CHAPTER TEN

THE ORACLES

             

Mattera flew back to Santo Domingo after his journey to the archive in Seville, but he didn’t go on to Samaná to rejoin his team. Instead, he made phone calls to old men in America, living legends of treasure hunting who knew things a person couldn’t learn from books. He doubted that any of them had chased a pirate before—these men lived for silver and gold—but he believed in wisdom and experience, and in that way, they were oracles to him. Soon, he had appointments to see the best of them.

He flew to Florida and checked into a hotel in Key Largo. At a lobby kiosk, he saw a brochure for the Pirate Soul Museum in Key West. “See real pirate treasures from the Golden Age!” “No quarter given!” Mattera stuffed the flyer into his pocket. Key West was one hundred miles to the south. He had people to see the next day. But pirates were calling, so he started driving.

Standing in line outside the museum, he took in the passing parade of bohemians, artists, and tourists. To him, Key West was laid-back and glorious, a place he could live for up to a week before going crazy and needing something to do.

He paid the $13.95 entry fee and walked back in time. In the first few rooms, he saw authentic pirate swords, pistols, treasure, cannons, rum bottles, and tools, including a gruesome amputation kit. The museum even had a globule of quicksilver—mercury—captured from pirates and entombed in a small jar of water. All of it dated to the Golden Age of Piracy, between 1650 and 1720. But the rarest items were still to come.

Hanging on one wall, ominously lit, was an original Jolly Roger, the infamous skull-and-crossbones flag flown by pirates, and one of only two known surviving examples in the world. Near it lay the only pirate treasure chest in America, complete with hidden compartments and belonging to captain Thomas Tew, number three on Forbes magazine’s list of the Twenty Highest-Earning Pirates (estimated career earnings $103 million), who was said to have been disemboweled and killed by a cannon shot during battle. On another wall, Mattera saw an authentic English proclamation from 1696, offering five hundred pounds for the head of pirate Henry Avery; the piece was likely the oldest wanted poster in existence.

The museum had been put together by Pat Croce, the former owner of the Philadelphia 76ers, from his personal collection. “This guy might love basketball,” Mattera thought as he stood before a 1684 first-edition copy of Exquemelin’s The Buccaneers of America. “But he loves pirates more.”

Mattera didn’t leave until he’d read about the great pirates, and they all lived here: Morgan, Blackbeard, Kidd, Anne Bonny, “Black Sam” Bellamy, “Calico” Jack Rackham. Each one’s career seemed more thrilling than the last. Yet, walking out the door into the blinding Key West sun, Mattera couldn’t help but smile, because he knew a pirate captain who could top them all.

—

THE NEXT DAY, Mattera walked into Manny and Isa’s restaurant in Islamorada, about twenty-five miles south of Key Largo, and shook hands with a quiet, slightly built eighty-year-old man named Jack Haskins. Few names were better known in the treasure business, yet Haskins had never been the classic treasure hunter. A researcher first, he had done work that had led to the discovery of some of the greatest Spanish galleons ever found. In talking to others about treasure, Mattera always heard the same things about Haskins: first, that he knew more about finding old shipwrecks than anyone in the world; second, that he was a decent and honest man, a rarity in the business; and third, that he’d been taken advantage of throughout his career.

Haskins recommended the conch chowder, and the two men got to talking. In treasure, he said, information was paramount. A person could own the latest technology, operate the finest boat, and have the deepest pockets, but little of that mattered without knowing where to look. And that always came down to research.

Haskins’s own research had begun in Seville, at the General Archive of the Indies, the place from which Mattera had just returned. As a young man, he’d made a pilgrimage there, armed only with an English-Spanish dictionary and a hunger to find a galleon, and over the next few years made himself fluent in the archaic language and script that told the story of the great Spanish treasure fleets.

Soon, treasure hunters began paying Haskins to do research in Seville. He stayed for weeks at a time, completing assignments, then copying thousands of other documents, some of them seemingly at random, until he’d built an archive of his own—one that filled even the bathrooms and reached to the ceilings of his small Florida home. He used some of that research to find shipwrecks himself; by many accounts, he was as fine a treasure hunter in the water as he was in the stacks in Seville. But perhaps Haskins’s greatest contributions came from the groundbreaking research he did that helped lead to the discovery of the galleons Atocha, Concepción, Tolosa, Guadalupe, San José, and Maravilla.

Many thought Haskins had never received the credit, or treasure, he deserved. At times, his finances had run so low he’d been forced to sell his scuba gear. Supporters urged him to fight for his rights, sue, throw a punch, anything; attorneys offered to take his cases for free. But he’d seen enough combat on PT boats in World War II, and he was a gentle soul. Instead of fighting, he returned to the archives, finding things no one else could find, diving his own wrecks, selling enough antique coins to survive. Now almost eighty, he was renowned in the world of treasure—not just for his ability to find valuable shipwrecks, but for his instinct to forgive those who’d wronged him.

