Pirate Hunters: Treasure, Obsession, and the Search for a Legendary Pirate Ship (16 page)

Mattera could have listened to Marx’s stories all day, but he’d come to talk about pirates, and he pressed Marx on the subject. Marx, in fact, had mentioned Bannister and the
Golden Fleece
briefly in one of his books, and now Mattera wanted to know more.

“There’s no map or secret instructions for finding the
Golden Fleece
,” Marx said. “If you’re going to get her, you’ve gotta understand what these guys were doing. You gotta know the pirates.”

Marx himself had come to learn a lot about piracy when, in 1964, he fulfilled a childhood dream by salvaging the sunken city of Port Royal, Jamaica, the fabled pirate haven lost in an earthquake in 1692. It was in Port Royal that Bannister had stolen his own ship and turned pirate. It was from Port Royal that the manhunt for him had been directed.

“Pirates from all over the world went to Port Royal,” Marx said.
“Big things were happening there. Your guy was part of all that. He was there in its heyday. That’s gotta tell you something.”

Mattera spent the rest of the afternoon talking to Marx, absorbing his stories. In late afternoon, the men went to another of Marx’s offices in town, where the old treasure hunter showed photographs from his career. By the time they left, it was near dark, but Marx was still going strong as ever, limping from gout as they made their way to the car, still firing off profanity-pocked stories of treasure derring-do. It was clear to Mattera that the man would never retire—that treasure was not something Marx did but rather something he was. Like William Phips in the late 1600s, Marx seemed to exist on confidence—on an inborn instinct to take rather than ask from the sea. Retire? And do what, take a Perillo bus tour of Europe? Get an early-bird price on a meal? In the end, Mattera thought, it didn’t matter if guys like Marx got too old to actually find the stuff; they weren’t really in it for the treasure. In the end, they seemed in it to set sail, to search for things others didn’t dare look for, to be “Sir Robert” instead of Bob.

M
ATTERA HAD ONE MORE
appointment to keep. In ways, he looked forward to this one most of all.

Carl Fismer had a reputation for being a maestro in a business full of great storytellers. He was also known for his honesty and integrity; as with Haskins, his close friend, it had probably cost him several fortunes. He’d worked on some important wrecks, including
Concepción.
And he’d worked in Samaná Bay. Many said that “Fizz” knew even more about human nature than about treasure.

Generations of salvors knew Fizz’s story. He’d worked for General Motors in Cincinnati but despised it; every day seemed the same to him there. He moved to Florida in 1968, after his wife, who’d been his high school sweetheart, was killed in an automobile accident. She was just twenty-six. Punching the clock didn’t feel right to Fizz after that. He gathered his two young children, packed his car, and drove south.

In Sarasota, he joined the fire department, the closest thing he could find to a paying adventure. Practicing body recovery on a fireboat, he came across a shipwreck, a small freighter busted open and showing its copper pipes. Fizz and the other firemen salvaged what they could. In the end, the haul netted the men a total of $6.40, but the idea that he could take money from water inspired Fizz, and from that day he was hooked.

For months, he visited every library and bookstore within a day’s drive of Sarasota, reading everything he could on Spanish galleons and sunken treasure. He built his own magnetometer, a hodgepodge of transistors and wires that turned out to be better at picking up local radio stations than metal, but it just made him hungrier still. For six years, he searched the waters near Sarasota but found almost nothing. Only then, at age thirty-six, did he drive to the Keys, not to go looking for treasure, but to find the man who had practically invented the hunt.

Art McKee was considered the grandfather of American treasure hunting. He’d found several Spanish galleons in Florida waters in the 1940s, part of the fabled 1733 Fleet, and had been featured in
Life
magazine, on
The Dave Garroway Show
, and in newspapers, magazines, and newsreels. Before McKee, few in America knew that real-life treasure hunters existed. McKee had built a treasure museum next to his house in Islamorada, and that’s where Fizz found him, riding on a lawn mower. By now, McKee was in his sixties.

“I want to be a treasure hunter,” Fizz told him, “and I’m willing to work for free to learn the business.”

“I bet you’re a diver,” McKee said.

“Yes, sir.”

“What else can you do? Are you a boat captain? A mechanic? Have medical training? Can you cook?”

