Pirate Hunters: Treasure, Obsession, and the Search for a Legendary Pirate Ship (22 page)

“I’m drowning again,” he said. “We’re a week away from getting the
Golden Fleece.
But it’s not happening. I’m inches from the surface but I can’t pull the hook out.”

A
FEW WEEKS LATER
, in mid-February 2009, Chatterton and Mattera agreed that they needed to talk. Both were headed back to the Dominican Republic, so they made a date for lunch the next week.

In Samaná, they set out for a restaurant about fifteen kilometers down the road. Neither said much as Chatterton drove the white pickup truck through a street crowded with crooked houses, chicken
coops, and hanging laundry. Every block or so, he weaved around an open manhole, the cover stolen and sold for scrap.

From out of nowhere, a man riding a motorcycle pulled in front of the truck and began waving.

“Look at this guy,” Chatterton said. “He’s pissed.”

“What did you do to him?” Mattera asked.

“Nothing.”

“You didn’t cut him off? Run over some chickens? Flip him the finger?”

“Nothing.”

The agitated rider swerved back and forth a few more times.

“John, he’s got a gun,” Chatterton said.

Mattera looked over. He could see the weapon, a nickel-plated Beretta 92. Expensive.

To Mattera, all this was bad news. Either the man was emotionally disturbed, or he was looking to rob two gringos who’d wandered out too far in the country. Drug smugglers lived in these parts, hidden in the hills. They would kill two rich-looking Americans without blinking.

Mattera unholstered his Glock nine millimeter.

“Keep him in front of us,” Mattera said. “Don’t pass him or let him get to our flanks.”

The biker began flailing his gun, screaming obscenities and demanding that Chatterton pass, but Chatterton wouldn’t do it. The man slowed his bike to twenty miles per hour, then fifteen, bobbing and weaving, trying to slip behind the truck, but Chatterton slid with him, refusing the flank. It occurred now to Chatterton to stop, but he didn’t know who else might be lying in wait; in a moving truck, at least they had three thousand pounds of momentum.

The biker slowed to five miles per hour.

“Watch his hands,” Mattera said.

Driving only fast enough to keep the bike upright, the man now waved his pistol over his left shoulder, toward the truck. People crowded the street to take in the spectacle. Mattera cracked open his
passenger door and wedged his foot in the space, then pointed his Glock at the biker’s torso.

“Stay behind him. I’ve got him framed.”

“Give the word and I run him over,” Chatterton said.

Women screamed, children ran, barking dogs descended as the motorcycle inched forward at just two or three miles per hour, the white truck just ten yards behind, guns drawn on both sides, the biker and Mattera screaming at each other in Spanish, a thousand obscenities as the men continued their crawl. Mattera didn’t want to shoot, especially near a crowd, but the guy was giving him less choice with each passing moment.

“Drop the gun now!” Chatterton yelled, but the man kept waving his weapon and screaming.

Mattera’s finger flexed alongside the trigger guard.

“If he points it at us I’m going to drop him,” said Mattera.

“I’ll hit the gas and finish him,” Chatterton said.

The motorcycle stopped. Slowly, the man got off the bike and stepped forward. This was Mattera’s best chance, but it would only be there for a fraction of a second. He carried baggage from things he’d done in his life, just because killing was justified didn’t mean it was easy to live with, he had the tactical advantage here, the protection of his truck, and the enemy in front of him, and how would they explain this to police, he’d seen guys die for thinking things over too long, and now Chatterton revved the engine.

“Pon tus malditas manos en tu cabeza!”
Mattera yelled. Put your fucking hands on your head!

Slowly, the man tucked the gun into the back of his pants. Spinning around, he ran back to his bike, gave a half salute, then drove off the road and up into the mountains, dirt and dust flying from his wheels. A moment later, he had disappeared.

For a minute Chatterton and Mattera drove in silence. Then, one of them said, “Man, we were good,” and the other said, “Hell, yeah, we were.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

THE BATTLE

I
n a booth at the restaurant, the men replayed their showdown with the motorcycle desperado. They’d intended to use the time to address the obvious—that things weren’t working out for them—but neither had the heart to think about quitting on the other on a day when they’d had an adventure like this.

