Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea (51 page)

Inside the dark control van, the techs watched the stern of the ship glide by on the monitors. Scotty was trying to get as many acoustical readings as he could, but he needed a full twenty to thirty seconds of quiet, and he couldn’t get it with the thrusters whining. Thirty seconds went by. Then a minute. Then suddenly they felt a hard thump, the control van jerked, and the wreck disappeared from the monitors. Once again they were looking at the whiteness of the barren ocean floor.

“I remember all the panic and the screaming and hollering,” said Brockett. “‘What the hell’s going on?’”

Then they realized they were now tied up to the supply boat and the two vessels were rocking against each other in the swells. They felt more thumps. Moore raised the vehicle a few hundred feet, and except for Scotty, everyone left the control van and went out on deck to help off-load supplies and groceries. Scotty stayed behind, hunched over a pad of paper at the nav station, and tried to calculate where they had been when they saw the ship. But the geometry didn’t work. “Scotty is generally pretty laid back, and it appears that nothing ever upsets him,” said Brockett, “but this time he was white knuckled.”

Once every hour or so, Moore or Brockett or Bob Evans would poke his head into the control van to see if Scotty had worked out the navigation yet. And every time, Scotty would say, “Nope.” Bob’s visits remained civil. Brockett got progressively sharper. Moore became so enraged he finally stopped coming in. He couldn’t understand how Scotty could have the most sophisticated navigation system available and
not be able to figure out where they were. “It can’t be that difficult!” he told Scotty. Moore didn’t realize that although Scotty had the numbers to work with, they meant nothing: The software was defective. Scotty suspected the software was defective but refused to mention it until he was certain.

The
Seaward Explorer
finished refueling the
Navigator
and departed at five-thirty that afternoon. The vehicle remained on the bottom, and the techs waited for Scotty to figure out where they had been. But as evening came on and then darkness fell, he still could not calculate where they had been when they saw the stern of the ship. At midnight they gave up and recovered the vehicle.

W
HEN HE AROSE
the next morning, now June 22, Scotty discarded the faulty data he had from the navigation software and started calculating his own grid, using whatever figures he could rely on: the position of the ship, the layback on the vehicle, some of the ranges he had recorded. At noon, he thought he had enough of an answer to try again, and they launched the vehicle.

For the first three hours, they hovered above where they thought the ship was, moving the vehicle a few meters this way and a few meters that way. The video camera was working well, and even the Mesotech seemed to be functioning. Then late in the afternoon, they acquired a target on the Mesotech. Scotty alerted Tommy on the intercom, and with all of the techs watching the monitors, he guided Burlingham closer and closer to the target, and once again the white sediment on the monitors suddenly filled with varying shades of gray and they saw the stern of the ship on camera. In the dark control room, everyone stared at the monitor for five minutes before they again lost contact. But Scotty now had a good fix on the site. He told Burlingham to come around and swing the bow of the
Navigator
to the northwest and proceed in that direction.

Bob had watched all thirty-six hours of video the sonar crew had shot the previous summer, and he had analyzed the two minutes when they had the ship in view; but even during that two minutes the light level was so low he could discern nothing except a few ship timbers and some anchor chain. His real understanding of the site had come from a
suite of high-resolution work done with the SeaMARC, and in one image, right in the middle of the target, was a hump that looked like a paddle-box and a sidewheel.

“You just look at that sonar picture,” said Bob, “and you say, ‘Good lord, look at that!’”

Rising straight up just forward of that hump appeared to be the main mast, and aft appeared to be another mast, the mizzen. And if you studied that sonagram, really studied it, as Bob had, you could see spokes in the paddle wheel. That’s what they were looking for.

Burlingham turned the ship and assumed a new heading to the northwest. With the camera running, the sled crept forward a few meters at a time. After an hour, they saw the stern again, but this time Scotty had put them on a bearing almost perpendicular to the last. Burlingham stopped and backed down, and Moore dove the camera sled just inside the starboard wall. For the next fourteen minutes, they followed the hull in a slow sweep, from the stern all the way to the bow.

