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On January 2, 1678, a fleet of French ships sank in the Caribbean Sea, one hundred miles off of 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, and Thomas Paine, The Lost Fleet delivers a 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 in the Caribbean. 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 the French and English governments - sacking ships, ports, and coastal towns.
