Pirate Hunters: Treasure, Obsession, and the Search for a Legendary Pirate Ship Read Online Free PDF Page A

northern coast of the island; it was all rocks, so a ship could not have careened there. The southern coast had beaches, but they’d been built for the resort in the past decade, so the island’s southern coast was out, too.
    The island’s eastern coast had a large beach, but the area was rocky and exposed to wind and weather, making that location impractical and risky for a pirate looking to evade authorities.
    That left the western beach, the only one that made sense. It was at the leeward side of the island, so it was protected from wind and waves. And it seemed well hidden from the open Atlantic, so passing ships couldn’t see it. If a pirate captain chose to careen at Cayo Levantado, that’s where he’d go every time. And that’s where Chatterton went now.
    He guided the
Deep Explorer
toward the southern tip of the western beach and allowed her to drift to a halt. Once the boat was settled, Kretschmer prepped the magnetometer, while Ehrenberg set up the software program to collect data. Just after dawn, it was already eighty degrees outside, the coolest it would be all day.
    Mattera reminded the men that the pirate ship had been lost in twenty-four feet of water. Depths could rise and fall at random near islands like this, so they would start their survey a good distance offshore and work their way in toward the beach. That way, they wouldn’t miss any area that included the appropriate depth.
    The men were ready to go. Mattera pulled out his Nikon D300, set the delayed shutter, then joined the others for a photo. After the camera snapped, he grabbed four diet sodas from the cooler, passed them out, and raised a toast.
    “To Captain Bannister,” he said.
    “To Captain Bannister,” the others echoed.
    “One unlucky sonofabitch. First, the Royal Navy hunts him down. Now us.”
    —
    T HE MEN TOWED FOR HOURS . They stopped only to wolf down soggy tuna sandwiches, then continued their survey until the waters turned choppy and the magnetometer began porpoising over the surface. It was frustrating to halt work so early in the day, but the bay stayed calm only until early afternoon in these parts, and without quiet waters their readings might be skewed. To both Chatterton and Mattera, survey work was science; there was no room for imprecision. So they pulled in their gear and turned the
Deep Explorer
around.
    Twenty minutes later, they docked their boat in a small channel four miles from the island. By a stroke of good luck, Mattera’s soon-to-be father-in-law, a former admiral and chief of staff of the Dominican Navy, owned a little villa on the bay, and it was here that the team would be living temporarily while they searched for the
Golden Fleece.
Overlooking the water, the home was cut into the cliff face and accessible only by a narrow road that wound through a mango orchard. Inside, the building opened into a spacious indoor-outdoor living area. All the bedrooms had private terraces. The view of the sunset was spectacular. Mattera’s future in-laws would want it back before long.
    The men unloaded their gear, but work wasn’t done for the day. Ehrenberg still needed to process the data the team had collected, using custom software programs to make a map of the hits detected by the magnetometer. A day or two later, the team would dive those hits. Even the smallest blip would be investigated.
    Chatterton and Mattera stepped onto the veranda and called their significant others; in this remote area, if they stood in just the right spot and tilted slightly toward the moon, they could catch a cell phone signal that might last for an entire five-minute call.
    Chatterton reached Carla at their home on the Maine coast, where she was curled up on the couch and watching a movie with their yellow Labrador retriever, Chili. Carla missed John and did not approve when she learned that her husband had eaten Zucaritas—Frosted Flakes—for dinner three nights in a row.
    Mattera got Carolina while she was reading in the