The partners didn’t see each other for several days after that. Then Chatterton called and told Mattera it was time to talk. They met at the villa and sat on the veranda, holding sweating cans of diet soda, each waiting for the other to quit.

“Give me three days,” Mattera said. “I have one more idea.”

The men looked over the channel toward Cayo Vigia.

“I thought we might be done,” Chatterton said.

“We might be,” Mattera replied. “But not yet.”

A few days later, Mattera was on a flight bound for New York. On airplane tray tables, he usually balanced three or four books, a notebook and pens, and a snack. This time, he just looked out the window, nothing in front of him, watching the ocean pass below.

I
N
M
ANHATTAN
, M
ATTERA PUSHED
into the stacks of the New York Public Library on Forty-Second Street, pulling out as many volumes
on seventeenth-century naval warfare and weapons as he could find. None made mention of the Royal Navy’s engagement with Bannister, but if taken together, they could be assembled into a picture of the battle, an accounting that put Mattera into the throat of the fight. He took notes on it all, searching for clues in the rubble.

By his previous research, Mattera already knew how things started. Acting on orders from the governor of Jamaica, two Royal Navy frigates, the
Falcon
and the
Drake
, sailed into Samaná Bay to catch the pirate captain Joseph Bannister and destroy the
Golden Fleece.
The navy captains expected to find the ship on the careen—being cleaned of barnacles and other sea growth—as she lay beached on her side at an island.

Mattera had always believed the advantage to lie with the navy. The frigates could carry fifty-eight cannons between them (the
Falcon
forty-two, the
Drake
sixteen), while Bannister had perhaps thirty. But it wasn’t until Mattera opened his books that he began to understand the extent of the navy’s upper hand.

The frigates were designed to be nimble and quick, lie low in the water, and carry heavy guns. They also happened to be beautiful, with sleek and muscled lines, the hunting dogs of the English fleet. The largest of them, like the
Falcon
, was powerful enough to fight in the line among England’s mightiest warships. Between them, the
Falcon
and the
Drake
carried about 250 men, at least double the size of Bannister’s crew. In addition to agility and speed, these three-masted frigates cut imposing figures. The
Falcon
was about 130 feet long, the
Drake
about 125, massive ships for a Caribbean deployment. The
Golden Fleece
, at a length of perhaps 100 feet, was a baby by comparison. By size alone, the frigates carried a statement of intent from the governor of Jamaica: The
Golden Fleece
was going to be destroyed, and Bannister was going to die.

But the advantage only began with the ships. While pirates aboard the
Golden Fleece
probably had rare occasion to fire their cannons, gunners aboard the frigates practiced constantly. The navy captains,
Charles Talbot of the
Falcon
and Thomas Spragge of the
Drake
, were military commanders trained in the art of war. Bannister, by contrast, had been a merchant captain trained in the art of moving hides and dried meat. In terms of provisions, weapons, and ammunition, the navy ships were much better supplied. Best of all for the frigates, Bannister was pinned down on an island. Pirates often were best at running, but there was nowhere for Bannister to go.

Mattera, however, had thought enough about tactics and conflict during his career in security to know that the pirates had advantages of their own. Bannister had placed two cannon batteries on the island—one of ten guns and the other of six—and no doubt had hidden them behind trees and in bunkers of logs or mud or sand, making it difficult for the navy to see his men or hit his guns. They would be firing their weapons from an elevated position on land, not the pitching and rolling decks of a ship. The pirates would be fighting for their lives, always a strong motivator. Most of all, they were being led by Joseph Bannister, a man who’d already proved he could pull off the impossible by cheating the hangman and restealing his ship at Port Royal.

