The Lost Fleet (4 page)

M
AY 11, 1678
L
AS
A
VES

D
EATH ON THE
R
EEF

I
may have been eager to get out to the reef, but the sailors and pirates who ended up there three hundred years ago—those who lived through the night—certainly wished they had never seen the place.

Le Terrible
piled up on the reefs of Las Aves and instantly became a total loss. Comte d'Estrées tried desperately to prevent the rest of his fleet from meeting the same fate. If he could keep enough of them from running aground, he might still drive the Dutch from Curaçao, even with the loss of the seventy-gun flagship.

Night was fully on them. D'Estrées ordered
Le Terrible'
s guns fired and a lantern lit in the main top, the fastest means of signaling the other ships and warning them of the danger. Gunfire proved to be a sadly ambiguous warning. The captains of the great men-of-war astern thought the cannon blasts meant that the admiral was engaged with the enemy.

Their duty was clearly to get up with the flagship and support her.
They ordered more sail set and closed as quickly as they could. As Dampier later reported, the captains “hoisted up their topsails, and crowded all the sail they could make, and ran full sail ashore after him, all within a mile of each other. For his light being in the Main-Top was an unhappy Beacon for them to follow….”
¹

One after another, the great ships ran up on the reef;
Le Tormant
with her four hundred men,
Le Bellseodur
with a complement of four hundred fifty, and
Le Bourbon, Le Prince,
and
Le Hercule,
each with three hundred aboard, all broke their backs on the unseen rocks.

Along with the gunfire, d'Estrées managed to dispatch a boat, which was able to warn the left wing of the fleet in time for those vessels to veer off.
²
But for the ships following in the admiral's wake it was too late.

No doubt some of the men aboard those doomed ships realized the danger before they actually struck the reef, but the unweatherly men-of-war of the late seventeenth century were helpless to sail clear once they had the reefs right under their lee.

Though the process of rigging and dropping the huge anchors was time-consuming, some ships might have managed to do so. But it did not help. The anchors found nothing to grab on the reefs and just dragged along behind. The mariners aboard the French fleet could have done nothing but endure the horror of waiting for the inevitable.

In all, ten French men-of-war were wrecked on Las Aves, the
largest ships in d'Estrées' fleet. Lost with the ships were approximately five hundred men and 490 guns. Even in a major naval engagement, it was rare to see such complete destruction.

Dampier suggests that the buccaneers fared better in this disaster, though the record is unclear. As a renegade mercenary force, the freebooters,
³
as they were called, were of no official concern to the French navy, as long as they did as ordered and aided d'Estrées in his designs. As a result, the navy took no official notice of the number of pirate vessels that were wrecked, and the pirates themselves were not much given to record-keeping.

Some reports that made their way to the colonial governors indicate that as many as eight buccaneer vessels went up on the reef. It is certain that at least three were lost with the men-of-war. The accounts of the aftermath reveal that a number of buccaneers were stranded on the beach along with the survivors from the naval force. Enough of the buccaneer ships escaped, however (many no doubt thanks to their shallow draft), to become a power in their own right.

N
IGHTTIME AND
B
REAKING
S
EAS

One can only imagine the horror that the shipwrecked mariners suffered through the night of May 11 and 12, with the great men-of-war grinding themselves to bits on the reefs, held there by the trade winds and the steady pounding of the sea.

The air was filled with the sounds of wooden hulls crushing against rock, tons of masts, spars, and rigging collapsing, panicked orders as the officers tried to maintain discipline and salvage what they could of men and ships, the screams of the drowning men, the shudder of waves breaking on the stranded vessels.

Dawn revealed a chaotic scene, with the men-of-war, stove in but still largely intact, stranded on the half-moon reef. The clear blue-green water and the white sand beaches of Las Aves were covered with debris and the bodies of the men who had drowned.

The survivors began the task of getting themselves off the stranded, wrecked ships, which were beginning to break up, and onto the dubious safety of the beaches on Las Aves. The work was difficult. The boats were hampered by large seas that made the generally dangerous task of approaching an unstable wreck even more treacherous.

The scene on the beach at Las Aves and on the wrecks still clinging to the reef must have been one of the strangest in all the history of the Caribbean, no small feat in a country where the bizarre and outrageous is a standard part of regional history.

