CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

ANOTHER WAY

             

Mattera and Carolina waded into the water and walked to the Zodiac, carrying a picnic basket full of sandwiches, wine, cold water, and suntan lotion. On board, they joined Kretschmer, who had already loaded his share of picnic treats: a handheld metal detector, a shovel, and a hatchet. Mattera carried two cameras around his neck. Carolina wore a giant floppy hat.

Driving the Zodiac at tourist speed, they headed across the channel toward the eastern end of Cayo Vigia. They landed on a tiny section of sand, unloaded their gear, and did their best to look like they’d come from the nearby resort. Carolina posed for Kretschmer’s snapshots; Mattera assembled a fishing pole. When they were sure no one was looking, they ducked into the dense woods and began hiking up the steep hill.

It took twenty minutes for them to fight their way past tangled overgrowth and bird-sized insects to a point more than a hundred feet over the water. Looking out over the channel, Mattera could see the world through Bannister’s eyes. In all the Caribbean, there was no better place to careen a ship or to win an unwinnable battle. From here, pirate cannons could hit any target, but anyone shooting back would be doing it blind.

Kretschmer assembled the metal detector and put on the headphones. Running the unit over mud and brush, he listened for hits but heard nothing. The group pulled themselves through the overgrowth, trying to suck in the bits of fresh air that managed to penetrate the dense jungle. Even Carolina was sweating now, but the group kept moving, bent over and dripping, all of it a fevered dream.

Kretschmer stopped.

“I’ve got something,” he said.

He moved the metal detector, slowly, over a patch of dirt and mud about three feet square. Beeps in his ear adjusted his aim, until he arrived at a spot.

“Here,” Kretschmer said.

Mattera grabbed the shovel, Kretschmer the hatchet, and the men went to work digging on hands and knees. As the hole got bigger, Kretschmer pushed the metal detector down into it to refine the direction of the dig. But no matter how much dirt they removed, there was more underneath. They kept at it, for thirty minutes, digging, chopping at roots, listening to the metal detector, and digging again, until the blade of the shovel finally collided with something solid at a depth of about a foot, something it couldn’t move.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Mattera said.

Now using a hand spade, Kretschmer chipped away sections of dirt from the sides of the hole until a shape began to emerge, a little less black than the mud, but as round as the top of the moon.

“There it is,” Mattera said.

Wedging the hatchet behind the object, Kretschmer muscled and leveraged until the thing finally came loose. All three picnickers stared into the hole. Lying free at the bottom was a six-pound cannonball.

“The last time someone touched that was in 1686,” Mattera said.

He reached into the hole and pulled out the cannonball. The weight startled him. He could tell it was a six-pounder, but only by holding it could he feel its destructive potential.

The group celebrated with hugs, kisses (Kretschmer wiped off Mattera’s), and a glass of wine. Carolina spread out the blanket she’d brought so they could sit and enjoy a toast. Kretschmer wondered aloud if Bannister could have imagined this scene—two treasure hunters and a beautiful woman drinking wine on the site of his battle. Mattera assured him that Bannister could.

When they finished, they hiked back down the hill, running the metal detector as they fought not to fall. Halfway down, they got another hit, and dug up another cannonball, this one even bigger than the first.

After everyone posed for photos with the cannonballs, the group made its way back to the beach, then across the bay to the villa. Mattera dashed off an email to Chatterton. In the subject line, he wrote, “Buddy, we got it.”

But Chatterton wasn’t there to receive it.

He’d set out in the Range Rover to pick up supplies. On an unimproved road near the back bay in Samaná, he’d hit a hole filled with jagged rock, tearing a gash into the sidewall of his tire. He managed to drive onto the beach, but when he tried to change the tire, the jack collapsed and bent, and the wheel sank up to its fender in sand. Chatterton checked his cell phone—no signal. It might be miles to the next town. He started walking.

Down the road, he found four local men, one of them elderly, playing cards outside a small shop. They didn’t have a jack, nor did they know where to find one, but told Chatterton they would help with his car. He tried to explain that the Range Rover was heavy, but they didn’t seem to understand. Walking back to the vehicle, the elderly man motioned for Chatterton not to worry.

The Dominican men studied the truck, muttering in Spanish too fast for Chatterton to understand. Soon they were gathering supplies: a large tree branch and a pile of rocks. “I’m in the Stone Age here,” Chatterton thought. The men went to work. Using improvised levers and fulcrums, and a big rock as a hammer, they bent the jack back into shape. “No way,” Chatterton thought, but soon the jack looked nearly new. When they got it under the truck, however, it gave way and collapsed again, this time beyond repair.

Chatterton began to thank the Dominicans and reach into his pocket, but none of them wanted his money. Instead, they went out collecting again, farther away this time, bringing back heavy palm branches and giant rocks. Chatterton tried to explain that the jack couldn’t be saved, but that’s not what they had in mind. The men used the stems to dig a hole under the truck’s strut assembly, then replaced sand with rocks. Chatterton grabbed his own leaf and jumped in to help them dig. A space began to open under the flat tire, and the truck’s frame came to rest on its rock support.

