Pirate Hunters: Treasure, Obsession, and the Search for a Legendary Pirate Ship (5 page)

And then, in late April, nearly two months after the team had launched its search, their magnetometer registered an especially strong reading. Mattera had a feeling about this one. He and Kretschmer got in the water. Not far down, they saw an unmistakable shape rising four feet out of the sand. Mattera wrote on his slate:

CAREFUL!

It was a grappling hook, an anchor-like device with sharpened claws. Ominous, even frightening, in appearance, they were often used by salvors—and opportunistic pirates—to pull up objects from sunken ships.

Mattera drifted slowly toward the hook and pulled it from the mud. Four claws bloomed from the shaft, each still razor sharp. The base, overgrown in gravel-colored coral, made Mattera’s heart race; by his estimation, it was at least three hundred years old. He glanced at his depth gauge. Twenty-four feet.

He motioned to Kretschmer to summon the others, and soon the four-man team was in the water and gathered around. One by one, they examined the hook’s hand-forged black iron and timeless design. But mostly, they were impressed by its age. The grappling hook was period. It had come from Bannister’s time.

They would have given anything to salvage the hook, but no one dared expose it to air for fear it would oxidize and fall apart in their hands. Instead, they photographed it and buried it back on the bottom. Topside, they made sober notes in their books, but couldn’t hide their excitement. Beneath them, at just the right depth, was the first
solid piece of evidence that a late-seventeenth-century ship had sunk at the island. No one said it aloud, but everyone was thinking the same: They’d found a piece of the
Golden Fleece.

The men stayed out late that night, raising toasts to Bannister and his pirate crew. Back at the villa, after stripping for bed, Mattera found a book about anchors in the villa’s small library. The power went out, but by flashlight he found a page that showed a grappling hook almost identical to the one he’d discovered that morning. Carrying the flashlight in one hand and the book in the other, he made his way to Chatterton’s bedroom and knocked on the door. Receiving no answer, he let himself in. Chatterton awoke with a start.

“Jesus, Mattera, you look like Jacob Marley!”

“Look at this book.”

Chatterton pressed his face to the page and saw a photograph of the very same grappling hook they’d found that day. The author dated it to the late seventeenth century.

Chatterton fist-bumped Mattera.

“You know what, partner?” he said. “I think we just found our pirate wreck.”

T
HE MEN SET OUT
early the next morning for Cayo Levantado, setting up a new grid centered over the grappling hook, this one with narrower lanes—a hard-target search. If the hook belonged to the
Golden Fleece
, there would be more pieces of the wreck nearby.

They surveyed for days. This time, they didn’t even find fish traps. Whatever ship had used the grappling hook was long gone. Chatterton got out of his dive gear and sat on the stern, talking to no one in particular.

“I’ve found wrecks in the open Atlantic, in hundreds of square miles of water. Why can’t I find a pirate ship in an area no bigger than Central Park?”

Chatterton was in no mood to drive the boat, so Kretschmer took
the wheel and set course for the villa. When the water turned choppy, Kretschmer eased back on the throttle, but water still broke over the vessel. Chatterton charged into the wheelhouse.

“What the hell are you doing, Heiko? We have water over the bow! We have a hundred thousand dollars of electronics in here! What’s wrong with you?”

Mattera put up his hands.

“Whoa, John. It’s Mother Nature; it’s nobody’s fault. He’s driving fine.”

“He is not driving fine. Salt water on electronics means we’re out of business. If you can’t drive, Heiko, don’t take the goddamn wheel.”

Mattera motioned for Kretschmer to leave the wheelhouse, then closed the door behind him.

“John, you gotta calm down. You’re going to give yourself an aneurysm here, and I’m going to be the one feeding you oatmeal while you drool on yourself, and I don’t want to do that.”

