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

by Robert Kurson

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 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.

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.

Every diver, at some deep level in his soul, dreamed of discovering a pirate ship. Yet,

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

In 1655, England invaded Jamaica and captured it from the Spanish. The conquest planted the English into the heart of the Caribbean, well positioned to disrupt Spanish shipping and attack her colonies. But just a year later, many of the warships that had captured the island had been retired or returned to England. Left vulnerable, the English governor of Jamaica needed to figure out another way to defend the island. And he had to do it fast. So he turned his attention three hundred miles northeast to Tortuga, a wild island inhabited by English, French, and Dutch cutthroats who made their livings by attacking Spanish ships. People called these bandits buccaneers, from the French word boucan, for the wooden cooking frame used by area hunters to smoke meats. The governor made the buccaneers an offer: Protect English interests in Jamaica with your heavily armed ships and you can use Port Royal’s harbor as a base for your pirating operations. Tough men, from Tortuga and elsewhere, lined up to accept. Some secured official commissions from the English Crown and were known as privateers.

Others worked independently, answering to no one but themselves; they were called pirates.

No matter the title, these men lit into their jobs, harassing and plundering Spanish shipping, launching operations against Spanish settlements, and keeping Jamaica safe for the English. Many got rich. The best of them, including the legendary pirate Henry Morgan, became wealthy beyond imagination. All seemed to spread their good fortune across Port Royal, and, in turn, many people in the town became rich. Merchants, government officials, and townsfolk profited by dealing in vast quantities of stolen goods. The town expanded, its crooked wharf-side streets filling with markets that offered anything, legitimate or lurid, that a person desired. Weekly, ...

The pirates couldn’t get enough of it all. Leading lives dangerous and often measured in months, they spent money with abandon. Said one contemporary historian of the pirates of Port Royal: “Wine and women drained their wealth to such a degree that, in a little time, some of them became reduced to beggary. They have been known to spend 2 or 3,000 pieces of eight in one night and one gave a strumpet 500 to see her naked. They used to buy a pipe [105 gallons] of wine, place it in the street, and oblige everyone that passed to drink.”

For years, there were few better places for pirates or privateers than Port Royal. But in the early 1670s, as trade between Jamaica and the rest of the world grew, pockets of opposition formed against these bandits of the sea. Jamaica was becoming a major producer of sugar; anything that caused mayhem or interfered with trade came to be seen as a threat by powerful merchants and government officials. A peace treaty between England and Spain made the island less vulnerable. Antipiracy laws were enacted; those who didn’t abandon the trade could be prosecuted and hanged. The pirates did not go gently. But as London sent warships and sailors to Port Royal, the statistical life expectancy of a pirate dropped further. By 1680, the year Bannister nearly lost the Golden Fleece in Port Royal harbor, many pirates and privateers had been driven from the island. Those who continued to operate there did so at great peril.

Still, opportunity beckoned. As transoceanic trade increased, ships crossed the Atlantic and Caribbean in greater numbers than ever, many loaded with valuable cargos, some with treasure. A man of a certain daring, able to secure a powerful ship and inspire a crew, could still make a fortune by hijacking these vessels on the open seas. The question, as the 1680s wore on, was whether such a man existed anymore.

At trial, a strong case was made against the pirates. But when it came time for the Spaniards to testify, they swore “backward and forward” that they had sold their boat and cargo to Bannister, and that he had paid them to serve as crew aboard the Golden Fleece. If that testimony shocked the prosecution, at least the governor could still rely on the jury, who were certain to see through the ruse. But this was Port Royal, where ordinary folk, remembering who’d made their town rich and had infused it with spirit, still counted pirates as neighbors and friends. They returned with a verdict: not guilty. Bannister had cheated the hangman.

Bannister’s escape blindsided Governor Molesworth. Still, he couldn’t hide a grudging respect for the captain. Writing to an English colonial official, he said of the getaway: “[It came as] a great surprise to me, for I thought Bannister’s want of credit would prevent him from ever getting the ship to sea again . . . yet now he has obtained credit from some persons underhand, and has his ship well fitted in every respect. It was done so artfully that no one suspected it, or I should have found some pretext for securing him.”

First, things could turn on a person—and especially gringos—very fast in the Dominican Republic. And second, someone was already gunning for them in the country.

