The Lost Fleet (2 page)

S
EVENTEENTH
C
ENTURY
T
ORTUGA

T
he early part of the seventeenth century marked the beginning of the end of Spanish rule in the Caribbean. The Spanish were still the dominant power, their great treasure fleets still sailed, and the wealth of that region supported the government in Madrid. But the Caribbean was no longer a Spanish lake.

In the first few decades after Columbus's discovery of the New World, Hispaniola was the focus of Spanish colonization and settlement. While there was some gold found there, the island failed in the expectations of many of the conquistadors. So, when Hernando Cortez came upon the fabulous riches of the Aztec Empire, Hispaniola was quickly depopulated; cattle and hogs were left behind to fend for themselves.

One of the first groups that came to stay after the Spanish exodus were
les boucaniers
—the buccaneers. The first
boucaniers
were hunters, predominantly French, who came in the first quarter of the seven
teenth century to hunt the feral cattle and pigs the Spanish had abandoned. From the natives they learned the technique of smoking meat on a wooden grill, or
boucan,
to prevent it from spoiling. This smoked meat was not only delicious but very desirable at a time when keeping food edible was a major concern. The
boucaniers
traded their smoked meat for guns, powder, tobacco, liquor, and other essentials with the ships that called at Hispaniola.

In many ways the
boucaniers
of Hispaniola were like the mountain men and trappers who were the first white men into the American west. They were tough, brutal men, not fit for civilized living. Their work was hard and filthy, and they labored in sweltering, mosquito-infested jungles. They were men best left alone.

But Spain, still hoping to maintain absolute control over the rich Caribbean, could not ignore them. Through various means, including slaughtering the animals the buccaneers hunted, the Spanish by the 1630s managed to make Hispaniola untenable for these wild men, who now numbered in the thousands.

Driven from their hunting grounds, the buccaneers settled on the island of Tortuga, just five miles from the northwest coast of Hispaniola.

Since 1625, Tortuga had been the home of a small French colony, complete with governor and a fortress known as the Dove Côté, though possession of the island shifted back and forth between the French and English colonists and the Spaniards who at various times captured the island, only to be driven off again. Though the island was ostensibly French, as were most of the buccaneers, there was in reality little government there. And since what little French government was there did not much care if the buccaneers were enemies of Spain, it was a fine place for the displaced hunters to make their home.

During their hunting years, the buccaneers had sporadically attacked Spanish shipping, generally when the hunting was not good. Now, deprived of their former livelihood, and with fresh hatred of the Spanish, they began to attack shipping in earnest. In their attempt to eradi
cate the buccaneers, the Spaniards had created a powerful enemy. It was a classic example of the law of unintended consequences.

Early buccaneer successes in attacking the rich homeward-bound Spanish treasure ships encouraged the former hunters to look on piracy as a full-time profession. And they were good at it. Most were excellent shots, grown expert hunting on Hispaniola. They were tough, used to fighting, and had little to lose. Invariably they attacked big ships with big crews, and though outnumbered, the buccaneers were often victorious. From small vessels they graduated to larger and larger ships as they took larger prizes. The early raids on Spanish shipping became a proving ground for these guerrilla warriors.

As the years went on, the wild men who settled on Tortuga became increasingly organized. By the 1640s they had developed a rough pirate democracy, with formalized codes of conduct called the “Custom of the Coast,” a form of government that with some variations would be a hallmark of piracy for the next eighty years. They called themselves the Brethren of the Coast.

H
ELL
T
OWNS

Piracy is nearly as old as seafaring itself. The word
pirate
comes from a Greek word meaning “sailor.” Julius Caesar, as a young man, was captured by pirates. But in the long history of piracy, there have been only a few genuine “hell towns,” places that not only catered to pirates but where the population and economy were almost entirely piratical. Port Royal in Jamaica was one such place, as were Nassau on New Providence Island and a number of settlements on the island of Madagascar. Tortuga was the first in the New World.

Tortuga was so bad that around 1650, the French government imported hundreds of prostitutes to the island in an effort to civilize the buccaneers, but this measure had little effect. By 1678, there
existed in the Caribbean a genuine outlaw community, a population without a legitimate government. The Brethren of the Coast rejected most aspects of civilized society, submission to authority being first on the list.

The buccaneers tended to operate in small groups, coming together for the purpose of a raiding voyage. They elected their leaders, agreed on the terms of their confederation before setting out, and divided their take evenly.

Despite the antisocial core of the buccaneers' worldview, they were capable of organizing in large numbers. By the time of d'Estrées' attack on Curaçao, a number of leaders had emerged who were able to organize the buccaneers into a sizable force for as long as it took to sack some Spanish town of their choosing.

One of the most successful, and vicious, of the leaders to emerge from the buccaneer community at Tortuga was Francis L'Ollonais. L'Ollonais was a former indentured servant and later a hunter and
bou-canier
of Hispaniola who, like many, turned pirate. In 1667 he organized and led an army of seven hundred Tortuga pirates on an attack on Maracaibo in Venezuela.

L'Ollonais also had the distinction of being one of the cruelest and most psychotic of the buccaneers. His fellow pirate Alexandre Exquemelin describes how, frustrated by uncooperative Spanish captives, “L'Ollonais…drew out his cutlass, and with it cut open the breast of one of those poor Spaniards, and, pulling out his heart with his sacrilegious hands, began to bite and gnaw it with his teeth.”
¹

It was not long after that event that many of L'Ollonais's followers took leave of him. Even for pirates, that was a bit over the top.

The most successful of the buccaneer leaders was Henry Morgan. Morgan was a Welshman who first came to the Caribbean as an English soldier but stayed for a life of piracy. By 1678 he had already coordinated several of these buccaneer armies. In 1668, under Morgan, seven hundred filibusters—that is, freebooters, or pirates—had sailed in a great flotilla and plundered Puerto del Principe in Cuba and Puerto Bello, Panama, in orgies of brutality.

