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Pirate Hunters: Treasure, Obsession, and the Search for a Legendary Pirate Ship - Softcover

Kurson, Robert

 
9780812973693: Pirate Hunters: Treasure, Obsession, and the Search for a Legendary Pirate Ship
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0812973690 ISBN 13: 9780812973693
Verlag: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY CHICAGO TRIBUNE • A thrilling adventure of danger and deep-sea diving, historic mystery and suspense, by the author of Shadow Divers

Finding and identifying a pirate ship is the hardest thing to do under the sea. But two men—John Chatterton and John Mattera—are willing to risk everything to find the Golden Fleece, the ship of the infamous pirate Joseph Bannister. At large during the Golden Age of Piracy in the seventeenth century, Bannister should have been immortalized in the lore of the sea—his exploits more notorious than Blackbeard’s, more daring than Kidd’s. But his story, and his ship, have been lost to time. If Chatterton and Mattera succeed, they will make history—it will be just the second time ever that a pirate ship has been discovered and positively identified. Soon, however, they realize that cutting-edge technology and a willingness to lose everything aren’t enough to track down Bannister’s ship. They must travel the globe in search of historic documents and accounts of the great pirate’s exploits, face down dangerous rivals, battle the tides of nations and governments and experts. But it’s only when they learn to think and act like pirates—like Bannister—that they become able to go where no pirate hunters have gone before.

Fast-paced and filled with suspense, fascinating characters, history, and adventure, Pirate Hunters is an unputdownable story that goes deep to discover truths and souls long believed lost.

Praise for Pirate Hunters

“You won’t want to put [it] down.”—Los Angeles Times

“An exceptional adventure . . . Highly recommended to readers who delight in adventure, suspense, and the thrill of discovering history at their fingertips.”—Library Journal (starred review)

“A terrific read . . . The book gallops along at a blistering pace, shifting us deftly between the seventeenth century and the present day.”—Diver

“Nonfiction with the trademarks of a novel: the plots and subplots, the tension and suspense . . . [Kurson has] found gold.”—The Dallas Morning News

“Rollicking . . . a fascinating [story] about the world of pirates, piracy, and priceless treasures.”—The Boston Globe

“[Kurson’s] narration is just as engrossing as the subject.”—The Christian Science Monitor

“A wild ride [and an] extraordinary adventure . . . Kurson’s own enthusiasm, combined with his copious research and an eye for detail, makes for one of the most mind-blowing pirate stories of recent memory, one that even the staunchest landlubber will have a hard time putting down.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“The two contemporary pirate-ship seekers of Mr. Kurson’s narrative are as daring, intrepid, tough and talented as Blood and Sparrow—and Bannister. . . . As depicted by the author, they are real-life Hemingway heroes.”—The Wall Street Journal

“[Kurson] takes his knowledge of the underwater world and applies it to the ‘Golden Age of Piracy’ . . . thrillingly detailing the highs and lows of chasing not just gold and silver but also history.”—Booklist

“A great thriller full of tough guys and long odds . . . and: It’s all true.”—Lee Child

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Robert Kurson is the author of the runaway bestseller Shadow Divers, and Crashing Through.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

By 1684, Bannister had been making the London–Jamaica run for at least four years, delivering his cargos and building his reputation. In June of that year, however, the lord president of the Council of Jamaica received a disturbing letter from the island’s governor, Thomas Lynch: “One Bannister ran away with a ship, the Golden Fleece, of thirty or forty guns, picked up over a hundred men from sloops and from lee- ward [at Port Royal], and has got a French commission.”
Bannister, in fact, had no commission, but he most certainly had stolen the Golden Fleece, and he’d done so with a single purpose—to turn pirate. His actions hardly could have been bolder. It was near unheard of for a transatlantic captain, especially one as well regarded and trusted as Bannister, to “go on the account,” as it was said of pirating. Even in Port Royal, where everything happened, few had seen anything like this.

Lynch didn’t sit around and wait for Bannister to return to his senses. Instead, he ordered the Ruby, the biggest and deadliest war- ship in the Jamaica fleet, to go after the Golden Fleece. A monster rated at 540 tons, with forty-eight cannons and a crew of 150, the Ruby was a pirate killer down to her timbers.

Bannister did not intend to make it easy for Lynch’s enforcers. Since stealing the Golden Fleece, he had picked up additional crew, robbed a Spanish vessel, and made his way to the Cayman Islands to take turtles and gather wood. But the Ruby surprised him there, and her captain, David Mitchell, and his crew captured Bannister and put an end to his six-week pirate career.
Lynch was delighted.

“Last night,” he wrote, “the Ruby brought in Bannister. He took him at Caymanos; he has about 115 men on board, most of the veriest rogues in these Indies. I have ordered the ship and the men to be de- livered into the Admiralty and commanded the judge immediately to proceed against them, because we do not know how to secure or keep such a number. We conclude they’ll be found guilty of piracy.”