It took just a week or two for Chatterton to find the answers he’d come for: America didn’t belong in Vietnam. The soldiers were heroes. Human beings were animals. Yet he still kept walking point, still kept looking to see how people lived and died, how they made decisions, and the accountings they gave of themselves when things mattered.

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.

It’s not that he believed the worst wouldn’t happen—he knew from Vietnam that it would. He just knew that when he became buried in sludge or could no longer breathe or got pinned to a wall, he would come out okay, because in his mind he’d already been there; in his mind he knew the way out.

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.”

this: A person could have theories about who he was; he could make predictions about what he might do in a given situation. But he’d never really know until he was tested.

boat. Do I want to do this anymore? Have I grown too hardened to these fatalities to see what’s really going on? Is diving worth dying for?

No one lives forever. A person has to be who he is. I’m a diver.

As revelers rang in 2004, he made an addendum to his principles for living: —Do it now. Tomorrow is promised to no one.

For the next several hours, Marx told stories about treasure hunters, past and present. Each was laced with adventure and close calls, but most of them underlined what Marx had said decades earlier—“Treasure is trouble”—a line that had become gospel in the business.

The trouble he was referring to resided in the hearts of the unlucky few who found treasure—to the weight that gold and silver placed on the soul. Time and again through history, treasure turned honorable men greedy and brought out the worst in the well-intentioned. Just the sight of it caused reasonable people to sever marriages, friendships, and partnerships; to cheat investors; to fight for more than their fair share. In this way, gold and silver performed alchemies of their own. By mixing with human instinct, they could turn even the pious base.

existed. McKee had built a treasure museum next to his house in Islamorada, and that’s where Fizz found him, riding on a lawn mower. By now, McKee was in his sixties. “I want to be a treasure hunter,” Fizz told him, “and I’m willing to work for free to learn the business.” “I bet you’re a diver,” McKee said. “Yes, sir.” “What else can you do? Are you a boat captain? A mechanic? Have medical training? Can you cook?” “No, none of that.” “Everyone’s a diver. Got too many of those.” Fizz got into his car and drove back to Sarasota, where he enrolled in an emergency medical technician course, earned his boat captain’s license, learned to work on small engines, and volunteered to cook for fifteen firemen a day at the firehouse. Two years later, he drove back to Islamorada, where he found McKee, again, on the lawn mower. “I’m Carl Fismer. I want to be a treasure hunter and I’m willing to work for free to learn the business.” “I bet you’re a diver.” “Yes, sir.” “What else can you do?” “I’m a boat captain, I fix small engines, I’m a state-certified paramedic, and I cook. Meatloaf is my specialty.” “Good. You’re on my next trip.” And with that, Fizz began to learn from the master. It was the start of a career that would take him on adventures across the world.

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.

The merchant captain yells for his crew. And then he sees what he has spent his career dreading: the onrushing ship lowers its English flag and hoists a new one, blood-red and emblazoned with an hourglass. This is a pirate flag. The hourglass makes a warning—if you resist, your remaining time on earth will be short. And bloody.

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.

they swore, drank, gambled, and womanized as if any night might be their last. “Whenever they have got hold of something, they don’t keep it for long,” wrote one contemporary observer. “They are busy dicing, whoring and drinking so long as they have anything to spend. Some of them will get through a good two or three thousand pieces of eight in a day—and next day not have a shirt to their back.” Mattera had known guys like that

Almost without exception, pirates viewed the presence of women aboard their ships as a distraction and a potential source of conflict and jealousy. On some pirate ships, the penalty for secreting a woman aboard was death.

They also sent a message to the rest of the world: Do not struggle against us. We are crazy. It always ends better if you just go along. To guarantee they were heard, they often spared a lucky few, sending them home to spread the terrible word.

The Buccaneers of America, written by onetime pirate Alexandre Exquemelin, and first published in 1678.

while Carolina inspected the produce, he found this sentence: “When a ship has been captured, the men decide whether the captain should keep it or not.”

Before every voyage, pirates gathered together to commit an unthinkable act: They made every crewman an equal. From the greenest of lookouts to the captain himself, no one would own rights over any other or possess privileges unavailable to all. The men would eat the same meals, earn similar wages, share the same quarters. The captain would exercise absolute authority only in battle; at other times, he would guide the ship according to the pleasure of the crew.

