The Lost Fleet (8 page)

We made it to the airport forty-five minutes before our scheduled departure. We had a small mountain of gear and personal luggage—fourteen bags of it.

By some miracle, our gear and our team all made it onto the airplane. Before we left, I gave everyone a quick primer on what to expect in South America. I have spent a lot of time in the Third World, but Caracas has a particularly sharp edge to it. I was determined that none of my team would get cut. We boarded the plane. Next stop, Venezuela.

O
CTOBER
1998
L
AS
A
VES

W
e were certainly not the first to come poking around the wrecks at Las Aves. Someone else, perhaps the Florida treasure hunters, had been there since our first trip to the island. Near one of the larger wreck sites we could see where something had been salvaged from the reef. Anything that has sat on a reef for three hundred years becomes embedded in the coral, and when it is wrenched out, it leaves a big, fresh hole.

At this site someone had done just that. From the size and shape of the hole and the artifacts around it, it looked as if it was a cannon that had been taken, perhaps one of the valuable bronze cannons. I was sorry to see the site vandalized in that way. And looking at the damage to the reef caused by the removal of one gun, I began to wonder if any excavation would be worth the environmental cost.

Neither of us was first on those wrecks. The first salvagers showed up while they were still fresh. One of them was Captain Thomas Paine.

Not to be confused with the Tom Paine of
Common Sense
fame, Thomas Paine the pirate holds a special place for me. Paine is one of the living links between the early era of the golden age of piracy, the middle to later seventeenth century, and the later period that ended
around 1720. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, however, he was a respectable citizen. He was also a pirate kingpin who had numerous criminal connections among those pirates and smugglers who made my native Cape Cod home.

S
UMMER
1678
L
AS
A
VES

T
HE
F
IRST
S
ALVAGER

Captain Thomas Paine was in some ways the polar opposite of the Chevalier de Grammont. Rather than starting life in the upper strata of society, Paine began as a simple seafarer, a most common profession, particularly in New England, where he grew up.

Thomas Paine is believed to have been the same Thomas Paine who was born on Martha's Vineyard in 1632. His father died young and his stepfather was Thomas Mayhew, the famous governor of that island. He became a sailor and left the island no earlier than 1647. The exact circumstance of his having turned pirate are unknown, but he is believed to have served with L'Ollonais or Morgan, or possibly with both.

While we do not know how he first arrived in the West Indies, it was definitely not as a commissioned officer in anyone's navy. I know what Martha's Vineyard was like in the old days and for Paine it took determination and hard work, not to mention a good deal of luck and money, to rise above his humble beginnings. Only after a long and successful career as a privateer and pirate would he become a pillar of society.

Paine was already established as a filibuster captain by the spring of 1678. Since the proposed attack on Curaçao involved so many of the buccaneers, it is probable that Paine was a part of it, and like the others found himself on Las Aves. Paine's ship, which sported six guns, would have had a shallow enough draft to avoid wrecking on the reefs as the larger ships did.

From Las Aves, Paine appears to have accompanied de Grammont and the rest to Maracaibo in June 1678. Much of the documentation is found in French colonial records, and the vagaries of seventeenth-century French make it impossible to know for certain if such spellings as “Gouain” refer to Paine. If Paine did go to Maracaibo, he stayed only for the initial festivities. In the summer of 1678, Paine turned up at Las Aves to refit and careen his ship.

Careening was a laborious process by which a ship was emptied of guns and stores, run up on the beach on a falling tide, and hove down nearly on her side. As the water dropped away the vessel was left high and dry and the crew was able to scrape weeds and barnacles from the exposed side. The ship was refloated on an incoming tide and hove down on the other side to complete the cleaning. The whole process was labor-intensive and left the vessel defenseless, but it was necessary to keep the hull clean to maintain the kind of speed needed by fast-moving pirates.

Not only did Las Aves have beaches on which to careen, it was the perfect place to refit and replace old and worn gear. With the French fleet's disaster only a few months old, Las Aves must have been like a free open-air chandlery, with all manner of spars, rigging, timber, and stores handily scattered over the beach.