The case against Bannister was airtight. Not only had he stolen the Golden Fleece, he had taken two Spaniards captive after attacking their boat. The testimony of those two men alone would secure a conviction. By now, Bannister could only hope for leniency, but if he expected it, he’d chosen the wrong governor under which to become pirate.

“I intend if it proves so to make a terrible example of the captain, his lieutenant, officers, and all the men that have committed other crimes as many of them have,” Lynch wrote, “and hope the severity may have some influence on the other rogues that swarm in these In- dies.”
By that, Lynch meant Bannister would hang. His crew, if lucky, might be whipped, jailed, or put into irons or stockades. If unlucky, they might follow Bannister to the gallows.

The pirates were returned to Port Royal and held aboard the Ruby pending trial. One might have expected Bannister to use the time to pen letters of good-bye or to contemplate eternity; instead, he waited for a break in his captors’ attention, then managed to get word to on- shore associates to bribe the two Spanish witnesses against him. It was an audacious plan and one that, even if the connections were made, seemed doomed given that the Spaniards had been rescued by the Royal Navy.

At trial, a strong case was made against the pirates. But when it came time for the Spaniards to testify, they swore “backward and for- ward” that they had sold their boat and cargo to Bannister, and that he had paid them to serve as crew aboard the Golden Fleece.

If that testimony shocked the prosecution, at least the governor could still rely on the jury, who were certain to see through the ruse. But this was Port Royal, where ordinary folk, remembering who’d made their town rich and had infused it with spirit, still counted pi- rates as neighbors and friends. They returned with a verdict: not guilty. Bannister had cheated the hangman.

Already a sick man, Lynch suffered “such disturbance of mind” from the verdict that, according to accounts, he died of it a week later. By all rights, his replacement should have set Bannister free. Instead, Hender Molesworth tried to convince the jury to reverse itself, but the jurors wouldn’t budge. Worse, Bannister threatened to sue the captain of the Ruby, “as though [Bannister] were the honestest man in the world.” That was more than Molesworth could take. Stretching the boundaries of the law—if not breaking them—he had Bannister re- arrested and charged. Bail was set at three hundred pounds, a staggering amount in an age when the annual wage for a seaman might be twenty pounds.

Somehow, Bannister raised the money and, at least for the moment, remained free. He was not, however, permitted to leave Port Royal, and in any case was likely too broke to do it. To make certain he entertained no thoughts of fleeing, officials cut down the sails of the Golden Fleece. By January 1685, five months after the original charges against him were thrown out, Bannister was still languishing in Port Royal, waiting to be retried.

He was still waiting when, on a dark night in late January, he began to make his way through the narrow streets of Port Royal. As he crept past taverns and brothels and sleeping families, fifty men were already at work aboard the Golden Fleece, moving furiously but making no sound. Before long, Bannister reached Thames Street, which ran along the wharf on the northern side of town. There, he rushed for theGolden Fleece, tied up at the docks, and stole aboard his former ship. Sails were hoisted and lines cut, and soon the vessel picked up the breeze and moved out into the harbor.

Landlocked to the east, the harbor offered only one way out, to the south, and that is where Bannister steered. To make it into the open Caribbean, he had to hope that no one in town noticed the Golden Fleece missing, or sounded the alarm at the sight of a ship moving in the dead of night. Even then, he would have to pass the twenty-six cannons at Fort James and, in the unlikely event he were still living after that, turn south and get by the thirty-eight cannons, and hundreds of men, at Fort Charles. At any point along the way, he might be spotted by Royal Navy ships anchored just a mile to the west, or by men at work in nearby Chocolata Hole. If such a thing as a suicide mission existed in seventeenth-century Port Royal, Joseph Bannister had just embarked on it.

Generally, winds were calm at night in Port Royal, but on this evening Bannister picked up a fresh breeze off the land and began moving west along the town’s docks, maybe as fast as five knots, or about six miles per hour. Before long, he reached Fort James. Per- haps because of the hour, or because the garrisons there never expected such an unlikely event, it seems no one fired on the Golden Fleece, or even took notice of her. For the moment, Bannister and his crew remained safe.
Now rounding Port Royal’s western shore, Bannister headed south toward Fort Charles, about a half mile in the distance. By now, he might have been fifteen minutes into his rush toward freedom, but he had at least another fifteen minutes to go—critical moments that would determine whether he and his crew lived or died.

Soon, he could see the guns at Fort Charles, the most heavily fortified place in all of Jamaica. Staying within a few hundred yards of the shore, he ordered his men to ready their “plugs,” chunks of mattress or wood they’d brought to fill holes in the ship they knew would be made...

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Verlag
Random House Trade Paperbacks
Erscheinungsdatum
2016
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0812973690
ISBN 13 
9780812973693
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
304
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