The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down (16 page)

The eleven-ship armada sailed out of Havana and into the Straits of Florida, their sails full and flags waving. Ubilla and Echeverz's massive fighting galleons took the lead, their raised aft decks towering above both the main deck and the ocean waves like wooden skyscrapers. Six treasure galleons made up the body of the fleet, their cargo-laden hulls riding low in the water.
El Grifon,
the French frigate, darted back and forth, being more nimble than her fortresslike consorts. Two more fighting galleons brought up the rear, dozens of heavy bronze cannon concealed behind their gun ports.

On Friday, July 19, the easterly winds blowing off the Florida coast began to fail. The air turned unusually hot and humid and some of the veteran sailors began feeling pains in their joints. Slowly the winds began picking up, but this time from the eastern horizon, where thin, wispy clouds had been hovering since morning. By midafternoon the skies had darkened, rain squalls passed over the galleons, and the winds began to strengthen from the east-northeast. First to twenty miles an hour, then to thirty, and forty. Sailors clung to the masts in the growing seas as they struggled to shorten sail. On every ship, cannons were secured, hatches battened down, and cargo double-checked as the Spaniards prepared to meet the coming storm.

By midnight, the Spanish vessels were plowing into hurricane-force winds. Fear turned to terror as the clumsy galleons began climbing mountainous waves, forty and fifty feet tall. As the winds reached a hundred miles an hour, the furled sails loosened and were torn to ribbons, and bits of heavy rigging began crashing onto the decks. All the while, Ubilla and his fellow officers kept looking over their shoulders, knowing that the wind and waves were driving the fleet toward the treacherous Florida coast. They were also aware that there wasn't a single refuge between Key West and the great Spanish outpost of St. Augustine, and there was little hope of making it that far.

In the small hours of the morning, the men spotted roaring surf off their ship's aft port quarters. Struggle as they might, the crew could do nothing to prevent the galleons from being driven onto the reefs and sand by the mountainous seas. One by one the ships struck. Ubilla's 471-ton flagship,
Nuestra Señora de la Regla,
had her bottom torn off by a reef and sank in thirty feet of water. One of the rear galleons vanished under a wave, while another, the 450-ton
Santo Cristo de San Roman,
capsized in the surf a few miles south of the
Regla
and disintegrated. The commander of one of the treasure galleons, the
Urca de Lima,
managed to run his ship aground in the shelter of a river mouth, but she was still battered apart by the storm. In the end, all ten were destroyed, littering the beaches with hundreds of bodies. Only
El Grifon,
which had sailed ahead of the fleet, was able to escape the hurricane.
^*

Fewer than half of the 2,000 men aboard the doomed ships made it to the beaches alive, crawling in terror through the stinging rain and darkness to shelter themselves amid the dunes. Dozens more died from their wounds and dehydration over the next few days while they huddled on the beach, looking out for hostile Indians. Both Ubilla and Echeverz had drowned, but Admiral Don Francisco Salmon made it to shore and put the survivors to work digging for water and building crude shelters from the wreckage of their ships. Several men made for St. Augustine in one of the surviving ship's boats. A week later they made it into that harbor, rowing beneath the giant fort, Castillo de San Marcos,
^*
to break the news of one of the greatest maritime disasters in the history of the Americas. Along with the remains of ten ships and a thousand corpses, seven million pesos in treasure lay scattered off the beaches of east Florida, most of it in water so shallow that a good diver could reach it all.

***

The news spread across the Americas faster than the plague, from St. Augustine and Havana to Jamaica and the Bahamas. Ship captains carried the word to Charleston, Williamsburg, Newport, and Boston. The
Boston News-Letter
did the rest, its late summer editions carried far and wide by ships, sloops, and post riders alerting readers from Cape Cod to London of the disaster. Soon, from every corner of British America, men were piling onto vessels of all sorts bound "to fish upon ye wrecks."

For Williams and Bellamy, it was a dream come true. Sometime in the early fall they headed for the Florida wreck sites. Perhaps there were tearful good-byes between Sam and Mary Hallett, between Paulsgrave and his wife, Anna. When the two men eventually returned to New England, it would be under far different circumstances.