Chatterton told Mattera he just wanted things done right—anything less than perfect wouldn’t be enough to find something as elusive, as impossible, as a pirate ship. In the past, it had been his commitment to excellence—his insistence that things be done beautifully, not just correctly—that had delivered him into places others couldn’t reach.

Chatterton let a few minutes pass, then took a deep breath and walked out of the wheelhouse. At the stern, he found Kretschmer smoking a Marlboro.

“Heiko, I’m sorry for yelling,” he said.

“No problem, John. Don’t worry about it.”

“No, really, I’m sorry.”

“It’s forgotten.”

“Thanks. I think I yelled because I have a rash.”

Kretschmer looked confused.

“I’m sorry?” he said.

Slowly, Chatterton turned around and lowered his shorts, exposing his buttocks. A grin spread across his face.

“Heiko, do I have a rash?”

Kretschmer looked shocked, then horrified. The others started laughing. This was trademark Chatterton humor—a sudden shift from tension into farce.

“Heiko!” Chatterton called, his butt still showing, “Give me a hug!”

With that Chatterton reached for Kretschmer, who ran as fast as he could. Chatterton began chasing him, bottomless and hot on his heels.

“Run, Heiko!” the others called out.

“I have a gun!” Kretschmer warned, and now he was laughing, too, but Chatterton would not stop chasing him. His only means of escape was into the water, and that’s where he leaped.

Chatterton called out over the side.

“Heiko! Give me a hug!”

I
T HAD BEEN TWO MONTHS
since the team started work at the island. As much as either man hated to do it, Chatterton and Mattera agreed it was time to bring Bowden up to date. It would be easy, since Bowden was in the area doing work on his dive boat.

They met him the next evening at Tony’s, a restaurant on Samaná’s main street fancy enough to serve ice with its sodas. Bowden looked like a kid about to open a birthday present, which made the disappointing report even harder to deliver. But deliver it they did. If the
Golden Fleece
had sunk anywhere near the western beach at Cayo Levantado, they assured Bowden, they would have found her by now.

Bowden asked about the other parts of the island. Chatterton explained the team’s thinking—that no other area at the island had been suitable for careening in the seventeenth century, and in any case, no pirate captain, no good one, at least, would have left himself exposed in those parts.

Bowden ordered a glass of wine. He seemed, in the most gentlemanly of ways, to be annoyed.

“Are you sure you guys didn’t miss something? Would it help to go try again?”

Mattera could see Chatterton’s face reddening. He jumped in before his partner could answer.

“Absolutely, Tracy. Don’t worry. We’ll get it.”

The rest of the dinner was spent telling old war stories about the early days of East Coast wreck diving. Between laughs and refills on drinks, Bowden spoke about the importance of patience in hunting shipwrecks. During these moments, it was all Chatterton could do to hold his tongue.

Driving home that evening, Chatterton and Mattera talked about how much they liked Bowden. He was warm and engaging, and his stories were often speckled with pearls of wisdom about salvage, instinct, and life. Still, there was no point in redoing their search at the island, as Bowden had suggested. Mattera said he didn’t think they had to. He’d been thinking, and it had occurred to him that neither he nor Chatterton knew anything about Joseph Bannister. Perhaps there was something in the pirate captain’s story that might help. They were getting nowhere in their search for the
Golden Fleece
, so maybe it was better to search for the man than the ship.

Chatterton loved that kind of thinking. He asked what Mattera needed to make it happen.

“Just time to hit the books,” Mattera said.

The men pulled into the entrance of the villa’s zigzag driveway.

“I can’t wait to see what you find out about our pirate,” Chatterton said.

“Me, too,” Mattera replied. “Because you know what, John? I’ve had good street instincts all my life. And I’ve got a feeling about this guy.”

CHAPTER FOUR

A WELL-RESPECTED ENGLISHMAN

S
anto Domingo, the capital city of the Dominican Republic, looked like Manhattan, London, and Hong Kong rolled into one when Mattera arrived to start his research. After living in Samaná for the previous two months, he needed a while to adjust to the sights and sounds of modernity.

