The Lost Fleet (14 page)

O
CTOBER
28, 1998
L
AS
A
VES

A
diver floating in the water above and looking down at one of the wrecks at Las Aves, a diver not accustomed to finding artifacts underwater, would not see much at all. It is very likely that he would not realize he was looking at a wreck. It's like looking at a black cat in a coal bin. The ballast piles are inconspicuous and the cannons and anchors are covered with coral, so that they tend to blend in with the coral reefs, as if they were camouflaged, hiding from would-be salvors.

It takes years of practice to train your eye to see the man-made object among the rest of the debris, but eventually you can see right off when something just does not look right. I can watch thousands of stones tumbling down a sluiceway and I'll pick out a silver coin that's black and concreted. I don't know how. It's as if my mind sees it before my eyes do and my hand will just reach for it. It's the same swimming along a reef. I have spent so much time looking at the ocean floor that when something unnatural is there I can usually spot it. Sometimes it is the shape, sometimes it's the color of the coral, which is different because it is growing on something organic, like a wood hull, or something metal. But mostly it is subconscious.

I think the difficulty of recognizing man-made objects on the bot
tom became a source of frustration for Charles Brewer. He wanted desperately to see what we were seeing, but he just couldn't. He was out of his element.

If we had been in the jungle, Charles's lair, the situation would have been reversed. Charles would have seen a thousand things that I would never notice. The difference is, I would have said, “Hey, Charles, what's that?” I am happy to be a professional in my own field; I don't feel the need to appear to be an expert at everything. But Charles was different, and his inability to find wrecks chaffed at him.

Disguised as they might have been, the artifacts we saw from the boat were as obvious to me as if they had been labeled. Neither the Venezuelan navy nor the coast guard seemed to take any interest in what we were doing, so we went to work. We had located a wreck site, and there was no reason not to start mapping.

Since we had all worked together on the
Whydah
and other projects, and since we had reviewed our techniques while in Caracas, we had the drill down. In fact, many of the mapping techniques we used at Las Aves had been developed for the
Whydah
site, especially by Todd Murphy.

Todd's background in exercise physiology gave him experience in statistics, and his military training taught him a lot about electronic navigation systems, which we used extensively. What Todd brought to the system was an effort to simplify it, since doing anything underwater is much more difficult than doing it on land. Very often—and this was really true with the
Whydah
—conditions were so bad you simply had to do the best you could as quickly as you could.

Mapping any site begins with what is known as a datum point. This is a fixed reference point, what would be the 0–0 point on a graph. Todd would choose the datum for each site, some point just off to the side of the bulk of the wreck. This is the 0–0 point for local reference—in other words, the starting point for that particular site. Everything we find on that particular site is measured in terms of distance and direction from the datum point. This is the standard grid system right out of “Underwater Archaeology 101.”

Once the datum point was chosen, we would physically mark it. If it was in sand we would stick in a pole and that would be our point. If it was on coral we would tie a line to the coral with a buoy attached. As long as there was no current or tide running, the line would stay straight up and down.

The next step was to determine exactly where on the globe the
datum was located—in other words, the exact latitude and longitude. Modern technology has made that considerably simpler, particularly the advent of Global Positioning System satellites, or GPS. The system is very common now, but for any who might not be familiar with it, here is a simple explanation.

A GPS receiver on earth picks up signals from multiple satellites in orbit over the earth. From those signals it is able to triangulate the exact position of the receiver, down to centimeter accuracy. When GPS was first available for civilian use in the 1980s, the receivers were bulky, expensive, and unreliable. Now for $300 you can pick up a handheld GPS that is reasonably accurate and about the size of a conventional telephone receiver. We used a highly accurate Trimble Navigation GPS as our primary unit. We also used a British OmniStar GPS.

GPS was developed by the military. Its potential uses are obvious, from navigation on land or sea to running the guidance systems on missiles. Only after the military had fully integrated it to their needs was it released for civilian applications. But the military version was considered too accurate for civilian use. It would have created a serious risk to national security if anyone could walk into a marine supply store and pick up an electronic navigation device accurate
enough to drop intercontinental ballistic missiles into American missile silos.

To deal with that problem, the government built into civilian GPS “selective availability.” Essentially, they threw in an error. For nonmilitary applications, the government would periodically degrade the signal, so that rather than being accurate within a few centimeters it would be accurate to within one hundred feet. That's good enough to find the harbor if you're aboard your yacht, but not good enough for some enemy nation to use as a missile guidance system.

It also wasn't accurate enough for our purposes when it came to geographically locating our datum points. Fortunately, there are ways around the selective availability problem, ways that we had used with
Whydah.
They involve using two GPS receivers rather than one.

