Pirate Hunters: Treasure, Obsession, and the Search for a Legendary Pirate Ship (3 page)

Over the next decade, Chatterton went to dozens of the most dangerous wrecks, often penetrating into places thought too difficult, or deadly, for a human being to reach. By the time he was thirty-five, some veterans of the sport were calling him the greatest shipwreck diver they’d ever seen.

In 1997, Chatterton and dive partner Richie Kohler solved an international mystery by identifying a World War II German U-boat sunk off the coast of New Jersey. Three divers died during the six-year odyssey; Chatterton lost his marriage and his money, and several times he nearly lost his life. When people asked why he’d been willing to risk it—the sub had no gold or priceless artifacts aboard, just an identifying number—he told them the U-boat was his moment, that once-in-a-lifetime chance a person gets, if he’s lucky, to see who he really is. For that reason, he would have rather died than turn his back on the wreck just because it got difficult, just because it couldn’t be done.

The U-boat brought Chatterton and Kohler international acclaim. By 2004, they’d been featured in a book and in documentaries, and
had become hosts of a popular television show on the History Channel. Chatterton, handsome and tall, and with a beautiful baritone voice, was paid to do speeches and endorse products. For the first time since Jacques Cousteau, a scuba diver had emerged from the sea and into the mainstream. People recognized him on the street. Kids asked for his autograph. Women sent him their pictures.

Most wreck divers, especially those past fifty, would have hung it up then and called it a career. But Chatterton kept pushing—body, technology, and nature—to go deeper into oceans and farther into wrecks. He saw more divers die. He reached even more places no one had ever gone.

His last big adventure had come in 2005, when he and Kohler put together an expedition to
Titanic.
The trip produced new insight into the ship’s sinking, but in the end it hadn’t pushed Chatterton to his limits. The location of the wreck was already known. The ship was sunk in thousands of feet of water, which meant he could do no more than remain in the Russian submersible that had delivered him to the site. Others had been there first.

After returning home from
Titanic
, Chatterton began to look for a new shipwreck project, something harder and rarer than anything he’d done. For more than a year, he came up empty. Accountants and lawyers urged him to retire and invest his money. Relax. He redoubled his efforts. He couldn’t pretend to be happy when Kohler announced he was going back to work in his family’s glass-repair business. How could a man fix broken windows at Burger King after he’d pushed into a World War II German U-boat that no one in the world knew was there?

And yet, he wondered if Kohler might not have it right. Great wrecks were rare; a person could search for decades and never find another. Chatterton was fifty-six then. He didn’t have decades anymore.

That’s when he connected with Mattera. They’d met once or twice in the early 1980s, but hadn’t spoken for twenty-five years. At a dive
seminar in 2006, the men reacquainted; by the end of the weekend, they’d pledged their lives and their savings to an idea: They could find a Spanish galleon in Dominican waters, one of the last places on earth left to hunt treasure ships. And that they would find one, whatever it took.

M
ATTERA
’
S LIFE WAS BIGGER
than Hollywood even before he could drive. A butcher’s son from Staten Island, he started risky businesses as a teenager that earned hundreds of thousands of dollars, and owned social clubs and taverns he was too young by law to enter. At twenty-three, he became embroiled in a historic war between factions of New York’s Gambino crime family. One of his options was to plunge headfirst into the violence. His other option was even crazier—to become a cop. Mattera made his choice, and joined law enforcement. By thirty, he was a highly paid personal bodyguard, protecting celebrities and tycoons.

All the while, history and diving had been Mattera’s salvation. In his younger years, when his life might have gone either way, he found his center in history books, which he devoured by the dozens, and in libraries, where he camped out for days. To Mattera, history was more than just a collection of old stories; it was an insight into human nature, a crystal ball that told as much about the future as it did about the past. And he learned to scuba dive, not to look at pretty fish in tropical resorts, but to go deep into cold oceans, where a person could swim inside the wrecks and touch history for himself.