Having made everyone equal, the pirates now put almost everything to a vote. To choose where to stalk prey, they voted. To decide whether to attack a target, they voted. To determine the rules of the ship, the punishment for wrongdoers, division of booty, to maroon or shoot traitors, they voted. And every man’s vote counted the same. One might have expected these men, who lived lawless lives in the shadow of gallows, to cast their ballots in unpredictable ways. Yet, time and again through the decades that spanned their Golden Age, the pirates seemed to vote exactly alike.

rules that seemed to govern every pirate ship that sailed in the era: – Captains were to earn no more than two or three times that of the lowliest deckhand. – Every man was to have an equal share of food, liquor, and other provisions. – Battle injuries would be compensated according to body part. On one pirate ship, damages were paid as follows: Lost right arm 600 pieces of silver or six slaves Lost left arm 500 pieces of silver or five slaves Lost right leg 500 pieces of silver or five slaves Lost left leg 400 pieces of silver or four slaves Lost eye (either one) 100 pieces of silver or one slave Lost finger 100 pieces of silver or one slave Internal injury up to 500 pieces of silver or five slaves Lost hook or peg leg Same as if original limb was lost – Anyone caught stealing from the ship’s plunder would be punished, including by being marooned on an uninhabited island. – Anyone caught cheating another crewman would have his ears and nose slashed by the aggrieved party, then turned out at the next port. – No women were allowed on board. Anyone sneaking a woman onto the ship would be killed. – Disputes between crewmen would be settled onshore by duel. – Bonuses would be awarded for courage in combat, the sighting of prey, boarding a target ship first, and other heroics. – Punishments would be inflicted for cowardice, drunkenness, insolence, disobedience, rape, and any other action that undermined the ship’s primary purpose—to steal. – Any unsettled issues would be put to...

Mattera couldn’t get enough of these captains. Each needed to be fearless in vision and unflinchingly brave, and willing to visit terror on targets that resisted attack. Yet, the captain served at the pleasure of his crew. He was elected by popular vote and could be deposed by the same. If he were too lenient or too cruel, too aggressive or too passive, if he refused to be guided by the will of the ship, he was out and might be punished, even marooned, for his failures. And this was true even if, like Bannister, he owned the ship.

Mattera couldn’t figure why a made guy would make such a leap. But he understood it now. There was freedom aboard these pirate ships, one hundred or more men inflamed with the idea that anything was possible for anyone. Bannister might have been a gentleman, and he might have had his future ahead of him. But he’d likely never gotten inside a feeling like that.

any man might become rich if he dared, but that no man should ever become king.

Bannister was more than a great pirate—to Mattera, he was a man enthralled by democracy. No other motive so elegantly explained why a gentleman captain, likely in his thirties or forties and with a future secured, would risk everything to go plunder on the high seas. Maybe he loved money. Maybe he loved adventure. But he must have known one thing for sure: Men came alive when they were made equal. A hundred of them together could take on the world.

There were no classes or instruction manuals for finding those kinds of ships in those days, no mentors looking for protégés. Bowden had to figure things out for himself, and that wouldn’t be easy while carrying a full-time job. By now, he’d become a master electrician, but more than ever, his heart wasn’t in it.

That didn’t stop others from envying his life—one in which they imagined him cruising the Caribbean, wind in hair and cognac in hand, in search of the next lost treasure. Few thought about the life he lived every day. He was away from home almost all the time, which made a normal existence impossible and his marriage a challenge. It was hard for him to have a meaningful conversation about his job—almost no one in the world did what he did, or could even imagine it. Even the treasure itself had a tragic patina: Much of it came from wrecks in which people had died violently at sea. Still, he could not dream of doing anything else.

Cannons were not accurate in the 1680s, especially at distances of more than a few hundred yards. Most often, they didn’t need to be; warring ships of the age commonly battered each other from point-blank range, which might be as close as fifty feet. Sometimes, they didn’t fire until they saw the buckles on the enemy’s shoes. And that was not just an expression. Shooting cannons at a distance was especially difficult. Gunpowder was inconsistent in both quality and quantity from shot to shot, which affected the speed at which the ball left the muzzle, and therefore the gunner’s ability to fire with precision. Cannonballs were made about a quarter-inch smaller than the diameter of the bore, to assure that they didn’t jam during discharge and blow up the gun. That meant the ball bounced off the sides of the bore while being fired, and flew out at some small angle—not a severe one, but often enough to make it hook or slice like a golf ball, and almost impossible to put on a bull’s-eye.