Here is how it works. First, you have to know where you are—exactly, down to the fraction of a second in latitude and longitude. This has to be done on land, since a boat moves too much to establish a fixed point.

We pick a station on shore for which we know the precise location, generally by locating it on a chart of the area. Since we know the exact latitude and longitude of the shore station, we feed that information into the GPS at that location. The shore GPS knows exactly where it is. If it then gets a signal collected from the satellites that tells it that its location is, say, twenty meters north of where it knows itself to be, then the GPS knows the selective availability error at that time. It can figure out the error built into the satellite signal.

Out in the boat, right above the datum point, we have what is called a differential GPS, or DGPS. The DGPS is capable of receiving a differential signal—in other words, a signal that will allow it to correct its own reading.

The DGPS over the datum point tells us where it thinks it is, within one hundred meters. But it is also receiving the signal from the shore GPS, and the shore GPS, which knows exactly where it is and what the satellite error is, is saying to the DGPS, in essence, “Hey, the satellite is telling you that you are twenty meters north of where you really are. Correct for that.” The DGPS makes those corrections, and the resulting position is accurate not within meters but within centimeters.

That is how we do it at the
Whydah
site, but at Las Aves there was an additional problem. There is only a little landmass associated with
the reefs at Las Aves, and we anticipated problems in getting an exact geographical location for the land GPS. Also, we didn't know if we would be allowed to set up a land station. The Venezuelan coast guard station on the island might not want foreign civilians wandering around with sophisticated electronic equipment. For Las Aves we had to work out another way.

The other way was to get the differential signal from a satellite. In an effort to provide extremely accurate GPS data, a number of government organizations, including the U.S. Coast Guard, broadcast differential signals for use with DGPS units. There are also a number of commercial providers. The differential signal is via radio waves, broadcast from radio navigation beacons, commercial FM transmitters, and geostationary satellites.

Along with maritime navigation, one of the primary uses for DGPS is in farming. Farmers use this technology to map their fields and plot where, when, and how they will plant. If you are in the United States or Canada, you can generally pick up one of the government signals for free. Unfortunately, we were using it for a very different purpose, and at a very remote location. We would not have access to one of the U.S. government signals. So we contracted with a private satellite firm for the use of their differential signals. With the satellite sending the correction to the DGPS unit over the datum point, we were able to pinpoint exactly where on earth each of d'Estrees' ships came to rest.

Now, just a few years later, all this effort is unnecessary. With the technology and the ability to correct the signal so easily accessible, the government has removed the selective availability in civilian GPS. Now GPS receivers all have military accuracy, and our work has become that much easier. But we did not have that luxury in 1998.

Ideally, we would have set up a whole network of datum points for each site. In a best-case scenario we would set up a boundary around the whole site and have some datum points inside the boundary and some outside the main circumference. We would map those datum points relative to each other and then start mapping in artifacts relative to those datum points.

In a perfect world, we try to fix each artifact relative to three datum points. That way you can triangulate each artifact and check your measurements, which is much more accurate. But this was not a perfect world, and it only got worse.

With the time constraints and the conditions at Las Aves, we had to go with one datum point and take strikes and measurements from that. We wanted to find as many wrecks as we could, to survey and map them all. We had two weeks. And that was only if the navy did not get serious about enforcing its orders.

We decided to work quick.

S
PRING
1683
T
HE
G
ULF OF
H
ONDURAS

T
he pirate wrecks we have found, the
Whydah
and others, bear silent witness to the brutal end that met so many buccaneers. It was not a career from which many retired peacefully.

Yet not all pirates finished their lives swallowing a lungful of salt water or dancing at the end of a rope. There were a few who managed to hit it big and retire, a lucky handful who went ashore with their fortunes and became wealthy and respected citizens. Laurens de Graff would become one such man. In the summer of 1682, however, he still had years of buccaneering left in him, many bloody conflicts, and many wild, audacious acts.

The capture of the
Princesa
and her 122,000 pesos in Spanish payroll money was not enough to tempt him to stop. After the capture of that ship, and the subsequent conversion of the Princesa into his new flagship, de Graff sailed for Cartagena to see what might be found there. Sailing in company with him was yet another Dutch filibuster, Michiel Andrieszoon, who would work with de Graff on a number of pirate ventures.

Cartagena was disappointing. The two Hollanders found nothing
but small coasting vessels. The
Princesa,
one might imagine, was a hard act to follow. The buccaneers were looking for far more than what they found off the South American coast. Still in company, they sailed off to the northwest for the Gulf of Honduras, where they had reason to believe that the hunting might be more fruitful.

