The Lost Fleet (22 page)

De Graff sent word to Governor Ducasse calling for reinforcements, but they did not come, probably because Ducasse had none to send. The combined English and Spanish troops pushed the French defenders back as far as Port-de-Paix, which the invaders overran more than a month after landing. Having taken Port-de-Paix, the English and Spanish withdrew, leaving behind the kind of destruction that de Graff had once brought to the Spanish.

Once the fighting was over, the finger-pointing began. De Graff
bore the brunt of it, with some even suggesting that he had colluded with the enemy, since Holland, de Graff's native land, was allied with the English and Spanish. Laurens was relieved of his command and sent to France to face a court-martial.

The subsequent trial of the Sieur de Graff, lieutenant du roi, completely exonerated him from any wrongdoing. He returned to his home in the West Indies, but by then the war was over, and his standing was greatly diminished, despite having been cleared by the court-martial. De Graff's wife was held captive by the Spanish until the very last prisoner exchange in October 1698, possibly out of Spanish vindictiveness toward its former tormentor.

Laurens de Graff's fighting days were over. By the time the famed buccaneer returned to Saint-Domingue from his court-martial, it had been twenty-one years since the great wreck at Las Aves. Twenty-one years of near constant warfare, of pirate raids and bloody land battles. No doubt, de Graff was weary and ready for a change.

A
N
O
LD
P
IRATE
M
OVES
O
N

A the end of the year 1698, an explorer named Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville stopped off at Saint-Domingue. He was en route to Louisiana with an eye toward establishing a colony there. De Graff, now around fifty years old, agreed to accompany him as translator and guide.

At first, de Graff's reputation proved to be a hindrance to the expedition. The five ships of d'Iberville's squadron anchored off of Pensacola, Florida, in January 1699 and called for a pilot to bring them into the harbor. The Spanish officer in charge of the local garrison there was not happy to see ships belonging to his recent enemy just offshore. When he went aboard he was even less happy to find that d'Iberville's translator was none other than the famed “Lorencillo.” Entrance to the harbor was refused, and a few days later, at the request of the Spanish, the squadron put to sea again.

The French squadron sailed west, eventually landing at what is now Biloxi, Mississippi. With them went de Graff, who settled there with the official function of clerk for the king. Five years later, it was reported that he was dead.

Just as de Graff's beginnings were shrouded in mystery, so too was
his end. One source states he died near Biloxi, but another says he is buried at Axis, Alabama, a suburb of Mobile. The governor of Cap François (modern Cap Haitien, Haiti) wrote that he had died there on May 25, 1704.

The end of the seventeenth century saw the end of the great buccaneers of the Caribbean. The piracy that pitted English and French against the Spanish Empire in the New World was over, and the filibusters of Tortuga and Petit Goâve, who were looked upon by colonial governors as both a plague and a resource, were gone. Some retired, most were dead. The Carribean had no place for them anymore.

The piracy that would spring up to take its place, piracy based from Madagascar and the Bahamas and colonial America, would be something very different.

The greatest of the true buccaneers, Laurens de Graff, died peace
fully in a quiet backwater colony. In his tumultuous lifetime he had gone from slave to knight of the realm, a black man who rose higher than any other filibuster ever did, in a world in which slavery was an integral and unquestioned way of life. Of all the pirates of the Spanish Main, de Graff was the best of them. The world has never since seen his like. Nor is it likely to.

N
OVEMBER I
, 1998
L
AS
A
VES

A
t first, I was not sure what to do about the pirate wrecks for fear word might leak out to the wrong people. News that we had found a pirate shipwreck with intact metal-laden barrels would bring swarms of treasure hunters.

It should be remembered, of course, that d'Estrées' fleet was on its way to sack Curaçao, not on its way back. There would have been no captured booty on board, and filibusters seldom carried their personal fortunes with them. Still, it conjured up the kind of images to tempt what Billy Bones in
Treasure Island
called “lubbers as couldn't keep what they got, and want to nail what is another's.”

After a few hours, I did tell the others of our discovery. They were as excited as I was, and I told the story of de Grammont and de Graff, and how they led the buccaneers of Las Aves on their rampage at Maracaibo.

The next day we went back with the whole team to map and film the site of the second pirate shipwreck. The wind was building, but it was not so bad as to keep our dive boat from getting over the reef. We knew, however, that it was only a matter of time before we would be blown off the site.