***

When the news of the wreck of the treasure fleet reached Jamaica, all hell broke loose. Every mariner in town seemed to be readying himself to sail to get his bit of Spanish treasure. Sailors were soon deserting the Port Royal-based naval frigate HMS
Diamond
at a rate of five a day, even as she was preparing to sail home to England. "If I had stayed a week longer I do believe I should not have had men enough to have brought me home," the
Diamond
's commanding officer, John Balchen, reported. The mariners were "all mad to go a wrecking, as they term it, for the generality of the island think they have [the] right to fish upon the wrecks, though the Spaniards have not quitted them."

Rather than suppressing the wreckers, Governor Hamilton tried to get in on the action. He approached Captain Davis of HMS
Jamaica,
suggesting the young officer sail his sloop-of-war up to Florida, loot the wrecks, and share the proceeds with Hamilton. Davis was offended by the request, as was Commodore Balchen, who informed the governor in no uncertain terms that he would not permit his ships to be used in such an ignoble errand. Rebuffed by the navy, Hamilton quickly moved to purchase shares in the privateers he had commissioned. His official orders to the privateers were to "execute all manner of acts of hostility" against pirates. Privately, he directed them to go straight to the Spanish wrecks and to bring back whatever treasure they could.

Henry Jennings took his mission to heart. He signed on fourteen skilled divers—some black, some white—and loaded the
Barsheba
with "warlike stores." In December, he sailed out of Bluefields, Jamaica, in the company of another privateer, the thirty-five-ton sloop
Eagle
commanded by one John Wills. Jennings's
Barsheba
had eighty men and eight guns. The
Eagle
was even stronger, with twelve guns and 100 men. Together they could hold their own against the Spanish
guardas costas
and easily overwhelm the Spaniards' lightly manned trading vessels. They sailed along the mountainous shores of Cuba, stopping in the wild harbors of Honda and Mariel until, sometime after Christmas, they began making their way into the Florida Straits, searching for the signs of the ruined treasure fleet.

On Christmas morning 1715, the privateers stood just off Key Biscayne,
^*
a well-known watering hole at the mouth of the Florida Straits. Around eight o'clock, a small sailing launch approached them from the north, bucking the warm flow of the Gulf Stream. It turned out to be the
San Nicolas de Vari y San Joseph,
an official Spanish mail boat on her way from St. Augustine to Havana. Her master, a forty-six-year-old seaman named Pedro de la Vega, offered no resistance. Yes, he knew where the treasure wrecks were: His vessel had stopped at the main Spanish salvage camp on the way down from St. Augustine. No, Jennings wasn't the first person to ask; the
San Nicolas
had been looted the day before by a pair of English sloops at the site of one of the wrecked treasure galleons. Those Englishmen had also wanted to know about the strength of the Spanish camp, the nature of its defenses, and the quantity of treasure accumulated there. Pedro de la Vega told Jennings, Wills, and Vane what he had told the others: that he'd only anchored off the shores of the camp for a few hours and knew little of the proceedings there. If de la Vega did know more, he wasn't volunteering. He also neglected to mention the 1,200 pieces of eight hidden aboard the
San Nicolas.

De la Vega and his crew were imprisoned aboard the
Barsheba,
relieved of two gold pieces (worth £8) and some of their clothing, but not abused in any way. It helped that de la Vega had agreed to show the privateers the way to the Spanish salvage camp. It was easy, he told them: Just let the Gulf Stream push you along the flat, featureless Florida shore for a hundred miles and you can't miss it. There's really nothing else between here and there.

It was as the Spaniard said. All day long and through the night the three vessels made their way up the deserted Florida shore, flying Spanish colors. The following morning, they witnessed the first signs of the destroyed treasure fleet. Bits and pieces of the patrol ship,
Nuestra Señora de las Nieves,
were scattered high up a barrier island beach a few miles north of the St. Lucie Inlet. The vessel's hull was visible in the shallow water a few hundred yards off the beach. It was clear that it had already been thoroughly salvaged by the Spaniards. On the shore were signs of their operations: remains of campfires and crude crosses marking the graves of those who hadn't survived. The flotilla continued northward, passing the remains of the
Urca de Lima,
run aground in the mouth of Fort Pierce Inlet; the galleon had also been picked clean by her surviving crew, then burned to the waterline to discourage freelance salvors.