“No, none of that.”

“Everyone’s a diver. Got too many of those.”

Fizz got into his car and drove back to Sarasota, where he enrolled in an emergency medical technician course, earned his boat captain’s
license, learned to work on small engines, and volunteered to cook for fifteen firemen a day at the firehouse. Two years later, he drove back to Islamorada, where he found McKee, again, on the lawn mower.

“I’m Carl Fismer. I want to be a treasure hunter and I’m willing to work for free to learn the business.”

“I bet you’re a diver.”

“Yes, sir.”

“What else can you do?”

“I’m a boat captain, I fix small engines, I’m a state-certified paramedic, and I cook. Meatloaf is my specialty.”

“Good. You’re on my next trip.”

And with that, Fizz began to learn from the master. It was the start of a career that would take him on adventures across the world.

Mattera found Fizz’s address in Tavernier, a small town about seven miles south of Key Largo, and knocked at the door of a small house beside a winding canal. A stocky, tanned, and handsome sixty-eight-year-old man answered the door. He sported a neatly trimmed gray beard, Hawaiian shirt, khaki shorts and deck shoes, and a heavy silver coin around his neck.

“Come on in and let’s talk shipwrecks.”

Mattera looked around. On every shelf, atop the television, behind the coffeemaker, he saw shipwreck artifacts. On the TV stand, he spotted a silver coin, its date clearly marked—1639.

“That’s the second-best coin I ever found,” said Fizz.

“I’m guessing the best one is around your neck.”

“You guess good.”

Fizz knew Mattera wanted to discuss pirates, so they sat at the kitchen table, where Fizz said the best stories got told.

“Let me hear what you got,” Fizz said.

And Mattera told him the story—about Bannister and the
Golden Fleece
, about searching Samaná Bay with Chatterton, about doing exhaustive research in libraries, archives, antiquarian bookstores, and rare-map dealers.

“I’m lost, Fizz. I don’t know what to do next.”

Fizz got Mattera a beer.

“What are you best at, John?”

“What do you mean?”

“What do you love doing when you’re looking for a wreck? Is it the survey work? Diving? Digging? What gets you?”

“It’s the history. The research.”

“Then you need to keep doing that.”

But Mattera had already done months of research and read everything he could find, and he told Fizz so. That’s when Fizz told him a story about Jack Haskins.

Like many treasure hunters in the late 1960s, Haskins had been working to find the
Atocha
, a Spanish galleon sunk off the Florida Keys in 1622. For centuries, salvors believed the ship to be lost off the village of Islamorada, in the central Florida Keys, but no one could find a trace of her there. So Haskins, a historian in his heart, went to Seville.

He threw himself into the stacks there, unearthing thousands of pages of documents, many of which hadn’t been handled since the seventeenth century. He spent years going through the papers but never found anything that helped further the search.

“That’s when most guys would have given up,” said Fizz. “But not Jack.”

Haskins kept reading, even the most obscure papers—ones that didn’t even seem worth the price of a photocopy in Seville. One day, he ran across a single sentence buried in one of those thousands of papers. It mentioned a place called Marquesas Keys, off Key West, about eighty miles from where most treasure hunters in search of the
Atocha
were working at the time. Haskins shared that information—it was his nature to share—and it helped lead treasure hunter (and former chicken rancher) Mel Fisher to the wreck. Soon, the
Atocha
became the most famous treasure ship of all time.

“She’s been worth half a billion so far,” Fizz said. “Jack got almost
nothing, but that’s another story. One of the richest treasure wrecks ever was found because he never gave up on those papers.”

The first fishing boats began returning to dock, so the men went out on Fizz’s screened porch to watch them come in. They talked for hours, Fizz telling stories from a lifetime in the business, and in the cracks and unspoken spaces Mattera heard subtext, and this is what he took Fizz to be saying:

Treasure shows who you really are. It strips away every façade you’ve constructed, every story you believe about yourself, and reveals the real you. If you are a miserable, lying, greedy, worthless fuck, treasure will tell you that. If you are a good and decent person, treasure will tell you that, too. And you needn’t find a single coin to know. It’s enough to get close to treasure, to believe it within reach, and you’ll have your answer, but once it happens it can’t be lied about and it can’t be bullshitted away. For that reason, treasure is crisis, because what you get in the end is yourself.

