Pirate Hunters E-Book

Robert Kurson

• Herausgeber: Elliott & Thompson
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Seitenzahl: 456

Beschreibung

The gripping true story of bitter rivalries on the high seas, a brilliant 17th-Century pirate captain, and the two adventurous men determined to find his treasure.Captained by English nobleman-turned-pirate Joseph Bannister, the Golden Fleece was a pirate ship sunk by the Royal Navy in 1686 taking with it many fortunes' worth of gold. When present-day adventurers John Chatterton and John Mattera hear of it, they know they have to risk everything to get their hands on it.Bestselling author Robert Kurson not only recreates the break-neck excitement of their search for the lost ship, but also vividly re-imagines life on the high seas in the Golden Age of piracy in this thrilling true-life adventure.

Leseprobe

Praise for Pirate Hunters

“Pirate Hunters is a fantastic book, an utterly engrossing and satisfying read. It tells the story of the hunt for the rare wreck of a pirate ship, which had been captained by one of the most remarkable pirates in history. This is a real-life Treasure Island, complete with swashbuckling, half-crazy treasure hunters and vivid Caribbean settings—a story for the ages.”

— Douglas Preston

“A terrific read. I was pulled in from page one. Kurson brings us face to face with some of the most swashbuckling pirates ever to sail the Caribbean, even as he takes us underwater on a high-tech quest to discover the relics they left behind.”

— Daniel James Brown

“There’s nothing in the world like buried treasure—and people hungry and obsessed enough to risk their lives for it. Pirate Hunters isn’t just a good story—it’s a true one. Searching for the souls of its explorers, it takes you to the far tip of the plank and plunges you deep to the bottom of the ocean.”

— Brad Meltzer

“A great thriller full of tough guys and long odds . . . and: It’s all true.”

— Lee Child

“Kurson’s own enthusiasm, combined with his copious research and an eye for detail, makes for one of the most mind-blowing pirate stories of recent memory, one that even the staunchest landlubber will have a hard time putting down.”

— Publishers Weekly

“Action and adventure on land and sea—you can’t ask for more. But Robert Kurson raises the ante in Pirate Hunters with an array of mystery and a fleet of colorful characters spanning four centuries. This is a great summer read!”

— Michael Connelly

“Kurson’s own style of writing and the story he tells is reason enough to read this narrative from cover to cover....Anyone with a sense of adventure will enjoy this book. Highly recommended to readers who delight in adventure, suspense, and the thrill of discovering history at their fingertips.”

— Library Journal

BY ROBERT KURSON

Shadow Divers

Crashing Through

Pirate Hunters

For Amy, my treasure found

Now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates.

MARK TWAIN

Pirates could happen to anyone.

TOM STOPPARD

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Early one January morning in 2012, I received an international call from an unknown number. It was coming from the Dominican Republic, but I didn’t know anyone in that country, I had never been there in my life. The voice on the line, however, was unmistakable.

“If you like pirates, meet me in New Jersey.”

The caller was John Chatterton, one of the heroes of my book Shadow Divers, a true story about two weekend scuba divers who discover a World War II German U-boat sunk off the coast of New Jersey, and their obsessive and deadly quest to identify the wreck. I hadn’t spoken to Chatterton in more than a year, but knew his New York–tinged baritone right away.

“What kind of pirates?” I asked.

“Seventeenth century. Caribbean. The real deal.”

Just the mention of pirates sat me straight up in my seat. But the timing for a trip from Chicago to New Jersey could not have been worse. It was snowing. I was researching a new book. And I was just winding down from the holidays. But I’d learned something from Chatterton the first time around—if there’s a window to go, you go. An hour later, I was on I-94 headed east.

Late that night, I pulled into Scotty’s Steakhouse in Springfield, New Jersey. I hadn’t seen Chatterton for three years, but he looked younger than I remembered. He was sixty now, but appeared in better shape than men half his age. He introduced me to his friend John Mattera, a man of about fifty with a broad smile and a Staten Island accent. I’d met Mattera years earlier, and remembered he’d worked as an executive bodyguard. His arms still looked the part.

We ordered drinks and caught up on family, then Chatterton got down to business.

“How much do you know about the Golden Age of Piracy?” he asked.

As it turned out, I knew quite a bit. Years earlier, at a used bookstore, I’d picked up a tiny paperback called The Buccaneers of America by Alexandre Exquemelin, a true account of pirate life by a man who’d sailed aboard real pirate ships and had chronicled the exploits of Captain Henry Morgan. The book, considered a classic, couldn’t have been more than two hundred pages. I had paid two dollars and taken it to lunch with me down the street.

I never got to the food.

Exquemelin’s pirates were wilder than in any movie, more treacherous than in any novel. They conquered entire cities, devised ingenious methods for plundering, and struck terror into the hearts of their enemies, sometimes without raising a sword. By a single act alone—perhaps by eating the still-beating heart of a merchant captain who refused to surrender—they broadcast their reputations across oceans. Even their downtime was epic, so packed with debauchery and fast living it would have spun the heads of modern millionaire rock stars. And yet, these pirates lived by a code of conduct and honor so far ahead of its time it made them nearly invincible.

They also left no trail. Only one pirate ship had ever been discovered and positively identified in the centuries since the buccaneers prowled the oceans: the Whydah, found in waters off Cape Cod in 1984. Nothing was harder to find underwater—or maybe in all the world—than a pirate ship. It was as if every trace of the buccaneers had disappeared.

I read every pirate book I could find after devouring Exquemelin, asked at rare coin shops to see silver pieces of eight, and even drove cross-country to explore a museum exhibit on the Whydah. So I knew about the Golden Age, which lasted from about 1650 to 1720.

