The Lost Fleet: The Discovery of a Sunken Armada from the Golden Age of Piracy

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About The Lost Fleet: The Discovery Of A Sunken Armada

Product Description An extraordinary and dramatic tale of shipwrecks, underwater discovery, and the dawn of the golden age of piracy. On January 2, 1678, a fleet of French ships sank in the Caribbean Sea, one hundred miles off the Venezuelan coast, on the killer reef of Las Aves Island. These wrecks, which claimed more than 1,200 lives, proved disastrous for French naval power in the region and sparked the rise of a golden age of piracy, an era that was forever to alter the shape of the Americas. In The Lost Fleet, writer, explorer, and deep-sea diver Barry Clifford interweaves the dramatic tale of this maritime catastrophe -- and the dangerous upsurge of piracy in the world's seas -- with the contemporary account of his own expedition to document and explore the wrecks. Tracing the lives of fabled pirates like the Chevalier de Grammont, Nikolaas Van Hoorn, Thomas Paine, and Jean Comte d'Estrées, The Lost Fleet delivers a stunning portrait of a dark age, rich with historical detail and romantic drama. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, the outcasts of European society came together to form a democracy of buccaneers, settling on a string of islands off the African coast. From there, the pirates made their fame and fortune by haunting the world's oceans, wreaking havoc on the settlements along the Spanish main and -- often enlisted by French and English governments -- sacking ships, ports, and coastal towns. Now, two hundred and fifty years later, Barry Clifford has followed the pirates' destructive wake around the world all the way back to Venezuela. With the help of a remarkably accurate map, drawn by Jean Comte d'Estrées (the captain of the lost French fleet) himself, Clifford was able to locate the exact site of the disaster and the wreckage of the once mighty armada. Beautifully told, epic in scope, and steeped in period detail, The Lost Fleet is a mesmerizing account of historical discovery and underwater reclamation for anyone with a heart for adventure and history, myth, and treasure hunting. From Publishers Weekly Diver and shipwreck explorer Clifford (Expedition Whydah) produces an entertaining account of his 1998 exploration of the Caribbean reef of Las Aves, off the coast of Venezuela, where more than 1,000 French seamen and accompanying "filibusters" (pirates) ran aground in 1678. Clifford shows why the Las Aves calamity "one of the most fatal naval catastrophes of its time" was not only "the spark that ignited the golden age of piracy" but also the event that "probably meant the end of any chance for French domination over the West Indies." The bulk of the book is a fascinating investigation of the life of 17th-century pirates. Clifford argues that, in the wake of their destruction of much of the French naval force in the Caribbean, "pirate crews carried on a unique social experiment, creating a sea-faring society that was fundamentally democratic, egalitarian, fraternal and libertarian." Clifford does not overlook the crime and squalor of "hell towns" occupied almost exclusively by pirates, such as the legendary Penzance in England or the island of Tortuga, off the coast of Hispaniola. But his profiles of renegade sailors Captain Thomas Paine, the Chevalier de Grammont and others make vivid the complexity of the pirate world. Unfortunately, Clifford's detailed recollections of his ultimately successful discovery of two pirate vessels at Las Aves simply can't compete with his descriptions of pirate life; this less-interesting secondary narrative is overshadowed by his own ability to bring that lost pirate world alive for the reader. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal Clifford, the author of Expedition Whydah: The Story of the World's First Pirate Ship and the Man Who Found Her and subject of a PBS National Geographic Explorer special on his discovery of the Whydah, here attempts to weave together two stories: the almost-forgotten 1678 wreck of the French West