Although the lights were not bright enough to see large sections at once, they could see small portions distinctly. The camera sled inched forward toward the bow, and the scenes once bright at the center of the screen slowly receded into the dark and new scenes appeared out of the same dark. They could see the ribs of the ship, and before they had gone far, they saw a long cable coiled round and round inside the hull. As the lights and camera passed over the coils, their shadows played across the ribbing. In the first several scenes they saw nothing but more ribbing and more cable, each scene virtually the same as the last. And then Bob noticed in the sediment just outside the hull what appeared to be two bottles. A little farther on they saw anchor chain trailing across the white floor into the darkness. Then the scenes returned to more ribbing and more cable, the only thing distinguishing one scene from another being a section of charred planking, as if part of the hull had once burned. They had no explanation for that.

No one spoke, but everyone wondered why the site looked so clean. How could Moore drop the sled inside and follow the starboard wall? Where was the decking, the superstructure, the stairways, the cabins? Maybe the scientists had been wrong, maybe the degradation process
continued even at these depths. Maybe everything but the hull itself had simply degraded and dissolved and returned to the sea.

After several minutes, they approached midships, and based on their various target models, they expected now to get a glimpse of a sidewheel or the paddle-boxes or at least the shaft and some of the iron works of the engines, but the camera glided by, sending back images of an empty hull, a few more ribs, and planking. Where were the sidewheels, where were the boilers, where were the masts? Where was the coal? They saw not one lump of coal inside or outside. Yet the
Central America
sank with more than two hundred tons of coal in its hold, and coal wouldn’t degrade; it wouldn’t go away; even if the superstructure and the iron of the paddle wheels disintegrated, the coal would remain, huge piles of coal. But they saw nothing, nothing but the hollow shell of an old wooden vessel.

“You could see down to the rakes of the bilge,” said Tommy. “You could see everything, and it was empty, completely empty.” Before they had gone the length of it, he knew. “I had a feeling the minute I saw it that this wasn’t the
Central America
. There wasn’t enough debris. No cargo, no engines, no fastenings, no junk.”

The fastenings alone on a steamer like the
Central America
, just the bolts and nails and brackets to hold together the engines and boilers and support the weight of the coal, would weigh close to one hundred tons. Even if the engines and boilers weren’t there, the site should have been littered with debris, and there was none of that. Except for the wire coiling through the bilge, the hull was empty. “With a passenger liner, you’d expect a lot of anything,” said Tommy, “dishes, personal effects—you know, stuff. And it’s almost like this thing was full of cotton and the shipworms ate it all.”

This was the first time anyone had “ground-truthed” the sonagram of a deep-water wooden shipwreck; the first time anyone had gone to the bottom and looked, then compared what they saw to what appeared in the sonagram. And what appeared in the sonagram of Sidewheel, what had impressed Williamson and his crew and Bob Evans and everyone else who had seen the sonar images of the wreck, wasn’t there on the bottom.

Before they reached the bow, Tommy said, “Let’s get out of here.”

No one could explain the hump in the middle of the sonagram that had looked so distinctly like a paddle wheel. The hull was degraded and tipped slightly on its side; perhaps it had degraded in a way that left a big moon-shaped section that appeared on the sonagram as a hump, a misleading sculpture cast by the sea. Another trick: The faint straight lines they had seen on the sonagrams that looked like two masts standing tall corresponded with anchor chain they now saw trailing out of the hull and across the ocean floor.

The excitement and the expectation over that site had built for months, and since the techs first saw those white blotches painting the target’s outline, perfect even from a hundred feet away on the Mesotech, that excitement and that expectation had risen right through the antsy frustration of waiting out bad weather and dealing with Mesotech malfunctions, navigation glitches, and teasing glimpses of the hull, and finally the big moment had arrived. So many people had convinced themselves and others that the suite of “Sidewheel” sonagrams perfectly portrayed a 280-foot sidewheel steamer that emotions now banged against an abrupt realization: The gold pea lay under another shell somewhere in the Atlantic. And the sea offered no clue.

