Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea (59 page)

The core seemed mounded at roughly the center of the site, and debris fields extended outward far beyond that, but at most points they couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began. Shipworms, the sea, and gravity had turned the once stout timbers into soggy wood and collapsed them beneath their own weight. A thin layer of white silt covered the entire wreck, and fragile sponge life, like white tissue paper, undulated hypnotically in the gentle current. A few rattail fish, a foot or two long, it was hard to tell, crossed back and forth over the debris, and a small number of crabs and sea stars sat sprinkled among the wreckage.

The main video camera, the SIT, was black-and-white and the picture grainy, but it worked well in low light, and they could see parts of the ship coming into view far sooner than with the other cameras. Moore used that camera to guide the vehicle closer for the still photos. Doering
worked next to Moore, sometimes snapping pictures from his own console and taking notes. “John Doering’s seen more shallow-water ships than probably anybody around, and he knows what he’s looking for,” Tommy had said. “He’s got a draftsman’s eye, but no one in the world had ever analyzed a deep-water, wooden-hulled, historic ship. It takes a lot of people from different perspectives to interpret a ship like that.”

When the vehicle came up, Doering took the film from the day’s run and developed it in color strips. After the strips had dried, he laid them on the light table and studied each frame. Earlier, he had photographed the nineteenth-century drawings of the
Central America
and superimposed the drawings over the sonagram of Galaxy. “It looked good,” he said. “And when we got down there, it still looked good.”

For the three weeks he joined the crew that summer, Milt Butter-worth worked with Doering in the photo lab, developing film and interpreting the photographs. “We used to invite virtually everybody in to look at the photographs, in case I missed something,” said Doering. “But Milt was the greatest one. He’d look at the photographs and he’d say, ‘Look at this shot, this is something,’ and I’d look at it, ‘Nah, don’t worry, that’s nothing.’ ‘Yeah, yeah,’ he’d say, ‘that’s it, that’s it!’”

But that was all they could do: study photographs of things underwater, bent and broken, decayed and rusted, encrusted with sea life, distorted by white sediment, subject to interpretation and misinterpretation. They couldn’t land to confirm doubt or suspicion; they couldn’t touch anything. First they had to understand the site, and when Tommy returned they would select areas to scrutinize and venture into slowly. Until then, they flew back and forth, collecting thousands of photographs, and continued to debate what they saw.

As Doering studied the monitors from his place next to Moore, and as he developed and analyzed more and more of the pictures, two things concerned him. One was the paddle wheels. Flying at thirty feet above the site, they saw nothing that looked like the iron-spoked behemoths that had hung from the sides of the steamer. “That was the big thing,” said Doering. “Where are these damn paddle wheels?” The other was the size of the site.

The size of things seen underwater could be deceiving, and the ship was so deteriorated they still weren’t sure where the bow began and the
stern ended; but it seemed short. On one run, Scotty marked a reasonable point for the bow and the stern in his navigation system, Moore flew the vehicle from point to point, then Scotty calculated the slant ranges. “The vehicle is not traveling ninety meters,” confirmed Scotty. “We’re traveling a much shorter distance.”

E
ARLY THE MORNING
of August 8, Tommy and Barry returned to the
Navigator
, accompanied by Don Hackman, back for his second stint. The
Washington Post
and the
Los Angeles Times
and every other publication that had run articles on the Columbus-America Discovery Group had reported favorably on the group’s interest in the science and the archaeology of wooden-hulled ships found in the deep ocean. Tommy seemed refreshed and encouraged by the judge’s decision and the public’s response, and he was ready to spend another two months at sea.