“Good,” Mattera said. “Because we just spent a year living in the seventeenth century.”

For the next three hours, the men told me of their quest to find a great pirate ship—a journey filled with danger, diving, and mystery. They talked about researching the history of pirates in libraries and archives around the globe. They described using cutting-edge technology and tracking down ancient maps and manuscripts. They told stories about learning from wise elders, and doing battle with cutthroats and rivals. And they told me about their search for a pirate captain more notorious than Blackbeard and more daring than William Kidd, a real-life Jack Sparrow, a man who’d been legend but whose story had been lost to time: the buccaneer Joseph Bannister.

I pressed the men for more details and asked questions until the restaurant closed. In the parking lot, they told me they’d be happy to talk further, but that a person couldn’t truly understand what they’d been through without seeing for himself where it all had happened.

Two weeks later, I met Chatterton and Mattera in the Colonial Zone in Santo Domingo, the oldest permanent settlement in the New World. We walked down the cobblestoned Calle Las Damas, the first paved road in the Americas. To my right, I could see the home of conquistador Nicolás de Ovando, built in 1502, complete with dungeons; to my left, the oldest church in the New World. After breakfast, the men took me to a sixteenth-century coral block structure. This was the laboratory at the Oficina Nacional de Patrimonio Cultural Subacuático, the place where artifacts discovered by treasure hunters were cataloged and divvied up.

I didn’t know where to look first. On one table was a nine-foot gold chain from the seventeenth century. On another was a set of slave manacles and an egg-shaped box made of pure silver. In a cement tank, lying in water, was an anchor used by Christopher Columbus. In the States, the anchor would have been protected by Plexiglas and guarded by lasers. Here, I was free to reach in and touch it, and I did. Time disappeared with the contact. This is what Columbus’s world felt like. Now I was feeling it, too.

Near the exit, I was shown to a final table, this one piled high with hundreds of pieces of eight, all from the seventeenth century. I scooped up as many of the silver coins as would fit in my hands, then let them spill onto the table. They made a sound I’d never heard before but somehow had known my whole life, a waterfall of muted chimes, dense and deep and old. This was the song that had called to the pirates. This was the sound of treasure.

That night, the men drove me to the north coast of the country, where they’d launched their search for the Golden Fleece, the greatest pirate ship that had ever sailed. In New Jersey, they had told me the outline of the story. Here, on a sticky hot night in which even the moon seemed to sweat, I heard more—about how difficult the quest had become for Chatterton and Mattera, how much they’d risked to undertake it, how they were still paying the price for going on this hunt for history, and for getting into the mind of a great leader and adventurer, the pirate Joseph Bannister. And I could feel, in between the swashbuckling details of their tale, how they’d been searching for more than a pirate ship all along.

When I got home, I didn’t feel much like going back to work on my old project. Instead, I woke my two young sons and told them the pirate story. Then, I decided to tell it to you.

Chapter 1

THE GREATEST PIRATE STORY EVER

John Chatterton and John Mattera were days away from launching a quest they’d been planning for two years, a search for the treasure ship San Bartolomé, sunk in the seventeenth century and worth a hundred million dollars or more. To find it, they’d moved to the Dominican Republic and risked everything they owned and held dear. The discovery would make them rich beyond their dreams and engrave their names in the history books. The New York Times would profile them. Museums would hold black-tie affairs in their honor. Best of all, they knew just where to look.

And then their phone rang.

On the line was Tracy Bowden, a sixty-nine-year-old treasure hunter and a legend in the business. He said he had something big to discuss and asked if the men might fly to Miami to hear him out.

Chatterton and Mattera didn’t have two minutes to spare in advance of their quest for the San Bartolomé. They’d vowed never to let anything put them off track. But there was an urgency in Bowden’s voice they hadn’t heard in the year since they’d met him, and Miami was just a two-hour flight from Santo Domingo; they could be there and back the same day. If nothing else, Bowden told great stories, and in treasure hunting, stories were the next best thing to gold. So, one morning in early 2008, they packed day bags and booked tickets, and went on their way. The treasure on board the San Bartolomé had been lost for four hundred years. It could wait another few hours for them to come find it.

In Miami, they rented a car and set out for Bowden’s house. He wasn’t like any other treasure hunter they’d met. He seemed to work in the shadows, shunning publicity and almost never teaming up with others. He didn’t boast or issue bullshit claims. And he used little of the modern technology that had revolutionized underwater salvage, relying instead on old drawings, aging equipment, and his own decades-old notes to find wrecked ships loaded with silver and gold.

During his career, Bowden had discovered not one but two Spanish treasure galleons, and he’d done groundbreaking work on a third, yet neither Chatterton nor Mattera could judge how wealthy he’d become. His home in the Dominican Republic was hardly larger than a garage, and his salvage boat, the Dolphin, was good but not grand. As a successful treasure hunter, Bowden should have been able to live in a palace, a place with solid gold doorknobs and a moat. But as Chatterton and Mattera pulled into the driveway, they had to double-check the address. The house, while lovely, looked no different than any other in this ordinary suburban subdivision.

Inside, Bowden offered them coffee, but they hardly heard him. Everywhere they looked they saw treasure. In one room were silver coins embedded in coral; in another, centuries-old brass navigational instruments that museums would have paid a fortune to own. The china in Bowden’s dining room was seventeenth-century Delftware, still as blue and white as the day it was made, and a match for a priceless set Mattera had seen in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Bowden showed them other coins and artifacts, each with a story, each from a shipwreck he’d worked. He let them handle everything; touch was important, he said, otherwise a person could never really know this stuff. Finally, Mattera excused himself to use the bathroom. He stopped when he walked in the door.

