You go in one strip all the way down, turn around and go back up. It’s very similar to mowing a lawn in a large back yard. Then, using these instruments, you go back and forth, moving up and down in lanes. First, you have to have a good idea where a shipwreck might be. To do that requires going back and forth over small segments of the water. These are the tell-tale signs of a shipwreck. What they’re looking for are cannons or anchors or other iron objects. When a wooden ship-which a pirate ship would have been-sinks, there’s nothing that an instrument can do to detect old sunken wood under the waves. The magnetometer is especially important because it locates ferrous objects. When you’re looking for a sunken ship, the primary tools treasure hunters use are side scan sonar and the magnetometer. And the things they didn’t get right are the most interesting. So, there are a lot of things that Hollywood didn’t get right about pirates. But business was better when you didn’t have to use violence. They were like the Mafia, and used it to instill fear in people. That’s an interesting thing I learned about pirates. Pirates did keep parrots as pets they did commit terrible acts of violence, although only when necessary. Is there any truth to the Hollywood portrayal? These days, we associate pirates with Keith Richards and Johnny Depp in Pirates Of The Caribbean. Proving a wreck is a pirate ship is virtually impossible. You might find cannons, muskets or coins, but those were being traded by any number of merchant ships. Many pirate ships were also converted merchant ships, so if someone happened to find a wreck later on, it would be very difficult to identify it as a pirate ship. If they sank or got captured, no government or navy went looking for them. They were outlaws and belonged to no country, so they never filed crew lists or paperwork. In the first place, there weren’t that many pirates in the golden age of piracy according to the best research I could find, there might have been a few thousand over the 70-year course of the golden age of piracy. They quickly discovered when they set out to search for The Golden Fleece that unless they got into the mind, and especially the heart, of Joseph Bannister, they were not going to come close to finding his ship. That was one of the challenges presented to the two main characters in my book. So, it’s very hard to say why Bannister did this. If a pirate captain was caught, he was going to hang. The Royal Navy had become adept at hunting them. We don’t and it’s especially vexing because at the time he did it, in 1684, pirates were in great jeopardy, especially in that part of the world. One day, for reasons lost to history, Bannister stole The Golden Fleece and went “on the account,” as turning pirate was known. In the 1680s when Bannister was sailing The Golden Fleece, Port Royal was known as the most lawless place on earth. It’s very unusual because he began his career as an upstanding English merchant captain, in charge of a ship called The Golden Fleece, a beautiful merchant ship Bannister captained to move cargoes like sugar, hides and indigo dyes between London and Port Royal Jamaica. At the center of the story is a British pirate named Joseph Bannister. So, the idea of going to look for a Golden Age pirate ship was irresistible. I knew that only one pirate ship had ever been found and positively identified: The Whydah, which was discovered in 1984 off Cape Cod. He was with a friend and his friend proceeded to tell me a singular story about going to hunt for a pirate ship from the Golden Age of Piracy, which ran from about 1650 to 1730. I drove all the way from Chicago and met him at this steakhouse. But I had learned from Chatterton in the past that when there’s an opportunity to go, you go.Īnd that’s what I did. But it was not a good time to go to New Jersey. He’s got this distinctive, baritone kind voice. He just said something to the effect, “If you like pirates, meet me in New Jersey.” Years later, I got a call at home in Chicago. I knew one of the primary characters, John Chatterton from writing my first book, Shadow Divers.
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