When the men finally got up to say good-bye, Mattera asked about the coin on Fizz’s necklace. Fizz pulled it from his shirt. It was an eight escudo from
Concepción
, a wreck he loved because it had been lost twice to history but never abandoned.

Driving over long bridges back to his hotel, Mattera watched the Keys disappear behind him, local joints such as Craig’s Restaurant and Doc’s Diner giving way to Starbucks and Denny’s. His time with the oracles had come to an end, and though none of the men could show him to Bannister’s wreck, each had pointed him in the same direction, to history, and they told him not to let go.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

THE GOLDEN AGE

A
weathered ship sails through the Caribbean in the late seventeenth century, chicken coops and empty barrels cluttered about her decks, a handful of rough-hewn crewmen scrubbing, painting, and unwinding rolls of line. Aloft in the masts, a lone sailor scans the seas, looking for others.

Late in the day, the lookout spots the white sails of a smaller vessel in the distance, and soon, he can make out her flag—English. He calls for his captain, who trains his looking glass. He can see that she carries six cannons, typical of a merchant vessel, but he is even more interested in whether she rides high or low on the water. This one rides very low, meaning she is full of cargo, and to this captain, that is what matters.

The captain issues orders and his crew snaps into action. Two of the men open a chest containing a collection of flags from around the world, fish out the English Red Ensign, and hoist it to the top of their mast. Three others dress in women’s clothing and begin sauntering around the bow. Below decks, 130 men arm themselves with weapons and explosives. At the helm, the captain orders his ship to set course, slowly, for the merchant ship in the distance.

By now, the merchant ship captain is looking back through his own telescope. He is excited to see the red English flag in the distance.
This is his forty-man crew’s chance to trade supplies, exchange stories, and share drinks with fellow countrymen. But he is wary, too. He is carrying a valuable cargo of silver, sugar, and indigo, and knows that pirates hunt in these shipping lanes.

So the merchant captain keeps watching the English vessel. When the two ships close to within five hundred yards, the women on board the larger vessel throw off their clothes and start running, only they are not running like women, and in a moment they muscle a wood-colored tarp off the sides of their ship, revealing an additional twenty-four cannons. Dozens of men rush up from the decks of the larger ship, some to guard posts, others to masts, still others to the stern, and in a sudden and screaming ballet they trim sails so that the large ship now knifes through the sea, making white foam as she hurtles toward the smaller merchant ship.

The merchant captain yells for his crew. And then he sees what he has spent his career dreading: the onrushing ship lowers its English flag and hoists a new one, bloodred and emblazoned with an hourglass. This is a pirate flag. The hourglass makes a warning
—if you resist
,
your remaining time on earth will be short. And bloody.

The merchant captain orders his men to their guns. Before they can act, the pirates fire a cannon. The seas explode, a thunder so loud it seems to collapse the skies, and out of a billowing cloud of gray smoke a six-pound black iron ball screams over the bow of the merchant ship, a preview of what is to come if they fail to surrender. The smell of burning sulfur fills the air.

It takes minutes for the smoke to clear, but when it does the pirate ship is just three hundred yards away and closing fast. Now the merchant captain can see pirates streaking up from the holds, twenty at a time, until more than a hundred line the decks, screaming and waving swords and firing muskets into the sky.

The merchant captain’s instinct is to flee, but he is heavy with cargo and slow. Still, if he could run for just a few hours he might slip away under cover of night; there was always hope in the night. He orders
his crew to speed away, to get the ship moving for all she’s worth, but no matter how fast she sails the pirate ship stays with her, gaining with every maneuver. Now just two hundred yards away, the pirate captain finally shows himself, stepping onto his bow dressed in gray breeches and tan waistcoat, a heavy gold chain around his neck. Calling into a speaking tube, he demands that the merchant captain surrender or face the fires of hell.

The merchant captain now must decide whether to fight. A single well-placed shot from one of his cannons could stop the pirates. Two might destroy them. But if he fails, he knows how the rest would unfold; he has heard accounts of pirate attacks since boyhood.

