The Lost Fleet by Barry Clifford

Brewer called a press conference to announce the extraordinary find we had made on the reefs. The conference was held at an exclusive country club, of which he and his family were members. The club was original Spanish Colonial, at least three hundred years old, with a panoramic view of Caracas.
    Among the press corps in attendance was the Associated Press correspondent in Venezuela, Bart Jones, an American. I was tired and ready to go back home. Charles had set up an interview for me with Bart, however, and he insisted I do it, so I relented.
    Bart was wary. He had a poor opinion of Charles—especially his reputation for manipulating the press. He assumed that I was part of the Brewer publicity machine, and he was prepared to inhale a lot of ether.
    Bart and I talked for some time, and, the more we talked, the more he realized that I was not going to hype the find as a treasure wreck as Charles intended to do. Finally, Bart asked, “What do you know about Charles Brewer?”
    I equivocated a bit, suppressing an impulse to tell Bart about our experience on the reef with Charles. I told him I didn’t really know much, which was true.
    Bart knew quite a lot about Charles Brewer, and he told me a few things—most of which Charles had not mentioned in his résumé. 1 Charles Brewer was more well known in Venezuela than I had imagined. He had been Minister of Youth, and he had been a partner of the controversial anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon. Brewer and Chagnon had worked with the mistress of impeached Venezuelan president Andrés Pérez in an effort to take control of huge tracts ofland on which the primitive Yanomami tribe live. According to Bart, Charles had been caught in illegal gold strip-mining ventures.
    From what Bart was telling me, I could see that, at the very least, Charles was playing the same game here, working himself into the center of things so that he could exploit a situation. For a guy who was essentially a sports diver, he was already posturing himself as a great maritime explorer and underwater archaeologist. Even before I left Venezuela, I knew that if I had any interest in further exploration at Las Aves, Brewer would make sure that he was going to be in control.
    I wasn’t so sure about some of Bart’s other allegations. I had not known him long enough to tell what his particular biases might be, and some of his information simply staggered the imagination. It almost sounded as if one of the early Spanish conquistadors had been somehow reincarnated at the very brink of the second millennium. At the back of my mind was also the Elizabethan river wreck of which I had heard. I know the sea; someone like Charles would be needed for a jungle river expedition. I decided to be wary of Charles, but to keep an open mind.
    Bart wrote the Las Aves story for AP, and it went out over the wire. Soon the whole world was aware of what we had found at Las Aves.Those stories were read with great interest in certain treasure-hunting circles.
    Just a few days after the interview, I was back at my home in Provincetown, at the tip of Cape Cod. Looking out over the frigid, blue-gray Atlantic, as an icy wind kicked up rows of whitecaps, it was hard to believe that this was the same ocean in which I had been diving just a week before.
    What we had found continued to tantalize me. There are, of course, thousands of wrecks scattered across the ocean bottom. Most are not worth the trouble to find. But Las Aves seemed to hold promise. I wanted to know more.
    I gave Ken Kinkor a full account of what we had found on the reefs and asked him to look into what ship, or ships, might have been there. With the work on the Whydah wrapped up for the season, Ken had time to dig deeper into the history of Las Aves. What he found fascinated us.
    Ken unearthed primary source documents, reports, and letters from English sources describing the magnitude of the disaster that had befallen d’Estrées’