Mattera ordered a piece of key lime pie and sat back and listened to Haskins talk treasure. Modern gold and silver, Haskins said, could not compare in beauty or presence to the old gold and silver found on galleons, which had been mined using mercury, a dangerous process no longer permitted but which produced a remarkable purity. The imperfection of handmade early Spanish coins, or “cobs”—no two were exactly alike—made discovery endlessly interesting. The amounts of contraband carried by some treasure ships still staggered Haskins’s imagination.

“But I know you want to talk about pirates,” Haskins said. “Why don’t you follow me home and we’ll do that. I want to show you a few things.”

Mattera pulled into the driveway of a modest house built on stilts, a must in the flood-prone area. A narrow set of stairs led to the front door, which Haskins climbed carefully—there was no railing, so he held the side of the house for support. Inside, copies of centuries-old Spanish documents towered high in every room—hundreds of thousands of pages written in a near-indecipherable hand. There was little else in the place, not even a television.

“I married once, briefly. Never had any kids,” Haskins said. “Mostly, it’s been just me, my cats, and my research.”

Every few minutes, Haskins picked a random page from a random box and read aloud to Mattera—about cargo lost from a doomed galleon, the worries of a captain on the eve of his journey back to Spain, the accounts of survivors who had seen their loved ones vanish during storms. All of them came from the logs of treasure ships, many still out there waiting to be found.

In the kitchen, Haskins poured Mattera a cup of coffee.

“You’re working in Samaná and looking for a pirate,” Haskins said. “Which means you must be looking for our friend Mr. Bannister.”

Mattera smiled.

“You know about Bannister?”

Haskins did. He’d come across mention of the pirate and his ship, the Golden Fleece, while researching the Concepción. He’d even done research in Seville on the wreck, just as Mattera had the previous week. That alone made Mattera feel like he was playing in the big leagues. But it worried him, too. If a historian like Haskins couldn’t track down Bannister’s ship, what chance did he have on his own?

“What can I do, Jack?” Mattera asked. “I’m running out of ideas.”

Haskins sipped from his coffee and thought it over. Shipwreck research, he said, wasn’t just about looking through books and records. In the case of Spanish galleons, it was about understanding the nature of the target, the treasure ship—why she sailed when she did, what she feared, the shortcuts she used, the chances she took. In the case of the Golden Fleece, perhaps it meant understanding the same things about a pirate ship.

Haskins showed Mattera more documents and maps he’d acquired over a lifetime of research, then walked Mattera back to his car. Standing in the driveway, the men shook hands. Mattera needed to leave—he could see Haskins was tired—but he couldn’t go without asking one last question.

“Do you feel like you got ripped off all these years, Jack?”

For a moment, Haskins didn’t reply. Then he smiled.

“I just loved the wrecks.”

—

MATTERA’S NEXT APPOINTMENT, THE following morning, was a three-hour drive north of Key Largo, but he was eager to make it. Seventy-five-year-old Bob Marx was one of the most successful treasure hunters ever. A former marine, underwater archaeologist, and the author of dozens of books on treasure and shipwrecks, he listed nearly one hundred major discoveries on his curriculum vitae, and that was just the short version of the document. By turns bombastic, brilliant, and profane, he’d discovered, among other things, the sunken city of Port Royal, Jamaica; the Spanish galleon Nuestra Señora de las Maravillas; lost Mayan temples in the jungles of Central America; and ancient Phoenician ports and wrecks in Lebanon.

Few men knew more about shipwreck hunting, or had seen more of the business, than Marx. He’d recovered millions of dollars in treasure, lectured in more than forty countries, and been knighted by the Spanish government for sailing in a replica of Columbus’s ship the Niña from Spain to San Salvador, a journey that had risked his life. When customers purchased his treasure, they received a certificate of authenticity signed “Sir Robert Marx.”

In recent months, Mattera had become friendly with Marx, but it hadn’t always been that way. In 1998, Marx had insulted Mattera, whom he did not know, at a book signing. Years later, when Marx showed up at a dive conference Mattera was sponsoring in the Dominican Republic, Mattera told him, “You’re too old for me to punch you in the face, Bob, but I can still yell at you,” and gave him an uncensored piece of his mind. To Mattera’s surprise, Marx apologized for the long-ago incident. That meant a lot to Mattera, given that he owned twenty-eight of Marx’s books and considered him a pioneer—and that Marx clearly didn’t remember the event.

But that was a long time ago. Now Marx was waiting for him in the driveway and waving him in.

“Are you packing?” Marx asked. He wanted to know if Mattera had brought a gun.

“Yeah, it’s in the glove compartment.”

“Good. We might need it. There’s some crazy bastard after me, don’t ask why. Just bring the piece.”