The survivors were divided into two distinct groups: the men of the French navy and the buccaneers. Of the two, the men of the navy had by far the worst time of it.

Most of those killed in the wrecks seem to have been sailors aboard the French men-of-war. This is hardly surprising. Common sailors made up the majority of casualties in any conflict at sea, whether by gunfire or rocks.

All through the day the survivors poured onto the sands of Las Aves. They were frightened and dispirited, and many had been injured in the wreck or cut up by coral in getting ashore. Many more, no doubt, fell victim to the fire coral that grows in those waters.

With the water filled with blood, sharks and barracuda began to school. We saw enough of both, diving at Las Aves, even without the attraction of fresh blood to lure them. The predatory sharks came, silent and unseen, and claimed their own screaming victims.

Once they were on the beach, the sailors' suffering was intensified by the fact that Las Aves was little more than a barren stretch of sand
and shrub, just twelve degrees north of the equator, with no shelter from the elements. The European sailors, unused to such conditions, “died like rotten sheep.”
⁴

There was at least no shortage of food and drink. As the ships broke up, they began to disgorge their holds full of supplies—casks of beef and pork, water and wine and brandy—all floating free of the wrecks and washing up on the beaches of Las Aves.

Some of the shipwrecked Frenchmen were overcome with despair and reached for the bottle. Forty or so French sailors found themselves aboard a wreck with a good supply of liquor. Rather than trying to save themselves, they chose to get dead drunk. When at last the after part of the ship in which they had settled broke away and floated off, the men could be heard singing merrily as they drifted out to sea, never to be heard from again.

Most of the French naval officers survived but would have to answer for the destruction of the ships under their command. That would not be a pleasant prospect for any of them, least of all Admiral Jean Comte d'Estrées, whose record as a naval commander was mediocre at best. One can imagine d'Estrées looking out over the wreckage and working out the explanation he would give to the Sun King. It must have been the worst moment of his life.

M
AY
12, 1678
L
AS
A
VES

N
o doubt the officers thrown up on the beach were concerned with more than just their personal reputations and careers. In just a few hours, the bulk of the French naval presence in the Caribbean had been wiped out more completely than any enemy in those waters (least of all the Dutch) could have ever hoped to achieve. Any man of insight could have realized that that single event probably meant the end of any chance for French domination over the West Indies. The Caribbean was, and would continue to be, one of the major sources of European wealth. The loss of the fleet was a major blow to France, the repercussions of which would be felt for nearly a century.

Soon after the disaster, the end of French designs on the region was welcomed with ill-concealed glee among the English colonists in the West Indies. The governor of Barbados, Sir Jonathan Atkins, wrote, “[T]here is little danger now from the French fleet under the com
mand of Count d'Estrées, the greatest part of it having been ‘ruined almost to a miracle.'” Atkins went on to add, facetiously, that “d'Estrées is like to give his master a good account of his fleet. I wish them luck at home if we have a war with them.”
¹

Comte d'Estrées, true to his character, had lost neither his courage nor his sense of duty. He still held out hopes of driving the Dutch from Curaçao. As a French nobleman, he no doubt cared deeply for French glory and understood the importance of France gaining supremacy in the region. It might also have occurred to him that the blame he would bear for the loss of the fleet could be somewhat mitigated if he could still manage to complete his mission.

With most of his fleet gone, d'Estrées needed the buccaneers more than ever. The pirate ships that survived the reefs, nine or ten in all, now represented half of the admiral's available fleet, and the twelve hundred or so buccaneers a sizable portion of his land forces. Unhappily for d'Estrées, the buccaneers had lost interest in attacking Curaçao.

Concerns of French pride and dominance in the West Indies mattered not a bit to the freebooters. With the big men-of-war wrecked, the odds of sacking Curaçao did not look so attractive, not enough to tempt them into following d'Estrées any longer. As Atkins reported, “D'Estrées lost not his courage, but with the Ships he had left would have attempted [Curaçao], But his Buckneers (which are only Beasts of Prey) seeing there was little to be gott but Blows left him and would not hazard any farther with him.”
²

The buccaneers might have suffered the same hazards as the French sailors in getting ashore, but once on the beach things were much easier for them. These were not sailors fresh from Europe's cool, damp climate, but men who had already been many years in the Caribbean and were acclimated to the heat and the blazing sun. The buccaneers led wild and adventurous lives. Finding themselves shipwrecked on a barren island was not so far removed from the normal course of events.

