Lost Fleet

<p>On January 2 1678 a fleet of French ships sank off the Venezuelan coast. This proved disastrous for French naval power in the region and sparked the rise of a golden age of piracy.</p><p>Tracing the lives of fabled pirates like the Chevalier de Grammont Nikolaas Van Hoorn Thomas Paine and Jean Comte d'Estrées <em>The Lost Fleet</em> portrays a dark age when the outcasts of European society formed a democracy of buccaneers settling on a string of islands off the African coast. From there the pirates haunted the world's oceans wreaking havoc on the settlements along the Spanish mainland and -- often enlisted by French and English governments -- sacking ships ports and coastal towns.</p><p>More than three hundred years later writer explorer and deep-sea diver Barry Clifford follows the pirates' destructive wake back to Venezuela. With the help of a lost map drawn by the captain of the lost French fleet Clifford locates the site of the disaster and wreckage of the once-mighty armada.</p>