The pirates would fire their cannons at his masts in order to disable, but not ruin, his ship and her cargo. They would strafe his decks with musket fire, looking to kill and maim as many crew as possible. As they drew closer, they would hurl shrapnel-filled cast-iron hand grenades, fire-starting bombs, and flaming stinkpots (a rancid concoction of rotting animal flesh, tar and pitch, and other putrid ingredients). Some of these fireworks would kill or disable his crew; others would blanket his ship in smoke.

When the pirates got just a few yards away, they would use grappling hooks, swords, axes, pikes, and pistols to fight off defenders and pull the ships close. Swarming onto the merchant ship, they would hack and shoot, slash and bite anyone who resisted them. Even if the merchant captain and his crew fought well, it usually ended badly for captains who chose to fight pirates.

And that was if the captain was lucky enough to die in the fight.

If he survived, the pirates might boil him alive, cut out and eat his still-beating heart, pull out his tongue, crush his skull until his eyeballs disgorged, hang him by his genitalia, throw dice for the privilege of chopping off his head. If a merchant captain surrendered peacefully, however, the pirates might set him and his crew free, invite them to join their crew, even return the ship. Nothing, however, was guaranteed, which was the pirates’ most terrifying quality of all.

“Answer, dogs!” the pirate captain orders, his men training their cannons and muskets on the merchant ship.

The merchant captain has no more time for thought. By surrendering, he places his own life, and the lives of his crew, in the hands of madmen. But he also can count. The pirates outnumber him three to one. They have thirty cannons; he has six. He remembers the stories he heard growing up. So, as do most merchant captains in his position, he puts down his guns and surrenders.

The pirates board, and the merchant captain and his crew are made prisoner, chained together on the deck. None is surprised when the pirates relieve them of their clothing and valuables, then plunder the ship of its cargo. But the crew is startled to hear the pirate captain address them directly.

“Speak up plain, lads. What treatment from your captain have ye?”

For a time, the merchant crew stays silent. Then, one by one, they begin to tell the pirates about their captain. When they finish, the pirate captain walks up to his counterpart.

“And so sir,” he says, “the same shall happen to you….”

“J
OHN
?”

Mattera’s heart pounded at the sound of his name. Ready to meet his own fate, he looked up to face the pirate captain. Instead, he saw Carolina, bleary-eyed and in her negligee.

“It’s two in the morning,” she said.

“I’m researching. Is it really that late?”

“Yes, really. Can you make room for me?”

Sitting cross-legged on the dining room floor of his Santo Domingo apartment, Mattera was surrounded on all sides by piles of books and papers on pirates. It had been a week since his trip to see the oracles in Florida, and he’d done little but study pirate history since then.

“Come here, my pirate princess,” he said.

He pushed aside a pile of books and pulled Carolina into his circle. He described the pirate attack he’d just envisioned, pieced together from these resources. He’d known tough guys in his life, some of them legends, but few came close to these men.

Even pirates, Carolina said, needed sleep, so she insisted that Mattera hang it up for the night. Since he’d begun this phase of his research, he’d spent every evening working past midnight.

Mattera took a quick shower, brushed his teeth, and put on his boxer shorts and T-shirt. In bed, he kissed Carolina good night and waited for sleep.

And waited.

He turned onto his side and adjusted his pillow. He flipped onto his other side and pushed down a sheet. Maybe he needed a drink of water—

“John?” Carolina said, “I was wondering…if you’re not too tired to talk…what’s so interesting about these pirates?”

Mattera smiled and sat up in the bed.

“You really want to know?”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“Then listen to this.”

P
IRATES WERE BORN IN
ancient times, on the day men first loaded cargo onto ships—or maybe the day before. They came from Greece and Rome, China and North Africa, and almost every other country on the map—bandits of a thousand eras who sailed with a single purpose: to steal everything they could from ships too lightly defended, or too terrified, to fight.

The pirates Mattera cared about came from a special time and place. They hunted prey on the Caribbean and the Atlantic from the mid-seventeenth century to the early eighteenth century, the Golden Age of Piracy. It was these men who swashbuckled and plundered in the books and movies of generations, and who haunted and thrilled
the dreams of youngsters. It was these men whom Bannister commanded.