In 1670, Morgan organized a raid on Panama City, collecting together an unprecedented two thousand buccaneers on forty ships. Fighting their way through the rivers and jungles of Panama, they fell on and took the city after defeating a superior number of defenders in a great land battle. Morgan set the standard for the large, organized
buccaneer raid. He also set the standard for playing the political game, seldom operating without the tacit approval of government authority. Despite his outrageous behavior, Morgan was a favorite in England. He was ultimately knighted and made lieutenant governor of Jamaica.

By the time d'Estrées was ready to attack Curaçao, the precedent of bringing together the buccaneers of Tortuga as a large, amphibious fighting force was well established. The buccaneers, when properly organized, were an effective and devastating weapon. These were the men whom d'Estrées wanted with him.

A
N
A
RMY FOR
H
IRE

Early in the year 1678, d'Estrées dispatched two frigates to Tortuga with orders from Louis XIV to the governor, Jacques Nepveu, Sieur de Pouançay, to raise an ad hoc buccaneer army to join in the attack on Curaçao.

De Pouançay was able to rally a significant force—between twelve and fourteen hundred buccaneers—no doubt with promises of pay and suggestions of the booty from sacking the Dutch city. The buccaneers brought to the expedition more than a dozen of their own pirate ships, most of which they had captured by staging attacks in smaller vessels. With their fleet they joined the French at Cap François.

None of the buccaneer vessels were close to the size and power of the massive French warships. Still, they were fast and nimble. Their companies, eager and experienced fighting men, were far more effective in battle than the average enlisted soldier or sailor of any nation's regular armed forces. As it happened, the smaller size of the filibusters' ships would be the very thing that would save them.

The fleet of French men-of-war and filibusters sailed from St. Kitts in late April. With the steady trade winds over their larboard quarter, they made their way southwest toward the smattering of islands off the Venezuelan coast. The westernmost three, Aruba, Curaçao, and Bonaire, were the Dutch possessions for which they were bound.

The Venezuelan coast is a treacherous one, and the French navigators were not overly familiar with it, nor were they always in agreement as to where exactly they were. They had no reliable way of determining their longitude, a serious problem in those reef-and-island-strewn waters.

D'Estrées sent a fire ship
²
and three of the smaller filibuster craft several miles ahead of the fleet to scout for navigational hazards. Those ships were more maneuverable than the big French men-of-war, more able to work their way out of any trouble they might get into. Also, they were considerably more expendable.

A fleet of thirty or more ships was not easy to hide, even in the days before radar and airplanes. No doubt the fleet was spotted by passing merchantmen that reported its presence to the governor of Curaçao. While reports differ on this point, the Dutch governor apparently sent out three vessels of no great size to keep an eye on the French fleet but to avoid capture at all costs.

The small Dutch squadron made visual contact with d'Estrées' ships, keeping several miles ahead of them. D'Estrées ordered his lead vessels, the three buccaneer vessels and the fire ship, to go in pursuit of these spies, a perfectly reasonable tactic.

Then, inexplicably, the admiral ordered the rest of the fleet to join in the chase, eighteen big men-of-war going after three small Dutch ships. It was akin to pursuing a mosquito with a sledgehammer, and a
perfect example of the common military blunder of allowing oneself to become distracted by a sideshow and losing focus on the main objective.

Who the Dutch captains were or what they were thinking is lost to history, but we can well imagine their reaction to seeing this massive fleet coming in pursuit of them. The Dutch mariners, unlike the French pilots, knew those waters intimately. They knew exactly where they wanted to go, and they saw a marvelous opportunity.

The chase continued on through the afternoon and into the evening. The three Dutch ships ran west, with the three buccaneers and the fire ship in pursuit, and behind those ships, the fleet of Admiral Jean Comte d'Estrées.

Sometime around eight o'clock, with the sun well gone, the Dutch squadron neared the tiny island of Las Aves. Las Aves was, and is, no more than a coral outcropping, four miles long with no vegetation to
speak of, and only a few wells dug by pirates who occasionally visited the place. Perhaps the island was visible in the starlight, perhaps not. The French were unaware of the danger into which they were sailing.

What the Dutch knew, and the French did not, was that a great half-moon of submerged reefs, three miles long, ran from the southern tip of the island eastward and then arched away to the north. Three miles of ship-killing rock, perhaps ten feet below the surface, invisible in the dark.

The three Dutch ships passed easily over the reef, as they knew they would. The small buccaneer vessels and the fire ship in pursuit did so as well.

Behind them came the grand French fleet, and foremost in the attack, the bold Comte d'Estrées, eager as ever to get into the fight, plunging recklessly on through the dark.

It was sometime around eight o'clock that the flagship,
Le Terrible,
struck the reef. One can imagine what that moment was like aboard the ship.
Le Terrible
was bowling along under easy sail, a beautiful spring night in the Caribbean, a sure prospect of success for the expe
dition. And then in an instant she slammed to a stop, the men thrown off their feet, the heavy bows crushed like eggs, the sick feeling as all aboard realized what had happened. The masts that towered overhead swayed forward and probably broke off at the base, many tons of spars and rigging crashing down to the deck.

In just a minute or two,
Le Terrible
was transformed from one of the most sophisticated, costly, and dangerous fighting machines in the world to mere wreckage.

Comte d'Estrées, not forgetting his duty even at such a moment, ordered cannons fired to warn the rest of the fleet of the danger that lay under their bows. One after another the great guns banged out in the night. To d'Estrées, it was the sound of a warning. To the other captains it was the sound of battle. What none of them knew, or could have known, was that the cannon fire was also the starting signal for the golden age of piracy.