Piled high in the bathtub were plastic bags filled with silver pieces of eight, all from the seventeenth century. He lifted one of the bags from the tub and inspected the contents through the flimsy plastic. For years, he’d seen silver coins like these sell for a thousand dollars apiece at auction. By his count, there were at least one hundred bags in the tub, and fifty coins to a bag. Mattera had never been quick at math, but he made this calculation right away. In a single bathtub, he was looking at five million dollars in treasure, all bundled in the cheapest baggies he’d ever seen, not even with Ziploc tops.

Returning to the living room, Mattera quick-stepped over to Chatterton and whispered in his ear.

“Take a leak.”

“Huh?”

“Just do it. Go to the bathroom.”

Chatterton shrugged. They were partners. So he went.

He returned a few minutes later, eyes bulging.

Bowden asked the men to join him at the dining room table, then got down to business. He’d done it all in his thirty-plus-year career—worked three galleons, a slave ship, and a legendary warship from the American Revolution. He’d been featured—twice—in National Geographic (Mattera had read the first of those stories when he was sixteen, then read it over and over again). He’d recovered world-class treasures and priceless artifacts. But there was something he wanted different from any of that—something rare beyond measure, a prize he’d been seeking for decades.

“Have you heard of Joseph Bannister?” he asked.

The men shook their heads.

Bannister, Bowden explained, was a well-respected seventeenth-century English sea captain in charge of transporting cargos between London and Jamaica. One day, for no reason anyone could explain, he stole the great ship he commanded, the Golden Fleece, and embarked on a pirating rampage, a genuine good guy gone bad in the 1680s, the Golden Age of Piracy. In just a few years, he became one of the most wanted men in the Caribbean. The harder the English tried to stop him, the more ingeniously he defied them. Soon, he’d become an international terror. The Brits swore they’d stop at nothing to hunt him down and hang him.

The Royal Navy pursued him on the open seas and used the full force of its might to try to find him. In those days, no one eluded a manhunt like that. But Bannister did. And his crimes got bolder and bolder. Finally, two navy warships pinned the pirate captain down, trapping him and his ship on an inescapable island. At the sight of a single frigate like these, most pirate captains threw up their hands and surrendered. Confronted by two? Even the toughest would drop to his knees and pray.

Not Bannister.

He and his crew manned cannons and rifles, and they waged an all-out battle against the two Royal Navy warships. The fighting lasted for two days. Bannister’s ship, the Golden Fleece, was sunk in the combat. But Bannister won the war. Battered, and with many men dead and wounded, the navy ships limped back to Jamaica, and Bannister made his escape. It was a stunning defeat for the English and made Bannister a legend. Through the ages, however, his name had been lost to time.

“This is the greatest pirate story ever,” Bowden said. “And no one knows about it. I want the Golden Fleece. And I think you guys can help find her.”

Bowden did not have to explain the rarity of finding a pirate ship. Both Chatterton and Mattera knew that only one had ever been discovered and positively identified—the Whydah—lost in 1717 off Cape Cod and recovered by explorer Barry Clifford in 1984. The discovery had inspired books, documentaries, and an exhibit that continued to tour major museums more than twenty years after the find. It was clear, after the Whydah came up, that the world couldn’t get enough of real pirates. Now Bowden was talking about going after a pirate ship captained by a man who sounded even more daring than the swashbucklers in Hollywood movies.

But that wasn’t the only big news. Bowden also believed he knew the wreck’s location. History was clear that the Golden Fleece had sunk off Cayo Levantado, a small island on the north coast of the Dominican Republic. Chatterton and Mattera knew the place; it was shimmering with white sandy beaches, and home to a five-star resort. For years, it had been known as Bacardi Island, used by the rum maker in ads to depict a paradise on earth. It was a manageable area to work.

Bannister’s story had been legend in its day, but few people seem to have searched for the wreck. The late Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo was rumored to have sent divers to Cayo Levantado as recently as the 1960s, but his men came up empty. Bowden picked up the search in 1984 but had found little more than modern debris at the island. In recent months, he’d come to believe that without the use of state-of-the-art equipment such as side-scan sonar and magnetometers, the Golden Fleece might never be found. Bowden had never gone in for technology like that; he’d stayed loyal to the time-tested ways that had made him. But he couldn’t deny that guys like Chatterton and Mattera were the future. He knew they’d spent two years of their lives and a fortune to master the modern equipment, and he’d seen them make it work as they trained to hunt for their own galleon.

So, he offered them a deal.

He would give them 20 percent of the Golden Fleece if they found the pirate wreck for him. There might be gold, silver, and jewels aboard. There might be swords, muskets, pirate beads, peg legs, and daggers. Even skeletons. Or there might be nothing at all. In any case, Bowden wanted something bigger than treasure. He wanted Bannister, the greatest pirate of them all.

Bowden didn’t require an answer on the spot. He knew Chatterton and Mattera were about to embark on their own journey. He admired their guts and vision—it reminded him of when he’d thrown over his own safe American life to seek his Caribbean fortune. But Bannister’s Golden Fleece was once in a lifetime. Think it over, he told them, and give me your answer soon.

Pulling out of Bowden’s driveway, the two partners said almost nothing, but each was thinking the same thing. Between them, they’d dived the most famous and fascinating shipwrecks in the world—Titanic, Andrea Doria, Lusitania, a mystery German U-boat, Britannic, Arizona—but neither could imagine anything cooler or rarer than a Golden Age pirate ship, especially one captained by a gentleman sailor turned rogue who had defeated the Royal Navy in battle. Every diver, at some deep level in his soul, dreamed of discovering a pirate ship. Yet, it never seemed to happen to anyone. Ever. Now, Chatterton and Mattera were being given a chance to find one as thrilling as any history had known.