The campfires of the Spanish salvage camps flickered red against the pitch black shore. It was, again, as de la Vega outlined: two camps, six miles apart, near a grove of palm trees planted by Florida's natives, the Ayz Indians. Palmar de Ayz, as de la Vega called it, was the final resting place of the late General Ubilla's flagship as well as one of the treasure-laden fighting galleons, the
San Cristo de San Roman.
Any treasure the Spaniards had salvaged would be in the main camp, the northernmost clump of light on the shore. Jennings ordered all lamps doused, hands turned out of their hammocks, and the boats prepared for a landing.

***

Admiral Francisco Salmon, the commander of the camp, was lucky to be alive. The hurricane had dismasted his ship and smashed her into three pieces on the shoals; the middle section sank, carrying a hundred men to their deaths, but the bow and stern were thrown ashore, sparing Salmon and half of his crew. By the time help arrived from St. Augustine and Havana, the survivors had already eaten the last of the dogs, cats, and horses that had made it ashore, and had moved on to devour the bitter berries of the palmetto trees growing along the beach. Salmon was ill, but refused to leave the wreck site. "I will stay on this island [
sic
]...in bad health and half dressed," he wrote his king, "even if it means sacrificing my life." He had posted his strongest men as sentries near the hulk of the
Regla
in an attempt to prevent the other men from looting the chests of treasure within. Then he set about trying to re-cover as much of the fleet's cargo as possible. It was clear that a great deal of dangerous diving work would need to be done, but few of Salmon's men were eager to enter the shark-infested water. Those who did sickened within a few weeks under the strain of the heavy work. With hundreds of tons of treasure to salvage from the ocean floor, another solution was clearly called for. Salmon sent a man to Havana with orders to round up African and Indian divers.

Early-eighteenth-century diving techniques were primitive and extremely hazardous. Free divers—almost all of them slaves—were sent out over the wreck sites on simple rafts. Each took a large rock and a very deep breath before jumping overboard and sinking to the ocean floor twenty to fifty feet down. There they scampered about for a few minutes, scooping up coins and small objects, and marking the locations of chests, boxes, cannon and other desirable objects. On the surface they were searched, then sent back to the bottom with ropes or chains to attach to the larger objects, so they could be raised with ship-mounted windlasses. In deeper water, the divers couldn't stay down long enough to be useful, so a large bell was lowered down with them. When a diver ran out of breath, he could stick his face under the bell and take another from the pocket of air there. If they didn't take care to exhale completely before heading to the surface their lungs could rupture, resulting in an agonizing death. Others were forced to stay down so long that they built up dangerous levels of nitrogen in their blood; when they resurfaced the dissolved gas bubbled in their veins—the bends—leading to permanent paralysis, nerve damage, and death. Mortality rates were extremely high among enslaved divers, and a third of the 300 divers at Palmar de Ayz did not survive their servitude.

No matter the human cost, Admiral Salmon was pleased with the results. Over four million pesos (£1 million) in coins and cargo had already been salvaged, most of it from the
Regla
and
Roman,
which lay in relatively shallow water near his camp. To expedite operations, he'd set up an auxiliary camp next to the
Roman,
a mile down the beach from the main camp. The vast majority of the treasure Salmon recovered was already in Havana under heavy guard, yet some 350,000 pieces of eight (£87,500) were buried in the sand within his fortified main camp. These chests of silver must have been the first thing that came to mind when his aides shook him awake in the wee hours of December 27 to tell him the camps were under attack.

***

As his ships tossed in the darkness, Jennings selected 150 men, armed them to the teeth, and divided them into three equal companies. Each company boarded a large boat and, at two in the morning, rowed ashore. They landed midway between the two Spanish camps. At daybreak, they marched up the beach toward the main camp, a drummer and flag bearer at the head of each company. Panic spread within the camp. Admiral Salmon's men had built a sand embankment to defend against attacks by the Ayz, but they knew it would be little match for the musket-toting English. They were also outnumbered; Salmon had only sixty soldiers and a few cannon at his command. A dozen of his men fled the scene as the rat-a-tat-tat of Jennings's drummers grew closer. Salmon, reading the writing on the wall, took a white flag and went out alone to meet the English.