Delving further into the books on his table, Mattera could see how the battle must have unfolded. The frigates would have sailed into Samaná Bay on the prevailing wind, hugging the peninsula along the northern shore, the only area deep enough and sufficiently free of reefs to allow safe passage for ships so large. With a stiff wind, they might have made nine or ten knots (ten or eleven miles per hour), their Red Ensigns flying in the breeze at the sterns, the Union Jack (like the modern British flag, but without the red Irish diagonal stripe) hoisted on the bowsprit over the bow.

Entering the channel near Cayo Vigia, where Chatterton and Mattera believed the engagement occurred, the frigates would have been prepared for action, their gun decks cleared of tables, hammocks, and other tools of life at sea. At midafternoon, they would have been less than a mile from the
Golden Fleece
but still wouldn’t have seen her.
Tucked into a crook in the island, the pirate ship was invisible to all but those who came close enough to be ambushed.

By now, pirate lookouts would have sounded the alarm and Bannister would have ordered gunners to their stations. Some of them manned cannons, others muskets. The only question was when to fire on the navy ships.

The frigates drew closer, to within a quarter mile of the
Golden Fleece.
At this point, it was unlikely that Bannister had gotten his ship off the careen and back into the water, but it would have been too late to matter either way. Sailing into the channel, navy lookouts would have spotted the pirates through their telescopes. And the pirates would have known they’d been seen.

It was impossible for Mattera to know exactly what happened next. If he were Bannister—and he knew they thought alike—he would have fired on the frigates at this point, aiming for their bows, which were less well protected than their sides. Whether Bannister did this or, rather, allowed the frigates to move in closer to give his gun crews a better shot, one thing was certain: The two sides were no more than five hundred yards from each other, and the distance was closing fast.

Now, the navy captains had to decide how close to get to the pirates before they committed to fight. There was risk and reward no matter which way they played it.

Cannons were not accurate in the 1680s, especially at distances of more than a few hundred yards. Most often, they didn’t need to be; warring ships of the age commonly battered each other from pointblank range, which might be as close as fifty feet. Sometimes, they didn’t fire until they saw the buckles on the enemy’s shoes. And that was not just an expression.

Shooting cannons at a distance was especially difficult. Gunpowder was inconsistent in both quality and quantity from shot to shot, which affected the speed at which the ball left the muzzle, and therefore the gunner’s ability to fire with precision. Cannonballs were made
about a quarter-inch smaller than the diameter of the bore, to assure that they didn’t jam during discharge and blow up the gun. That meant the ball bounced off the sides of the bore while being fired, and flew out at some small angle—not a severe one, but often enough to make it hook or slice like a golf ball, and almost impossible to put on a bull’s-eye.

When cannonballs did find their targets, they could cause devastating damage. Weighing at least six pounds, and often much more, they could tear through the thick hulls and masts of enemy ships, sending huge wood splinters flying into anything, and anyone, nearby. Mattera was surprised to learn that the secondary impact from splinters was the cause of most human casualties from naval cannon fire. Slower flying cannonballs often did the most damage because they didn’t penetrate as cleanly through wood, which meant cannons fired from a distance might be the deadliest of them all.

To Mattera, it was clear that the navy captains chose to fight up close. According to records, they’d been hit by musket fire; that wouldn’t have happened if the frigates had been more than about 150 yards from the island. But that was the outer range of effective musket fire. When Mattera envisioned the start of the battle, he saw the two sides even closer than that.

Closing in on the
Golden Fleece
at the island, the frigates would have turned sideways—broadside—to fire. Most of their cannons were positioned along the ships’ sides, and while this made them a bigger target when fighting, it also allowed them to deliver maximum fire. This is how navies were built to do battle in the Age of Sail—broadside to broadside—a brutal and close-up affair.

Mattera knew from the records that Bannister fired first. But it wouldn’t have taken long for the gunners aboard the frigates to throw open the ships’ shuttered gun ports and bring their guns to bear. Operating cannons was a muscular and dangerous business. Lives depended on which side could do it best.