But Craft took Tommy aside and suggested that a crew rest would be, uh, desirable. He pointed out that for the past three and a half weeks Tommy had been on dry land, where the ground didn’t move, where diesel fumes did not congregate and thrusters did not vibrate and one could stroll for more than a hundred feet and not see the same thing. A little R&R back at the beach for the rest of the crew would in Craft’s words be “very desirable.” When Tommy had had time to think about this, he figured it might also be an opportunity to invite some of the partners down to Charleston for a face-to-face progress report. Eventually, he not only agreed to head in, but even proposed flying the crew’s families to Charleston and putting them up in a nice hotel. On the afternoon of August 12, the
Seaward Explorer
arrived to stand watch over the Galaxy site, and late that night the
Navigator
was bound for Charleston.

By 0815 a day and a half later, Burlingham had the
Navigator
secured to the Union Street wharf; families waited on the dock, and Don Craft and his wife, Evie, announced that the first party, lunch at Henry’s, was on them.

Henry’s was the oldest restaurant and bar in Charleston. It oozed with the redolence of the Old South, like the tables and chairs had all been marinated in bourbon. That afternoon, Henry’s was stuffed with summer tourists tasting she-crab soup and sipping mortar-muddled
fresh mint juleps. In the middle of the hullabaloo stood a piano, an old upright about chest high that the servers stacked with doilies, dishes, and silverware. The Columbus-America group had been seated for no more than a few minutes when Bob Evans disappeared. All they could see was his white straw Panama hat with the black band floating through the crowd. Evie watched him sit down at the old piano.

“He picks these doilies up and sticks them on top,” said Evie, “just like he was in his own living room.”

Bob hit a few keys and then a few chords and people started looking at him. The piano was not in tune, but it was close enough. Those near the piano noticed somebody tickling the keys, and the talking slowed in ever widening circles, until the room had grown almost silent, and suddenly the intensity of those weeks of sliding dinner plates and leaky thrusters all exploded out of Bob’s fingertips into Scott Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag,” in a way, according to witnesses, that would have made Joplin weep for joy, and the good-time alarms set inside all of those tourists sipping mint juleps started going off at once.

“The place went crazy,” said Evie. “He played the most gorgeous stuff you ever heard in your life.”

Bob hit the keys on that old piano like a man exorcising his demons, that long blond hair shaking down his shoulders, those short thick arms pounding the ivory faster than the eye could see. Henry’s piano and Bob’s Panama and Scott’s music and the ambience of Charleston all melted together that afternoon and whipped everyone there into a fine southern froth. “It was just absolutely perfect,” said Craft.

When the yankee from Ohio skidded to a finish and punched that last high note, it wafted upward into the rafters, and the room erupted in applause and shouts of “More!”

“The entire room started applauding,” said Craft. “They wanted him to stay on forever.”

That was the beginning of three days of partying in Charleston for the Columbus-America crew and their families. Tod’s sister Paula organized a party the first night at the East Bay Trading Company, more lunches at restaurants in the historic area of old Charleston, and a catered picnic, where rain drove them back under a gazebo. Milt brought along
slides of the trip and projected them for everyone to see, and a few partners flew in from Columbus.

While the Columbus-America crew partied with their families and the
Navigator
hugged the Union Street wharf, a boy of two lay in the Intensive Care Unit of Charleston’s Roper Hospital, suffering from a respiratory attack caused by pesticides. From the window of the ICU waiting room, the boy’s father, a brick mason named Wally Kreisle, could see the
Navigator
down at the wharf. He knew it was Tommy Thompson’s ship, and the sight disturbed him. For the past six years, Kreisle had been in a dozen libraries up and down the East Coast researching the
Central America
. He had become obsessed with finding the fabled steamer. Now he had investors and a ship, a deep-water side-scan sonar and a contract with Steadfast Oceaneering, the deep-ocean search and recovery company used exclusively by the United States Navy and controlled by Bob Kutzleb. Kutzleb was one of the two deep-ocean experts who had come to Columbus at the invitation of an investor two years earlier to grill Tommy. The investor had given Kutzleb Tommy’s proprietary and highly confidential concept paper on the
Central America
, including how to find it with the most recent generation of side-scan sonar. Kutzleb had signed a confidentiality agreement, but only after first crossing out some of the clauses. With Kutzleb’s sonar experts behind him, Kreisle was ready to launch his own expedition. He had read in the paper about the court’s awarding the ship to Columbus-America, but he had gained too much momentum to stop now; he was waiting only for his son to recover before he set to sea to find the
Central America
.