Mattera’s first trip had been to the
Oregon
, a luxury liner sunk in 1886 in water deep enough to kill an experienced diver. He was just fourteen. Minors were forbidden on dive charters, so he showed up at the dock one morning with a case of beer and a cooler full of sandwiches from his father’s butcher shop. He bribed the captain with this bounty, and an hour later he was on the high seas, bunking next to a rogues’ gallery of bikers, dive gang members, and other hardened
souls who were the pioneers of East Coast wreck diving. For three days, he pounded out portholes on the
Oregon
, looking for clues that would add to his understanding of her sinking. The trip hooked him. No matter where life took him after that—to high-tech shooting schools, to third-world countries doing contract work for the U.S. government, to glamorous international locales working security detail for celebrity clients—he came back to history and diving, the two things in a risky world that always told him the truth.

At forty, he sold his security company. It was a mistake—the money was too good to pass up and his partner wanted to sell—but there he was, with a big bank account and, for the first time in his life, nowhere to go at five every morning. Since boyhood, he’d dreamed of living somewhere warm enough to read his books outside at night, surrounded on all sides by shipwrecks. He’d done work in the Dominican Republic, loved its people and its history. And the shipwrecks were everywhere—this is where Columbus had landed, the gateway to the New World. A few months later, he moved to Santo Domingo, the Dominican capital, and began a life of leisure.

It lasted all of two months. Mattera was blue-collar—he needed to work, so he opened Pirate’s Cove, a dive resort on the country’s south coast, and began taking paying customers to centuries-old shipwrecks in the area. Few tourists, however, seemed interested in these living pieces of history; clients preferred to stay close to the resort, where the coral was pretty and the scotch on the rocks was never more than a few minutes away. Mattera continued to smile and show his guests a good time. At night, he took refuge in his books.

This time, he began reading a different kind of story—of popes and kings, explorers and conquistadors, and fearless captains who’d perished at sea. These were the stories of the galleons, the legendary Spanish treasure ships from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that carried vast fortunes from the New World back to Spain. The Dominican Republic—then called the island of Hispaniola—was the crossroads of it all.

Mattera put together a plan. Whatever the cost, he would go find a galleon of his own. The monetary reward would be staggering—he could buy his beloved New York Mets and have several treasure chests left over. More important, discovering a galleon would be historic, and for that he was willing to risk all he had.

That’s when Chatterton showed up at a dive workshop Mattera was sponsoring at Pirate’s Cove. The men hadn’t seen each other in decades, but it took just a seaside lunch for Mattera to remember what he admired about the guy. Chatterton was in love with shipwrecks, but he bothered only with those that mattered to history and were difficult to work. Once he committed to a wreck, he never let go, no matter how deep or tangled the ship, and that was true even if it might cost him his life. More than anything, Chatterton believed in rare things; to him, “hard to find” equaled beauty, and he was willing to search the world for beautiful things no one else could find.

S
TANDING IN LINE
at Miami’s airport, the men marveled at the pirate story Bowden had told them, and especially about that badass captain, Joseph Bannister. Imagine a proper English gentleman stealing the ship he’d been trusted to sail, going on a whirlwind crime spree, then doing battle with two Royal Navy warships. And winning. You didn’t even see stuff like that in the Johnny Depp movies.

In the terminal, they stopped at gift shops to pick up something for Chatterton’s wife, Carla, and Mattera’s fiancée, Carolina. When they got to their gate, they knew it was time to call Bowden. They would be up-front with him and explain the reasons they couldn’t deviate from their treasure quest. No one would understand better than an old treasure hunter like Bowden. They dialed him on speakerphone to deliver their regrets together.

Bowden answered on the first ring.

“Tracy, it’s John and John. We’re calling about the pirate ship and that captain, Bannister.”

“Have you guys made a decision?”

“We have.”

Numbers flashed on the arrivals screen. The flight to Santo Domingo started to board. Chatterton looked at Mattera. Mattera looked at Chatterton. Each waited for the other to speak.

“Tracy,” Mattera said, “that pirate ship of yours is about to get found.”