Yet, both men knew they could never accept Bowden’s offer.

They had trained for two years to find treasure, spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on boats and equipment, pledged their lives’ savings to the cause. They’d put together a crew, researched at archives in Spain, consulted legends and gurus, nearly got into gunfights in wild but beautiful places, survived an attack by shadowy rivals. It all had led them to a target few others knew about, a galleon called the San Bartolomé, sunk in a hurricane in 1556 on the Dominican south coast, and still filled with mountains of treasure. They knew she was there. They’d come too far to turn their backs on her now.

In another era, the two partners might have delayed their search for this treasure ship, but time was running out for treasure hunters now. Governments and archaeologists had pressured many of the countries richest in treasure wrecks—Jamaica, Mexico, Cuba, the Bahamas, Bermuda—to outlaw private salvage. Just a few years earlier, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) established an international treaty effectively holding that shipwrecks more than one hundred years old belonged to the nations that lost them, not to the person who found them. Already, several countries had adopted the treaty. The Dominican Republic had managed to hold out thus far, but it was just a matter of time before it signed on, too. In 2008, if a person intended to hunt treasure in that country, that person had to go now.

Time was running out on the divers, too. Chatterton was fifty-seven, Mattera forty-six. Both were much older than most participants in deepwater-wreck diving, a sport that pushed the body to its limits and could paralyze or kill a person for the slightest mistake. Most got out of the game by forty; those who stayed longer often just dipped their toes on the weekends. But galleon hunting was no part-time job. To do it, Chatterton and Mattera had to be ready to spend full days in the water, perhaps for weeks or even months on end. They couldn’t afford to grow older by searching for a pirate ship that very well might not be there.

And there was no guarantee they could afford a pirate ship search, in any case. Both men had begun life as blue-collar workers; neither was independently wealthy. Together, they’d invested nearly a million dollars to hunt for a galleon. If they detoured now for a pirate ship, they risked expending what remained of their funds to find a wreck that might have no treasure at all.

So, it was clear they needed to call Bowden to thank him for the pirate opportunity, and then to politely decline. Yet, even as they arrived at the Miami airport, neither man could reach for his phone.

In just ten years, John Chatterton had gone from being an underwater construction worker to perhaps the most famous living scuba diver in the world. He hadn’t done it by being a great swimmer or by exploring beautiful coral reefs. He did it by going inside the most dangerous and deadly shipwrecks on earth.

John Chatterton

These places were steel labyrinths, twisted like balloon animals by nature’s temper and the ravages of time. Many lay at depths never intended for humans, where water pressure could collapse vital organs, and the buildup of nitrogen could disorient the mind and turn blood to foam. If a person stayed in the sport for a season, he would see fellow divers hallucinate underwater, get lost inside wrecks, become tangled in wire and cable. If he stayed longer, he would see them succumb to crippling nerve damage, become paralyzed, or drown. And that’s if it didn’t happen to him first. In his twenty years as a deepwater-wreck diver, Chatterton had seen nine men die, including a father and son, and one of his best friends.

He didn’t risk these wrecks for the usual reasons—to stockpile artifacts, bragging rights, or mentions in dive magazines. In fact, he gave away much of the rare china and other relics he found, even when the stuff had great value. He pushed inside these wrecks because he believed, as he had since volunteering to fight on the front lines in Vietnam, that the only way to see what really mattered in life was to go to the places that were hardest to reach. After the war, he found those places to be made of steel and sunk hundreds of feet underwater.

Over the next decade, Chatterton went to dozens of the most dangerous wrecks, often penetrating into places thought too difficult, or deadly, for a human being to reach. By the time he was thirty-five, some veterans of the sport were calling him the greatest shipwreck diver they’d ever seen.

In 1997, Chatterton and dive partner Richie Kohler solved an international mystery by identifying a World War II German U-boat sunk off the coast of New Jersey. Three divers died during the six-year odyssey; Chatterton lost his marriage and his money, and several times he nearly lost his life. When people asked why he’d been willing to risk it—the sub had no gold or priceless artifacts aboard, just an identifying number—he told them the U-boat was his moment, that once-in-a-lifetime chance a person gets, if he’s lucky, to see who he really is. For that reason, he would have rather died than turn his back on the wreck just because it got difficult, just because it couldn’t be done.

The U-boat brought Chatterton and Kohler international acclaim. By 2004, they’d been featured in a book and in documentaries, and had become hosts of a popular television show on the History Channel. Chatterton, handsome and tall, and with a beautiful baritone voice, was paid to do speeches and endorse products. For the first time since Jacques Cousteau, a scuba diver had emerged from the sea and into the mainstream. People recognized him on the street. Kids asked for his autograph. Women sent him their pictures.

Most wreck divers, especially those past fifty, would have hung it up then and called it a career. But Chatterton kept pushing—body, technology, and nature—to go deeper into oceans and farther into wrecks. He saw more divers die. He reached even more places no one had ever gone.

His last big adventure had come in 2005, when he and Kohler put together an expedition to Titanic. The trip produced new insight into the ship’s sinking, but in the end it hadn’t pushed Chatterton to his limits. The location of the wreck was already known. The ship was sunk in thousands of feet of water, which meant he could do no more than remain in the Russian submersible that had delivered him to the site. Others had been there first.