We found even more artifacts, including cannons and some odd, concreted shapes, the identity of which we could not even guess at. We also found clear glass liquor bottles embedded in the coral. That was the only wreck where we saw that. It was another identifier: I would expect to see more gin or rum bottles aboard a pirate vessel than a man-of-war. We swept the barrels again, and again the metal detectors sang. Most likely they held gun parts or nails, but one couldn't help thinking, Silver?…

The barrels were camouflaged with coral and a fantastic array of other sea growth. They had become a part of the living reef, and to remove them would have taken a lot of brute force that would have irreparably damaged the reef. Even if our permit would have allowed for excavation and retrieval, there would be the question of whether or not to leave them in situ.

As at all of the other wreck sites, there were also cannon balls and lead shot scattered everywhere. We couldn't fan our hands over the sand without seeing them. The shot were in little pockets where the canvas bags that once held them had rotted away. Stored in shot lockers, big wooden bins belowdecks, the cannon balls had scattered all over the reef when the ships broke up. Using the metal detectors became almost pointless because they were going off constantly.

I was still thrilled about the wreck, even as we went through our ordinary mapping routine the next day. We had found two pirate-ship wrecks and used an old map to do it. It doesn't get much better than that for pirate hunters.

I kept thinking about how Ken Kinkor was going to react to these discoveries. With the
Whydah,
he was studying artifacts from the first pirate shipwreck ever authenticated. If this project moved from “reconnaissance and survey” to “archaeological excavation and recovery,” there would be data from the second and third to be scrutinized and interpreted as well. While these vessels might never be identified by name, they could still serve as a potentially valuable pool of information about a subculture of men whose lives are seriously misunderstood by both scholars and the general public.

From the very onset of my research on the
Whydah
nearly two decades ago, I had noticed the international character of her crew. Ken had taken these perceptions and built further on them. We learned that pirates of the early eighteenth century had practiced an amazingly high level of tolerance among themselves: national, religious, and racial. When compared with European societies and their colonies, buccaneers were also extraordinarily democratic and egalitarian. Now we had the chance to see if their forebears by three decades had held similar beliefs.

Analysis of shipwreck artifacts produces a sense of the men who used those objects. We believe that Sam Bellamy and his crew of the period 1715–25 held most of the same beliefs as the Brethren of the Coast of the period 1678–1700. However, those buccaneers operating prior to the disaster at Las Aves were more closely tied to their respective governments than were the freebooters who followed in their wake. The later freebooters and pirates were far more self-reliant, which led to a different form of social organization. In practical terms, Laurens de Graff would have found himself at home aboard the
Whydah
in ways that Henry Morgan would not have. Without the disaster at Las Aves, which severely weakened French naval power, the freebooters and pirates of the post-1678 period would not have risen to power.

Having read the history of d'Estrées' fleet and seen the wrecks, I had a good sense for the scale of the disaster in terms of the human cost. And I had already fought my own battle with the reef. In full daylight, knowing exactly what I was up against, with cutting-edge equipment and a lifetime of underwater experience, I had still been nearly knocked out of the ring by the reef.

I thought of those men, the French soldiers and sailors and the buccaneers, who in one instant went from the solid deck of a sturdy man-of-war into the cauldron, half-drowned, dashed against staghorn and fire coral, dragged over the reef by crashing waves in the dead of night. Most people in the seventeenth century could not swim. Swimming would not have done them much good anyway, not on that reef.

No doubt some managed to cling to wreckage and drift to the beach. Others must have walked through the rushing waters across the reef to shore—though the trek would have cut their feet to pieces. In some places they would have had to swim across gaps in the coral. In some instances, the ordeal might have stretched almost four miles. I am amazed that anyone got to shore alive. Many of them, of course, were so cut up by the coral that they wished they were dead. It appears that about half of them were granted their wish.

As they reached the sandy beach at Las Aves, they must have collapsed in exhaustion, relieved to be on dry land. Yet many would have been in agony from the beating they had taken in the turbulent water on the reef and their wounds from the fire coral.

Each time I looked at the island I felt something of the despair these sailors must have experienced. It is one of the most inhospitable,
windswept, arid pieces of real estate I have ever seen in the Caribbean. There is virtually no vegetation aside from scrub brush and mangrove, and no shelter from the welding-rod bright sun.

I can only imagine what those castaways thought. Some of them probably gave up hope and died as soon as the rising sun revealed what a godforsaken place they had ended up on.

The sores and lacerations on the sailors' hands, knees, and feet would have started growing septic, hour by hour, day by day. Fire coral leaves a painful red welt that feels as if you are being jabbed with hot matches. The bugs on the island are intolerable. When we were anchored in the lagoon with the breeze blowing we didn't notice them, but, once ashore, they came swarming—flies, no-see-ums, and sand fleas—just as they must have come swarming to the smell of fresh blood from the survivors' wounds more than three centuries ago.