CHAPTER TWO

BANNISTER’S ISLAND

J
ust before dawn in March 2008, in a tropical paradise on the north coast of the Dominican Republic, a leather-skinned fisherman with a cigarette in his mouth leaned over the side of his wooden rowboat and dropped a net into Samaná Bay, just as his ancestors had done day after day in this spot for centuries. In every direction, he and the waves were all that moved.

Soon, his boat began rocking, gently at first, then with a warning—something big was coming his way. In the distance, he could see the running lights of an onrushing boat and hear the hum of its outboard engines. It must have struck him as odd to see anyone in that kind of a hurry in Samaná Bay. There was nothing to rush to here; that was the beauty of the place.

He stood up and shined a flashlight. At the sight of it, the fast boat bit hard into the water and made a sweeping turn to the right. Only navy boats moved like that around here, but this vessel didn’t look built to chase drug smugglers or check cargos. With her long back deck and shallow draft, she looked built to go out and find things.

The rowboat nearly capsized as the thirty-foot fiberglass vessel streaked past, but the fisherman still saw a name etched in red letters on her side
—Deep Explorer
—and two men waving to him from the bow. Chatterton and Mattera didn’t normally operate their boat in the
dark, especially in areas that were new to them, but they had a Golden Age pirate ship to find, and neither of them could wait on the sun to get started.

Even now, it seemed incredible to the men that they’d undertaken this mission. They’d invested two years of work, preparation, and much of their savings to set themselves up to find a treasure ship, only to abandon it all to search for a pirate ship no one had heard of, on the hunch of an old man who kept treasure in his bathtub and still used visual landmarks to find his way.

Yet, as they watched the glowing reds and blues on their instrument panel count down the distance to the island where the pirate ship sank—3.8 miles…3.7 miles…3.6 miles—neither man had a doubt he’d done the right thing. A pirate ship was the single hardest and rarest thing a person could discover underwater. And while galleons had been largely forgotten, the voices of pirates never stopped calling, to the imaginations of children and anyone else who believed the world could be thrilling if one only dared step off the dock.

As the first fires of a red sun spit over the horizon, Chatterton and Mattera called to their two crewmen to look through binoculars at the outline of the distant island. First out of the cabin was Heiko Kretschmer, a thirty-eight-year-old dive instructor, master handyman, and East Germany native who had risked his life at age eighteen to escape Communism and come west looking for adventure and a better life. Engines, regulators, transmissions, pumps—there was nothing Kretschmer couldn’t fix with a roll of duct tape and a pair of pliers, and for that reason, and his relentless work ethic, Mattera considered him the most valuable man he’d ever employed.

Following him out of the cabin was Howard Ehrenberg, also thirty-eight, a Long Island native and computer whiz who had previous lives as a follower of the Grateful Dead, a head shop owner, and a sound technician. He’d met Chatterton at a dive charity event and the two hit it off. Captivated by the idea of hunting treasure in a faraway land, he asked if Chatterton might use a technical guy who could dive.

“Ever worked with side-scan sonars, magnetometers, or subbottom profilers?” Chatterton asked.

“Never,” Ehrenberg replied.

“Okay, you’re perfect for us,” Chatterton said, and Ehrenberg became crew.

Now the men could see Cayo Levantado, where Bannister’s ship had sunk. Chatterton cut back on the throttle, and the men stood on the bow and admired the island’s white sands and swaying palm trees. In the years since it had been featured in Bacardi ads, it had become home to a luxury resort, complete with sparkling swimming pools and a dock built for cruise ships.

“It’s even more gorgeous than in those old
Playboy
magazine ads,” Mattera said.

“You were looking at the ads?” Chatterton asked.

As the boat slowed its approach to the island, the men jumped down to the deck and got ready to search the waters. Until about the 1970s, treasure hunters did their work by putting on a snorkel or peering through glass-bottom buckets or, in the case of famed salvor Teddy Tucker, swaying in a window washer’s chair under a hot-air balloon. And they didn’t look for shipwrecks so much as for straight lines; nature didn’t make anything linear, so when they saw straight edges and right angles, they knew they were seeing something man-made.