After returning home from Titanic, Chatterton began to look for a new shipwreck project, something harder and rarer than anything he’d done. For more than a year, he came up empty. Accountants and lawyers urged him to retire and invest his money. Relax. He redoubled his efforts. He couldn’t pretend to be happy when Kohler announced he was going back to work in his family’s glass-repair business. How could a man fix broken windows at Burger King after he’d pushed into a World War II German U-boat that no one in the world knew was there?

And yet, he wondered if Kohler might not have it right. Great wrecks were rare; a person could search for decades and never find another. Chatterton was fifty-six then. He didn’t have decades anymore.

That’s when he connected with Mattera. They’d met once or twice in the early 1980s, but hadn’t spoken for twenty-five years. At a dive seminar in 2006, the men reacquainted; by the end of the weekend, they’d pledged their lives and their savings to an idea: They could find a Spanish galleon in Dominican waters, one of the last places on earth left to hunt treasure ships. And that they would find one, whatever it took.

Mattera’s life was bigger than Hollywood even before he could drive. A butcher’s son from Staten Island, he started risky businesses as a teenager that earned hundreds of thousands of dollars, and owned social clubs and taverns he was too young by law to enter. At twenty-three, he became embroiled in a historic war between factions of New York’s Gambino crime family. One of his options was to plunge headfirst into the violence. His other option was even crazier—to become a cop. Mattera made his choice, and joined law enforcement. By thirty, he was a highly paid personal bodyguard, protecting celebrities and tycoons.

All the while, history and diving had been Mattera’s salvation. In his younger years, when his life might have gone either way, he found his center in history books, which he devoured by the dozens, and in libraries, where he camped out for days. To Mattera, history was more than just a collection of old stories; it was an insight into human nature, a crystal ball that told as much about the future as it did about the past. And he learned to scuba dive, not to look at pretty fish in tropical resorts, but to go deep into cold oceans, where a person could swim inside the wrecks and touch history for himself.

John Mattera

Mattera’s first trip had been to the Oregon, a luxury liner sunk in 1886 in water deep enough to kill an experienced diver. He was just fourteen. Minors were forbidden on dive charters, so he showed up at the dock one morning with a case of beer and a cooler full of sandwiches from his father’s butcher shop. He bribed the captain with this bounty, and an hour later he was on the high seas, bunking next to a rogues’ gallery of bikers, dive gang members, and other hardened souls who were the pioneers of East Coast wreck diving. For three days, he pounded out portholes on the Oregon, looking for clues that would add to his understanding of her sinking. The trip hooked him. No matter where life took him after that—to high-tech shooting schools, to third-world countries doing contract work for the U.S. government, to glamorous international locales working security detail for celebrity clients—he came back to history and diving, the two things in a risky world that always told him the truth.

At forty, he sold his security company. It was a mistake—the money was too good to pass up and his partner wanted to sell—but there he was, with a big bank account and, for the first time in his life, nowhere to go at five every morning. Since boyhood, he’d dreamed of living somewhere warm enough to read his books outside at night, surrounded on all sides by shipwrecks. He’d done work in the Dominican Republic, loved its people and its history. And the shipwrecks were everywhere—this is where Columbus had landed, the gateway to the New World. A few months later, he moved to Santo Domingo, the Dominican capital, and began a life of leisure.

It lasted all of two months. Mattera was blue-collar—he needed to work, so he opened Pirate’s Cove, a dive resort on the country’s south coast, and began taking paying customers to centuries-old shipwrecks in the area. Few tourists, however, seemed interested in these living pieces of history; clients preferred to stay close to the resort, where the coral was pretty and the scotch on the rocks was never more than a few minutes away. Mattera continued to smile and show his guests a good time. At night, he took refuge in his books.

This time, he began reading a different kind of story—of popes and kings, explorers and conquistadors, and fearless captains who’d perished at sea. These were the stories of the galleons, the legendary Spanish treasure ships from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that carried vast fortunes from the New World back to Spain. The Dominican Republic—then called the island of Hispaniola—was the crossroads of it all.

Mattera put together a plan. Whatever the cost, he would go find a galleon of his own. The monetary reward would be staggering—he could buy his beloved New York Mets and have several treasure chests left over. More important, discovering a galleon would be historic, and for that he was willing to risk all he had.

That’s when Chatterton showed up at a dive workshop Mattera was sponsoring at Pirate’s Cove. The men hadn’t seen each other in decades, but it took just a seaside lunch for Mattera to remember what he admired about the guy. Chatterton was in love with shipwrecks, but he bothered only with those that mattered to history and were difficult to work. Once he committed to a wreck, he never let go, no matter how deep or tangled the ship, and that was true even if it might cost him his life. More than anything, Chatterton believed in rare things; to him, “hard to find” equaled beauty, and he was willing to search the world for beautiful things no one else could find.

Standing in line at Miami’s airport, the men marveled at the pirate story Bowden had told them, and especially about that badass captain, Joseph Bannister. Imagine a proper English gentleman stealing the ship he’d been trusted to sail, going on a whirlwind crime spree, then doing battle with two Royal Navy warships. And winning. You didn’t even see stuff like that in the Johnny Depp movies.

In the terminal, they stopped at gift shops to pick up something for Chatterton’s wife, Carla, and Mattera’s fiancée, Carolina. When they got to their gate, they knew it was time to call Bowden. They would be up-front with him and explain the reasons they couldn’t deviate from their treasure quest. No one would understand better than an old treasure hunter like Bowden. They dialed him on speakerphone to deliver their regrets together.

Bowden answered on the first ring.

“Tracy, it’s John and John. We’re calling about the pirate ship and that captain, Bannister.”

“Have you guys made a decision?”

“We have.”

Numbers flashed on the arrivals screen. The flight to Santo Domingo started to board. Chatterton looked at Mattera. Mattera looked at Chatterton. Each waited for the other to speak.

