Pirate Hunters: Treasure, Obsession, and the Search for a Legendary Pirate Ship (4 page)

Nature took over from there. It might take just a few years for mud and sand to bury a shipwreck completely.

That didn’t mean, however, that a sunken pirate ship was never to be seen again. Over the ages, it was near certain that explorers, fishermen, and even snorkelers had stumbled across the scattered remains of Golden Age pirate ships. Few, however, would have known that the debris was special, or could have identified what they’d found. Much of what a pirate ship carried—dishes, rigging, tools, ballast stones, coins, weapons, even cannons—was carried by merchant ships, too, which meant that even if a finder dared to dream he’d discovered a pirate ship, proving it would be near impossible.

Except for one man.

As a boy, American Barry Clifford had heard stories about the pirate captain “Black Sam” Bellamy, whose ship had been lost in 1717 off Cape Cod. As an adult, Clifford went out and found Bellamy’s ship, the
Whydah
, not far from Clifford’s own childhood home. News of the 1984 discovery reverberated worldwide, but it wasn’t just the artifacts or piles of silver or even the story of the crew’s dramatic end
in a storm that fired people’s imaginations. It was a bell Clifford had pulled from the wreckage, inscribed “The Whydah Gally 1716.” It made identification of the wreck ironclad, and the
Whydah
the first pirate ship ever confirmed to be found. No one else had ever gotten so lucky.

But that didn’t keep capable people from trying.

In the years after Clifford’s discovery, research teams claimed to have found the ships of two of history’s most famous pirates. Neither team, however, seemed able to prove the identity of its wreck.

The first of the two discoveries had come in 1996 at Beaufort Inlet, just off the North Carolina coast. There, a shipwreck exploration firm discovered what appeared to be the wreck of Blackbeard’s flagship,
Queen Anne’s Revenge
, which had run aground and sunk in 1718.

Almost immediately, the governor of North Carolina publicly announced that the notorious pirate’s ship had been found. Just as fast, some experts cast doubt on the wreck’s identity. Among their objections: The artifacts could have come from any merchant ship of the time; the
Adventure
, a ship that sank with Blackbeard’s, was nowhere to be found; and one of the cannons discovered seemed marked with a date of 1730 or 1737, at least twelve years after the loss of
Queen Anne’s Revenge.
Debate raged, a technical back-and-forth that never settled the matter. In 2005, experts wrote in
The International Journal of Nautical Archaeology
, “The incontrovertible fact remains that no single piece of evidence, or trend of circumstantial evidence, indicates that this wrecked vessel is actually the
Queen Anne’s Revenge
.” They also addressed the issue of money, noting that the project had received nearly one million dollars in grant funding to date, and was seeking almost four million dollars more. “One may speculate,” the authors wrote, “that the investments already made, plus the possibility of future financial gains, may indeed be the reason for a continued emphasis on the identification of the wreck, and a refusal to consider that the identification could be flawed.”

None of that deterred North Carolina officials and entrepreneurs
from opening exhibits, walking tours, historical reenactments—even Blackbeard’s Miniature Golf—and tourists flocked to the area.

A second possible pirate ship was found in the Dominican Republic in 2007, when a team from Indiana University was led to a site they thought to be the
Quedagh Merchant
, the 1699 wreck of infamous pirate captain William Kidd. Media such as NPR, CNN, and
The Times
of London swarmed to the story, telling how the researchers had found the ship, exploring theories about Kidd’s possible innocence, and recounting how Kidd had been hanged by the British (the rope had broken on the first attempt; after the second did the job, his body was hung over the River Thames for three years as a warning to those who fancied the pirate life).

Yet, even as plans were made with the Dominican government to turn the wreck site into an underwater national park, the Indiana University team didn’t seem willing to say it had definitive proof of the wreck’s identity. Charles Beeker, who led the expedition, said, “As an archaeologist, I cannot say conclusively that it’s Captain Kidd’s ship, but as a betting man, I am betting on the ship.”

Four years later, Indiana University officials would be speaking in stronger terms about the identity of the wreck, though a smoking gun—proof-positive evidence—still hadn’t been found. Nonetheless, the discovery generated more than two million dollars in grants, a push by the Dominican government to promote the site for tourism, and a permanent exhibit, “
National Geographic
Treasures of the Earth,” at the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis.

A few other pirate ship claims had been made over the years, all based on circumstantial evidence, not a smoking gun among them.

But grants and exhibits and circumstantial evidence and miniature golf didn’t cut it for Chatterton and Mattera. Neither could imagine going through life thinking he’d probably found a pirate ship. Neither could imagine going to sleep at night wondering if he’d really done what he’d dreamed.

