Pirate Hunters: Treasure, Obsession, and the Search for a Legendary Pirate Ship (23 page)

It was essential for the frigates to take out the pirate cannon batteries, which Mattera believed had been placed by Bannister at the top of the eastern tip of the island. The elevation alone—more than a hundred feet over the shoreline—would have made aiming heavy cannons on the frigates even more difficult through narrow gun ports. Often, to aim high, a ship had to anchor farther away from its target—thereby reducing its accuracy. To Mattera, elevation alone meant advantage.

But perhaps the biggest problem in hitting the pirates with cannon fire came from the pitching and rolling of the ships. Fighting from the water, cannoneers often had to wait until the moment their vessel came level to fire. In this way, they were aiming the ship more than the guns.

Both sides likely missed with most of their shots. Those that connected, however, would have done grave harm. The
Golden Fleece
, minus at least half her guns (which had been moved onto the island) and possibly still careened on the sand, was likely damaged early on, though she might have been unmanned during the battering. Navy seamen, struck by musket balls and wood splinters, would have begun to fall. Those hit in the head or neck or torso often died, immediately if they were lucky. The injured who survived were moved to the ship’s surgeon or barber for bandaging or, if the wounds were more serious, amputation. It was here, before the surgeon and his saw, that the grievously injured man’s fate would be decided.

S
EAMEN DOING BATTLE IN
the seventeenth century expected to lose limbs. Navy surgeons had seen every gruesome injury and removed mangled arms and legs often. By Bannister’s time, there were few places in the world more advanced in trauma surgery than the dank and unsterile quarters of a navy fighting ship. If one had to be separated from a part of his body, this was the place to be.

Amputations were performed frequently, but the surgeons did not go into them lightly. The operation “cannot be performed without putting the Patient to violent and inexpressible pain,” wrote Pierre Dionis, a prominent French surgeon of the time and author of a surgical textbook. Nor were surgeons under any illusions about the outcomes; there was a good chance a patient would die after amputation, but it was near certain he would die without it. So they did what had to be done.

Speed was paramount. Delay increased the risk of blood loss, infection, shock, and delirium. It often exposed the patient, and his wound, to onboard nibbling rats. And it allowed him to contemplate what was to happen on the operating table; sometimes the imagination could be even crueler than the bone saw. Delay also deprived the surgeon of perhaps his most effective tool—the patient’s own adrenaline. That hormone, in addition to acting as a painkiller, could provide a man courage, and he would need it, because in the late seventeenth century there was no anesthetic. At best, a man might be given a bit of alcohol to drink, and then not too much, for fear it might inflame rather than calm him.

Shipboard surgeons had little time to explain amputation to injured men, but what they said was likely honest and direct. John Woodall, an English author of an early-seventeenth-century text on surgery, recommended, “If you be constrained to use your saw, let first your patient be well informed of the eminent danger of death by the
use thereof, prescribe him no certaintie of life, and let the worke be done with his owne free will, and request, and not otherwise.”

The patient would have to be held down. For this, the surgeon called on several assistants, the stronger the better. Moving the wounded man onto the operating table (often just a board balanced on two chests and covered by a piece of canvas), the assistants would take their positions and plant their feet. One held the patient from behind, others restrained his extremities, and still another held down the ruined limb, often over the edge of the table, so that the surgeon could do his work.

Until now, the surgeon had taken great pains not to show the patient his tools; sometimes, the sight of a bone saw or curved knife could be more terrible than the cut itself. Only after the patient had been secured would the surgeon bring out his instruments. They included an amputation knife, a bone saw, forceps, needles, bandages, and cauterizing implements. They were made as clean as possible for the time, often with a mixture of vinegar and water.

Many surgeons chose to include a bit of healthy flesh above the wound to ensure removal of all damaged tissue and bone. No one, however, wanted to take more of the patient’s limb than was necessary. Having chosen the spot, the surgeon tied on a tourniquet (perhaps a rag torn from the patient’s own clothes), then steadied himself against the movement of the ship. Every surgeon hoped to make a quick, clean cut, but that could be interrupted by the temper of the sea.

The surgeon first went to work with his knife, making a circular cut through to the bone, and fully around the limb, clearing the way for the bone saw. If possible, he would do it in just two strokes, one on top, the other underneath, a procedure that might take just a minute or two if done right. By now, the pain would have been excruciating for the patient. Some would have gone into shock.