They were right, to a point. In the Gulf of Honduras they encountered two large Spanish ships, the
Nuestra Señora de Consolación
and
Nuestra Señora de Regla.
These ships, riding at anchor, were part of the regular shipping that moved between Cádiz and the West Indies, bringing wealth and supplies back and forth.

The two vessels had arrived some months before and discharged their cargo, which had been taken overland to Guatemala. Now they were preparing for the return trip to Spain, waiting for the profits from the sale of the cargo to come back from the inland city, along with the goods that they would carry back to the Old World, including valuable indigo and gold.

De Graff, unlike many of the buccaneers, was not a rash or impulsive man. He understood that the ships he found in the Gulf of Honduras were of little value, empty as they were, but in a month or so they would be crammed with treasure and valuable cargo. He and Michiel Andrieszoon left the gulf and sailed to nearby Bonaco Island, where de Graff could careen his ship while their Spanish plum ripened.

Neither de Graff's presence in the Bay of Honduras nor his intentions were much of a secret. Lynch reported that “Laurens…lies by to intercept a ship of forty-four guns and four hundred men, with another just half her strength, that are loading goods and money at Guatemala.”
¹
If a royal governor was privy to this information, it is a good bet that the buccaneers knew it as well. And clearly they did, for Nickolaas Van Hoorn sailed directly from Jamaica to the Gulf of Honduras in search of de Graff.

Instead he found the same two ships de Graff had discovered. Van Hoorn was unable or unwilling to see the sense in waiting until the ships were loaded with cargo. Instead, he attacked.

As it happened, the Spanish were also aware of de Graff's presence and had little of value aboard the ships. It will never be known whether the Spanish would have eventually concluded that de Graff was gone and then sailed into his trap. Long before that could happen, Van Hoorn moved in and captured the empty ships.

Going aboard the larger of the two vessels, Van Hoorn was furious
to find barely thirty chests of indigo in her hold. In a rage, he burned the larger ship and took the smaller as a prize. From there, he sailed off to find de Graff.

De Graff and Andrieszoon were still at anchor at Bonaco Island, waiting for the Spanish ships. During that time, a small privateer unwittingly sailed into the harbor and was taken by Laurens and company, who treated them as prisoners. Some time later Robert Dangerfield, a sailor on board that ship, described what happened when Van Hoorn arrived:

It might be an understatement to say that Laurens was “disappointed.” He was so angry that Dangerfield feared that de Graff would vent his fury on them.

Sir Thomas Lynch, the self-styled historian of pirates, heard the same story. According to the reports he received, “Van Hoorn…boards the larger of the two ships, finds but thirty chests of indigo, burns her in a rage, and bringing off the smaller vessel joins Laurens who was violently enraged at having thus lost his prize.”
³

Van Hoorn was for joining forces—indeed, he had sought out de Graff for just that purpose—but de Graff was not interested, particularly after Van Hoorn had upstaged him. De Graff had men and ships enough; he did not need the help of a violent drunk like Van Hoorn. Again Lynch summed it up, saying, “He [Van Hoorn] has tried to draw the privateers together, but it is said that Laurens, having two good ships and four hundred men, will not join him, and that his [Van Hoorn's] own people and the other French abhor his drunken insolent humor.”
⁴

A G
ATHERING OF
B
UCCANEERS

Despite de Graff's reluctance, the men in his company believed it was a good idea to join forces with Van Hoorn, and de Graff finally relented. Perhaps Van Hoorn's second in command, the venerable old Chevalier de Grammont,
⁵
played the part of peacemaker, using his reputation and commanding presence to bring about an accommodation, grudging though it might be.

The pirates retired to the nearby island of Roatán, there to decide upon which unhappy Spanish town they would descend. This gathering at Roatán was one of those extraordinary events in pirate history, like the wreck at Las Aves, five years earlier, which had initiated this wave of large scale pirate action. On the sandy, jungle-covered island were gathered more than one thousand buccaneers, among them the most influential and feared in all the New World.

Here was the Chevalier de Grammont, once the most powerful of the buccaneers, now relegated to vice-admiral status. Here was the mulatto Laurens de Graff, whose very name filled people of the West Indies with terror, and would continue to do so for decades. Here were the vicious killers Nikolaas Van Hoorn, Yankey Willems, Michiel Andrieszoon, Pierre Bot, and Jean Foccard.
⁶
It was one of the largest gatherings of buccaneers ever, a prime example of the fluid alliance that existed among the Brethren of the Coast.

The Gulf of Honduras offered little opportunity for the buccaneers. Their presence was well known, and every city and naval vessel in the area was on the alert. With reinforcements on their way from Cartagena, they knew they had to leave the area and fall on some unsuspecting city before word of this massive gathering spread.

They decided on Vera Cruz.