The sun would have beaten down on them and their thirst would have quickly become overpowering. Wine and brandy were their staples, but alcohol would have further dehydrated them, making the agony worse. For food, they had either salt-meat fished from casks drifting in from the ships or conch, which is also very salty. They would have required enormous amounts of water to avoid complete dehydration, and so they must have been going mad with thirst.

I spent some time walking around the shore, thinking of those men cast up on the beach. I looked for evidence of graves but did not find any. The French would have buried their dead properly, perhaps a mass grave for the common soldiers and seamen and individual graves for the officers and gentlemen.

I did find some old foundations made out of conch shells and crude brick hearths. They were ancient structures, most likely long deserted when the buccaneers wrecked on the reefs. No doubt they were already no more than foundations when de Grammont was cast up on the beach. These had been European-style houses, the biggest perhaps ten feet by twenty. They represented an earlier, unrecorded attempt to settle there. Nothing in the record indicates that these houses were still habitable at the time of the wrecks on Las Aves. They had belonged to settlers who had given up.

I pictured filibusters sheltering themselves from the wind, decked out in finery they had salvaged from the surf, drinking themselves into happy oblivion with wine and brandy liberated from the holds of the men-of-war.

The freebooters were hard men. Amid all that death and suffering, a tragedy of epic proportions, legend says they were toasting the short and happy life of the buccaneer. Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die. It is hard to imagine people so fatalistic and careless of suffering—their own or anyone else's.

N
OVEMBER
2, 1998
L
AS
A
VES

O
n our sixth day of work, just as the conditions were going from bad to worse, we made an extraordinary find: a pile of iron cannons, fifty or more of them, and an anchor, all heaped together. It was unlike anything I had ever seen. When a ship goes down as they did when the fleet struck Las Aves, the cannons tend to be scattered around the seabed, or fall off as the ship rots away. But not here. These were piled up like logs in a logjam. It was not a random accident.

Someone had done this, and from the coral growth, done it a long time ago. It might have been Thomas Paine in his effort to salvage what he could find. It might have been d'Estrées himself, who did return to the island some months after the disaster to recover some of his lost fleet, and perhaps some of his reputation. It could also have been any of the thousands of buccaneers, wreckers, and human flotsam who prowled the Caribbean world, aware of the riches that lay strewn over the reef.

I asked Chris Macort to make a careful drawing of the site. We all wondered, why did this happen? Why were the cannons deliberately piled in that way?

From the size of them, they looked to be from one of the larger ships, maybe
Le Terrible.
Once the ship hit the reef, the crew might
have lowered the cannons overboard with a block and tackle to lighten the ship in an attempt to get her off. Or it might have been part of a salvage effort. Iron cannons become useless as artillery after they have been submerged in seawater for any length of time. Bronze guns can be salvaged, however. Perhaps the salvagers pulled the guns up one at a time, kept the bronze ones, and threw back any iron guns.

Just past the halfway point in the expedition, the wind was back with a vengeance, blowing nearly as hard as it had on our first trip. The surf was exploding against the reefs with a force like an earthquake, sending shock waves through the water that could be felt a quarter mile away. We no longer had the luxury of motoring over calm water to look for wrecks. We once again had to pull ourselves against the current over the shallow reef.

It was hard and brittle. We tried to be as gentle as possible as we pulled ourselves over the reef, but it was hard not to break the delicate coral. It was much like cave diving, with its delicate stalactites and stalagmites. I realized the disastrous effects dozens of divers might have over the course of many years.

There was more than just coral, of course. The reef is alive with a wide range of undersea flora and fauna: sea fans, gorgonias, brain coral, staghorn coral, and all of the other creatures dependent on that ecosys
tem. It was beautiful, but that beauty was hard to appreciate when we had to drag ourselves over it just to get to the wrecks.

Once again, the conditions were just like being inside a washing machine. We would stick to the bottom, which was only a few feet down, weaving our way through the taller stands of coral. When the big waves we called gorillas came, we would blend into the bottom like flatfish and wait for it. We wore leather gloves for just that purpose. The waves would crash on top of us, and we wouldn't see a thing except froth, bubbles, and turbulence.

As the water rushed out, we'd kick like hell until the next one hit, and then we'd stop and hang on again. It was hand over hand over hand and stopping while the waves battered us. You couldn't stand up in it—you'd get knocked over or get your legs knocked out from underneath you. So we clawed our way along, burning air, exhausted and frustrated that we were reduced to this once again.

As on our first trip to Las Aves, coming back in over the reef was a wild ride. Every day the wind blew stronger, and the danger increased proportionally.