S
INCE THE
L
IBERTY
S
TAR
appeared on the horizon late one night in early July, Tommy had been preoccupied with battling intruders and dealing with the media. At the top of his priority lists were legal concerns and crew concerns and strategy. He had spent little time in the control van, watching flyovers of the site and analyzing data. Although his purpose at sea that summer was to find and identify the
Central America
, not until late August could he concentrate on the science and the engineering and the technology to accomplish his goal. While the crew partied in Charleston, Tommy ducked out of celebrations early and stayed up late to review the
video and the photographs they had shot in his absence. He spent long hours talking with Bob. He now felt he understood the site well enough to begin forays into the debris to search for signs besides an abundance of coal that would confirm: This is the
Central America
.

Identifying the ship was crucial, because treasure occupied an area no bigger than a small closet; if you were on the wrong ship, you could spend months searching for something that did not exist. If you identified the ship, the search for the treasure could be focused and likely places explored and eliminated until you found it. Tommy wanted to verify that the debris on this small patch of ocean floor had arrived there 130 years earlier when the
Central America
came to rest. Then he could begin a methodical search for the treasure.

Early the morning of August 20, the
Navigator
was back on site and the techs had launched the vehicle. Coming in for their first landing up close to the wreckage, Moore eased the vehicle onto the ocean floor. The fine silt that had collected for over a century rose into a cloud.

No one knew what the
Central America
should look like after 130 years at the bottom of the sea: all its timbers and rigging and boilers and steam engines and cast-iron fittings and giant sidewheels and the attendant flotsam and jetsam of six hundred passengers and crew. Tommy and Bob had modeled the site every way they could imagine. They had models in which teredo worms had eaten all of the wood; models in which the iron had wasted away to ions and disappeared; models in which neither had occurred and the ship sat upright virtually intact; models in which both had occurred and the site was almost nothing but coal. And when the silt settled, that’s what they saw. “We thought we were looking at probably what happened,” said Tommy. “There was wood there and there was iron there, but most of the iron and wood was gone and mostly what remained was coal.”

In the background they could see a few broken and rotted timbers, dark and flecked with rust, but so much coal surrounded and covered the timbers that even at this lower angle, they could hardly discern the line of the hull. Bob had studied the architecture of the
Central America
, but the crisp drawings from exploded views of the mid-nineteenth-century sidewheel steamer looked nothing like the worn, decayed, funny-angled, broken, silt-covered, coal-strewn scene in front of them.
What struck everyone was the violence evident at the site. “At Sidewheel,” said Tommy, “we couldn’t see the violence. It was just sitting there like a rowboat, with nothing in it. On this site you get more of a sense of, Wow, this really was a disaster.”

Tommy had one rule in the control room: No one was allowed to say out loud what he thought he was seeing. As soon as somebody said, “It looks like an anchor,” then everybody else would see an anchor. Perceptions produced better results if one wrote, “wine bottle”; another wrote, “whistle”; another figured, “piece of pipe”; another thought, “It looks like a ladder”; another wondered, “Is it a lantern?” “If people get to talking about it,” said Tommy, “they all arrive at a conclusion, and the conclusion has more to do with the social dynamics in the control room than it does with the reality of the situation.”

A black timber embedded in the silt might look like a hole, or a hole might look like a blackened timber. Colors and shapes and textures could all conspire to make a collection of small coal pieces and bits of wood appear to be a decanter or an old iron plate or a mottled bar of gold. “A number of times we thought we saw gold mixed in with the coal,” said Tommy, “but it wasn’t obvious it was gold.” They couldn’t be sure of anything until Doering had developed the film from the higher-resolution still cameras and they had studied the pictures and gone back for a closer look.