The Lost Fleet by Barry Clifford Page A

fleet, and the catastrophe it represented to French designs on the Caribbean. In the course of phone conversations with other historians and archaeologists, I gathered more material. Others who had seen the AP reports chimed in with what they knew.
    The most important discovery was a map d’Estrées had made of the wreck site before departing Las Aves. It was an incredible document. The admiral’s drawing of the reef system looked very much like modern charts of the area. All along the reef line were drawings of French men-of-war positioned at the places where they had struck. Next to each of the carefully drawn pictures was the name of that unfortunate vessel—except for two. Next to those drawings was only a single word: flibustier.
    Flibustier. A French word derived from the Dutch vrijbuiter; in English, it is “filibuster.” All are terms for the same root concept, “freebooter,” defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “one of a class of piratical adventurers who pillaged the Spanish colonies in the West Indies during the 17th century.”
    With that one word, my interest in the wrecks at Las Aves skyrocketed. Filibusters. Pirates have always been my main area of interest. At that time, the Whydah was the only known pirate shipwreck ever discovered and authenticated. Now, here were the locations of two more. Not eighteenth-century pirates like Bellamy, but seventeenth-century buccaneers of the Spanish Main.
    More research revealed the French recruitment of the buccaneers of Tortuga, at least fourteen hundred pirates on fifteen ships. Knowing that Tortuga was the central gathering point for the Caribbean pirates of that era, and knowing that the French must have recruited nearly every major crew in the West Indies to have put together a flotilla of that size, Ken suspected that some of the famous figures in the annals of seventeenth-century piracy might well have been among those men of Las Aves.
    It was an extraordinary prospect. D’Estrées had lost some of the largest warships of his time on the reefs at Las Aves. The buccaneer contingent represented one of the largest mobilizations of those men ever recorded. And here were to be found the remains of ships from that event, artifacts from the beginning of a great wave of piracy that would plague the Caribbean for decades.
    I was ready to go back to Las Aves.

9
The Chevalier de Grammont
    [T]he chief of the filibusters.
    â€” THE SCOURGE OF THE INDIES
    Maurice Besson
    J UNE 1678
L AS A VES
    T he Brethren of the Coast were not men who took orders easily. Power and influence could shift radically and quickly within their community. Leaders emerged, had their moment of power, and then fell victim to any of the many fates that awaited such men—death in battle, shipwreck, or at the end of a noose, their men turning on them, losing face for a bad decision or a momentary act of perceived cowardice. Many buccaneers rose to power and fell. At the time of the Las Aves disaster there was only one undisputed leader of the filibusters: the Chevalier de Grammont.
    One of the most popular Hollywood pirate themes is the banished nobleman turned pirate, the aristocratic gentleman forced to flee his ancestral home and turn buccaneer. Such was the case with de Grammont.
    The Chevalier was a small, swarthy man in his late twenties or early thirties at the time of Las Aves. His father, who died when de Grammont was quite young, had served in the King’s Guards. Though the family was not of the uppermost strata of French society, they did enjoy a certain status and the favor of the royal court. As it turned out, that was fortunate for the Chevalier.
    Little is known of de Grammont’s earlier years. Indeed, even his Christian name is in some doubt, given variously as Michel, Nicolas, or François. He was born some time before 1643, during the reign of Louis XIII. The story (perhaps “legend” is a more apt term) of his road