Paine sailed into harbor and then prepared to heave his ship down. The first step was to unrig the ship: to take down all of the masts and yards, sails and rigging so that they would not hamper the heaving down or be damaged in the process.

So Paine's ship was completely immobile when, by sheer bad luck, a Dutch ship of twenty guns hove into view. The Dutch, of course, were as aware as the pirates of the booty to be found on Las Aves, and this ship had been dispatched from Curaçao to retrieve it.

The Dutch knew exactly what this strange ship was about. They sailed to within a mile of her and opened fire, to little effect. At last they ceased fire and anchored, most likely because night was falling and the Dutch captain did not care to get tangled up in the reefs after dark.

Instead, the Dutch made preparations to move the ship in closer the next day by means of warping, a process that involved dropping an anchor out ahead and hauling the ship up to that anchor. There was time enough. The Dutch captain knew that this interloper, with his ship stripped of masts and sails, was not going anywhere.

It seemed hopeless, and, indeed, it probably was, but Paine was a man who would not go down without a fight. He began to set up as good a defensive situation as he could although he knew it would only delay the inevitable. He and his men were outnumbered and outgunned.

Then, ironically, salvation came in the form of another Dutch vessel, a sloop that sailed in near the west end of the island and unwisely dropped anchor. Once night had fallen, Paine and his men went out in two canoes and boarded the sloop, taking her before an alarm could be raised. Then, tiptoeing out to sea, they abandoned their old and tired ship to the Dutch man-of-war. Thus bad luck had become what Dampier described as “a pleasant accident.”
¹

Having made their narrow escape, Paine and his associates continued their cruise against the Spanish. He and his men joined forces with two other vessels. One was commanded by an English buccaneer named Wright who sailed with a French privateer's commission. The other commander was a Dutch captain, Jan Willems, better known as Yankey, apparently a mangled version of the Dutch “Jan.”

Little is known about Yankey's prior life, but in the years to come he would make his presence felt on the Spanish Main. Together he, Wright, and Paine prowled the seas for Spanish prizes.

T
HE
S
ACK OF
R
ÍO DE LA
H
ACHA

In 1680, Paine and Willems were among those who staged a raid on the city of Río de la Hacha, about one hundred miles east of Cartagena in present-day Colombia. Along with plundering the town in high style, the pirates kidnapped for ransom a number of important citizens, including the governor of the province, Vincent Sebastian. They also hit the nearby town of Santa Marta. With their prisoners aboard, the freebooters sailed for Jamaica, and from there issued their demands.

News of Paine's outrageous behavior reached the very highest levels, providing a perfect example of the official wink and a nod occasionally directed toward piracy. Paine's actions were legitimized by a French commission, thus making Paine's attacks technically French aggression. But there were English fingerprints all over this action despite the fact that Spain and England were at peace.

Not only were Paine and Wright English, but they transported Governor Sebastian and the others to the English island of Jamaica and held them there. Paine demanded four thousand pieces of eight for the return of the governor as well as the release of an unnamed French pirate held prisoner at Cartagena.

To make matters worse, the demand for the release of the pirate and the money arrived in Cartagena aboard a barque from Jamaica. And the final straw, the demand itself was cowritten by the governors of Jamaica and Tortuga. The outraged Spanish ambassador in England, Don Pedro de Ronquillos, wrote to Charles II:

All that year, Paine and Wright's activities continued to plague the Spanish. Again Don Pedro wrote to Charles II:

The commission alluded to is presumably the one issued by Governor M. de Pouançay to all of the buccaneers hired at Tortuga for the attack on Curaçao. If this is so, then it is unlikely that a two-year-old commission would still be considered valid by any honest jurisdiction. It was, however, good enough for the buccaneers. Since piracy of the
late seventeenth century had a decidedly political flavor to it, it was probably good enough for English and French authorities, too, so long as grand theft was confined to the Spanish.

