The Lost Fleet (7 page)

S
UMMER
1998
P
ROVINCETOWN,
M
ASSACHUSETTS

T
he more Ken and I dug into the history of the wrecks on Las Aves, the more we understood how the disaster had kicked off a wave of buccaneering from which emerged some of the leading names among the seventeenth-century pirates, and the more eager I became to get back there. During our brief stay on the island, I had seen enough to convince me there was a mystery to be solved at this site. What had the filibusters left behind? What couldn't they find? That was one thing that interested me. Given the magnitude of the disaster, it seemed impossible to me that a longer, more systematic search would not reveal much, much more.

The second thing that interested me was the map d'Estrées had made. The admiral, intending to go back one day and salvage what he could of the wrecks, had made a meticulous drawing of the island, the reefs, and the ships that went up on them.

I was curious to see how accurate d'Estrées had been. If his map was indeed accurate, then it would be a useful tool for discovering wrecks. Sometimes you get lucky, but more often you have to prod your luck along though tremendous research and hard work. We had labored over maps and other documents to find the
Whydah,
but it all turned
out to be right there, waiting to be unearthed. I have found other wrecks as well by finding documents and following their lead. Perhaps d'Estrées' map would be one of those.

Of course, I was excited by the “filibusters'” ships. Pirate ships generally disappeared with little fanfare. Clever pirates, like Thomas Paine, did not keep records. But in my hands was an official map, made by an admiral of the French navy, noting the location of two of them. It was a chance to be the first person in three hundred years to set eyes on a pirate vessel of the Spanish Main, to see how it might differ from the
Whydah,
a pirate ship of forty years later. And I wanted to be the first to swim, see, and touch another pirate ship.

I called Mike Quatrone of the Discovery Channel, who has the nose of a truffle hound when it comes to sniffing out a good story. We discussed organizing a full-scale survey and exploration of the reefs at Las Aves, of going back and shooting a documentary about the wrecks. Soon our talk evolved into a plan: with the Discovery Channel, in tandem with the BBC, underwriting the exploration and producing a show about the expedition.

With some of the other people involved in the project, Pedro Mezquita and Charles Brewer and their contacts in Venezuela, we talked about a major excavation and a museum in Caracas dedicated to the wrecks of d'Estrées' fleet. We began to develop plans for a conservation center and discussed training Venezuelans as conservators. With high hopes and the best intentions we envisioned an important project.

Charles took the lead in Caracas, talking to everyone he knew, which seemed to be a lot of people. I was afraid he was overstepping his bounds, but the phone calls and e-mails I received from him seemed to indicate that we were all on the same page. As we were making preparations, Charles (who writes English exactly as he speaks it) sent me an e-mail, addressed to “Dear friend Barry,” discussing how he was allaying some of the Venezuelans' fears about what we intended. He wrote, “I am dealing here with people that are full of fears and complexes of underdevelopment (mentally). Questions as Who are these guys?, Are they coming here to smuggle items? Should we put the police to follow them?” He closed by assuring me that he would be “solving problems” for me in Venezuela.

It was an awkward situation. The BBC and the Discovery Channel had agreed to film a documentary about the exploration based on our
work with them in Scotland on the King Charles I site. But Charles seemed to have contacts within the Venezuelan government. Still, I wondered if I was being given “the ether.”

We were both eager to get back to Las Aves to see what we could find. We had to figure out how to work with each other.

Then, from left field, came another problem. A high-powered insurance salesman from Florida had invested money with a fly-by-night Florida treasure hunter. The initial ill-conceived project was to locate a sunken German U-boat off Venezuela, allegedly filled with stolen Jewish gold. One of the investors' former employees told me that $600,000 had been put up but nothing was ever found: no U-boat and certainly no gold. The treasure hunters needed a big find to keep their investors on the hook.

The Florida businessman had two Venezuelan partners with a lot of influence. At some point prior to our going down to Las Aves they secured a contract with the Venezuelan navy to do “archaeological” salvage work in that country. They claimed they had only to ask for permission and they would be allowed to conduct underwater archaeological digs wherever they wanted.

When one of the Florida treasure hunters read Bart Jones's article in the newspaper, he fired off an angry letter to me, informing me that I had no right to explore their wrecks, that Las Aves was their permit area, and that the right to explore Las Aves was exclusively theirs. He claimed that the Venezuelan navy, having known about the wrecks at Las Aves, had asked that his team go out there and conduct archaeological work.

To this day, I still don't know how valid those claims were. I certainly wasn't going to jump someone's permit. I have been on the receiving end of that game too many times, with the
Whydah
and other projects. To complicate matters, we had also heard rumors that a notorious wrecker had been bragging that he had taken a cannon from the site and was making plans to do his own salvage, with or without a permit. Business as usual on the treasure-hunting front.