Trading knife for saw, the surgeon went to work on the bone. Using gentle strokes at first, he made sure the teeth took hold, then used
long, powerful strokes to cut through the bone, as clean and as fast as he could. Only when it was nearly severed did he revert back to gentle strokes to prevent the bone from splintering.

When the limb finally came free, the surgeon or an assistant tossed it into a nearby bucket of water or sawdust, which might still contain the severed parts of previous patients. The contents of the bucket would be thrown overboard and likely eaten by sharks.

Now the surgeon had to stop the bleeding, not just because the patient could die from it, but because the sight of it could overwhelm him. To do so, the surgeon cauterized the wound with medicines, acids, blazing irons, or binds. Next, he stitched up the flesh, pulling extra skin over remaining bone, then bandaged it. If all had gone well, the amputation might be complete in under five minutes. If the ongoing battle was hot, as it likely was between Bannister’s men and the frigates, the surgeon would have wiped down his tools, taken a breath, and called for the next man to be placed on his table.

H
AVING DESTROYED THE
G
OLDEN
F
LEECE
, the frigates were free to direct the full force of their fire on the small ship Bannister was reported to have with him, and on the pirates themselves. But now Mattera could see it: The Royal Navy could fire forever and it still would be difficult to kill Bannister’s men. Dug in behind sand, mud, and trees, the pirates were protected from cannon and musket fire, which were absorbed with little more than a thud.

And that’s how it must have gone for the next few hours, navy seamen shooting and dying from their powerful ships, but unable to put down the pirates. On board the frigates, supplies of powder and shot dwindled, and hulls and masts were battered and damaged by pirate cannon fire. To the navy captains, it had to look like Bannister, who was standing just across the channel, was oceans beyond their reach.

Unless they got to the island.

By storming the shore, the frigate crews could engage the pirates
hand to hand, using swords, pistols, muskets, pikes, hatchets, and fists to do what their cannons could not. Better trained than Bannister’s men, and outnumbering them by at least two to one, the navy was likely to decimate the pirates in any face-to-face meeting on the island.

The problem was getting there. The frigates were too big to sail into the shallow water at shore. That meant crewmen would have to row to the island in longboats, perhaps thirty to a vessel, leaving them virtually helpless against sniper fire—a miniature version of Omaha Beach. The Royal Navy prided itself on its willingness to fight, even under brutal conditions. Suicide, however, was another matter. If Talbot and Spragge considered a landing, they likely didn’t consider it for long.

Instead, the navy seamen reloaded their weapons and pounded the island wherever they saw evidence (mostly from smoke and flames) of pirate gunfire. In this era, the rate of cannon fire was slow—it took five or six minutes for gunners to reload—but it was not imperative that the frigates fire rapidly, as the pirates no longer had a means of escape now that the
Golden Fleece
had been battered. Instead, the gunners strived to be accurate, to whatever extent that was possible.

All the while, the pirates fired back. It didn’t need to be much, just enough for Bannister to remind the navy he was still armed and supplied—and to wear them down and to keep them from storming the island.

As darkness settled over Samaná Bay, the fighting would have died down; it made little sense for either side to spend powder and shot on targets they couldn’t see, but both sides would have maintained a continuous watch. Navy crews would have gone to work repairing damage and preparing for the battle yet to come. During breaks, they probably wolfed down salt beef, salt fish, salt pork, peas, cheese, biscuits (often infested by weevils), and beer (one gallon per man, per day). If there were even a few minutes for sleep, they took it.

It might have been during the night that the navy tended to its dead. The English were religious and would have done all they could
to perform a burial service. Given the size of the crews aboard the frigates (about 180 on the
Falcon;
about 75 on the
Drake
), there likely was at least one chaplain between them. To the best of his abilities, that chaplain would have performed some kind of service. Crewmen would have doffed their caps as the bodies were pushed overboard.

M
ATTERA COULDN
’
T WAIT TO
read more, but the library closed, so he met his childhood friend John Bilotti at Elaine’s, the famed restaurant near Second Avenue and Eighty-Eighth Street in Manhattan. They ordered mussels and clams, and Mattera described all he’d learned about the drama of doing battle at sea in the seventeenth century. Mattera and Bilotti agreed that the Royal Navy was one hell of a tough outfit. But neither man would have joined that crew in the seventeenth century.