With the possibility of competition appearing at any moment and the whole search map now to be reconsidered, they had no time to waste on a site with such low probability of being the
Central America
. After the camera crept past the bow and they had the length of the ship on film, Tommy called off the dive. Until they found the real site, they might use Sidewheel as a test site to build their database on deep-water wooden ships and to practice with their equipment, but Tommy had concluded that the site that so obviously held paddle wheels and massive boilers and huge engines and tall masts was no more than a sailing vessel that perhaps had burned before sinking and now lay hollow and empty at the bottom of the sea.

I
N HIS FAILURE-MODE
thinking Tommy had considered the possibility that Mike Williamson might be wrong in his analysis of the sonagrams. Williamson was the best, but no one had ever seen a wooden ship in deep water, so he had nothing to compare a sonagram to. If he was right, they had no problems. But what if Sidewheel was not the
Central America
?
After a tightly controlled effort to construct a probability map using the most sophisticated methods available, they had searched over 94 percent of that map and so had a 94 percent probability of having imaged the
Central America
. Even in Tommy’s limit-your-risk world, that was an overwhelmingly high probability. The
Central America
had to be somewhere in their database.

Tommy assigned Bob Evans and John Doering to review the major targets on the optical disk. First, they analyzed the images in black-and-white, comparing the features of each to what they had seen in the Sidewheel images and what they had found at the Sidewheel site. Then they went to the color mode and experimented with drawing more information from the images. They analyzed several other anomalies. When they compared the sonagram of Sidewheel to these sites, they all appeared to fall into two categories: either a highly reflective rocket shape indicating hard metal, or a softer return indicating an old sailing vessel. Finally, they got to the sonagram labeled “Galaxy.”

In 1986, the sonar team had imaged Galaxy only after Tommy insisted they stop running high-resolution passes over Sidewheel and finish running the broader-swath track lines through the lower-probability cells to the east. When Williamson imaged Galaxy, he studied the sonagram and pronounced the ship “a steel-hulled vessel with associated debris.” But before Tommy would allow the sonar team to return to Sidewheel, he had wanted a high-resolution shot of Galaxy, and he kept them there until they had swept the target at closer range three more times. The debris field surrounding the core had intrigued Tommy; it swirled about the site like a galactical spray, so Tommy had named the site “Galaxy.” It was the last wreck site they had imaged in 1986.

Bob and Doering now sat in the Elder van watching the software paint Galaxy in black-and-white, and before the lines had finished neither could believe what they saw staring back at them. Nearly filling the screen was an eerie caricature: a human skull with sunken cheeks and large, hollow sockets for eyes.

“Have you ever seen this picture,” said Doering, “if you look at it from afar it looks like a skull, but when you get closer you see it’s a woman sitting in front of a mirror combing her hair? This looked very similar to that. You could see a skull, and it looked like he was scratching his head.”

At the core appeared to be a primary deposit, indicating the hull of a ship, then came a secondary ring of debris, and finally a tertiary plume of more debris. It looked like a ship that had twisted and turned on its way to the bottom, spilling its contents as it traveled down through the long column of water, the contents roiling around the hull as it descended, the hull crashing into the seafloor, and the contents scattering in a swirl around it. The reach of the arm up toward the top of the skull was part of that swirl.

Now that they had ground-truthed Sidewheel, they knew more about interpreting sonar images, and they saw quickly that Galaxy appeared to have a lot of hard targets at the center and thousands of tiny bright reflections in the debris field that formed the skull, scatters of what they thought might be chunks of coal.

“The more Bob and I talked about it,” said Doering, “we went, ‘Goddamn, this has all the earmarks of being the
Central America
!’”

They showed the sonagram to Tommy, and Tommy immediately saw the skull. He liked the site because it differed significantly from all the others. It appeared to have sufficient mass to be the
Central America
and to be long enough. And it was surrounded with plumes of debris, now so obviously absent from Sidewheel and the other sites. After studying the sonagram and comparing it to the others and talking to Bob, Tommy estimated that the site had at least a 50 percent probability of being the
Central America
, and maybe a much higher chance than that.