The circumstances on Las Aves were far better than usual, because a fortune in loot literally drifted in on the tide. The buccaneers discarded their old ragged clothing and donned the finery that had floated free of the cabins, or that they stripped from the bodies of drowned officers. They made tents from the sails torn from shattered yards. They retrieved casks of food and liquor from the surf and rolled them up the beach to their makeshift hell town. One of the survivors of Las Aves
later told William Dampier that “if they had gone to Jamaica with 30l. a Man in their Pockets, they could not have enjoyed themselves more.”
³

The buccaneers kept to themselves, enjoying the high life at their end of the beach, while at the other end the men of the French navy suffered, wallowed in their despair, and died.

D'Estrées worked hard to rally the freebooters in his camp into proceeding with the attempt on Curaçao, but the men of Tortuga would have none of it. The wreck of the French fleet seemed to have dissolved any ties they felt to the French. The buccaneers felt free to loot whatever they could of their former employers' possessions.

D'Estrées did not remain long on Las Aves. Soon he managed to get
the remainder of his force aboard what was left of his fleet. With what they could salvage, they left the scene of the great disaster astern. They did not go to Curaçao, of course, but instead retreated to the French colony of Saint-Domingue. D'Estrées returned to France that summer. By then, the war was all but over.

As thorough and devastating as it was, the loss of the fleet on Las Aves did not completely ruin d'Estrées' reputation or career. Such an accident was much more forgivable at a time when charts were few and mariners had no more than a lead line to warn of dangers below. Louis XIV was more likely to ascribe the disaster to the will of God than a modern head of state might be.

A year later, d'Estrées was back in the Caribbean with yet another fleet under his command. Once again, his presence caused great alarm. In the end, however, he did no more than show the French flag in the region before returning to France. Ironically, he would spend much of his remaining career fighting the Barbary pirates of the North African coast.

A G
ATHERING OF
B
UCCANEERS

The buccaneers were not so quick to leave Las Aves. They were having a tropical vacation, with all provisions provided free of charge, courtesy of the French navy. They found themselves in a unique position. They were pirates to a man, already assembled and under way, men under arms who no longer had a fight. They had lost only a few ships and a small portion of their company. They still represented a significant fighting force—nine or ten ships and twelve to fifteen hundred men. They had been infected by the dream of plunder, and that dream only needed direction.

The more democratic a society, the more opportunity for natural leaders to emerge, and the pirates were the most democratic of all. Contemporary reports state that one man, who would later become famous for his exploits as a pirate captain, was most certainly there: the Chevalier de Grammont. De Grammont would eventually sail with some of the most famous men in the history of seventeenth-century piracy—Laurens de Graff, Jan “Yankey” Willems, John Coxon, and Thomas Paine. Given the long professional relationship that developed among them, it is likely that all or most of those men were together on Las Aves.

There is also circumstantial evidence to suggest that the most famous pirate of all, William Kidd, was one of the men of Las Aves. Kidd was serving as an officer aboard a French privateer ten years after the wreck at Las Aves, and he served in the English navy during the third of the Dutch Wars (1672–78). He may have joined the French in this venture in order to carry on the fight with the Dutch. He was certainly friendly with some of the buccaneers, most notably Thomas Paine, who sailed with d'Estrées.

These buccaneers were men who recognized opportunity when they saw it, and in this disaster, opportunity is what they saw. Why return empty-handed to Tortuga, after so many had come so far? For three weeks the buccaneers continued their revels at Las Aves, and then they were ready for more action.

The repercussions of this chance meeting on Las Aves would sound throughout the Caribbean, Europe, and America for the next forty years. The decisions made on that barren island would set off a chain of events that would usher in an age of piracy never seen in the world before or since.

The careers of men whose names would later become synonymous
with piracy—Blackbeard, Black Sam Bellamy, Bartholomew Roberts, William “Billy One-Hand” Condon, Charles Vane—were born of this meeting, and those later pirates were but a single generation and a few degrees separated from the buccaneers on that sun-baked beach.

But of course, the men on Las Aves were thinking of plunder, of gold, of sacking the towns of their perennial enemy, Spain.

They were thinking of Maracaibo.