Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea (32 page)

The last sentence is chiseled on a granite monument, twenty-one feet tall, which the officers of the United States Navy erected at Annapolis in 1860, to honor Captain Herndon for heroism.

COLUMBUS, OHIO

F
ALL
, 1984

T
HE
D
ATA
C
ORRELATION
Matrix on the wall at Bob Evans’s house became a Lotus spreadsheet twelve feet wide, twelve feet high. Fifty-nine survivors and ship captains had given their stories to the press in 1857, and thirty-three had made comments that would help locate the site. The names of those thirty-three ran across the top of the spreadsheet, four names to a page. Heading down, each of fifteen pages contained three time blocks, each block representing three hours, beginning Tuesday at noon, just after the
Central America
had left Havana Harbor, and running all the way through Sunday midnight, when the
Ellen
already had been underway for Norfolk half a day.

Besides an intimate understanding of the story, Bob was looking for three things: coordinates or distances and their time; the velocity and
direction of winds and the height and direction of seas; the condition of the vessel. Whenever a witness mentioned one of these, he placed it in the appropriate time slot under the witness’s name. The idea was to reduce as much of the oral information as possible to physical data.

After exhausting the resources at the Ohio State libraries, Bob next went to the Library of Congress, then the National Archives, and the Smithsonian, and the Army Office of Military History. He visited and corresponded with librarians at state and local libraries in New York, Norfolk, Savannah, Boston, Philadelphia, Charleston, San Francisco, and Sacramento. He contacted the Webb Institute of Naval Architecture and the Mariner’s Museum and the museum in Mystic Seaport. Everything that could affect the position of the steamer’s sinking went onto the Data Correlation Matrix. The rest went into Bob’s head, and a movie of the storm continued to evolve; as new bits of information came to the script, he rewrote the scenes, until he could close his eyes and see the ship tossing in the storm, the women and children huddled in the saloon, the men passing out in the bailing lines, and the water rising in the hold.

“I immersed myself in this stuff, because we needed every piece of data that could have bearing on the sinking location. We pulled all the human interest in as well, but the stuff that went up on the matrix were things about the sails being ripped to shreds at ten o’clock on Friday morning, things from which I could deduce wind strengths and wave heights and how far down the vessel had sunk at a certain point, when the water reached the lower deck and when it flooded the boilers.”

One witness might say the same thing as another witness, but there would be a difference of two hours, and Bob would ponder the discrepancy. Which account was more likely to have occurred when the witness said it occurred? Did either witness have a reason for remembering the time? Have both witnesses consistently reported other events accurately?

On the matrix in the Friday morning slot appeared, “Vessel careened over on her starboard side and we heard the beams crack.”

“That’s an interesting comment from Virginia Birch,” noted Bob. “None of the men put it quite as colorfully as that. She has a moment, ‘heard the beams crack,’ or at least as far as she was concerned that’s
what had happened. Friday morning is all she says, so I put it in the 9:00 slot just because that’s a nice midmorning slot to aim at. Right next to that you’ve got J. A. Foster reporting at 11:00, ‘Ship over on beam end.’ He commented about it once it was over on its beam end, he didn’t actually talk about it happening. So you see, there’s a different kind of information there. But it’s interesting that Virginia talked about the actual careening over; she probably had a colorful experience associated with that—who knows, maybe she slipped and fell or something happened that was a very kinetic act for her.”

Another passenger had reported that “the storm was raging with unabated fury” the minute they left Havana, but Virginia Birch said, “The nine o’clock weather was fair.” She continued, “On Wednesday at three o’clock the winds commenced to blow with increasing fury.”

“That’s why the Data Correlation Matrix became so important,” said Bob, “because whereas one man may remember that ‘The storm raged with unabated fury from the time we left Havana,’ Virginia Birch, a dance hall girl from San Francisco, knows that it was quite pleasant when they left. This other fellow may have been in his bunk when they left, but the ladies were out on the hurricane deck, enjoying the scenery. Then Virginia says, ‘On Thursday, we passed another fearful day, the vessel rocking and pitching violently,’ and yet another passenger reports, ‘The storm arose Thursday night, increased until Saturday morning.’ Until you get thirty-three of these next to each other, it’s really hard to figure out what the approximate truth is.”

Bob kept trying to squeeze objective data out of the subjective observations of a largely unscientific group of observers. He found dozens of clues that would help: how high the water rose within the vessel and when it got that high; how hard the wind blew on the second day and the third day and the fourth day out of Havana; when the foremast was cut away, or the drag sail launched, or the spanker torn to shreds off the mizzen. He stuffed his head with thousands of bits of arcane history, and his mind never stopped making connections. As he read the accounts, he would walk up and down, gazing at the matrix, weighing the information, imagining the scenes, pacing a little more, thinking about how each scene was related to another, trying to reconcile that one observer said that at this time a heavy gale blew, while another
opined that the gale then seemed only moderate. Or that witnesses reported sighting the
Marine
shortly after noon, or around noon, or about two o’clock, or about three o’clock. He rationalized that with six hundred people on the ship, not all of them were at the same spot at the same time to witness the same event. Some were in cabins, others in steerage, some were on deck, others below; as the storm reached its height, most were bailing. And that was another thing he thought about as he scrutinized the stories.

“A lot of this testimony came from men who first of all had worked for thirty hours bailing water, then they were in the water for eight or ten hours, with no hope of salvation whatsoever, at night, in the middle of nowhere, obviously going to die. And then they’re rescued by this strange foreign vessel with a captain who has a heavy German-Swedish-Norwegian accent, who tells them some kind of story about this mysterious bird that led him to the spot.”