“We would have been pirates,” Bilotti said.

“We were pirates once,” Mattera replied.

When it came time to leave, Bilotti asked Mattera how things were going. Mattera could not lie to his friend. He was hemorrhaging money with nothing to show for it. He was working with an old man who wouldn’t get out of his way. And his partner was losing his mind.

“I know you don’t quit,” Bilotti said. “And I’m not saying you should. But you and I both know. Sometimes a guy’s gotta get out.”

For a moment, Mattera didn’t know what to say. Then he told his friend that in a few months he was going to turn forty-seven, the age at which his father died.

“So I can’t quit now,” he said.

M
ATTERA RESUMED HIS RESEARCH
the next morning, just as the Royal Navy crews resumed their fight. Talbot and Spragge had to make a decision. They’d done their best to sink the
Golden Fleece
, but they also had orders to capture or kill Bannister. They could do that
more easily by drawing closer to the pirates, but they risked further damage to the frigates if they dared.

Historical accounts didn’t say how close the frigates moved in on the second day of the fighting, but Mattera knew one thing for certain: The navy seamen stayed on their guns, slugging it out, firing cannons and muskets, suffering more casualties, until evening came and the frigates ran out of gunpowder and shot. It was then that Captains Talbot and Spragge made the only decision they could: sail back to Jamaica and plead their case to the governor. Molesworth would not be happy. The frigates had suffered twenty-three dead and wounded, and no one had laid a hand on Bannister. That kind of failure might cost the captains their lives.

On return to Port Royal, Talbot and Spragge were “much censured,” but spared more serious punishment. Molesworth must have concluded that they’d unleashed hell on the island and done all they could, because the two men’s careers continued, as Bannister later would find out.

P
ACKING UP A PILE
of photocopied papers and notes, Mattera left the New York Public Library and caught a taxi to the airport. He felt like he’d just left the battlefield himself.

He met Chatterton a few evenings later in Samaná. He described what he’d brought back from New York: a historically accurate vision of the fight between Bannister’s pirates and the Royal Navy frigates. Chatterton sat riveted. But he knew Mattera hadn’t made the trip to New York just for a story.

“So what’s the upshot here?” Chatterton asked.

“I don’t know yet,” Mattera said. “But I’m close.”

The next afternoon, Carolina arrived for a visit, but Mattera was still working. He’d asked Kretschmer to meet him at the dive center, just below the villa: He sensed that Kretschmer, fed up with the tension among the crew, and months of fruitless searches, was about to
quit for good, and he couldn’t afford to lose him. When Mattera arrived, he could see Kretschmer already in the shed, at work on an engine.

Mattera didn’t want to go in just yet. He needed to use the right words with Kretschmer, so he stood on the beach to think it over. Across the channel, he could see the spot where the
Golden Fleece
would have careened, the woods where pirate snipers would have hidden, the hill on the eastern edge where Bannister would have placed his cannons.

And then he saw something he’d never seen before.

“Heiko!” he yelled.

Kretschmer came running from the shed.

“Drop everything,” Mattera told him. “Get Carolina, she’s up in the villa. I see it now. I know where to look.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

ANOTHER WAY

M
attera and Carolina waded into the water and walked to the Zodiac, carrying a picnic basket full of sandwiches, wine, cold water, and suntan lotion. On board, they joined Kretschmer, who had already loaded his share of picnic treats: a handheld metal detector, a shovel, and a hatchet. Mattera carried two cameras around his neck. Carolina wore a giant floppy hat.

Driving the Zodiac at tourist speed, they headed across the channel toward the eastern end of Cayo Vigia. They landed on a tiny section of sand, unloaded their gear, and did their best to look like they’d come from the nearby resort. Carolina posed for Kretschmer’s snapshots; Mattera assembled a fishing pole. When they were sure no one was looking, they ducked into the dense woods and began hiking up the steep hill.

It took twenty minutes for them to fight their way past tangled overgrowth and bird-sized insects to a point more than a hundred feet over the water. Looking out over the channel, Mattera could see the world through Bannister’s eyes. In all the Caribbean, there was no better place to careen a ship or to win an unwinnable battle. From here, pirate cannons could hit any target, but anyone shooting back would be doing it blind.

