemed to have lost patience—with Bowden, the search for the pirate ship, and the Dominican Republic. Bowden also appeared to have lost patience—with Chatterton, with him, with their crazy ideas.

So, Mattera had come to his senses. By reviving Pirate’s Cove, he could do what he’d originally intended: support himself in a Caribbean paradise by taking high-end clients to storied and beautiful shipwrecks.

He awoke three hours later than usual the next morning. He didn’t shave or brush his teeth; he just sat at the kitchen table, reading about the New York Mets on his laptop and eating his bowl of cold cereal.

Finally, he drove back to Samaná, where he was to meet Chatterton for dinner. But what kind of dinner would it be? Without crew, notebooks, or place mat diagrams, all that was left was the pizza at Fabio’s, and a person didn’t drive to the tip of nowhere for that.

Still, he went. A few hours later, when he reached cell phone coverage,
he received a voice mail from Bowden, who said he’d thought things over and wanted to further salvage the sugar wreck. They would work for two weeks, the typical salvor’s cycle, and discover what they could. To Mattera, it seemed like a miracle. This was what he and Chatterton wanted most of all.

He dialed his partner as fast as he could.

The two men made a plan on the phone. They would do a detailed side-scan sonar and magnetometer survey of the sugar wreck, then salvage as many artifacts from the debris field as possible, looking for anything that would confirm the ship’s identity as the
Golden Fleece.
If they found so much as a coin or pottery shard or anything newer than 1686—the year of the pirate ship’s sinking—they would rule out the sugar wreck as Bannister’s ship. But neither expected that.

Work began in earnest on the sugar wreck site several days later. Chatterton and Mattera scanned and magged the area, making detailed maps Bowden could use to pinpoint the search. Salvage began shortly thereafter. Bowden joined the men for the work.

From the start, the mood was collegial, especially between Chatterton and Bowden. Over the next week, crews pulled up hundreds of artifacts from under the muddy bottom, many of them pristine: muskets, knives, a broadsword with bone handle, jugs, Delftware china, Madeira wine bottles, and cannonballs. Each piece seemed more impressive than the last, not just for its delicate beauty, but for its age. Not one dated later than 1686.

At night, the two partners relaxed at the villa, looking out over the work site. In the distance, a great sailing ship appeared, her white sails stretching into the sky. The men watched her draw closer, until she’d entered the mouth of the channel. She was perhaps one hundred feet long, about the size of the
Golden Fleece
, and she maneuvered beautifully in this tight space. She anchored just past the island and parallel to the bridge, likely to resupply and take on freshwater, just as ships had for centuries here. To Chatterton and Mattera, the ship seemed a
gift, a demonstration of all they’d believed. A ship of her size could come here after all, if only her captain had vision.

The two-week salvage operation on the sugar wreck concluded a few days later. While crews pulled gear from the water, Chatterton and Mattera asked Bowden for his opinion: Was the sugar wreck the
Golden Fleece
?

Bowden told them that while all the artifacts were period to the
Golden Fleece
, the fact that the wreck was off the island and not in a careening place, and especially that the wreck was too deep, continued to trouble him. For those reasons, he still needed to be certain the pirate ship wasn’t at Cayo Levantado before doing more work on the sugar wreck.

Chatterton walked away. Mattera looked straight into Bowden’s eyes.

“Tracy, you know that people are looking to steal this wreck from you. And you know the government wants to cut down everyone’s leases. You can really help yourself by notifying Cultura you found the pirate ship. The wreck’s not at Levantado. It’s right here.”