The question was, could we legally document these sites before they were lost forever? In a place like Venezuela, when one government agency gives you “exclusive” rights it doesn't necessarily mean it has the authority to do so. On the one hand, I had this guy claiming exclusivity, but I also had Charles Brewer assuring us that he had all of the necessary permits in order for us to return to the reefs. After considering it all, I decided that we had as much right as the Florida group
to work Las Aves. After all, we were only going down to map and film the site, not excavate. We decided to press on.

An interesting sidebar to all of this was the reaction of the archaeologist Dr. John de Bry, whom the Florida group had hired. De Bry, who grew up in France, is an expert at researching historical documents. At the urging of the group's backer, he did a great deal of work on the Las Aves site. He even spent time at Las Aves, several months after our visit, exploring the wreck sites. He ended up leaving the project when he discovered that his employers were more interested in treasure hunting than archaeology.

John de Bry had heard plenty of stories about me from the people on his Las Aves venture, and his impression was that I was Genghis Khan in a wet suit, determined to loot every site I could find. So it didn't sit very well with him when a friend told him to watch a report on CNN about our Las Aves explorations and he saw, on television, his own research material in my hands!

Maps and other archival material are public domain, but taking research that someone else has done is theft of intellectual property. De Bry called his lawyer and had him write to me, demanding that I stop using his material.

I certainly understood that. Copies of the material had been sent to us by way of the
Boston Herald.
It turned out that these copies had been sent to the
Herald
by a diver who was a disgruntled employee of the Florida group, and who, as part of the team, had been given copies of de Bry's work. I wrote to John's lawyer, explaining this. But the fact is, I had previously found a copy of the same map de Bry had located, independent of the
Herald copy.
I found mine published in a French history book. I sent a photocopy of the page from the book to de Bry's lawyer with an admittedly sarcastic note attached. Then I braced for a good fight. Knowing the people with whom de Bry was associated, I looked forward to it.

More letters went back and forth, and as John read them he started to sense that perhaps I was not just an unscrupulous treasure hunter. My side of the story as to our research made sense to him. So one day, out of the blue, he called. We ended up talking for some time, since we obviously have a lot of mutual interests, and we developed a friendship over the phone. The National Geographic Society was staging an exhibit of
Whydah
artifacts in Washington, D.C. John mentioned that he would like to see it and I invited him.

A year or two later, when I needed an archaeologist for a project I
was doing in Africa, I gave him a call. We have worked together on several expeditions now, and have become friends. John is from the old school, a Vietnam vet, and has the work ethic of a badger.

The planning, organization, and logistics of an expedition like this are complicated and difficult. We worked hard at our end getting the people and equipment together for the dive. Max and his friends were planning to be there for part of it. But I knew that the second trip was not going to be a clambake and Max knew it. He was going to have his hands full keeping his group in one piece. This would not be a vacation.

S
UMMER
1998
P
ROVINCETOWN,
M
ASSACHUSETTS

N
early all of the Las Aves team members were veterans of Expedition
Whydah
.

Even if Todd Murphy and I hadn't been friends for as long as we have, he would still be a man to have on an expedition like this. Todd is a U.S. Army Special Forces master sergeant (MSG) with twenty-three years of active duty and reserve time. He is currently in a National Guard Special Forces unit. Todd is trained as a combat diver, diving supervisor, and diving medical technician. He is also an instructor at the Special Forces scuba school in Key West, Florida.

Todd and I began diving together long before the
Whydah
project. We met on Martha's Vineyard in the mid-seventies. I had built a little Cape, with a great central fireplace, where, on long winter nights, I'd sit by the fire with my kids, reading the history of lost ships and sunken treasure. Todd would take my kids swimming and hiking and spend evenings with us.

I ran a small salvage/diving company at the time and was engaged mostly in doing emergency dive work for the Coast Guard, disentangling nets and cables from the wheels of fishing boats, and, on occasion, landing lucrative salvage contracts.

John Kennedy Jr. worked for me then as a diver. Subsequently, he
and Todd became friends. The two of them were always looking for any excuse to go diving with me for shipwrecks around the Vineyard and Elizabeth Islands or to investigate various Island legends, such as the story of the two bronze cannons spotted by Alfred Vanderhoop lying off Gay Head, or the ancient Spanish helmets found in Quista Pond, or the lost cargo of lignum vitae logs resting somewhere on the bottom of Vineyard Sound. One trip that we made over and over again was to No Man's Land to find Viking Rock, a large boulder, reportedly with runic carvings, which was toppled into the ocean during the 1938 hurricane. Another of our hunts was for the wreck of the
John Dwight
—a ghost ship from the rum-running years, and the scene of the Vineyard's greatest murder mystery.

I think we explored every inch of every sandbar and reef, amassing an impressive collection of old bottles and china.