Marx was a hero to Mattera, so he did as he was asked.

The men walked up a pathway lined with shards of ancient pottery, the detritus of countless Marx scores.

“In the old days, everyone in the treasure business lived within about two or three miles of right here,” Marx said. “I don’t care if you worked in the Bahamas, Florida, Cuba, you were based here. All the astronauts were involved, ‘Hot Lips’ Houlihan from M*A*S*H—you name it. This was the place to be.”

Inside the house, Marx introduced his wife and coauthor, Jenifer. Mattera had read her work and spoken to her on the phone; if anything, she was even more impressive than her husband. The couple wanted to show Mattera around the house, but he stood frozen in the dining room. He stared at a bronze disk about the size of a grapefruit resting on a high shelf.

“There it is,” Mattera said.

The mariner’s astrolabe predated the sextant and had been used as early as the late 1300s to determine latitude at sea. Coveted by treasure hunters, archaeologists, collectors, and museums, a single example could fetch as much as half a million dollars at auction. Marx had a dozen of them lined up beside the one Mattera was beholding.

And that was just the start of the treasures Mattera observed on his way to the kitchen: a piece of pre–Ming dynasty china (circa 1200) with delicate dancing dolphins; pristine olive jars taken from sunken galleons; a jade burial suit that dated, by Mattera’s estimation, to around 200 B.C., used to bury royal members of China’s Han dynasty. Mattera couldn’t begin to calculate the value of that piece, if a value could be placed on it at all.

The men walked outside and crossed a small path to Marx’s office, which had once been the slave quarters on an old sugar plantation. Here, Mattera saw an even better kind of treasure—tens of thousands of books on double-deep shelves that seemed to stretch forever.

“Don’t touch those horses!” Marx called out when Mattera moved past sculptures recovered from a centuries-old Portuguese ship. “They’re a hundred grand apiece, don’t fucking break them!”

On a bench near Marx’s desk, Mattera saw a copy of a coffee-table book about Marx’s discovery of ancient Phoenician artifacts; on a nearby table, he saw hundreds of those very artifacts, and others millennia old, laid out on display.

“I’ll sell you whatever you want,” Marx said. “Friends and family price. I’ll throw in a certificate of authenticity, too. There’s an X-rated section in the back. The ancients loved that shit.”

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. Outsiders took the saying to mean that treasure hunters usually ended up broke, which was true, but not what Marx meant. 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.

Mattera could have listened to Marx’s stories all day, but he’d come to talk about pirates, and he pressed Marx on the subject. Marx, in fact, had mentioned Bannister and the Golden Fleece briefly in one of his books, and now Mattera wanted to know more.

“There’s no map or secret instructions for finding the Golden Fleece,” Marx said. “If you’re going to get her, you’ve gotta understand what these guys were doing. You gotta know the pirates.”

Marx himself had come to learn a lot about piracy when, in 1964, he fulfilled a childhood dream by salvaging the sunken city of Port Royal, Jamaica, the fabled pirate haven lost in an earthquake in 1692. It was in Port Royal that Bannister had stolen his own ship and turned pirate. It was from Port Royal that the manhunt for him had been directed.

“Pirates from all over the world went to Port Royal,” Marx said. “Big things were happening there. Your guy was part of all that. He was there in its heyday. That’s gotta tell you something.”

Mattera spent the rest of the afternoon talking to Marx, absorbing his stories. In late afternoon, the men went to another of Marx’s offices in town, where the old treasure hunter showed photographs from his career. By the time they left, it was near dark, but Marx was still going strong as ever, limping from gout as they made their way to the car, still firing off profanity-pocked stories of treasure derring-do. It was clear to Mattera that the man would never retire—that treasure was not something Marx did but rather something he was. Like William Phips in the late 1600s, Marx seemed to exist on confidence—on an inborn instinct to take rather than ask from the sea. Retire? And do what, take a Perillo bus tour of Europe? Get an early-bird price on a meal? In the end, Mattera thought, it didn’t matter if guys like Marx got too old to actually find the stuff; they weren’t really in it for the treasure. In the end, they seemed in it to set sail, to search for things others didn’t dare look for, to be “Sir Robert” instead of Bob.

—

MATTERA HAD ONE MORE appointment to keep. In ways, he looked forward to this one most of all.

Carl Fismer had a reputation for being a maestro in a business full of great storytellers. He was also known for his honesty and integrity; as with Haskins, his close friend, it had probably cost him several fortunes. He’d worked on some important wrecks, including Concepción. And he’d worked in Samaná Bay. Many said that “Fizz” knew even more about human nature than about treasure.

Generations of salvors knew Fizz’s story. He’d worked for General Motors in Cincinnati but despised it; every day seemed the same to him there. He moved to Florida in 1968, after his wife, who’d been his high school sweetheart, was killed in an automobile accident. She was just twenty-six. Punching the clock didn’t feel right to Fizz after that. He gathered his two young children, packed his car, and drove south.

