The Discovery of a Sunken Armada from The Golden Age of Piracy. 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 Bary Clifford inter-weaves 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. 39 Chapters & 281 pages.