Todd and John were eager to go on these adventures and to pick up a few dollars on salvage jobs when they could. Todd was paying his way through college, and John was always happy to get forty dollars for a hard day's work. It meant a lot to him to earn his own money—that's one of the things I liked about him.

We considered each job as a dangerous rival that had to be carefully assessed before going forward. These were wonderful days, and I remember them as some of the best times of my life.

That was about the time I became fixated on the
Whydah.
Not surprisingly, so did Todd and John. John made the first dive for the
Whydah
at Marconi Beach on a cold, blustery day in November 1982. The magnetometer put us over the wreck, but what we hadn't factored into the equation was that there was twenty feet of sand that had to be dug through to get at it.

We came back in the spring of 1983 for a full-scale search. Todd and John were members of that first exploratory team. It was not as glamorous as they imagined. Their first job was to head up to Maine to work on our newly purchased salvage boat, the
Vast Explorer II.

Todd was somewhat inexperienced when we began diving in the summer of 1983. However, after a few years of experience, he earned the job of diving supervisor/director of operations. He has been working with me ever since.

John went off to New York, though he often stopped by the
Whydah
HQ and museum at the end of Macmillan Wharf. The last time I saw John was in the spring of 1999. He had come to Provincetown to
spend the day with Captain Stretch Gray and myself aboard the
Vast Explorer.

Later that day, I found him wandering alone through the
Whydah
museum. The museum was closed for the season, and the cold Atlantic chilled the old building through its timbers. A smell familiar to those who have worked ancient shipwrecks permeates the air. It is the smell of pine tar and hemp, concreted cannon and flintlocks, and the belongings of long-dead pirates. It is more than a smell; it is an awareness that seems to drift about the place like a lost spirit. Perhaps it is.

Nonetheless, John chuckled out loud, remembering faces from old photographs of project crewmen that hang on the wall. Faces from when the thrill of finding pirate treasure was merely a dream—until it came true.

 

Todd Murphy keeps a cold-weather bag and another for the tropics ready at all times so he can grab the appropriate one and go if a project comes up. For example, it was less than two weeks from the moment I received a frantic call from a particularly mad Scotsman asking me to search for the wreck of
The Blessing of Burntisland
of King Charles I to the time we launched our first dive with full surface support.

By an odd coincidence, Todd was in Haiti with Special Forces about the time I was having troubles with the competing group at Las Aves. He happened to meet Dr. John de Bry, the former archaeologist for that group, who was then doing archaeological work at Cap Haitien. They started discussing their mutual interests, and we ended up hiring John for a project in Africa.

For the Las Aves expedition, Todd would be the director of operations, responsible for the thousand-and-one details involved in completing a successful mission. He would be assisted by Chris Macort.

Cathrine Harker is an archaeologist who had also worked on the
Whydah
project. She is Scottish, with a degree in geology from Edinburgh University and a master's degree in archaeology from Liverpool University. After graduating from Liverpool, she moved back to Edinburgh and became an exhibit interpreter for a traveling display of
Whydah
artifacts we had in Scotland at the time. That was where I first met her.

Since I needed staff for the permanent museum we were then
building in Provincetown, I asked her to join our team. Now, she would come to Las Aves to help explore and map the wrecks on that lovely reef.

Cathrine is very capable, and she is, without a doubt, one of the toughest and most loyal people on the team. More than once, I've seen her stand as solid as a samson post aboard the
Vast Explorer,
with breakers coming over the rail.

If Cathrine is feeling chatty, we might speak ten words to each other over the course of a summer. I think the English army understood it best: there are only two living creatures that will go face first into a badger hole—a Jack Russell terrier and a Scotsman.

Eric Scharmer was another diver who had worked on the
Whydah
project. An exceptional athlete, Eric is a former member of the Pro Mogul Ski Tour. He had taken up film and video-camera work as a profession. I persuaded the BBC to hire him to be the underwater cameraman at Las Aves because he knew our dive system. He ended up being the perfect man for the job. Indeed, if you've ever wondered “how on earth did they get
that
on film?” it's men like Eric who do it.

My future fiancée, Margot Hathaway, would also be coming with us. Margot is a strong swimmer and diver and also an accomplished fine arts and still photographer who has worked with me on the
Whydah
site as well as three trips to Africa.

Carl Tiska was the only team member who had not worked on the
Whydah,
but his credentials were nonetheless impressive. He is a lieutenant commander in the Navy SEALs. As with Todd, Carl's military training was a great asset to the project. Even though our expeditions are more relaxed than a military operation, there is still a chain of command and an organization not unlike the military's.

Though I had yet to meet them, I knew there would also be the production team from the BBC, and Max's group. I had no doubt that Charles would be bringing some of his own people. It was shaping up to be a large crew, and, as far as the people I could vouch for were concerned, a good one.