In Sarasota, he joined the fire department, the closest thing he could find to a paying adventure. Practicing body recovery on a fireboat, he came across a shipwreck, a small freighter busted open and showing its copper pipes. Fizz and the other firemen salvaged what they could. In the end, the haul netted the men a total of $6.40, but the idea that he could take money from water inspired Fizz, and from that day he was hooked.

For months, he visited every library and bookstore within a day’s drive of Sarasota, reading everything he could on Spanish galleons and sunken treasure. He built his own magnetometer, a hodgepodge of transistors and wires that turned out to be better at picking up local radio stations than metal, but it just made him hungrier still. For six years, he searched the waters near Sarasota but found almost nothing. Only then, at age thirty-six, did he drive to the Keys, not to go looking for treasure, but to find the man who had practically invented the hunt.

Art McKee was considered the grandfather of American treasure hunting. He’d found several Spanish galleons in Florida waters in the 1940s, part of the fabled 1733 Fleet, and had been featured in Life magazine, on The Dave Garroway Show, and in newspapers, magazines, and newsreels. Before McKee, few in America knew that real-life treasure hunters 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.

Mattera found Fizz’s address in Tavernier, a small town about seven miles south of Key Largo, and knocked at the door of a small house beside a winding canal. A stocky, tanned, and handsome sixty-eight-year-old man answered the door. He sported a neatly trimmed gray beard, Hawaiian shirt, khaki shorts and deck shoes, and a heavy silver coin around his neck.

“Come on in and let’s talk shipwrecks.”

Mattera looked around. On every shelf, atop the television, behind the coffeemaker, he saw shipwreck artifacts. On the TV stand, he spotted a silver coin, its date clearly marked—1639.

“That’s the second-best coin I ever found,” said Fizz.

“I’m guessing the best one is around your neck.”

“You guess good.”

Fizz knew Mattera wanted to discuss pirates, so they sat at the kitchen table, where Fizz said the best stories got told.

“Let me hear what you got,” Fizz said.

And Mattera told him the story—about Bannister and the Golden Fleece, about searching Samaná Bay with Chatterton, about doing exhaustive research in libraries, archives, antiquarian bookstores, and rare-map dealers.

“I’m lost, Fizz. I don’t know what to do next.”

Fizz got Mattera a beer.

“What are you best at, John?”

“What do you mean?”

“What do you love doing when you’re looking for a wreck? Is it the survey work? Diving? Digging? What gets you?”

“It’s the history. The research.”

“Then you need to keep doing that.”

But Mattera had already done months of research and read everything he could find, and he told Fizz so. That’s when Fizz told him a story about Jack Haskins.

Like many treasure hunters in the late 1960s, Haskins had been working to find the Atocha, a Spanish galleon sunk off the Florida Keys in 1622. For centuries, salvors believed the ship to be lost off the village of Islamorada, in the central Florida Keys, but no one could find a trace of her there. So Haskins, a historian in his heart, went to Seville.

He threw himself into the stacks there, unearthing thousands of pages of documents, many of which hadn’t been handled since the seventeenth century. He spent years going through the papers but never found anything that helped further the search.

“That’s when most guys would have given up,” said Fizz. “But not Jack.”

Haskins kept reading, even the most obscure papers—ones that didn’t even seem worth the price of a photocopy in Seville. One day, he ran across a single sentence buried in one of those thousands of papers. It mentioned a place called Marquesas Keys, off Key West, about eighty miles from where most treasure hunters in search of the Atocha were working at the time. Haskins shared that information—it was his nature to share—and it helped lead treasure hunter (and former chicken rancher) Mel Fisher to the wreck. Soon, the Atocha became the most famous treasure ship of all time.

“She’s been worth half a billion so far,” Fizz said. “Jack got almost nothing, but that’s another story. One of the richest treasure wrecks ever was found because he never gave up on those papers.”

The first fishing boats began returning to dock, so the men went out on Fizz’s screened porch to watch them come in. They talked for hours, Fizz telling stories from a lifetime in the business, and in the cracks and unspoken spaces Mattera heard subtext, and this is what he took Fizz to be saying:

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.

When the men finally got up to say good-bye, Mattera asked about the coin on Fizz’s necklace. Fizz pulled it from his shirt. It was an eight escudo from Concepción, a wreck he loved because it had been lost twice to history but never abandoned.

Driving over long bridges back to his hotel, Mattera watched the Keys disappear behind him, local joints such as Craig’s Restaurant and Doc’s Diner giving way to Starbucks and Denny’s. His time with the oracles had come to an end, and though none of the men could show him to Bannister’s wreck, each had pointed him in the same direction, to history, and they told him not to let go.