Most cannons of the day were made of cast iron, and fired round
iron balls. Many guns were named for the size of their shot; hence, a cannon that fired a twelve-pound ball was called, simply, a “twelve pounder.” The
Falcon
carried twelve pounders, six pounders, and a few “sakers” (cannons that fired balls weighing five and a quarter pounds). The
Drake
was more lightly armed, having several sakers and some three pounders. Bannister likely had some of them all (he would have carried several as a merchant captain, and no doubt had been stealing more since he turned pirate). Whatever the caliber, the weapons could inflict devastating damage to enemy ships and personnel. It was the job of each cannon crew—often comprising three or four men—to make sure its own gun delivered.

Mattera hardly could imagine a better showdown than the one between the navy and pirate gunners. The navy seamen were better trained, but the pirates had the high ground, and didn’t have to fire from a moving ship.

On board the frigates, boys as young as ten ran gunpowder from dry holds belowdecks up to the gunners. Most often, the powder was contained in a sausage-shaped canvas bag known as the cartridge, which was loaded into the bore of the cannon. The size of the cartridge depended on the size of the ball to be fired; usually, the gunpowder weighed a little more than half what the cannonball did. (A twelve pounder, for example, would require about seven pounds of gunpowder.) Wadding, made from old rope or canvas, was pushed in after the powder, then shoved down to the breach (rear) along with the cartridge by a long piece of wood called a rammer. Next, the cannonball was loaded, followed by more wadding and ramming.

Now the gun captain took center stage. Careful not to cause sparks, he pushed an iron poker into the cannon’s vent (a small exhaust hole near the breach), puncturing the gunpowder cartridge inside. Then, using a much finer gunpowder, known as serpentine, he filled the vent to the top. Only then was the weapon ready to fire.

Pulling on thick ropes attached to the gun’s wheeled carriage, the navy crew muscled the cannon forward until its barrel protruded out
of its port. Now, despite the pitch and roll of the ship, despite the concussion of other cannons, despite taking enemy fire, the gun crew aimed as best they could. All that remained was for the gun captain to step forward with his linstock (a long pole with a smoldering match at the end) and put it to the touchhole, and the weapon would fire. If ever there was a time to pray, it was now.

A cannon, even loaded properly, could explode on firing, killing anyone in the vicinity. Backblasts could burn, deafen, or concuss nearby crewmen. Open gun ports made gunners more vulnerable to enemy cannon fire. Even if perfectly fired, a three-thousand-pound cannon’s violent recoil could crush a slow-footed crewman who failed to get out of its way.

Moving the match to the touchhole, the gun captain ignited the serpentine powder. A moment later, the world thundered as a black ball, yellow flame, and gray-white smoke shot from the cannon’s mouth, and the gun flew back in protest, held down only by ropes tied to the ship’s inner hull. On the island, pirates with good eyes might see the cannonball streaking at more than seven hundred miles per hour toward the
Golden Fleece
—or toward themselves.

At the same time, shooters on both sides loaded their muskets (a process similar to loading the cannons, complete with wadding and rammers) and took aim at their targets. The effective range of these long-barreled guns was little more than one hundred yards, but no one was looking for bull’s-eyes. Instead, they would have fired in volley, sending dozens of shots at once in the general direction of the enemy. Just one heavy lead ball could tear off a man’s arm. Dozens raining down from the sky could test even the bravest man’s courage.

The battle was on. To destroy the
Golden Fleece
and the pirates’ gun emplacements, the navy gunners likely fired classic round cannonballs. Against people, however, they might have fired any number of nasty variants, including chain shot (two balls, or half balls, connected by chain), bar shot (similar to chain shot, but connected by a bar), and canister shot (metal cans of musket balls or rocks that sprayed
shrapnel). Returning fire, the pirates probably used round cannonballs aimed at the frigates’ hulls and masts.

By now, the navy warships were likely anchored at both ends to keep them steady and fighting near to each other, bringing the maximum amount of firepower to bear on Bannister and his crew. It was rare, during the Age of Sail, for ships to fire full broadsides all at once because it strained the timbers of the vessel. But both the
Falcon
and the
Drake
likely fired several of their guns together, pummeling the island and whatever targets they could find.