Technology changed all that. By the turn of the twenty-first century, salvors were using two primary tools to find shipwrecks. One of them, the side-scan sonar, used sound waves to paint images of the seafloor, but it wasn’t the right tool for nonflat, coral-strewn bottoms like the ones in Samaná Bay. The other kind of technology, the magnetometer, was perhaps the most important piece in the treasure hunter’s arsenal, and it was what Chatterton and Mattera planned to rely on for finding Bannister’s ship.

Built into a streamlined, torpedo-shaped unit, the magnetometer was designed to be towed by boat. When it passed over a ferrous object, it sensed the change in the earth’s magnetic field caused by that
object. The best units were exquisitely sensitive, able to detect even a screwdriver underwater. And while they did not react to precious metals like gold and silver (which do not contain iron), they were champions at detecting anchors, cannons, cannonballs, and other magnetic objects that had been part of well-armed colonial-era ships. Deluxe versions could cost more than a new Mercedes-Benz, but without a good one a treasure hunter flew blind. Chatterton and Mattera had chosen one of the best—the Geometrics G-882 cesium-vapor marine magnetometer with an altimeter, priced at almost seventy thousand dollars, including software and upgrades.

Buying the magnetometer was the easy part. Towing it was art. An operator set up a predetermined grid, then towed the instrument slowly and methodically back and forth, a process known as “mowing the lawn.” As the magnetometer detected ferrous metal objects below, the locations were recorded by the boat’s onboard computers, which would make a chart of the hits. All the while, the captain would work to keep his magnetometer at optimum altitude, about ten feet above the seafloor. In that way, surveys often turned into an ongoing waltz with the sea. The finest captains were the ones who could dance.

Chatterton, Mattera, and crew planned to move in lanes seventy-five feet wide, each of which stretched for a mile, then to dive every one of the hits the mag detected, looking for any iron remnant from the wreck of the
Golden Fleece.
If the first grid failed to produce evidence of the shipwreck, the men would set up a new grid, adjacent to the last, and survey that area, and they would continue expanding, mowing more lawns until they’d found their pirate ship.

Ordinarily, that kind of search might have required surveying the waters around the entire island, a massive area. But Bowden had provided the men information from historical records that helped narrow the search. The
Golden Fleece
, he told them:

—had sunk in twenty-four feet of water

—had muskets scattered on her deck

—had been careening when confronted by the Royal Navy warships

It was the last clue that was most significant to the men. Wooden ships sailing in tropical waters were plagued by
Teredo
shipworms, barnacles, and other marine life that attached to the underside of a vessel’s hull, slowing the ship and eating away at the wood. Left unchecked, these tiny scourges could bring down the mightiest of ships. To prevent the damage, crews cleaned and repaired hulls on a regular basis, and they did this by beaching the ships at high tide, then tilting them onto their sides as the water went out, a process known as careening. Since the
Golden Fleece
had been sunk while careening, it meant she would likely be found near a beach.

That, more than anything, gave the men hope for a quick discovery. By studying aerial photographs, they could see that there were no beaches on the northern coast of the island; it was all rocks, so a ship could not have careened there. The southern coast had beaches, but they’d been built for the resort in the past decade, so the island’s southern coast was out, too.

The island’s eastern coast had a large beach, but the area was rocky and exposed to wind and weather, making that location impractical and risky for a pirate looking to evade authorities.

That left the western beach, the only one that made sense. It was at the leeward side of the island, so it was protected from wind and waves. And it seemed well hidden from the open Atlantic, so passing ships couldn’t see it. If a pirate captain chose to careen at Cayo Levantado, that’s where he’d go every time. And that’s where Chatterton went now.

He guided the
Deep Explorer
toward the southern tip of the western beach and allowed her to drift to a halt. Once the boat was settled, Kretschmer prepped the magnetometer, while Ehrenberg set up the software program to collect data. Just after dawn, it was already eighty degrees outside, the coolest it would be all day.

