Pirate Hunters: Treasure, Obsession, and the Search for a Legendary Pirate Ship (24 page)

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

THE
GOLDEN FLEECE

T
he team didn’t know about Chatterton’s plan when they boarded the
Deep Explorer
toward the end of February 2009, but one thing was clear: He’d returned to the bay to search. The magnetometer, in storage at the villa, had been unwrapped and carried aboard. Lying in its wooden cradle, it looked like an old friend to the men.

Chatterton fired the engines, then put the boat into a swooping arc away from the villa and on course for the sugar wreck. Mattera feared this might happen—that he or Chatterton would finally be pushed too far by Bowden’s obstinacy and take matters into their own hands. Mutiny, however, was not an option. The partners liked and respected Bowden and considered him a friend. The pirate project had been Bowden’s idea, not theirs, so to go rogue now would dishonor them. And they despised claim jumpers. Mattera was about to remind Chatterton of all this when his partner cut the wheel hard to the right, bypassed the sugar wreck, and set course straight for the island. Two minutes later, they were there.

“What are we doing?” Ehrenberg asked.

“The cannonballs are irrefutable,” Chatterton said. “They prove Bannister was at this island. That’s the first solid evidence in more than three hundred years, since Phips was here. But we’ve been so
focused on the sugar wreck we never magged the shore along the island. That changes today.”

“What are we looking for?” said Kretschmer.

“I don’t know,” Chatterton said. “I think we take whatever the island gives us.”

And with that, the men started a magnetometer survey along the shore. Their work was difficult—the island had an irregular shape and quirky dipsy-dos, and modern debris threatened their sensitive equipment. Chatterton kept the survey tight until all of the island’s coast had been covered, even the back side, where everyone knew nothing had happened.

Survey complete, the team returned to the dive center to process the data. Ehrenberg began to see anomalies on the middle part of the northern side of the island, where Chatterton and Mattera believed the battle to have occurred. Everyone’s instinct was to gun the Zodiac back to the island and dive the hits, but they waited on Ehrenberg’s data, and by the end of the day they had their survey, a map with electronic Xs in places no one had ever looked.

The men would have mortgaged future treasure for another eight hours of daylight, but they had no choice but to wait until morning. And they needed to call Bowden anyway. They sensed they were getting close to something important, and he would want to know. Mattera reached him by phone. Bowden said he would be there soon.

The next morning, the team moved the boat to the northern shore of Cayo Vigia. A handful of tourists were strolling the bridge that connected the nearby resort to the island, watching the sunrise as if this had always been the most peaceful place on earth.

Kretschmer anchored the boat, then backed in and tied a line from the stern to a palm tree onshore. Then he and Mattera lifted the Zodiac from the roof of the boat, dropped it into the water, and used it to hover over the targets from their survey, marking each one of them with a buoy. Chatterton and Ehrenberg suited up, then splashed to check out each hit.

In the water, they spotted a mass of stones in the mud, clustered together into the most perfect shape in the shipwreck hunter’s world, the
pile.
This was ballast, assembled from rocks to give a ship stability in the water. It was not accidental, and it was not done by nature. It was from a shipwreck. And it was almost exactly where Bannister would have careened the
Golden Fleece.

In the mud around the pile, Ehrenberg and Chatterton began to see gallon jugs, many intact, at a depth of around twenty feet. Some appeared to have writing embossed on the sides. Ehrenberg moved one of the jugs toward his mask until he could read the writing:
Pearl Street—New York.
Other bottles were similar—beautiful and likely from the nineteenth century, too new to have come from the Golden Age of Piracy.

But maybe these bottles didn’t belong to the wreck that lay underneath the ballast; perhaps they’d come from a passing ship. The men moved more rock, looking for older artifacts, but they found only more bottles. They spent the rest of the day discovering nothing significant. On the way back to the villa that afternoon, no one said much more than “Damn, I thought we had her.”

By the time the men set out for Cayo Vigia the next morning, Bowden had anchored his own boat over the sugar wreck. If Chatterton and Mattera didn’t make good at Vigia now, there was nowhere left to look.