Kretschmer assembled the metal detector and put on the headphones.
Running the unit over mud and brush, he listened for hits but heard nothing. The group pulled themselves through the overgrowth, trying to suck in the bits of fresh air that managed to penetrate the dense jungle. Even Carolina was sweating now, but the group kept moving, bent over and dripping, all of it a fevered dream.

Kretschmer stopped.

“I’ve got something,” he said.

He moved the metal detector, slowly, over a patch of dirt and mud about three feet square. Beeps in his ear adjusted his aim, until he arrived at a spot.

“Here,” Kretschmer said.

Mattera grabbed the shovel, Kretschmer the hatchet, and the men went to work digging on hands and knees. As the hole got bigger, Kretschmer pushed the metal detector down into it to refine the direction of the dig. But no matter how much dirt they removed, there was more underneath. They kept at it, for thirty minutes, digging, chopping at roots, listening to the metal detector, and digging again, until the blade of the shovel finally collided with something solid at a depth of about a foot, something it couldn’t move.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Mattera said.

Now using a hand spade, Kretschmer chipped away sections of dirt from the sides of the hole until a shape began to emerge, a little less black than the mud, but as round as the top of the moon.

“There it is,” Mattera said.

Wedging the hatchet behind the object, Kretschmer muscled and leveraged until the thing finally came loose. All three picnickers stared into the hole. Lying free at the bottom was a six-pound cannonball.

“The last time someone touched that was in 1686,” Mattera said.

He reached into the hole and pulled out the cannonball. The weight startled him. He could tell it was a six-pounder, but only by holding it could he feel its destructive potential.

The group celebrated with hugs, kisses (Kretschmer wiped off Mattera’s), and a glass of wine. Carolina spread out the blanket she’d
brought so they could sit and enjoy a toast. Kretschmer wondered aloud if Bannister could have imagined this scene—two treasure hunters and a beautiful woman drinking wine on the site of his battle. Mattera assured him that Bannister could.

When they finished, they hiked back down the hill, running the metal detector as they fought not to fall. Halfway down, they got another hit, and dug up another cannonball, this one even bigger than the first.

After everyone posed for photos with the cannonballs, the group made its way back to the beach, then across the bay to the villa. Mattera dashed off an email to Chatterton. In the subject line, he wrote, “Buddy, we got it.”

But Chatterton wasn’t there to receive it.

He’d set out in the Range Rover to pick up supplies. On an unimproved road near the back bay in Samaná, he’d hit a hole filled with jagged rock, tearing a gash into the sidewall of his tire. He managed to drive onto the beach, but when he tried to change the tire, the jack collapsed and bent, and the wheel sank up to its fender in sand. Chatterton checked his cell phone—no signal. It might be miles to the next town. He started walking.

Down the road, he found four local men, one of them elderly, playing cards outside a small shop. They didn’t have a jack, nor did they know where to find one, but told Chatterton they would help with his car. He tried to explain that the Range Rover was heavy, but they didn’t seem to understand. Walking back to the vehicle, the elderly man motioned for Chatterton not to worry.

The Dominican men studied the truck, muttering in Spanish too fast for Chatterton to understand. Soon they were gathering supplies: a large tree branch and a pile of rocks. “I’m in the Stone Age here,” Chatterton thought. The men went to work. Using improvised levers and fulcrums, and a big rock as a hammer, they bent the jack back into shape. “No way,” Chatterton thought, but soon the jack looked nearly new. When they got it under the truck, however, it gave way and collapsed again, this time beyond repair.

Chatterton began to thank the Dominicans and reach into his pocket, but none of them wanted his money. Instead, they went out collecting again, farther away this time, bringing back heavy palm branches and giant rocks. Chatterton tried to explain that the jack couldn’t be saved, but that’s not what they had in mind. The men used the stems to dig a hole under the truck’s strut assembly, then replaced sand with rocks. Chatterton grabbed his own leaf and jumped in to help them dig. A space began to open under the flat tire, and the truck’s frame came to rest on its rock support.

Now Chatterton could see the beauty of this plan—it was right in front of him. And it struck him that he’d often seen this kind of approach in Dominicans—that they rarely had what they needed, and often had nothing at all, but they didn’t seem to notice that or at least be much bothered by it. Instead, they focused on what they did have—if not a jack then a branch, if not money then time—then cobbled together a solution, a different way of getting there. He’d long cursed their
mañana
culture, swore that these people were going nowhere because they didn’t go at full speed, but as he watched the old man flip off the ruined tire and replace it with the spare, he could see what he’d admired about Dominicans all along—that they didn’t worry for the future because they knew there was always a way to arrive.