Don Pedro goes on to describe the wild spree on which Paine and his cohorts were engaged:

R
ENEWED
A
LLIANCES

While Paine and Wright were rampaging across the Spanish Main, the Chevalier de Grammont tarried in Tortuga, enjoying the fruits of his piracy. In May 1680, a year and a half after Maracaibo, he was once more ready for action.

The Chevalier met Paine and Wright at Isla La Blanquilla, about two hundred miles west of Grenada, part of present-day Venezuela. This meeting was fortuitous, at least for the buccaneers. Paine and Wright decided to join de Grammont on his latest venture, perhaps the boldest and most audacious he would ever undertake.

The target was La Guaira, the port of Caracas, a place well protected by two forts and with cannons mounted on the city's walls. Dampier reports that the Frenchman was acting on the strength of an old commission granted him by de Pouançay. De Grammont, like Paine, was using his old papers to give his activities the thinnest veneer of legitimacy. For the buccaneers, it was good enough.

J
UNE
26, 1680
L
A
G
UAIRA,
V
ENEZUELA

O
n the night of June 26, 1680, the buccaneers came ashore at La Guaira with a mere forty-seven men. The pirates were vastly outnumbered. Rather than attacking, they slipped unseen into the city. They infiltrated the garrison and managed to capture the 150 soldiers stationed there without raising an alarm. That morning the civilians woke as usual, only to discover that their city was occupied by buccaneers.

De Grammont and Paine—bold but not stupid—knew that their position was weak. They began to loot as fast as they could, knowing that more Spanish troops would soon be on the way. As successful as the buccaneers traditionally were in such raids, they knew that there was only so much that forty-seven men could do.

Nor were the 150 soldiers they captured the only troops in the area. A Spanish officer, Captain Juan de Laya Mujica, and his company managed to escape. The captain sent a warning to Caracas of the buc
caneer attack, and at the same time rallied what soldiers and militia he could from the area around La Guaira.

When word of the raid reached Caracas, the usual panic ensued. The inhabitants loaded valuables on wagons and sent them inland. At the same time, the governor, Francisco de Alberró, organized a large contingent of militia and marched them off toward the occupied port city.

By daylight, it became clear to the Spanish that they had been attacked by a very small band of filibusters. Captain Juan de Laya Mujica, apparently an active and responsible officer, was emboldened by this. He led his troops in a counterattack against the pirates.

In the face of this assault, knowing that Governor Alberró's forces, now numbering two thousand men, were marching for La Guaira, de Grammont and Paine decided it was time to go. Still, the Spaniards did not rout the pirates despite their fifty-to-one advantage in the area. De Grammont and the others fought an organized rearguard action, retreating to the harbor with booty and prisoners and then out to their waiting ships in an orderly fashion.

De Grammont (and most likely Paine) personally covered the retreat of the men, holding off the Spanish troops. Dampier reports, “This movement was executed with difficulty, and for two hours de Grammont with a handful of his bravest companions covered the embarkation from the assaults of the Spaniards.”
¹

Of the forty-seven men who attacked La Guaira, only eight or nine were lost, but de Grammont was nearly one of them. A lucky Spanish swordthrust severely wounded him in the neck, and the Chevalier barely escaped with his life. Despite the kidnapping of the governor of La Guaira and many other prisoners, the pirates' take was small, particularly considering the hazard involved. In less than twenty-four hours they had probably endured more desperate fighting than they had in six months at Maracaibo.

De Grammont and the rest proceeded to Las Aves, where the Frenchman intended to convalesce. In the meantime the Chevalier turned command of the small buccaneer squadron over to Paine.

While at Las Aves, de Grammont reported that on “the 2nd of August I left the command of the King's subjects to Capt. Pain
[sic]
with orders to conduct them to the coast [of French Hispaniola] and give an account of our actions to the governor….”
²
Just which monarch de Grammont thought them to be subjects of is not clear. Presumably the Sun King, Louis XIV, from whom their commissions
originated. Whether or not Louis was happy to have them as subjects is unknown.