Coordinates were the most important information and therefore the most scrutinized. When Bob saw a coordinate, he considered the source and imagined the circumstances. Most of the coordinates from the
Central America
progressed from Havana up the East Coast, and those from other captains fit a pattern of rescue in the vicinity or subsequent encounters with survivors. But one coordinate continued to baffle him, the same coordinate Tommy had found early on in the official report by the New York Board of Underwriters. The men who drafted the report had included it because the captain of the
El Dorado
gave that coordinate as the point where he had encountered the
Central America
only ninety minutes before she sank. It was the coordinate that had confused Bob and Tommy earlier, because it was too far away from two coordinates taken aboard other ships. It was the same coordinate Harry John apparently had relied on for X-marks-the-spot in his unsuccessful search for the steamer a year and a half earlier. Bob wouldn’t use the coordinate until he could find out more about it, and right now it still made no sense. As he dug deeper into the documents, he pieced together this story:

Upon sailing into Boston, the captain of the
El Dorado
had met with scandal: Ninety minutes before the
Central America
sank, he had been close enough to shout across the water and be heard, and Captain
Herndon had requested him to lay by till morning, that he was sinking, but the
El Dorado
captain had failed to rescue even one of the desperate men in the water. Such behavior during the worst ship disaster in American history raised the public ire when the
El Dorado
arrived in port, and the captain spoke only briefly with reporters, then disappeared. With the captain in hiding, the first mate had to answer reporters’ questions, and during this public interrogation, he produced the ship’s log, which recorded several coordinates, and right there in the log was the site of the sinking: 31° 25′ north, 77° 10′ west, the same numbers that appeared in the official report. But to Bob, the coordinate looked suspicious.

“I’m sure that nobody else looking at this thing had ever thought that it doesn’t really look right, but it doesn’t; 31° 25′ latitude, and 77° 10′ longitude, very precise coordinates rounded off to the nearest five minutes.” And that was the problem: They were too precise.

Bob studied the
El Dorado
log and noticed that with one exception, every other coordinate entered was latitude only, how far north of the equator the ship had progressed. Latitude was the easy number to calculate, the part that a captain could determine by merely spotting familiar landmarks on shore or by “dead reckoning,” a sixth sense sailors developed at sea that enabled them to read the surface for wind speed, factor in the performance of their ship in similar seas, consider the distance from port to port and the latitude they had shot the day before at the solar meridian, and determine within five miles where they were.

But longitude, the position of the ship east to west, was so difficult to determine that in 1714 the English Parliament had passed the Longitude Act, offering twenty thousand pounds, the modern equivalent of millions of dollars, as a prize to anyone who could devise a method for determining longitude to within half a degree, or thirty miles. “Discovering the longitude” became synonymous with attempting the impossible. After forty years of continuous effort, John Harrison had finally claimed a portion of the prize with a chronometer, or watch, so complex that a renowned watchmaker required two years to duplicate it. Even in the mid–nineteenth century, most mariners couldn’t afford a chronometer, and only the experienced mariner, like Herndon, could calculate longitude using a chronometer and sextant. Captains sailing
the East Coast of the United States often reported only latitude. In the
El Dorado
log, Bob saw entry after entry like these: “blowing perfect gale from north northeast, latitude 29° 50′ North.” Only once, when the
El Dorado
neared the Florida coast and the captain identified a landmark, did he record longitude as well as latitude.

“Until he’s sailing past the
Central America
,” thought Bob, “in the middle of the storm, at a time when they could not have gotten a coordinate, and then he renders this extremely precise coordinate.” How could the captain of the
El Dorado
take a reading of anything at six-thirty in the evening? Even if the wind had been calm and the water like glass, there was nothing to shoot with his sextant. “This seemed kind of weird to me,” said Bob.

He restudied every account concerning the encounter between the two ships, and he found some confusing language in the way the story was reported. Most of the accounts said that Captain Herndon had yelled “our situation,” but one account in the
New York Tribune
said that Herndon had shouted to the other captain “our position.” Bob surmised that in mid-nineteenth-century English the two could be synonymous; and synony-mous or not, the writers of the other accounts could easily have misconstrued the seaman’s language spoken by some of the witnesses; and whether the words were synonymous or misconstrued, they supported Bob’s growing suspicion that the captain of the
El Dorado
had gotten that coordinate from someone else.

He imagined the scene: Over five hundred men gathered on the deck of the
Central America
, the steamer sinking beneath them, the storm still high, and out of the storm comes another ship and heaves to around their stern. Captain Herndon shouts through his bullhorn as each captain strains to hear the other, the roar of five hundred desperate men deafening, Captain Herndon wanting the other captain at least to know where he is, and somehow the numbers loft across the water from the
Central America
to the
El Dorado
, and either the other captain or his mate takes them down.

“They must have gotten it from Herndon,” concluded Bob. And that answered the question of how such a precise coordinate ended up among all of the half coordinates in the
El Dorado
log. But that raised another question: Did Herndon get the coordinate at six o’clock
in the evening from a pitching and rolling deck in the middle of a hurricane with five hundred men facing a watery grave? If not, where did he get it? And in the answer to that question lay the key to finding the ship.

I
N HIS RESEARCH
, Bob had seen references to the
New York Herald
, the major newspaper of the day, and although he had read none of its articles, he knew the
Herald
had covered the sinking of the
Central America
in great detail. The OSU library did not have the
Herald
, but in the spring of 1985, Bob traveled to New York to visit a brother and to look for sources not available in Columbus. There he found dozens of articles in the
Herald
, and he read them over and over. Some were verbatim accounts he had seen in other papers, others were fresh information, and one of the latter appeared on September 27, 1857, a three-thousand-word interview with Judge Monson. A third of the way through the article appeared this paragraph: