Pirate Hunters: Treasure, Obsession, and the Search for a Legendary Pirate Ship (26 page)

To “ease his dejected spirits,” Bannister sailed to the Mosquito Coast, where he was welcomed by Indians. Soon, all but six of his remaining men ran away with his ship, leaving Bannister at the mercy of the natives. Captain Spragge in the Royal Navy’s
Drake
tracked Bannister to this hiding place, where he found the pirate captain disguised as an Indian, roasting a plantain in a wigwam. One of Bannister’s men fired a musket at Spragge, but missed and slightly wounded another navy man. Bannister, along with three of his cohorts and two boys, were taken prisoner and put aboard the
Drake.
In sight of Port Royal, Bannister and the other pirates were hanged, their bodies dumped in nearby Gun Cay.

But something seemed wrong with this part of the story. It was neither consistent with historical accounts of Bannister’s character, nor with the spirit Taylor himself ascribed to the pirate captain in battle.

“You think Bannister really surrendered without a fight?” Mattera said. “This guy? Who stole his own ship twice? Who stood toe-to-toe with two navy warships?”

“Well, they hung him,” Ehrenberg said.

“Did they?” Mattera asked.

He allowed the question to linger. Then, he laid out his thinking.

The English government wanted Bannister dead. He was a top priority. He’d embarrassed them, not once but twice, by stealing his own ship and then by cheating the hangman under their noses. Then he defeated the Royal Navy in battle. Maybe Spragge did catch him on the Mosquito Coast. But maybe not. Maybe Bannister got away after
the fight with the frigates. Would the English want to admit that, and risk making him a folk hero forever?

Chatterton picked up Mattera’s thinking.

The navy supposedly hanged the pirates on a ship off the coast of Port Royal. But who saw it? How did the witnesses know it was Bannister? For all anyone knew, it was an unlucky Indian chosen by the navy to stand in for Bannister. The bodies were cut down and thrown overboard, so who could say?

Mattera opened the book and again read the last line Taylor had written about Bannister:

Thus wee have given you a full account of the overthrow of the misserable Banister, who not long befor was a welthy captain of good repute in Jamaica, and might have lived long and happy had not he turned pyrat.

To Mattera, that sounded like a warning to would-be pirates, directed by the powers that be.

“So what do you think really happened to him?” asked Kretschmer.

Chatterton imagined that Bannister might have taken on a new identity, put together a fresh crew, and continued pirating, taking even bigger ships, maybe moving operations to the Mediterranean or the American East Coast.

Mattera saw him as perhaps captain of a great whaling vessel, taking on an opponent even more dangerous than the Royal Navy.

“Or maybe he retired as an English gentleman,” Kretschmer said, “living a quiet life in a house by the sea.”

Chatterton and Mattera thought about that one. They looked across the channel. Under the moonlight, they could see waves breaking over Bannister’s wreck.

Then, each together, the partners said, “No way.”

EPILOGUE

S
alvage continued in earnest on the ballast pile at Cayo Vigia. Every artifact recovered by divers was period to the
Golden Fleece.
Over two months, Chatterton, Mattera, Bowden, and their crews discovered gold wedding rings, silver and bronze coins, a small gold statue, boarding axes, thousands of beads, a brass gun barrel, knives, smoking pipes (some with the owner’s initials scratched into the handle), jewelry, china, and a small bronze statue, beautifully crafted, of an English gentleman, wearing a top hat and holding a firelock musket, his dog standing guard by his side. This piece, the men liked to imagine, had belonged to Bannister himself.

Divers often couldn’t wait to get the artifacts topside for cleaning. Blackened Delftware china dishes, washed in mild soap and water, showed their true colors: blue and white, blue and yellow, and, rarest of all, red and black. All of it was delicate and valuable, worth perhaps three thousand dollars a plate, maybe more, given its provenance. A pewter bowl, after gentle rinsing, revealed lumps of leftover porridge still inside. Museums and auction houses would have desired any of these pieces; collectors would have paid handsome sums. Few people got a chance to acquire verifiable pirate booty—and no one knew if it would ever happen again.

Chatterton and Mattera stood to gain financially by these recoveries. By handshake, Bowden had agreed to give them a percentage of the salvage. But after accounting for expenses, neither man knew if
he’d break even. For now, everything recovered from the site would be cataloged, preserved, and stored at the laboratory at the Oficina Nacional de Patrimonio Cultural Subacuático. When salvage was complete—and that could take months or even years—a division would be made between the Dominican government and Bowden. It would then be up to Chatterton and Mattera to arrange their own division with Bowden. In this business, parties often selected their artifacts in rounds, in the way professional sports teams draft players: Bowden might choose a boarding ax and a sword, Chatterton a flintlock and a handful of beads, Mattera a pistol and piece of Delftware china, then back to Bowden again for another round. All of it would be done according to the percentages of their agreement.