A
N
I
LL
-F
ATED
E
XPEDITION

A year or so after the La Guaira raid we find Paine ranging the Spanish Main. In May, 1681, a number of captains came together at Springer's Key in the Samballoes Isles, near the coast of Panama, eager to cooperate in a joint raid. This was typical of the ad hoc nature of filibuster armadas. Present were ships and men of English, French, and Dutch extraction, most of whom had been “on the account” for years and many of whom had been among those flung up on the beach at Las Aves three years earlier.

Of the English and Dutch captains, there was Paine, with a ship of ten guns and carrying one hundred men; Captain John Coxon, similarly outfitted; and Paine's old consorts Wright and Yankey Willems.

Over the next decade, Yankey would become one of the foremost of the buccaneers and participate in nearly every major filibuster engagement in the region. For this expedition Yankey commanded what was essentially a very large sailing boat, called a
barcolongo,
carrying four small cannons and manned by a crew of sixty men, including Englishmen, Frenchmen, and fellow Dutchmen.

The French captains included a Captain Archemboe and Captains Tucker and Jean Rose. Little is known about them. Their crews numbered around 150 men, about half the size of the English force.

One of the political realities illustrated by this meeting was the fluid nature of English and French alliances. Despite on-again, off-again warfare for more than a century, the filibusters of the two nations could work together and even accept commissions from the others' government. What unified them was a universal hatred of the Spanish, and particularly of Spanish attempts to retain an iron grip on the riches of the Caribbean.

To this gathering of filibusters came another French captain named Tristian. Although his ship was undermanned and in poor condition, he had on board William Dampier, the great adventurer, filibuster, and author, fresh from the South Seas. Tristian had recently rescued Dampier and his shipmates from the nearby La Sound's Key after they
had abandoned their former captain in the Pacific and marched back over the Isthmus of Panama.

Dampier stayed with the buccaneers, and we are fortunate that he did and that he lived to write about it. Dampier provides us with a wonderful firsthand account of the organization of a buccaneer raid.

Paine's consort, Captain Wright, had been sent to the Panamanian coast to find a prisoner from whom they might gather intelligence. He returned with two prisoners and their canoe laden with flour. The captains assembled aboard Wright's ship and interrogated the prisoners as to the condition and strength of the city of Panama. Their plan was to march overland to the town, using the wild and often hostile San Blas Indians as guides.

The captains took under advisement the intelligence gathered from the prisoners and fell to discussing where they might mount an attack, whether Panama or elsewhere. Here again is classic pirate democracy in action. For seven or eight days they discussed their plans, meeting every day to try to find a mutually agreeable course of action.

The men at Springer's Key were very knowledgeable about the Spanish Main. As Dampier expressed it, “The privateers have an account of most towns within 20 leagues of the sea, on all the coasts from Trinidad Island down to La Vera Cruz: and are able to give a near guess to the strength of them….”
³

It was decided at last to mount a raid on a town lying on Carpenter's River. The river allowed the filibusters to attack the town in boats, thus avoiding the horrible and often fatal march though the Central American jungle required to reach Panama.

The pirates weighed anchor and set sail for the small, uninhabited island of San Andreas. They intended to fashion dugout canoes from the abundant cedar there for their attack on the river town, a most ambitious plan.

The English ships already assembled at Springer's Key were overmanned. Paine's ship of a mere ten guns could not have been very big, certainly not to ship one hundred men aboard. Dampier was forced to sail aboard the French captain Archemboe's vessel of eight guns, which was undermanned with just forty men.

Though they might be able to put aside political differences on the grand scale, the English and French were not so quick to set aside hard feelings on the personal level. The Englishman Dampier was none too happy about shipping with Frenchmen, nor was he overly impressed by the quality of seamanship aboard.