In the water, Chatterton and Ehrenberg pushed handheld metal detectors over the shallow bottom, searching for the source of the remaining hits on the survey. Soon, they were hearing faint beeps, and they followed these bread crumbs of sound to a new rock pile. But when they began moving stones and mud, they found only a steel beam and an old navigation buoy, all modern junk, all just like the stuff they’d spent the last year of their lives finding.

Then something in the distance caught Chatterton’s eye, the rippling outline of a pile of stones, lying about twelve feet from shore. As he moved toward it, the shape came into sharper relief. It wasn’t just a
pile of rocks and stones. It was a pile of rocks and stones in the shape of a sailing ship, one big enough to cross oceans.

He and Ehrenberg drifted over the pile. From above, they had no doubt this was ballast. And it was massive, about fifty feet long by forty feet wide. The shallowest part lay in just six feet of water, but much of the rest sloped downward. Chatterton checked the depth at the other end of the ballast pile. The reading on his gauge: twenty-four feet.

The men found artifacts right away: a paint can, a lawn chair, a combination lock. But for the first time, they weren’t worried by garbage. They dug deeper. Near one end of the pile, Ehrenberg found a three-foot-long pipe, almost entirely encrusted in coral. Chatterton swam over and motioned
—let me look.

Angling it into the sunlight shimmering down from the surface, Chatterton and Ehrenberg could see through cracks in the pipe’s coral encrustation and down to the metal, which was not rounded like pipes should be, but forged into the shape of an octagon.

Chatterton left the pipe back on the ballast pile and then swam to the surface. On the boat, dripping and clinging to the ladder, he called to Mattera.

“John, you gotta get down there. You need to look at something.”

Mattera was in the water minutes later. Hovering over the ballast pile, he could see five or six of the pipes. He picked one up. By its length and heft, he thought it looked like a musket barrel. Mattera had decades of experience with guns. He looked closer. To him, the object appeared to have been made in the late seventeenth century. That’s when he remembered what Phips’s men had said about seeing the wreck of the
Golden Fleece
: There were muskets lying on deck.

Mattera swam back to the boat. On board, he scrambled for his cell phone.

“Who are you calling?” Chatterton asked.

Mattera pointed toward Bowden’s boat, which was anchored just fifty yards in the distance.

Mattera didn’t know what to say first—in his hurry he stumbled over his words—but he finally asked Bowden his questions, which poured out in an unpunctuated stream: Could he and Chatterton recover the pipe and could they bathe it in muriatic acid to remove the coral and get a better look at the metal? He feared Bowden would want to step in and take over himself, but Mattera could not imagine anyone but his own team pulling up first proof of the pirate wreck.

Mattera hung up the phone.

“We’re a go to do it ourselves,” he told the others. “Tracy’s as excited as we are.”

Chatterton slipped his regulator into his mouth and fell back into the water.

Three minutes later, he surfaced, cradling the pipe with a midwife’s touch. Mattera took it from him—gently—and examined it.

“I’ve seen them in books and shows and auctions,” said Mattera. “I’m no expert, but I’m telling you, I think that’s late 1600s.”

Mattera snapped a photo of the artifact with his cell phone, and attached it to an email he addressed to antique gun experts and collectors he knew. In the subject line he wrote, “What does this look like to you?” He noted its dimensions and weight in the message field, but said nothing further. Then, he pressed send.

Piling into the Zodiac, and with Mattera cradling the length of iron, the men sped back across the channel to the dive center near the villa, where Kretschmer built a box made of two-by-fours, and lined it with a thick plastic bag. Ehrenberg poured in about two liters of muriatic acid and then, motioning everyone to stand upwind to avoid noxious fumes, took the pipe from Mattera and slid it into the bath. Coral broke loose in the acid, turning the liquid brown. This was shock treatment for an artifact, and likely to damage it, but the pipe could not be preserved in any case without great effort and expense, there were more of them on the ballast pile, and its value, in this condition and without its wood stock, was more evidentiary than monetary.

The last of the coral dissolved in ten minutes. Ehrenberg pulled the pipe from the acid and rinsed it in cold water. Now its octagon shape was obvious.