But that was the rub with a pirate ship. No matter what anyone did,
it was near certain he wouldn’t find proof of identity. Even if Chatterton and Mattera did find the
Golden Fleece
, even if historians wrote about them in books and curators gave them a museum exhibit of their own, without definitive proof there would always be doubt. And that was an outcome neither man could abide.

A
S
C
HATTERTON AND
M
ATTERA
hung up the phone with their significant others, Ehrenberg walked onto the veranda at the villa holding his laptop high. The screen showed a Rorschach-like pattern, the hits detected by the magnetometer that day. The men had to look twice at what they were seeing. Several of the hits were clustered in an area the size of a large wooden sailing ship. Chatterton and Mattera had been around long enough to know things didn’t happen so perfectly with shipwrecks—no one found what they were looking for on the very first day. Still, staring at that beautiful blotch, they couldn’t help but think they’d done it, that they’d already discovered the
Golden Fleece.
Now they just had to go out the next morning and find her.

CHAPTER THREE

NONE OF THIS MAKES SENSE

T
he men didn’t talk much during sunrise as they loaded the
Deep Explorer
and set out for the island, but inside, each was hoping he would be the first to pull up a hook or a cannon from the
Golden Fleece.
Even a handful of beads—the colorful and vivid trinkets that Golden Age pirates wove into their clothing, hair, and beards, and which terrified the pirates’ prey—would do.

No one expected to find the pirate ship as she’d sunk, skeletons frozen in fighting positions, a skull-and-crossbones flag crumpled beneath shattered beams. If they got lucky, they would see a part of the shipwreck lying exposed—the fluke of an anchor, a cannon’s muzzle, broken wood from the hull. More likely, they would see small pieces, or even shadows, of the objects that had made their magnetometer react. But all they needed was one artifact, and that would lead to the rest.

Not everyone would dive at once. Two of the men would remain on board the boat, securing it against drift and guarding against bandits who might steal electronics and guns. Firearms were necessary in these wilds; you didn’t leave home, or shore, without them.

Arriving on site, Chatterton and Ehrenberg geared up and splashed. Carrying handheld metal detectors, they descended to a depth of twenty feet, to the first of the hits on their chart. In the sand, Chatterton saw a silver shape. Swimming toward the object, he could see it
was box shaped—treasure chest shaped—which only made him swim faster, until he reached the container and discovered not pieces of eight or emeralds inside, but a parrot fish. He surfaced and shouted back to the boat.

“Fish trap.”

Mattera made the notation, but when he turned back Chatterton was gone, already onto the next hit. Chatterton and Ehrenberg floated above a straightened section of iron that rose from a coral mass on the bottom. Straight lines were the stuff of shipwreck hunters’ dreams. Chatterton moved closer, then pulled out a slate and wrote:

ANCHOR

Ehrenberg’s eyes lit up. Chatterton looked even closer. Slowly, he erased the word and wrote a new one:

WORKING

A working anchor was one that had been lowered by a ship in the routine course of its business, but which had become stuck in the coral or otherwise lost on the bottom. Chatterton and Mattera had found many such working anchors in the Dominican Republic while learning to use their gear, and though it was interesting to see these pieces, they were rarely associated with a wreck. The kind of anchor Chatterton and Mattera wanted likely would be lying flat on the bottom, meaning it had gone down with the ship.

Ehrenberg went after the third hit. He, too, found a working anchor. Back on board the
Deep Explorer
, the men drove the boat to the next set of numbers, which Mattera and Kretschmer would dive.

Their exploration proved equally fruitless: some telephone cable and a hammer. Still, cruising back to the villa, the team couldn’t hide its excitement. The magnetometer had worked. And there were more hits to explore the next morning. No one wanted to say it, but each of
them believed it would be just a matter of days before the
Golden Fleece
was theirs.

