Free The Lost Fleet by Barry Clifford

desperate and beyond caring, the pirates threw caution to the wind and attacked. Despite the odds against them, their attack succeeded.
    No doubt this was due in part to the ferocity and determination of the pirates, and perhaps to a lack of motivation among the Spanish troops, who sensibly chose to run for their lives rather than die defending the wealth of the Spanish aristocracy. The buccaneers’ unorthodox tactics played a role as well. While regular troops were accustomed to fighting European-style battles, the pirates employed guerrilla-style tactics, making it hard for defenders to predict when, where, or how they would attack. Further, the buccaneers, many of them former hunters from Hispaniola, were better marksmen than the Spanish troops. Whatever the reason, the pirates continued to succeed, time and again, against overwhelming odds.
    De Grammont had not only taken a succession of Spanish towns but in fact had made himself master of the entire Lake Maracaibo region, with no local force to challenge his supremacy and no need to rush his looting. After taking what they could from Trujillo, de Grammont’s men returned the way they had come, once again occupying Gibraltar. For a week or more, they continued to plunder the town. When they had taken everything they could lay their hands on, they burned it.
    In all, de Grammont spent nearly half a year on Lake Maracaibo, raiding, debauching, looting, and burning. It was not until December 3, 1678, that the Chevalier and his fleet, heavy-laden with all the wealth wrung out of the Lake Maracaibo region, left the Gulf of Venezuela.
    They did not return to Tortuga. Rather, they made for Petit Goâve, a hell town in Hispaniola, fifty miles west of present-day Port-au-Prince. Petit Goâve was beginning to challenge Tortuga as the chief gathering spot for the buccaneers. De Grammont and his men arrived as heroes.
    It was no matter that the war in Europe, which had been the root cause for collecting together the buccaneers in the first place, was winding down. The pirates were barely interested in such formalities. Their hatred of Spain and their disdain for treaties between nations went far deeper than that. They had, in fact, only just begun.
    Vast armadas of buccaneers were not a new thing in the region. L’Ollonais, Morgan, and others had already used that weapon as a tool of colonial policy. But something had begun on those hot sands of Las Aves that would not easily be stopped. With no sort of legal authority, the most charismatic leaders of the buccaneer community had cometogether, had led a great army in half a year’s raid on Spanish settlements, and had come away rich for their efforts.
    The French had brought the buccaneers together. The destruction of the fleet at Las Aves had ended the mission for which they had organized. Rather than return to port, however, the pirates had stuck together and had launched a raid of their own choosing.
    With the raid at Maracaibo they had set a new precedent, formed a loose alliance, an army that would split and come together again at will, like quicksilver. These buccaneers would become the dominant force in the Caribbean, and remain so for years to come. Governments, despairing of stopping them, would instead try to lure them into their service.
    The wreckage of the French fleet on Las Aves, as it turned out, was the starting point for some of the greatest piratical careers in Western history.

11
Curiosity Sparks Expedition
    S UMMER 1998
P ROVINCETOWN, M ASSACHUSETTS
    T he more Ken and I dug into the history of the wrecks on Las Aves, the more we understood how the disaster had kicked off a wave of buccaneering from which emerged some of the leading names among the seventeenth-century pirates, and the more eager I became to get back there. During our brief stay on the island, I had seen enough to convince me there was a mystery to be solved at this site. What had the filibusters left behind? What couldn’t