“Tracy,” Mattera said, “that pirate ship of yours is about to get found.”

Chapter 2

BANNISTER’S ISLAND

Just before dawn in March 2008, in a tropical paradise on the north coast of the Dominican Republic, a leather-skinned fisherman with a cigarette in his mouth leaned over the side of his wooden rowboat and dropped a net into Samaná Bay, just as his ancestors had done day after day in this spot for centuries. In every direction, he and the waves were all that moved.

Soon, his boat began rocking, gently at first, then with a warning—something big was coming his way. In the distance, he could see the running lights of an onrushing boat and hear the hum of its outboard engines. It must have struck him as odd to see anyone in that kind of a hurry in Samaná Bay. There was nothing to rush to here; that was the beauty of the place.

He stood up and shined a flashlight. At the sight of it, the fast boat bit hard into the water and made a sweeping turn to the right. Only navy boats moved like that around here, but this vessel didn’t look built to chase drug smugglers or check cargos. With her long back deck and shallow draft, she looked built to go out and find things.

The rowboat nearly capsized as the thirty-foot fiberglass vessel streaked past, but the fisherman still saw a name etched in red letters on her side—Deep Explorer—and two men waving to him from the bow. Chatterton and Mattera didn’t normally operate their boat in the dark, especially in areas that were new to them, but they had a Golden Age pirate ship to find, and neither of them could wait on the sun to get started.

Even now, it seemed incredible to the men that they’d undertaken this mission. They’d invested two years of work, preparation, and much of their savings to set themselves up to find a treasure ship, only to abandon it all to search for a pirate ship no one had heard of, on the hunch of an old man who kept treasure in his bathtub and still used visual landmarks to find his way.

Yet, as they watched the glowing reds and blues on their instrument panel count down the distance to the island where the pirate ship sank—3.8 miles . . . 3.7 miles . . . 3.6 miles—neither man had a doubt he’d done the right thing. A pirate ship was the single hardest and rarest thing a person could discover underwater. And while galleons had been largely forgotten, the voices of pirates never stopped calling, to the imaginations of children and anyone else who believed the world could be thrilling if one only dared step off the dock.

As the first fires of a red sun spit over the horizon, Chatterton and Mattera called to their two crewmen to look through binoculars at the outline of the distant island. First out of the cabin was Heiko Kretschmer, a thirty-eight-year-old dive instructor, master handyman, and East Germany native who had risked his life at age eighteen to escape Communism and come west looking for adventure and a better life. Engines, regulators, transmissions, pumps—there was nothing Kretschmer couldn’t fix with a roll of duct tape and a pair of pliers, and for that reason, and his relentless work ethic, Mattera considered him the most valuable man he’d ever employed.

Following him out of the cabin was Howard Ehrenberg, also thirty-eight, a Long Island native and computer whiz who had previous lives as a follower of the Grateful Dead, a head shop owner, and a sound technician. He’d met Chatterton at a dive charity event and the two hit it off. Captivated by the idea of hunting treasure in a faraway land, he asked if Chatterton might use a technical guy who could dive.

Heiko Kretschmer

Howard Ehrenberg

“Ever worked with side-scan sonars, magnetometers, or sub-bottom profilers?” Chatterton asked.

“Never,” Ehrenberg replied.

“Okay, you’re perfect for us,” Chatterton said, and Ehrenberg became crew.

Now the men could see Cayo Levantado, where Bannister’s ship had sunk. Chatterton cut back on the throttle, and the men stood on the bow and admired the island’s white sands and swaying palm trees. In the years since it had been featured in Bacardi ads, it had become home to a luxury resort, complete with sparkling swimming pools and a dock built for cruise ships.

“It’s even more gorgeous than in those old Playboy magazine ads,” Mattera said.

“You were looking at the ads?” Chatterton asked.

As the boat slowed its approach to the island, the men jumped down to the deck and got ready to search the waters. Until about the 1970s, treasure hunters did their work by putting on a snorkel or peering through glass-bottom buckets or, in the case of famed salvor Teddy Tucker, swaying in a window washer’s chair under a hot-air balloon. And they didn’t look for shipwrecks so much as for straight lines; nature didn’t make anything linear, so when they saw straight edges and right angles, they knew they were seeing something man-made.

Technology changed all that. By the turn of the twenty-first century, salvors were using two primary tools to find shipwrecks. One of them, the side-scan sonar, used sound waves to paint images of the seafloor, but it wasn’t the right tool for nonflat, coral-strewn bottoms like the ones in Samaná Bay. The other kind of technology, the magnetometer, was perhaps the most important piece in the treasure hunter’s arsenal, and it was what Chatterton and Mattera planned to rely on for finding Bannister’s ship.

Built into a streamlined, torpedo-shaped unit, the magnetometer was designed to be towed by boat. When it passed over a ferrous object, it sensed the change in the earth’s magnetic field caused by that object. The best units were exquisitely sensitive, able to detect even a screwdriver underwater. And while they did not react to precious metals like gold and silver (which do not contain iron), they were champions at detecting anchors, cannons, cannonballs, and other magnetic objects that had been part of well-armed colonial-era ships. Deluxe versions could cost more than a new Mercedes-Benz, but without a good one a treasure hunter flew blind. Chatterton and Mattera had chosen one of the best—the Geometrics G-882 cesium-vapor marine magnetometer with an altimeter, priced at almost seventy thousand dollars, including software and upgrades.