Too jazzed to stay home that evening, the team went to Fabio’s, a pizza parlor they’d nicknamed for its owner, who had hair (but little else) like the Italian male model. They ordered meat-lovers pies and Presidente Lights, and took turns listing how they would spend whatever treasure they might find aboard the
Golden Fleece.
This is what each man vowed to do with his haul:

Mattera

—Buy a five-hundred-acre ranch in Pennsylvania

—Buy a Beechcraft King Air B200 (capable of flying from Miami to the Dominican Republic)

—Buy the Binghamton Mets, the New York Mets’ minorleague team (a pirate ship, if it had treasure on board, wouldn’t carry enough to buy a major-league franchise)

Chatterton

—Buy the blue Maserati in the window of the Fort Lauderdale dealership (using his Mini Cooper and a bag of gold coins as trade-ins)

—Take a three-month tour of Machu Picchu and the Galápagos Islands

—Hire a chauffeur (must wear traditional chauffeur’s hat)

—Buy a solid gold dive helmet

Ehrenberg

—Stage a private concert by the remaining members of the Grateful Dead (the band he followed for three years in the late 1980s)

—Buy an Aston Martin DB5, the fabled James Bond car equipped with ejector seat, machine guns, bulletproof plates, and tire spikes

—Buy the best drum set in the world, along with a house far enough from neighbors so they wouldn’t complain about the noise when he played it

Kretschmer

—Move his wife, daughter, and stepson from the Dominican Republic to the United States

At closing, the men paid the bill and walked into the steamy night. They felt lucky to be staying at the villa, with its dependable plumbing and view of the bay. They had no doubt, however, that Mattera’s future father-in-law would soon want his place back for family getaways and weekend entertaining, just another reason to find the pirate ship fast.

The men were back at the island and diving hits the next morning. This time, they found a toolbox, a radio antenna, and three fish traps. Mattera logged the results and called the others to the wheelhouse.

“I know this is frustrating. But we gotta keep mowing the lawn and diving the hits; it’s part of the game. So back at it tomorrow morning.”

Chatterton fired up the engines and put the
Deep Explorer
into a sweeping turn that brought the men to within fifty yards of the beach at Cayo Levantado. They watched sunbathers stretch under the rays of a giant sun.

“Every woman is in a bikini,” Chatterton said. “Poor Bannister never got a view like this.”

The team began a new survey the next day. Chatterton moved the
Deep Explorer
east and west, shortening the towline around jagged reefs, speeding up when waters turned shallow. And the men did it again the next day, and the next after that, until they’d compiled a new
set of targets to dive. Some of the hits looked certain to be duds—tiny specks off by themselves in areas too deep or too shallow. But Chatterton insisted they dive every one. The first time they skipped something, that would be the musket ball that led to the ship’s rigging that led to the cannon that led to the
Golden Fleece.

The next time they got in the water, the men found a modern ax, a paint can, and some drainpipe.

And that’s how it went for the next week: more surveys, a few rainouts, and dozens of hits, but no trace of Bannister’s ship. Despite it, the men stayed in high spirits, knowing the wreck couldn’t hide from them. It had been folly, in any case, to think they might find a Golden Age pirate ship in the first days of exploring. Things only worked like that in the movies.

For the next three weeks, the men expanded their survey westward, but found nothing important. One afternoon, Chatterton gunned the boat’s engines and headed east into the open Atlantic. At the entrance to Samaná Bay, he shifted to idle and brought the craft to a halt. Standing on the bow, he and Mattera looked back toward the island, and they kept looking until the sun disappeared.

At Fabio’s that night, they laid things out for their crew.

“There are problems with the island,” Mattera said.

In Bannister’s time, a ship could have careened only on the island’s western beach. But that beach could be seen from the open Atlantic; they’d proved it themselves that day. Bannister was a capable man on the run from the Royal Navy. It seemed unlikely he would have made himself so visible, and so vulnerable, by beaching the
Golden Fleece
in view of passing ships.

And that wasn’t the only problem with Cayo Levantado. The surrounding waters were full of shallow reefs capable of tearing open the hull of a large sailing ship. There was no way a captain smart enough to defeat British warships in battle would risk bringing his ship into a minefield like that.

And then there was the issue of depth. According to Bowden, the
Golden Fleece
had sunk in twenty-four feet of water. It was true that the depths of seafloors could change over time, but the men had to move the
Deep Explorer
nearly a half mile offshore to reach waters twenty-four feet deep—too far from shore to careen a ship.

Pizzas arrived and everyone dug in.

“Maybe it’s us,” Mattera said. “What do we know about seventeenth-century naval strategy? I’m a bodyguard. Chatterton’s a commercial diver. Heiko, you’re a mechanic, and Howard, no offense, you’re a geek.”

“Maybe,” Chatterton said. “But the
Golden Fleece
is out there. If we can find fish traps and hammers, we can damn well find a pirate ship at some tiny bullshit island.”

S
TANDING ON THE BOW
of the
Deep Explorer
the next morning, Mattera caught sight of a twenty-foot boat about a mile away, bobbing on the waves but not moving. Probably sightseers or a fishing charter, he figured, but not locals; the boat looked too expensive for that. Later in the day, the boat was still there. Mattera showed it to Chatterton, who watched it through binoculars.