Now Chatterton could see the beauty of this plan—it was right in front of him. And it struck him that he’d often seen this kind of approach in Dominicans—that they rarely had what they needed, and often had nothing at all, but they didn’t seem to notice that or at least be much bothered by it. Instead, they focused on what they did have—if not a jack then a branch, if not money then time—then cobbled together a solution, a different way of getting there. He’d long cursed their mañana culture, swore that these people were going nowhere because they didn’t go at full speed, but as he watched the old man flip off the ruined tire and replace it with the spare, he could see what he’d admired about Dominicans all along—that they didn’t worry for the future because they knew there was always a way to arrive.

The men shoved piles of rocks under the truck to give it purchase, then Chatterton backed it off the beach. He insisted they take the money in his pocket, about twenty dollars, and they did, gracias, gracias, then walked back to where they came from, a place where they were dirt poor, able to figure their way as things came to them, looking happier than anyone Chatterton knew.

It was morning before Chatterton received the cannonball photos from Mattera. By that time, he was on his way to catch a flight to Miami, to take care of personal matters he’d put off for too long. The flight lasted more than two hours, much of which he used to gaze at the images his partner had sent him.

When he landed, he called Mattera, who told him about the discovery, and about how things looked from the top of the island, a worthy place for the “veriest rogues in these Indies,” as the governor of Jamaica had referred to Bannister and his crew.

To both Chatterton and Mattera, the cannonballs proved that the battle had occurred at Cayo Vigia, and that the so-called sugar wreck, located less than two hundred yards off the island, was the Golden Fleece. It was imperative that Bowden resume salvage on the sugar wreck immediately, not just to prove the wreck’s identity, but to put an end to the parade of interlopers at Cayo Levantado. Yet, Mattera was reluctant to tell Bowden about the cannonballs. He knew Bowden didn’t want anyone working on land—an area that went beyond his lease rights.

“Let me talk to him,” Chatterton said. “I’ll go in person.”

Mattera saw all kinds of risk in the idea. Chatterton could lose his cool and blow up at Bowden. Or Bowden might become frustrated with Chatterton and finally pull the plug on the pirate quest. Until now, Mattera had been a buffer between the two, but he’d be eight hundred miles away from this meeting. Still, he agreed to it.

“John, call me when the meeting’s over. And keep that famous Chatterton temper under control.”

Chatterton laughed.

“What temper?”

He sat down with Bowden a day later at a Denny’s restaurant in Miami and detailed Mattera’s adventure. He took Bowden all the way to the top of the hill at Cayo Vigia, just as Mattera had described it to him. To Chatterton, Bowden looked more excited with every detail.

“How many cannonballs did Mattera find?” Bowden asked.

“Two. In an hour. Can you imagine what else is up there, Tracy? Weapons, bones, treasure—who knows? Give the island to Cultura. They get shipwrecks all the time. They get galleons. How many pirate islands do they get?”

Bowden looked uncomfortable. In the past, he’d warned Chatterton and Mattera that his lease didn’t extend to the land, and he didn’t want to anger Dominican officials by working beyond the lease boundaries. But now Chatterton tried to reassure him: At the end of the day, would Cultura really be upset with him for unraveling the mystery of a historic pirate battle?

“This is your island, Tracy,” Chatterton said. “The Golden Fleece is your idea. Only now, you don’t just have a pirate wreck to offer; you have a pirate camp. How many of those are there in the world? Give Cultura the island. And let’s finish the sugar wreck.”

But Bowden still didn’t look sold, and Chatterton believed he knew why. The sugar wreck debris field lay in forty-four feet of water. Treasure hunter William Phips had seen the wreck of the Golden Fleece in twenty-four feet, just months after her sinking. That disparity, Bowden often had told Chatterton and Mattera, troubled him.

“I don’t think the sugar wreck is right,” Bowden said.

Chatterton sat there for several moments.

“All right, Tracy,” he said finally. “Thanks for your time.”

From his car, Chatterton called Mattera and reported on the meeting. It was clear, he told his partner, that Bowden would never finish salvage of the sugar wreck no matter what the evidence showed, because he believed it was too deep to be the Golden Fleece. After that, there was nothing left to discuss.

Mattera knew this must be the end for Chatterton. He’d lived with the man for two years, knew him better in ways than he did his own brothers. You couldn’t ask a person like that, one who’d been willing to swing a sledgehammer around live explosives in a sunken U-boat, to stand down from something that was speaking to him, something great and rare he believed he could reach.

“So, I guess that’s it, John,” Mattera said.

But Chatterton didn’t hear him.

“I think there’s another way to do this,” Chatterton said. “I’m coming back.”