On the ocean side of the reef, it was ten or twelve feet deep in this area. There were a couple of cannons in three feet of water, but about 80 percent were in ten to twenty-five feet of water, which made working somewhat easier.

Once we took the
Aquana
outside the lagoon. With the big surf breaking, the only way to get the dive boat out was to motor all the way around the tip of the reef, several miles from the
Antares.
It was almost as dangerous, however, as crawling over the reef.

What we really wanted to do was to move the
Antares
to the edge of the reef to make the trip in the dive boat shorter. That would have put us in plain sight of the coast guard station and the navy ship, like a mouse making its nest in plain view of the cat's favorite chair.

The coast guard or the navy continued to board us on a regular basis, and we'd go through the same routine. We were actually getting to know them. Many of the Venezuelans asked to have their pictures taken with us. We were happy to oblige.

Mike's people were still working to get the navy to recognize the validity of our permits. They were making headway, but, as in dealing with any military organization, it can take a while for decisions to work their way down through the chain of command. We were on a tight schedule. We knew we had valid permits, but there was no sense in flaunting what we were doing until the local commander had
received his instructions from Caracas. So we left the
Antares
where it was and either swam over the reef or took the long ride around the outside.

The big seas made it difficult not only to get to the wrecks, but to work them once we were there. During the first part of the expedition the divers had the luxury of freely swimming around the wreck sites in relative safety. Those days were gone.

Now the current was running strong, even in the deeper water outside, threatening to sweep divers into the reef zone. We needed to maintain handholds as we worked or to keep kicking like hell. The surge from the big waves created aftershocks that bounced us around like rag dolls in the mouth of a bull terrier. If we let go of whatever we were holding on to, we would get swept away and smashed up against coral like the surface of a cheese shredder.

The current would rip things from your hands. The hundred-foot tape measure that Carl and Todd were using became a nightmare as the current carried it off, twisting and tangling it around coral and artifacts. Chris's underwater notebooks were wrenched from his grip. The work was much tougher now, and much more dangerous. If it got any worse, our expedition would be cut short.

The next day, November 3, we moved north along the reef. The big freighter stuck high on the reef had gone aground right at the location of one of the larger wrecks, perhaps d'Estrées' flagship,
Le Terrible.
In fact, the modern vessel probably went aground at the very point where several of the bigger French ships had struck. The freighter captain could not have found a worse place from an archaeological point of view. I imagine, however, that he had little choice in the matter.

The freighter had done massive damage to the reef and the wreck site, and added some drama of its own. On the bottom, we found a navy stockless anchor, the standard anchor on a modern steel ship. Still attached to the ring, a great length of chain snaked across the reef. Draped over staghorn and fire coral and the debris field of d'Estrées' flagship, it led right to the wrecked freighter from which it came. This was a vivid reminder of the freighter crew's last desperate attempt to keep their ship from the killer reefs, like those two ancient anchors hooked together. Their effort, like the Frenchmen's before them, was in vain—the modern version of d'Estrées' nightmare.

I don't know how the freighter came to be wrecked or if any of the crew were killed. I doubt very much that they were. I doubt anyone
was even hurt. The ship held together, save for the big gash in her bottom. Steel hulls do much better on reefs than wood. In this case, it was the reef that got the worst of it.

But the sea is as patient as Ah Puch, the Mayan god of death, and will win in the end. For all her modern materials and construction, the freighter is quickly oxidizing away. Like the French fleet, someday she will become an indistinguishable part of the reef.

She was also making it difficult to explore and map the site. We were all afraid that the swirling current around her would sweep us through the jagged, rusty hole in the freighter's side, uglier and more intimidating even than a barracuda's mouth. We kept a sure grip on cannons and anchors as we worked upcurrent from that threat.

There was no way to know just how much of the old French wrecks had been disturbed by the passing of the freighter over the
reef, but a wide swath was mowed through the coral and the debris field. We found twisted, rusting I-beams lying on top of seventeenth-century cannons.

In fact, there were even some cannons underneath the wrecked freighter. It was surprising that we could see them at all, but there was a hollow space under the wreck, a narrow cave maybe four or five feet deep with the massive, rusting hull forming the roof. Into that dark, narrow space Chris went with his tape measure, to make sure we recorded every cannon possible.

The bottom was littered with all of the detritus dumped out of the split bottom of a massive warship. If we had been digging, we could have spent months just excavating that single site. But that was pure fantasy. Now, with conditions deteriorating, we were only hoping to complete the limited mission we had set for ourselves, and to get out of there before something bad happened.