About a month prior to the start of the expedition, I had a meeting in my home above the
Whydah
museum with executives from the Discovery Channel and the BBC to nail down some of the details about the documentary, plan logistics, and outline what we all hoped to accomplish.

The fact is that the Discovery Channel and BBC were taking a big risk with this production. All we had found so far were a couple of
cannons and some pottery. There was no guarantee that we would find more, though what we had learned through researching the wreck of the French fleet suggested we would. Still, the Discovery Channel and BBC had only my word to go on. They were familiar with the
Whydah
project and what we were accomplishing, and so the consensus was that it was a risk worth taking.

It was at that meeting that I first met Mike Rossiter, the BBC producer who would actually be making the film. He had flown in from London for the meeting.

Mike already had a proven track record when he was asked to participate in our project. At the time he had been with the BBC for only a few years, but he had many years of experience as an independent producer and had produced a number of documentaries for the Learning Channel, Nova, and the BBC.

Mike's accent is working-class London, and his working style is absolutely no-nonsense. At first glance, his demeanor seemed testy, bordering on arrogant, until I got to know him a little better and realized that was just his way. He is all business, no bull. He was not going to choreograph a successful expedition; he was going to docu
ment whatever happened. If I fell on my face, that would be the show.

Mike knows what he wants and makes it happen. The BBC is very demanding as far as the planning that it needs to see on paper is concerned. We prepared risk-assessment reports, documented safety procedures, and outlined for Mike exactly how we would be going about our job.

From our discussions, we were able to determine that an expedition of a couple of weeks would be enough for us to finish our work and for Mike to get the footage he needed to make a documentary about the wrecks. Besides, it was all the money that was available.

Unfortunately, as we were working out our plans, Charles Brewer was making his own plans. His plans apparently included spending significant amounts of other people's money. He e-mailed Mike Rossiter and me to outline what he thought was necessary to secure the permits. Mike was not happy when he read it. At the heart of the problem was the fact that Charles was angling to get the BBC to sponsor the expedition under his direction—and on his financial terms. Mike e-mailed me that Charles's demands were “causing alarm and despondency among my executive producers.”

For someone who had mysteriously appeared on the first trip, Charles had come a long way. He had managed to get in a position where his interference was threatening the production, which would have been disastrous for the project. At Mike's urging, I contacted Charles and explained the situation, telling him what the production company would—and would not—do. He was not pleased to have his plans thwarted, and I imagine he saw all manner of plots forming against him, but, in the end, he relented. After all, he was not going to get on television otherwise.

It was not a good start. And it cemented an enmity between Charles and Mike that would hang over the entire expedition.

Mike has enough experience working in foreign countries to know where the pitfalls lie. Though Charles had managed to usurp the permitting process—to make himself indispensable—Mike understandably wanted his own person on the job as well, to insure that all things went smoothly. He hired a Venezuelan named Antonio Casado to help us out with arrangements in Caracas. Antonio is a television producer in his own right, having worked for years with Venezuelan TV. That experience was crucial, because it meant that Antonio knew what we would need for television production and understood the
specific problems we might encounter. People like Antonio are known as “fixers.” Antonio went to work right away, and he was a godsend.

Antonio went to the Ministry of Defense and the various other ministries to see what we would need. After much legwork, he called Mike and told him that, in his view, all the BBC needed was filming permits. Then he added, “Of course, you should also have some expedition permits.”

“What are they?” Mike asked. Expedition permits seemed to be in Charles Brewer's domain, and he had told us he was handling them. I was very concerned, given our competitors' insistence that they alone had the rights to explore Las Aves. But Charles insisted that there was no problem, that the permits were in order.

Charles was well connected; his brother knew this person, his mother knew that person, he talked to the right government officials. Charles sent us copies of permits. Pedro Mezquita, who works in a major law firm in Caracas, said everything looked fine.

Charles and Antonio were in contact with one another, coordinating their efforts, and Mike assumed that they were handling affairs in Caracas. Charles sent an e-mail stating that he “had obtained the permits from the Minister of Defense,” and the filming permits were finalized three days before we were due to fly out to Venezuela. From his home in London, Mike called Charles and asked if any other paperwork might be required. “No, no, no. Don't worry about it, we'll sort it all out,” Charles told him.

We had spent the summer working the wreck of the
Whydah.
It was a great season for us. Not only did we bring up an impressive collection of artifacts, but we also located a sixty-foot section of hull, the only wooden section thus far. The National Geographic Society was there to capture the event for both television and their magazine.

The working season is short off Cape Cod, however, and by early fall it was over for the year. On October 21, 1998, we were ready to go south.

I woke up at seven in the morning, roused by what sounded like a grizzly bear trying to knock my building down. It took me a moment to realize it was Stretch Gray, the six foot ten, three-hundred-pound captain of the
Vast Explorer,
pounding on the side of my home at the end of Macmillan Wharf. He was our driver to the airport. I climbed out of bed.