He stopped first at home, where he picked up Carolina for a breakfast date. He could not have hoped for a more supportive fiancée. Rather than hurry him to finish his pirate hunt, she had been sending home-cooked barbecued chicken and macaroni salad to the villa, and promising to help with research when needed. Today, he would take her up on that offer. Carolina had earned a master’s degree in economics from the Sorbonne in Paris, spoke fluent English, Spanish, and French, and was proficient in Italian and Mandarin. She was also a beauty, elegant and curvaceous, with long black hair and wide dark eyes. Best of all, she liked shipwrecks.

After breakfast, the couple headed to the Museo de las Casas Reales, one of the country’s finest museums and archives, located in Santo Domingo’s historic Colonial Zone. Mattera and Carolina checked hundreds of sources there for references to the pirate Joseph Bannister. But for a few scant mentions, they could find nothing more
about him than what Mattera already knew. If he were to learn more, he would have to expand his search.

A few days later, Mattera was on a plane by himself to New York. He didn’t bother checking into his hotel when he arrived. Instead, he took a taxi to one of his favorite places: the main branch of the New York Public Library on Forty-Second Street. Since boyhood, he’d loved the iconic Beaux Arts building and its massive, seemingly endless collection of resources, manuscripts, and even old baseball cards. Like many, Mattera considered it to be the world’s greatest library.

He began in the maritime section, as he always had during high school. He hadn’t been to this place for years, but the smell was the same—a perfume atomized from the must of old books, oils from wooden bookshelves, and bleach from freshly scrubbed floors. Even in the 1970s, when New York City seemed to many to be dirty and neglected, this place remained spotless, a repository of history impervious to time.

Standing on tiptoe, Mattera began pulling volumes from the stacks, and he spent the rest of the day, and the next, pushing into the farthest colonies of the library, making copies of whatever documents made the slightest mention of Bannister.

The next morning, he was first in line at the Strand, a famed bookstore at Twelfth Street and Broadway. It had opened in 1927 and advertised eighteen miles of new, used, and rare titles, and Mattera came ready to look through them all. He estimated that he’d spent a month of his life at the Strand already, going back to his purchase of Robert Marx’s
Shipwrecks of the Western Hemisphere
when he was twelve. For the next several hours, he scoured every section that related to pirates, maritime history, Hispaniola, the Caribbean, shipwrecks, and the Royal Navy. He found only one or two volumes that made reference to Bannister, but they added more to the narrative he was building.

That night, Mattera met a childhood friend for dinner at a Staten Island diner. They talked of old times and reminisced about the pirates
they’d known growing up. Only at dawn, when the friends needed to return to work, did they hug each other good-bye.

Mattera spent that day visiting rare map dealers, then he rented a car and began driving south and west, dropping in at libraries and used bookstores. A few days later, he was at the archives in Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia, where he found letters from English officials describing their pursuit of the pirates. Then it was on to London to visit various archives, where he discovered important papers and correspondence that dated to the seventeenth century. None of it provided more than a glimpse of Bannister, but taken together, the information he gathered over his journey told a singular story.

J
OSEPH
B
ANNISTER BEGAN HIS CAREER
not as a pirate but as its opposite: a well-respected English merchant sea captain responsible for carrying valuable cargo like animal hides, logwood, indigo, and sugar, and sometimes well-to-do passengers, on the profitable trade route between London and Jamaica. By 1680, he was making the transatlantic trip perhaps twice a year at the helm of a ship called the
Golden Fleece
, an expensive and heavily armed vessel owned by wealthy merchants who were likely based in London. These owners must have had great faith in Bannister—every cargo was worth a fortune, the
Golden Fleece
many times more.