In May 2009, Mattera and one of Bowden’s crew began to uncover the hull, or lowermost section, of the pirate ship. Chatterton joined them soon after. As they removed ballast, they could see that the ship’s beams had remained intact, and the entire lower portion of the hull was still there, a miracle. If the wreck had sunk almost anywhere else, she would have long since disintegrated. But the water around the island was much less salty than in the surrounding waters, and had a freshwater stream nearby (yet another reason Cayo Vigia made for such an effective pirate stronghold—access to drinking water). Also, the sand and silt under which the
Golden Fleece
was buried was of a very fine consistency and acted as a preservative for the ship and her artifacts. Hovering over the site, the men could see the
Golden Fleece
as she had been, steadfast and muscular, a ship as tough as either of them ever had seen. A few days later, they found a cannonball on the wreck marked by the broad arrow, a symbol of the Royal Navy—just as the treasure hunter William Phips reported seeing on the wreck months after the pirate ship sank.

Representatives from the lab, along with archaeologists, visited the site later that month, inspecting artifacts and taking a tour of the island. They snapped photos and congratulated the men on the discovery. None had any doubt about what had been found. By now, divers
had recovered thousands of artifacts. Not one dated later than 1686, the year the
Golden Fleece
had been lost.

News of the find spread quickly through the treasure-hunting and archaeology communities. Those who managed to see the artifacts at the lab or even aboard one of the salvage vessels tipped their hats to Chatterton, Mattera, and Bowden. But perhaps the best endorsement came from the great treasure hunter Bob Marx, who had discovered the lost city of Port Royal, Jamaica. He called Mattera on the boat after he opened emailed photographs of the Delftware china and the pewter cereal bowl. “Goddamn it, you got it,” he said. “I wish you guys were here to see my smile.”

The men couldn’t stop smiling themselves. They’d found a Golden Age pirate ship, the hardest and rarest and most exciting thing an explorer could find underwater, or maybe in all the world. Sometimes, in the middle of lunch or after working on the boat, one would turn to the other and say, “We did it.” And the other would answer, “Yes, we did.”

It was around this time that Mattera flew back to New York to visit family and friends. His last stop was at Moravian Cemetery, at the bottom of Todt Hill Road on Staten Island. He spoke aloud to his father there, bringing him up to date on Carolina and the kids, and on the Mets, who were playing good ball that season.

“And one more thing, Dad,” he said aloud. “I found a really cool pirate ship. I wish I could tell you about it. It was an adventure. You’d love it.”

M
ONTHS OF SALVAGE REMAINED
to be done on the
Golden Fleece
, but Bowden and his crew had that in hand, so Chatterton and Mattera turned their sights back to treasure hunting, this time to the
San Miguel
, the early Spanish galleon they believed could be the most valuable treasure ship ever lost, loaded with gold, priceless Inca and Aztec works of art, and glorious contraband. The prizes from the
San
Miguel
might be worth more than five hundred million dollars at auction. But the finders of the great ship wouldn’t just be treasure rich; they also would have discovered the oldest known shipwreck in the Western Hemisphere. Instantly, the wreck would become important to historians, archaeologists, universities, and governments, its name—and the names of its finders—known the world over. Many treasure hunters dreamed of riches. Others imagined black-tie openings at museums or a dedicated auction at Sotheby’s or Christie’s. Still others yearned to make their names legend. For the finders of the
San Miguel
, every one of those dreams could come true.

So Chatterton and Mattera made a deal with Bowden to go after the
San Miguel
, which they believed to be sunk in one of Bowden’s lease areas, a discreet and searchable place less than a hundred miles from Samaná Bay. But they knew it would have to happen fast.

In early June 2009, a U.S. magistrate judge in Florida directed Odyssey Marine Exploration, the publicly traded salvage company that had recovered half a billion dollars’ worth of silver coins from a centuries-old Spanish warship, to return the treasure to Spain. That was the kind of writing on the wall Chatterton and Mattera had been warned about early in their partnership. Tides were shifting against treasure hunters, even as the partners began their new quest.

The men spent the next two and a half years in search of the
San Miguel.
It drained most of their savings. They’d expected to cash in on the pirate booty by now, but most of the artifacts from the
Golden Fleece
were still at the lab awaiting division. Expenses mounted. They lost their survey boat in a storm, which alone cost them more than one hundred thousand dollars. They raised the vessel, and it sunk again, this time with both of them aboard.

