Pirate Hunters: Treasure, Obsession, and the Search for a Legendary Pirate Ship

by Robert Kurson

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.”

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.

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.

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?

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 the era.

All the while, he marveled at their criminal instincts. Wherever he looked he saw Gambino in them. Like the gangsters Mattera had known growing up, the pirates worked to avoid violence and fighting. It wasn’t because they were frightened (they weren’t) or believed they couldn’t win (they almost always had bigger crews, stronger fighters, and better weapons than their prey). It was because bloodshed was bad for business. A battle at sea could result in casualties, ruin plunder, even cost the pirates their own ship. It also attracted the attention of the law. To steal quietly always paid best.

By Bannister’s time, there were few places in the world more advanced in trauma surgery than the dank and unsterile quarters of a navy fighting ship. If one had to be separated from a part of his body, this was the place to be.