“They haven’t moved in hours,” Mattera said. “Drive toward them, real slow. I want to see what they do.”

Chatterton took the wheel and set course for the target. The distant boat began moving away, leaving white foam in its wake.

“Think they were watching us?” Mattera asked.

“I don’t know,” Chatterton said. “But now I’m watching them.”

The crew collected strong magnetometer hits over the next two weeks but found nothing old when they dove them. Every miss frustrated them more, especially Chatterton, who found himself tossing and turning at night, trying to figure out what he and the others were doing wrong. “Think creatively,” he told himself. “Think like John Chatterton.” But the answers never came.

One evening, while the men were studying aerial photography of the island, the power went out at the villa, as it did almost daily.

“Goddamn it!” Chatterton yelled, slamming down a stack of photographs. Again, he would need to sleep without covers, windows open, a mosquito net his only protection against the swarms. In minutes, he was dripping sweat and stringing together expletives that would have made the pirates blush.

The move to Samaná hadn’t been easy for the team. The sudden decision to swerve from treasure to pirates had required all four men to uproot their already-uprooted lives. They’d planned to search for treasure near Santo Domingo, population nearly three million, a place of modern conveniences and a dazzling nightlife. Samaná, on the other hand, was a portal into the past. A treacherous six-hour drive to the north of Santo Domingo, its roads had pumpkin-sized potholes, chickens ran wild in town, and ice was a luxury.

Just reaching the place required an explorer’s heart. To get there, the men had loaded their belongings into a truck, then picked up a makeshift road that took them past abandoned towns, feral dogs, and cliffs so muddy a small tire slide would have plunged them into an unfindable grave. For miles at a stretch they saw no living thing. Halfway to Samaná, Mattera ran over a wild pig that had darted in front of the truck. An hour later, he reached for his gun when a gang of men with machetes refused to move off the road. (He steered around them and never looked back.) On the outskirts of Samaná, a bull wandered into the street and lowered its horns to fight them. If Samaná Bay hadn’t been the most beautiful place the men had ever seen, with its jumping dolphins, elderly fishermen, and crystalline waters, the mosquitos alone might have driven them mad.

Mattera knocked on the door and invited Chatterton to sleep with him in the pickup truck.

“There’s no room in that Mitsubishi,” Chatterton said. “The seats don’t recline. How are two grown men going to sleep in that?”

Mattera shrugged and walked away. In the driveway, he got into the truck and put his Glock under his right thigh—a running vehicle made a tempting target in this part of the country. Cranking the air conditioning,
he was asleep in minutes, and he stayed that way until a strange figure began pounding on the passenger window. Mattera reached for his gun, but then saw it was Chatterton, standing in the driveway wearing nothing but his underwear and a mosquito net.

“Jesus, John, do you want to get shot?” Mattera said, rolling down the window.

“It would’ve put me out of my misery. Can I sleep here?”

“Sure. But only if we can cuddle.”

“Don’t make me laugh, Mattera. Laughing makes me sweat.”

Chatterton climbed in the truck and the men sat staring up at the stars.

“We’re looking in the wrong place,” Chatterton said. “I’ve been around a long time, and I’m telling you—none of this makes sense.”

R
AIN POUNDED
S
AMANÁ
the next morning, so for the first time in a month, the men took a day off. Chatterton needed to open a bank account anyway, and Mattera had errands in town.

After the usual cold shower, Chatterton went to call Carla. His cell phone was out of power. He opened his laptop to send her an email. Dead.

The men went to the local bank. Inside, they waited in line for nearly an hour before a manager explained that Chatterton would need more documents in order to open an account, and in any case would need to wait several weeks before paperwork could be processed. Mattera could see veins bulging from Chatterton’s neck.

“You gotta go with it, John,” Mattera said. “This isn’t the States. We’re in the wild up here. Third world.”

Chatterton thanked the manager, and he and Mattera went outside.

“It takes three weeks to open a goddamn bank account?” Chatterton asked. “I have to break my ass to give them my money?”

The men were back on the water the next morning. Only the outer edges of the western beach remained to be surveyed. Chatterton
landed the boat near the northern edge and set up a grid, and by sunrise the men were mowing the lawn. By now, the team had become so sensitive to the magnetometer’s blips and spikes that they could tell the fish traps from the anchors just by scanning the data readouts. But they dove every hit, fearful that the first one they skipped would be the key that led to the pirate ship.