Buying the magnetometer was the easy part. Towing it was art. An operator set up a predetermined grid, then towed the instrument slowly and methodically back and forth, a process known as “mowing the lawn.” As the magnetometer detected ferrous metal objects below, the locations were recorded by the boat’s onboard computers, which would make a chart of the hits. All the while, the captain would work to keep his magnetometer at optimum altitude, about ten feet above the seafloor. In that way, surveys often turned into an ongoing waltz with the sea. The finest captains were the ones who could dance.

Chatterton, Mattera, and crew planned to move in lanes seventy-five feet wide, each of which stretched for a mile, then to dive every one of the hits the mag detected, looking for any iron remnant from the wreck of the Golden Fleece. If the first grid failed to produce evidence of the shipwreck, the men would set up a new grid, adjacent to the last, and survey that area, and they would continue expanding, mowing more lawns until they’d found their pirate ship.

Ordinarily, that kind of search might have required surveying the waters around the entire island, a massive area. But Bowden had provided the men information from historical records that helped narrow the search. The Golden Fleece, he told them:

– had sunk in twenty-four feet of water

– had muskets scattered on her deck

– had been careening when confronted by the Royal Navy warships

It was the last clue that was most significant to the men. Wooden ships sailing in tropical waters were plagued by Teredo shipworms, barnacles, and other marine life that attached to the underside of a vessel’s hull, slowing the ship and eating away at the wood. Left unchecked, these tiny scourges could bring down the mightiest of ships. To prevent the damage, crews cleaned and repaired hulls on a regular basis, and they did this by beaching the ships at high tide, then tilting them onto their sides as the water went out, a process known as careening. Since the Golden Fleece had been sunk while careening, it meant she would likely be found near a beach.

That, more than anything, gave the men hope for a quick discovery. By studying aerial photographs, they could see that there were no beaches on the northern coast of the island; it was all rocks, so a ship could not have careened there. The southern coast had beaches, but they’d been built for the resort in the past decade, so the island’s southern coast was out, too.

The island’s eastern coast had a large beach, but the area was rocky and exposed to wind and weather, making that location impractical and risky for a pirate looking to evade authorities.

That left the western beach, the only one that made sense. It was at the leeward side of the island, so it was protected from wind and waves. And it seemed well hidden from the open Atlantic, so passing ships couldn’t see it. If a pirate captain chose to careen at Cayo Levantado, that’s where he’d go every time. And that’s where Chatterton went now.

He guided the Deep Explorer toward the southern tip of the western beach and allowed her to drift to a halt. Once the boat was settled, Kretschmer prepped the magnetometer, while Ehrenberg set up the software program to collect data. Just after dawn, it was already eighty degrees outside, the coolest it would be all day.

Mattera reminded the men that the pirate ship had been lost in twenty-four feet of water. Depths could rise and fall at random near islands like this, so they would start their survey a good distance offshore and work their way in toward the beach. That way, they wouldn’t miss any area that included the appropriate depth.

The men were ready to go. Mattera pulled out his Nikon D300, set the delayed shutter, then joined the others for a photo. After the camera snapped, he grabbed four diet sodas from the cooler, passed them out, and raised a toast.

“To Captain Bannister,” he said.

“To Captain Bannister,” the others echoed.

“One unlucky sonofabitch. First, the Royal Navy hunts him down. Now us.”

The men towed for hours. They stopped only to wolf down soggy tuna sandwiches, then continued their survey until the waters turned choppy and the magnetometer began porpoising over the surface. It was frustrating to halt work so early in the day, but the bay stayed calm only until early afternoon in these parts, and without quiet waters their readings might be skewed. To both Chatterton and Mattera, survey work was science; there was no room for imprecision. So they pulled in their gear and turned the Deep Explorer around.

Twenty minutes later, they docked their boat in a small channel four miles from the island. By a stroke of good luck, Mattera’s soon-to-be father-in-law, a former admiral and chief of staff of the Dominican Navy, owned a little villa on the bay, and it was here that the team would be living temporarily while they searched for the Golden Fleece. Overlooking the water, the home was cut into the cliff face and accessible only by a narrow road that wound through a mango orchard. Inside, the building opened into a spacious indoor-outdoor living area. All the bedrooms had private terraces. The view of the sunset was spectacular. Mattera’s future in-laws would want it back before long.

The men unloaded their gear, but work wasn’t done for the day. Ehrenberg still needed to process the data the team had collected, using custom software programs to make a map of the hits detected by the magnetometer. A day or two later, the team would dive those hits. Even the smallest blip would be investigated.

Chatterton and Mattera stepped onto the veranda and called their significant others; in this remote area, if they stood in just the right spot and tilted slightly toward the moon, they could catch a cell phone signal that might last for an entire five-minute call.

Chatterton reached Carla at their home on the Maine coast, where she was curled up on the couch and watching a movie with their yellow Labrador retriever, Chili. Carla missed John and did not approve when she learned that her husband had eaten Zucaritas—Frosted Flakes—for dinner three nights in a row.

Mattera got Carolina while she was reading in the study of their apartment in Santo Domingo. He laughed when she asked if he’d found “Long John Silver,” yet the question jarred him. For all the luck shipwreck hunters had in finding real pirate ships, he and Chatterton might as well have been looking for Noah’s Ark.

Even during the Golden Age of Piracy, between 1650 and 1720, pirates were rare. Precise numbers are hard to come by, but according to British historian Peter Earle, in the period around 1700, “it seems unlikely that they ever had much more than twenty ships at any one time and less than two thousand men.” By contrast, there might have been as many as eighty thousand sailors and navy men working on legitimate ships in the Atlantic and Caribbean at the time. It’s difficult to say how many pirate ships in total might have sailed during the seventy-year Golden Age, but the number, in any case, would have been small, perhaps fewer than a thousand.