The men shoved piles of rocks under the truck to give it purchase, then Chatterton backed it off the beach. He insisted they take the money in his pocket, about twenty dollars, and they did,
gracias, gracias
, then walked back to where they came from, a place where they were dirt poor, able to figure their way as things came to them, looking happier than anyone Chatterton knew.

It was morning before Chatterton received the cannonball photos from Mattera. By that time, he was on his way to catch a flight to Miami, to take care of personal matters he’d put off for too long. The flight lasted more than two hours, much of which he used to gaze at the images his partner had sent him.

When he landed, he called Mattera, who told him about the discovery, and about how things looked from the top of the island, a worthy place for the “veriest rogues in these Indies,” as the governor of Jamaica had referred to Bannister and his crew.

To both Chatterton and Mattera, the cannonballs proved that the battle had occurred at Cayo Vigia, and that the so-called sugar wreck, located less than two hundred yards off the island, was the
Golden Fleece.
It was imperative that Bowden resume salvage on the sugar wreck immediately, not just to prove the wreck’s identity, but to put an end to the parade of interlopers at Cayo Levantado. Yet, Mattera was reluctant to tell Bowden about the cannonballs. He knew Bowden didn’t want anyone working on land—an area that went beyond his lease rights.

“Let me talk to him,” Chatterton said. “I’ll go in person.”

Mattera saw all kinds of risk in the idea. Chatterton could lose his cool and blow up at Bowden. Or Bowden might become frustrated with Chatterton and finally pull the plug on the pirate quest. Until now, Mattera had been a buffer between the two, but he’d be eight hundred miles away from this meeting. Still, he agreed to it.

“John, call me when the meeting’s over. And keep that famous Chatterton temper under control.”

Chatterton laughed.

“What temper?”

He sat down with Bowden a day later at a Denny’s restaurant in Miami and detailed Mattera’s adventure. He took Bowden all the way to the top of the hill at Cayo Vigia, just as Mattera had described it to him. To Chatterton, Bowden looked more excited with every detail.

“How many cannonballs did Mattera find?” Bowden asked.

“Two. In an hour. Can you imagine what else is up there, Tracy? Weapons, bones, treasure—who knows? Give the island to Cultura. They get shipwrecks all the time. They get galleons. How many pirate islands do they get?”

Bowden looked uncomfortable. In the past, he’d warned Chatterton
and Mattera that his lease didn’t extend to the land, and he didn’t want to anger Dominican officials by working beyond the lease boundaries. But now Chatterton tried to reassure him: At the end of the day, would Cultura really be upset with him for unraveling the mystery of a historic pirate battle?

“This is your island, Tracy,” Chatterton said. “The
Golden Fleece
is your idea. Only now, you don’t just have a pirate wreck to offer; you have a pirate
camp.
How many of those are there in the world? Give Cultura the island. And let’s finish the sugar wreck.”

But Bowden still didn’t look sold, and Chatterton believed he knew why. The sugar wreck debris field lay in forty-four feet of water. Treasure hunter William Phips had seen the wreck of the
Golden Fleece
in twenty-four feet, just months after her sinking. That disparity, Bowden often had told Chatterton and Mattera, troubled him.

“I don’t think the sugar wreck is right,” Bowden said.

Chatterton sat there for several moments.

“All right, Tracy,” he said finally. “Thanks for your time.”

From his car, Chatterton called Mattera and reported on the meeting. It was clear, he told his partner, that Bowden would never finish salvage of the sugar wreck no matter what the evidence showed, because he believed it was too deep to be the
Golden Fleece
. After that, there was nothing left to discuss.

Mattera knew this must be the end for Chatterton. He’d lived with the man for two years, knew him better in ways than he did his own brothers. You couldn’t ask a person like that, one who’d been willing to swing a sledgehammer around live explosives in a sunken U-boat, to stand down from something that was speaking to him, something great and rare he believed he could reach.

“So, I guess that’s it, John,” Mattera said.

But Chatterton didn’t hear him.

“I think there’s another way to do this,” Chatterton said. “I’m coming back.”