“That thing wasn’t made to move water,” Ehrenberg said. “That thing was made to kill.”

Mattera took the artifact and brought it close to his face. Etched over the length of the metal were elegant swirling patterns, like those he’d seen on hammer-forged musket barrels from centuries past. He didn’t know its pedigree. But he knew it was a gun barrel. And he knew it was old.

Everyone wanted back in the water now, but Chatterton thought they should wait. It was important to keep Bowden involved, so he had Kretschmer build a small wooden cradle for the gun barrel and secure it using zip ties. Only then did the team get back into the Zodiac and head for Bowden’s boat. On the way, Mattera received an email reply from Duke McCaa, a longtime dealer in rare and expensive big-game rifles, and an expert in antique firearms. McCaa had an opinion about the object in Mattera’s photo. It was a musket barrel. European. Dating from the late seventeenth century.

A holler went up from the Zodiac. Mattera warned that this was just one opinion, but no one was listening to that, including Mattera, and a minute later they were boarding Bowden’s boat. Bowden studied the artifact, turning it over in its wood cradle, moving his fingers over its textures and grooves, looking through its hollow barrel.

“How deep did you find this?” he asked.

“Sixteen feet,” Chatterton said. “But we have others that are deeper.”

Despite their excitement, Chatterton and Mattera knew the gun barrel would not be enough proof. Even if it were period to Bannister’s time, that didn’t mean it had come from the
Golden Fleece.
An ironclad case couldn’t be made based on just a half dozen musket barrels and a theory. Cultura, and history, would need better proof, something no one could argue with, especially with so many competitors
closing in. Mattera reminded everyone they weren’t likely to find a bell embossed with the name
Golden Fleece.
Most merchant ships of the era didn’t carry bells.

So a plan was made. Bowden would move his operation to the ballast pile where the muskets had been found. Both crews would work the site, looking for anything that would conclusively prove they’d found the wreck they were looking for. But they would have to wait until the next day to do it. The weather was turning. Chatterton and Mattera had waited a year for this, but neither of them felt like he could wait for another tomorrow.

There was an antidote to that, of course. The team would go drinking that night, because the next day was likely to be one of the happiest—or most disappointing—days of their lives.

By the time they dressed for dinner, Mattera had received more replies to his emails, each confirming that the object in his photo was likely a European-made musket dating to the late seventeenth century. This was cause for celebration, but as the dinner wore on the mood at the table changed. It wasn’t just muskets that couldn’t be proved to belong to the
Golden Fleece;
it was likely true of whatever artifacts they might find. When Chatterton had finally identified the mystery U-boat off New Jersey, he’d done it by pulling a tag from the wreck inscribed with the submarine’s number. But there were no tags on seventeenth-century pirate ships. To get that kind of proof, they would need a bell or something just as good, which meant they’d need something close to a miracle. Of course, this had always been true, but it hadn’t really hit them until they’d laid their hands on these muskets.

The next morning was too rainy to work. Inside Mattera’s dive center, the men tried to keep busy, but mostly they swore at the sky.

Early that afternoon, Mattera’s phone rang. It was Bowden.

“I have news,” he said. “Meet me at Tony’s.”

As Chatterton and Mattera waited for Bowden at the restaurant, they braced to be told that Cultura had awarded rights to the
Golden Fleece
to another company, or had taken back parts of Bowden’s lease.
By now they’d heard enough treasure-hunting stories to know how many of them ended a day short of the prize.

At Tony’s, Bowden opened a Ziploc bag and handed the men a piece of paper. It was a photocopied drawing of the battle scene between Bannister’s
Golden Fleece
and the Royal Navy, done by John Taylor, the
Falcon
’s clerk, who’d been aboard the navy ship during the fight.
An eyewitness.
It showed a group of masted ships set against a swirling island backdrop, and had been sent to Bowden by a historian he’d recently commissioned to do research on the
Golden Fleece
. The man had discovered the drawing in a newly published book,
Jamaica in 1687,
by noted historian David Buisseret.

Drawing of the battle between Royal Navy ships the
Falcon
and the
Drake,
and Bannister’s
Golden Fleece,
by eyewitness John Taylor, June 1686.