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

by Robert Kurson

Over the months, he compiled a short list of truths he saw reflected in the lives and the dying around him—his principles for living: —If an undertaking was easy, someone else already would have done it. —If you follow in another’s footsteps, you miss the problems really worth solving. —Excellence is born of preparation, dedication, focus, and tenacity; compromise on any of these and you become average. —Every so often, life presents a great moment of decision, an intersection at which a man must decide to stop or go; a person lives with these decisions forever. —Examine everything; not all is as it seems or as people tell you. —It is easiest to live with a decision if it is based on an earnest sense of right and wrong. —The guy who gets killed is often the guy who got nervous. The guy who doesn’t care anymore, who has said, “I’m already dead—the fact that I live or die is irrelevant and the only thing that matters is the accounting I give of myself,” is the most formidable force in the world. —The worst possible decision is to give up.

After graduating in 1982, he landed a job with a commercial diving company that was doing work in New York Harbor. There, he demolished concrete, welded support beams under South Street, and installed pile wrap beneath the Port Authority Heliport. Every hour demanded muscular expression and a nimble touch, often in caves or tunnels made black by swirling silt and sediment. Supervisors could see that Chatterton was different—not just because he slithered into difficult places or refused to quit even after his body went numb from the cold, but because of the way that he saw. During times of zero visibility, he used his body, helmet, and even his fins to decipher the contours of his work space, assembling the shapes he encountered into three-dimensional diagrams in his mind. By freeing himself from vision he came to see with his imagination, and that meant there was nowhere Chatterton couldn’t go.

By 1991, some were calling Chatterton the greatest wreck diver they’d ever seen. Charter captain Bill Nagle paid him the ultimate compliment: “When you die, no one will ever find your body.”

Treasure shows who you really are. It strips away every façade you’ve constructed, every story you believe about yourself, and reveals the real you. If you are a miserable, lying, greedy, worthless fuck, treasure will tell you that. If you are a good and decent person, treasure will tell you that, too. And you needn’t find a single coin to know. It’s enough to get close to treasure, to believe it within reach, and you’ll have your answer, but once it happens it can’t be lied about and it can’t be bullshitted away. For that reason, treasure is crisis, because what you get in the end is yourself.

They flourished for much of the seventeenth century, taking prizes and striking terror into the hearts of merchant seamen, especially the Spanish, who controlled much of the trade and shipping in the Caribbean and Atlantic. Many countries considered the pirates to be the “scourge of mankind.” England loved them. By harassing Spanish ships, pirates made room for English trade and expansion. In the bargain, pirate ships took hard and violent men off the streets and put them to work, then brought back stolen goods to English markets and sold them on the cheap. Pirates spent handsomely to outfit their ships, and paid generous bribes to English officials. They drained their purses in port like men just days away from the gallows, which many of them were. If England shook her fist at these rogues, she did so with fingers crossed, bulging coffers, and an eye toward expanding her empire.

In 1670, England and Spain signed the Treaty of Madrid. Among other things, it called for England to condemn piracy—no more privateer licenses, no more safe havens, no more markets for stolen Spanish goods. In return, Spain made concessions to English trade and shipping.

Mattera loved the language of the pirates, and even found a book dedicated to the subject. Pirates never said “Arrgh” or “Shiver my timbers” (which almost certainly originated, like so much supposed pirate language, in Hollywood movies from the 1950s). They did use terms and phrases such as “Ahoy,” “A merry life and a short one,” and several curses, oaths, threats, and greetings, each of which Mattera enjoyed. He scribbled down these favorites to yell at Chatterton when next he saw him: —Eat what falls from my tail! —Damn your blood! —I’ll cleave your skull asunder! —I’ll cut you in pound pieces! —I come from hell and I’ll carry you there presently!

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.

On the Golden Age of Piracy, The Buccaneers of America by Alexandre Exquemelin, originally published in 1678 (and later published by Penguin Books), was essential reading, an eyewitness account of pirate life by a man who sailed with Henry Morgan, and it’s a page turner. Peter Earle’s The Pirate Wars, published by Thomas Dunne Books, gave a first-rate and highly readable account of how and why navies did battle with the buccaneers. The Invisible Hook, by Peter T. Leeson and published by Princeton University Press, provided a compelling look at the economics of pirate life, and shed new light on why, beyond the obvious reasons, pirates might have chosen such risky lives. As a general primer, David Cordingly’s Under the Black Flag, published by Random House, was indispensable and a pleasure to read.