Their trust seemed well placed. Before a man became a merchant captain, he spent years proving himself, starting perhaps as a ship’s boy and, if capable and reliable, working his way up to officer of the watch or even first mate. If he were truly exceptional, he might make captain. By then, he likely would have been in his thirties, and would have shown himself time and again to be loyal to the masters of his ship.

Only the best captains were entrusted with a transatlantic route. The trip could take between three weeks and three months, depending
on weather and how accurately one made landfall. In charge of a crew of perhaps sixty or seventy, a captain like Bannister needed to be a leader of men as much as a first-rate sailor. Often, a ship like the
Golden Fleece
found herself in peril, at the mercy of hurricanes or reef systems that could smash the sturdiest vessels, or vulnerable to pirates, who prowled the oceans looking for prey. To avoid being ruined by nature, a captain like Bannister would draw on years of experience with weather and cartographic charts. To evade pirates, he’d best learn to think like one, in order to stay one step ahead.

Given Bannister’s trade, it is likely he hailed from near London or another of the English ports, perhaps Bristol or Liverpool. The ship he captained was impressively large, near one hundred feet long and carrying as many as twenty-eight cannons, roughly equal in size and power to a small Royal Navy warship. A pirate who chose to attack her did so at his peril.

The ship’s name, the
Golden Fleece
, would have been understood by many in the late 1600s. The classic Greek story, in which Jason and his band of heroes, the Argonauts, set sail in search of a magical ram’s golden coat, was familiar to educated people in the seventeenth century. Such names were common, too, in Jamaica and other parts of the West Indies, where slaves often received classical names such as Cassius or Hercules or Brutus.

By 1680, Bannister was running the London–Jamaica route and, as a prominent captain, making a handsome salary. He even might have shared in the ship’s profits. If he managed to stay healthy and continue sailing without falling to nature or pirates, he could expect to work into his fifties or sixties, perhaps retiring to a small house in England, where he could live out his days looking out over the sea.

Bannister seemed well on his way to that sort of soft landing when he anchored in Port Royal, Jamaica, in March 1680. There, while being scrubbed by her crew, the
Golden Fleece
rolled out of control, her masts crashing into the water. Bannister, aloft in the sails, managed
to save himself, but eight other men drowned. Crew from the
Hunter
, a small Royal Navy warship, moved to the scene and helped Bannister refloat and repair the
Golden Fleece.

Soon, the ship had been restored and, for the next four years, Bannister continued making the London–Jamaica run. The westward trip terminated at Port Royal, the epicenter of trade and shipping in the Caribbean, where captains often waited weeks, or months, for enough sugar and other cargo to carry back to England. Few complained, however, about laying over in Port Royal. In the late seventeenth century, there might not have been a more lively and lusty place in all the world. And it would be the place where Bannister’s life changed.

I
N
1655, E
NGLAND INVADED
Jamaica and captured it from the Spanish. The conquest planted the English into the heart of the Caribbean, well positioned to disrupt Spanish shipping and attack her colonies.

But just a year later, many of the warships that had captured the island had been retired or returned to England. Left vulnerable, the English governor of Jamaica needed to figure out another way to defend the island. And he had to do it fast.

So he turned his attention three hundred miles northeast to Tortuga, a wild island inhabited by English, French, and Dutch cutthroats who made their livings by attacking Spanish ships. People called these bandits buccaneers, from the French word
boucan
, for the wooden cooking frame used by area hunters to smoke meats. The governor made the buccaneers an offer: Protect English interests in Jamaica with your heavily armed ships and you can use Port Royal’s harbor as a base for your pirating operations.

Tough men, from Tortuga and elsewhere, lined up to accept. Some secured official commissions from the English Crown and were known as privateers. Others worked independently, answering to no one but themselves; they were called pirates. No matter the title, these men lit into their jobs, harassing and plundering Spanish shipping, launching
operations against Spanish settlements, and keeping Jamaica safe for the English. Many got rich. The best of them, including the legendary pirate Henry Morgan, became wealthy beyond imagination.