They flourished for much of the seventeenth century, taking prizes and striking terror into the hearts of merchant seamen, especially the Spanish, who controlled much of the trade and shipping in the Caribbean and Atlantic. Many countries considered the pirates to be the “scourge of mankind.” England loved them. By harassing Spanish ships, pirates made room for English trade and expansion. In the bargain, pirate ships took hard and violent men off the streets and put them to work, then brought back stolen goods to English markets and sold them on the cheap. Pirates spent handsomely to outfit their ships, and paid generous bribes to English officials. They drained their purses in port like men just days away from the gallows, which many of them were. If England shook her fist at these rogues, she did so with fingers crossed, bulging coffers, and an eye toward expanding her empire.

Many of the pirates got rich. If Spanish seamen happened to be terrorized or killed in the bargain, few in England seemed heartbroken about that.

And the pirates could bring the terror. In a letter to the secretary of state, one English witness wrote: “It is a common thing among the privateers…to cut a man in pieces, first some flesh, then a hand, an arm, a leg, sometimes tying a cord about his head, and with a stick twisting it until the eyes shoot out, which is called woolding.”

Another described the methods of a notorious French pirate: “L’Ollonais grew outrageously passionate; insomuch that he drew his cutlass, and with it cut open the breast of one of those poor Spanish, and pulling out his heart with his sacrilegious hands, began to bite and gnaw it with his teeth, like a ravenous wolf, saying to the rest: I will serve you all alike, if you show me not another way.”

The years following the English conquest of Jamaica were glorious for pirates and privateers, who preyed almost at will on Spanish shipping. Even Spanish towns weren’t safe from these marauders, who
were capable of assembling forces of a thousand or more and invading places thought to be impregnable. Often, the Spanish could do little but surrender and pray for mercy. In Port Royal, gold and silver spilled out of the taverns and brothels onto the streets. The Golden Age of Piracy had dawned.

And with it came great captains, men of charisma and vision who schemed on the grandest scales. None dreamed bigger, or led more men, than Welshman Henry Morgan, who launched a series of great invasions against the Spanish. In just four years, he led rough and wild crews, sometimes by the thousands, on raids against Porto Bello, Maracaibo, and, in one of the great military triumphs of the age, Panama. For this, he became exceedingly wealthy, and a hero in both Port Royal and England.

Stories of Morgan’s ruthlessness were legion. One witness reported that, when a prisoner refused to cooperate, Morgan’s men:

strappado’d him until both his arms were entirely dislocated, then knotted a cord so tight round the forehead that his eyes bulged out, big as eggs. Since he still would not admit where the coffer was, they hung him up by his male parts, while one struck him, another sliced off his nose, yet another an ear, and another scorched him with fire—tortures as barbarous as man can devise. At last, when the wretch could no longer speak and they could think of no new torments, they let a Negro stab him to death with a lance.

When another man refused to talk, “they tied long cords to his thumbs and his big toes and spreadeagled him to four stakes. Then, four of them came and beat on the cords with their sticks, making his body jerk and shudder and stretching his sinews. Still not satisfied, they put a stone weighing at least two hundredweight on his loins and lit a fire of palm leaves under him, burning his face and setting his hair alight.”

For every person who witnessed such horrors, a thousand more heard about them. Reputation became the pirate’s sharpest sword.

For a time, it seemed as if the glory years for pirates might last forever. By 1670, however, new economic winds were blowing in the Caribbean and Atlantic. Legitimate trade had become increasingly profitable to the merchant and ruling classes. Uncertainty on the high seas and in the shipping lanes was bad for business, and was putting the fortunes of powerful merchants, and even England herself, at risk. And there were no greater purveyors of uncertainty at sea than the pirates and privateers.

In 1670, England and Spain signed the Treaty of Madrid. Among other things, it called for England to condemn piracy—no more privateer licenses, no more safe havens, no more markets for stolen Spanish goods. In return, Spain made concessions to English trade and shipping.

The treaty provided England with new commercial opportunities, some big enough to grow an empire. But they required peaceful and predictable seas. English officials shook fists and swore vows to eradicate the pirates, but through the 1670s, little meaningful action was taken. Pirates still had deep roots in the Caribbean, and continued to supply locals with cheap goods, contraband, and a steady flow of income. To great swaths of the population, especially the commoners, the pirates remained the good guys.