Not all of those ships had been lost or sunk. Some were captured by authorities; others were sold or traded by the pirates and put to lawful uses. So the number of lost pirate ships is just a fraction of those that ever sailed. Finding any of them would be a long shot. Identifying one would be virtually impossible. The reason lay in the shadowy nature of crime itself.

Stealth was the lifeblood of a pirate ship. To survive, she had to be invisible, anonymous. Pirate captains didn’t publish crew lists or file sailing plans, and they didn’t paint names on the hulls of their ships. Whenever possible, they sailed in secrecy. These measures helped them evade the forces that hunted them, but it also meant that when they sank, they didn’t merely settle to the bottom; they disappeared from existence. No government went looking for them because they belonged to no country. Witnesses to a sinking couldn’t have described the location precisely in any case, as measures of longitude were unreliable during that era. If any pirates survived the ship’s demise, they weren’t going to report the loss to authorities.

Nature took over from there. It might take just a few years for mud and sand to bury a shipwreck completely.

That didn’t mean, however, that a sunken pirate ship was never to be seen again. Over the ages, it was near certain that explorers, fishermen, and even snorkelers had stumbled across the scattered remains of Golden Age pirate ships. Few, however, would have known that the debris was special, or could have identified what they’d found. Much of what a pirate ship carried—dishes, rigging, tools, ballast stones, coins, weapons, even cannons—was carried by merchant ships, too, which meant that even if a finder dared to dream he’d discovered a pirate ship, proving it would be near impossible.

Except for one man.

As a boy, American Barry Clifford had heard stories about the pirate captain “Black Sam” Bellamy, whose ship had been lost in 1717 off Cape Cod. As an adult, Clifford went out and found Bellamy’s ship, the Whydah, not far from Clifford’s own childhood home. News of the 1984 discovery reverberated worldwide, but it wasn’t just the artifacts or piles of silver or even the story of the crew’s dramatic end in a storm that fired people’s imaginations. It was a bell Clifford had pulled from the wreckage, inscribed “The Whydah Gally 1716.” It made identification of the wreck ironclad, and the Whydah the first pirate ship ever confirmed to be found. No one else had ever gotten so lucky.

But that didn’t keep capable people from trying.

In the years after Clifford’s discovery, research teams claimed to have found the ships of two of history’s most famous pirates. Neither team, however, seemed able to prove the identity of its wreck.

The first of the two discoveries had come in 1996 at Beaufort Inlet, just off the North Carolina coast. There, a shipwreck exploration firm discovered what appeared to be the wreck of Blackbeard’s flagship, Queen Anne’s Revenge, which had run aground and sunk in 1718.

Almost immediately, the governor of North Carolina publicly announced that the notorious pirate’s ship had been found. Just as fast, some experts cast doubt on the wreck’s identity. Among their objections: The artifacts could have come from any merchant ship of the time; the Adventure, a ship that sank with Blackbeard’s, was nowhere to be found; and one of the cannons discovered seemed marked with a date of 1730 or 1737, at least twelve years after the loss of Queen Anne’s Revenge. Debate raged, a technical back-and-forth that never settled the matter. In 2005, experts wrote in The International Journal of Nautical Archaeology, “The incontrovertible fact remains that no single piece of evidence, or trend of circumstantial evidence, indicates that this wrecked vessel is actually the Queen Anne’s Revenge.” They also addressed the issue of money, noting that the project had received nearly one million dollars in grant funding to date, and was seeking almost four million dollars more. “One may speculate,” the authors wrote, “that the investments already made, plus the possibility of future financial gains, may indeed be the reason for a continued emphasis on the identification of the wreck, and a refusal to consider that the identification could be flawed.”

None of that deterred North Carolina officials and entrepreneurs from opening exhibits, walking tours, historical reenactments—even Blackbeard’s Miniature Golf—and tourists flocked to the area.

A second possible pirate ship was found in the Dominican Republic in 2007, when a team from Indiana University was led to a site they thought to be the Quedagh Merchant, the 1699 wreck of infamous pirate captain William Kidd. Media such as NPR, CNN, and The Times of London swarmed to the story, telling how the researchers had found the ship, exploring theories about Kidd’s possible innocence, and recounting how Kidd had been hanged by the British (the rope had broken on the first attempt; after the second did the job, his body was hung over the River Thames for three years as a warning to those who fancied the pirate life).

Yet, even as plans were made with the Dominican government to turn the wreck site into an underwater national park, the Indiana University team didn’t seem willing to say it had definitive proof of the wreck’s identity. Charles Beeker, who led the expedition, said, “As an archaeologist, I cannot say conclusively that it’s Captain Kidd’s ship, but as a betting man, I am betting on the ship.”

Four years later, Indiana University officials would be speaking in stronger terms about the identity of the wreck, though a smoking gun—proof-positive evidence—still hadn’t been found. Nonetheless, the discovery generated more than two million dollars in grants, a push by the Dominican government to promote the site for tourism, and a permanent exhibit, “National Geographic Treasures of the Earth,” at the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis.

A few other pirate ship claims had been made over the years, all based on circumstantial evidence, not a smoking gun among them.

But grants and exhibits and circumstantial evidence and miniature golf didn’t cut it for Chatterton and Mattera. Neither could imagine going through life thinking he’d probably found a pirate ship. Neither could imagine going to sleep at night wondering if he’d really done what he’d dreamed.

But that was the rub with a pirate ship. No matter what anyone did, it was near certain he wouldn’t find proof of identity. Even if Chatterton and Mattera did find the Golden Fleece, even if historians wrote about them in books and curators gave them a museum exhibit of their own, without definitive proof there would always be doubt. And that was an outcome neither man could abide.