But the years and money seemed worth it. They tracked the
San Miguel
to a picturesque area on the eastern end of the country’s north coast. There, they found a sixteenth-century anchor that appeared, in detail, to be a match for one carried aboard the galleon. Soon after, they found broken pieces of pottery, which also had likely come from
the
San Miguel.
Hundreds of pebble-sized ballast stones lay nearby, the kind used to fill space between larger ballast rocks on galleon-sized sailing ships. Given all he and Mattera had learned about
San Miguel
, they had little doubt they were closing in on the great treasure ship.

And then, just as the men prepared to salvage the site, a business dispute arose between them and Bowden. Months passed as they tried to work it out. Eventually, lawsuits were filed. Chatterton and Mattera could hardly digest their position. They believed they were sitting on top of the most valuable treasure ship ever lost, but couldn’t bring her up while rights to the wreck remained in dispute.

The legal battle continues to this day. If Chatterton and Mattera prevail, they will go back to work on the wreck site. If they do not, the
San Miguel
might remain undiscovered forever.

M
OST OF THE ARTIFACTS
from the
Golden Fleece
remain at the lab. The divers have asked officials there to postpone a division until the dispute with Bowden is settled. Given the rarity of the find, it’s difficult to put a precise monetary value on the booty recovered from the pirate ship. By some estimates, the collection might be worth several million dollars.

But even if a single piece from the
Golden Fleece
never got sold, the men had their prizes. Chatterton had found the rarest and most exciting kind of shipwreck in the world. Mattera had pieced together the story of one of the Golden Age’s great pirate ships, changing how history understood her adventures and her final days. Best of all, they’d found Joseph Bannister.

Each man also got something else from his discovery, something different from shipwrecks and pirates, even if he didn’t expect it at the time.

For Chatterton, it was the chance to learn from the Dominicans. He had arrived in Samaná believing there was just one way to do things—straight ahead and by sheer force of muscle and will. Then he began
watching the locals. Many of them were near destitute but made do with whatever scraps they could gather. If they didn’t have a jack to change a tire, they used rocks and sticks. If they needed to dive deep to catch fish, they built an air supply system from an old paint compressor and a garden hose. To Chatterton, even the poorest among them seemed to have all they wanted, not because they didn’t desire much, but because they always found other ways to get what they needed, always found other ways to go.

That idea helped Chatterton break through on the
Golden Fleece.
But it also stayed with him after he found the shipwreck. He’d long dreaded the day when he would be too old to keep diving, to do what he was meant to do. He knew that his partnership with Mattera, made at age fifty-five, was in ways an effort to have one last great adventure before it might be too late. After watching the Dominicans, he didn’t believe in too late anymore. He knew the day was coming when he could no longer strap on the tanks. But when that day came, he would find other ways to get the feeling a great shipwreck gave him. The water was a big place, and he would find other ways to go.

F
OR
M
ATTERA
,
THE
G
OLDEN
F
LEECE
answered a basic question: Was it ever too late to follow one’s heart? Months into his search for the pirate ship, Mattera’s view on the matter had been dim. He’d spent several years and more than a million dollars to go after a dream—first of treasure, then of pirates—but had yet to find anything important. Worse, it had begun to occur to him, as the failures and stresses piled up, that there might be nothing out there for him to find.

That’s when he discovered Joseph Bannister, buried in historical records almost no one had touched for centuries. The pirate captain had been in his thirties or forties when he’d abandoned a respectable career and a future assured in order to do something daring, something that called to him. To Mattera, Bannister’s calling was democracy, but what mattered most was that Bannister had answered.

Things went badly for Bannister at first. Then he began a singular adventure, one of swashbuckling and daring that culminated in doing the near impossible—defeating the Royal Navy in battle. To Mattera, the lesson was clear: A person had to go when his heart told him to go. Even if he didn’t know how the journey would end.

Mattera was never the same after that. He fought through frustrations and challenges in Samaná, spent even more of his money, then found the
Golden Fleece.
He kept a cannonball from the wreck, a reminder to listen to his heart when next it asked him to go.

B
Y
2013, C
HATTERTON HAD
moved back to the United States, while Mattera, now married to Carolina, remained in Santo Domingo. In the spring of that year, Chatterton made a trip to the Dominican Republic to visit Mattera. The men had planned to take it easy that weekend, lounging around and eating grilled octopus, as they had in the early days, when every shipwreck in the New World might be theirs. Instead, they drove to Samaná, where they took the Zodiac across the channel and anchored over the
Golden Fleece
. It was tourist season. The beaches should have been crowded, but that day it was quiet. Only Chatterton, Mattera, and Bannister were there.