The first day out, the fleet kept company, but that night a hard gale blew from the northeast, and by the following night, the ships had lost contact with one another. Dampier was disgusted by his shipmates' feeble efforts to combat the storm. “Indeed we found no reason to dislike the captain; but his French seamen were the saddest creatures that ever I was among; for tho' we had bad weather that required many hands aloft, yet the biggest part of them never stirred out of their hammocks, but to eat or ease themselves.”
⁴

Despite the crew's relaxed, casual attitude toward seamanship, the vessel survived the storm and by the fourth day reached San Andreas. Of the ten vessels that had started out, only Wright's was there when they arrived, but Wright had managed to take a prize. It was a Spanish tartan, a small armed vessel the buccaneers had fought for an hour before taking. The tartan, as it turned out, belonged to a fleet of small men-of-war sortied specifically to rout out the pirates assembled in the Samballoes Isles, of whom word had reached Spanish authorities.

Dampier and his fellow South Sea adventurers saw the new prize as
an opportunity for them: “We that came over land out of the South Seas, being weary of living among the French, desired Captain Wright to fit up his prize the tartan and make a man-of-war of her for us….”
⁵
Wright, who did not share Dampier's dislike of the French, at first refused, and only relented when told that the South Sea men would build canoes and leave their company before they would sail with Archemboe again.

The men remained at San Andreas for ten days, waiting for the others to arrive, but only Captain Tucker turned up. At last, they left the island, concluding that the others must have been blown too far to leeward to claw their way back.

Searching for their companions, they eventually rendezvoused with Yankey Willems. Willems had met a fleet of Spanish armadillas, small men-of-war. The tartan that Dampier and the others insisted on hav
ing had been a part of this fleet. In the ensuing fight, Willems and his consorts had been scattered. And so, with their carefully laid and much debated plans now in ruin, the various filibuster captains went their separate ways, sailing off in pursuit of other ventures.

Captain Thomas Paine remained in the area of Boca del Toro in the northwest corner of Panama, where he had been blown by the gale that had scattered the fleet. Deciding that his ship could not go on without attention to the hull, he emptied the vessel and careened her on a convenient beach.

Unfortunately for Paine, he chose an area where the Indians had never made peace with the white men, nor had they been beaten down by force. Dampier explained, “The Indians here have no commerce with the Spaniards; but are very barbarous and will not be dealt with.”
⁶
One night, while some of Paine's men slept in a tent ashore with their weapons at their sides, a band of Indians quietly decapitated three or four of them and slipped back into the jungle. All in all, it had not been a good voyage for Paine.

With the storms and the armadillas and the leaking hulls and the deadly natives, it is little wonder that by October 1682, Thomas Paine was tired of piracy. He decided that a more prudent course might be to turn pirate hunter, and for that work he applied to Sir Thomas Lynch, the royal governor of Jamaica, through an intermediary named Clarke.

In November 1682, Lynch wrote to the secretary of the Council of Trade and Plantations Sir Leoline Jenkins, informing the secretary that “one Captain Clarke, a very honest useful man, solicited me about one Payn
[sic]
in a barque with eighty men. He told me Payn had never done the least harm to any, and if I would allow him to come in, he would engage to bring in or destroy these pirates.”
⁷

Lynch seems to contradict himself when he claims that the honest Captain Clarke assured him that Paine “had never done the least harm to any” yet acknowledges that he needs the governor's permission to “come in.” Perhaps “the least harm to any” in this sense meant any Englishmen or their allies.

Lynch further reveals his own understanding of Paine's former trade when he goes on to say, “I thought this likely and advantageous from creating division among the pirates so I accepted the offer and hope
per fas aut nefas
⁸
to put down these destructive rogues.” Clearly Lynch believed in the old saying “Set a thief to catch a thief.” He knew full
well that Paine was a pirate and that other pirates might be intimidated by having one of their own coming after them.

In the fall of 1682, after at least three years of piracy, Thomas Paine accepted the governor's commission and set about the job of pirate hunter, intending to live an honest life and forswear piracy forever.

Or so it seemed….