Mattera reminded the men that the pirate ship had been lost in twenty-four feet of water. Depths could rise and fall at random near islands like this, so they would start their survey a good distance offshore and work their way in toward the beach. That way, they wouldn’t miss any area that included the appropriate depth.

The men were ready to go. Mattera pulled out his Nikon D300, set the delayed shutter, then joined the others for a photo. After the camera snapped, he grabbed four diet sodas from the cooler, passed them out, and raised a toast.

“To Captain Bannister,” he said.

“To Captain Bannister,” the others echoed.

“One unlucky sonofabitch. First, the Royal Navy hunts him down. Now us.”

T
HE MEN TOWED FOR HOURS
. They stopped only to wolf down soggy tuna sandwiches, then continued their survey until the waters turned choppy and the magnetometer began porpoising over the surface. It was frustrating to halt work so early in the day, but the bay stayed calm only until early afternoon in these parts, and without quiet waters their readings might be skewed. To both Chatterton and Mattera, survey work was science; there was no room for imprecision. So they pulled in their gear and turned the
Deep Explorer
around.

Twenty minutes later, they docked their boat in a small channel four miles from the island. By a stroke of good luck, Mattera’s soon-to-be father-in-law, a former admiral and chief of staff of the Dominican Navy, owned a little villa on the bay, and it was here that the team would be living temporarily while they searched for the
Golden Fleece.
Overlooking the water, the home was cut into the cliff face and accessible only by a narrow road that wound through a mango orchard. Inside, the building opened into a spacious indoor-outdoor living area. All the bedrooms had private terraces. The view of the sunset was spectacular. Mattera’s future in-laws would want it back before long.

The men unloaded their gear, but work wasn’t done for the day. Ehrenberg still needed to process the data the team had collected, using custom software programs to make a map of the hits detected by the magnetometer. A day or two later, the team would dive those hits. Even the smallest blip would be investigated.

Chatterton and Mattera stepped onto the veranda and called their significant others; in this remote area, if they stood in just the right spot and tilted slightly toward the moon, they could catch a cell phone signal that might last for an entire five-minute call.

Chatterton reached Carla at their home on the Maine coast, where she was curled up on the couch and watching a movie with their yellow Labrador retriever, Chili. Carla missed John and did not approve when she learned that her husband had eaten Zucaritas—Frosted Flakes—for dinner three nights in a row.

Mattera got Carolina while she was reading in the study of their apartment in Santo Domingo. He laughed when she asked if he’d found “Long John Silver,” yet the question jarred him. For all the luck shipwreck hunters had in finding real pirate ships, he and Chatterton might as well have been looking for Noah’s Ark.

E
VEN DURING THE
G
OLDEN
A
GE
of Piracy, between 1650 and 1720, pirates were rare. Precise numbers are hard to come by, but according to British historian Peter Earle, in the period around 1700, “it seems unlikely that they ever had much more than twenty ships at any one time and less than two thousand men.” By contrast, there might have been as many as eighty thousand sailors and navy men working on legitimate ships in the Atlantic and Caribbean at the time. It’s difficult to say how many pirate ships in total might have sailed during the seventy-year Golden Age, but the number, in any case, would have been small, perhaps fewer than a thousand.

Not all of those ships had been lost or sunk. Some were captured by authorities; others were sold or traded by the pirates and put to
lawful uses. So the number of lost pirate ships is just a fraction of those that ever sailed. Finding any of them would be a long shot. Identifying one would be virtually impossible. The reason lay in the shadowy nature of crime itself.

Stealth was the lifeblood of a pirate ship. To survive, she had to be invisible, anonymous. Pirate captains didn’t publish crew lists or file sailing plans, and they didn’t paint names on the hulls of their ships. Whenever possible, they sailed in secrecy. These measures helped them evade the forces that hunted them, but it also meant that when they sank, they didn’t merely settle to the bottom; they disappeared from existence. No government went looking for them because they belonged to no country. Witnesses to a sinking couldn’t have described the location precisely in any case, as measures of longitude were unreliable during the era. If any pirates survived the ship’s demise, they weren’t going to report the loss to authorities.