Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea (21 page)

As the night wore on, one by one more men ceased the fight and quietly succumbed to the sea, the last flicker of life beat out of them by exposure and exhaustion and the relentless pounding of the waves, their fingers suddenly going soft and spreading, their arms relaxing, their bodies slipping lower, the final moments of their lives spent unconscious, their companions watching helplessly as the sea claimed another of their
own. Rafts that once held six or eight men now supported only three or four. Dead bodies wrapped in life vests floated by.

John George of England drifted in solitude, terrified by his loneliness and shouting himself hoarse to find a companion. Then in the darkness, he discerned a man wearing two life preservers and drifting toward him. He called to the other man and then paddled the best he could to meet him halfway. The other man said nothing but drifted nearer and nearer, until a wave threw them together, they touched, and suddenly George found himself staring into the face of a corpse.

Ansel Easton saw a number of men in the midst of their death agonies, and some he bade good-bye. Once he heard his name called in the dark, “Easton!”

The voice came from B. F. Parker, a merchant he knew from San Francisco, who upon coming closer said, “I cannot hold out but a few minutes longer. I am chilled, and I think we will both be in eternity in less than an hour. I hope we shall meet in heaven.”

Ansel tried to encourage him and provided him a place on his board, but soon they shook hands and bade each other good-bye, and Ansel never saw the man again.

Until the last moment, Ansel had been on the hurricane deck next to Captain Herndon. When Robert Brown had brought him a cork life preserver, Ansel had removed his long coat, donned the preserver, and then thrown his coat over his shoulders, only fastening it about his neck. Then the third wave had hit the ship and a heavy arm had grabbed him round the neck, and the vortex rapidly had sucked both him and the first officer into the watery blackness. Twisting and pulling to get away from the first officer’s panicked grip, he had reached to his throat and pulled open the one button keeping his coat about his neck, and as it slid away, so did the arm of the first officer. Then he had shot upward and found himself among hundreds of men floating with the debris, the subsea missiles still exploding to the surface. A large plank, once the front of a berth, floated by, and he grabbed it.

As storm waves carried him upward, he could turn his head away from the wind and see far to the lee the lights of the
Marine
, the brig that carried Addie and the other women. The thought that she would
send a boat out in the morning encouraged him. In the dark he called out from time to time, and sometimes he would receive an answer to his call. He felt no alarm, or that he was going to drown, but his own thoughts seemed strange to him, as if he were delirious and at the same time aware of his delirium.

William Ede had been floating for about three hours when he became so lonely he would have been glad to feel again even the sinking deck of the steamer beneath his feet. He cried out, “Hallo! Hallo!”

Out of the blackness came a voice not far away. “Ahoy! Ahoy?”

“Who are you?” yelled Ede.

“Jack Lewis of Pine Grove, California,” came the snappy answer.

Ede then was giving his name and home, when suddenly Jack Lewis of Pine Grove, California, shouted, “Where are you going to put up the night, Bill?”

Ede replied that only God knew. “How’s everything with you?”

“All taut, partner,” cracked Jack, and Ede heard nothing more, nor did he ever see the man again.

Dr. Obed Harvey had worked in the captain’s quarters to help set the fractured arm and reduce the dislocated shoulder of a young man who had jumped from the ship and been crushed between the lifeboat and the steamer. As the water suddenly had risen throughout the ship, and the first hard wave crashed over her rail, Dr. Harvey and two others had carried the young man onto the hurricane deck. The next two waves came within seconds, and the vortex had submerged and separated the four men. Dr. Harvey never again saw the other three. When he surfaced, he found himself among hundreds of other men, struggling, and at the mercy of the waves.

“I have no words to describe the melancholy scene,” Dr. Harvey reported later. “Soon after I had got to sea, I secured a small door, composed mostly of lattice work, or which appeared to me much like common window blind. This was of great service to me. When I left the ship, or rather when the ship left me, I had stripped myself of everything but a pair of pants and shirt, and although much disabled from a wound received on ship board, I firmly made up my mind that I could and would maintain myself above water till daylight. I saw and conversed
with several of my acquaintances while in the water. I saw many perish, and was frequently drawn under the water by drowning men. The waves ran high, and frequently dashed over us.”

It was now after midnight, and Dr. Harvey had been in the water for five hours, alone, when a man floated up alongside of him in a chair. The man was exhausted and placed his hand upon Dr. Harvey’s floating door. At first, Dr. Harvey hesitated to aid, fearing that the door would not support both of them, and that if the man tried to come aboard, they both would perish. The man said his name was Frazer and that if he were lost at sea, he would leave a young family in New York destitute. Dr. Harvey then recognized the young man as the second officer.

“I told him to let his chair go, and share with me on my floating substance, and that we would sink or survive together.”

I
N THE HOLD
of the
Marine
, hogsheads of molasses had burst and the molasses had run loose, sending thick, noxious odors wafting upward into the cabin, a room scarcely larger than an ordinary stateroom on the steamer—no more, estimated one woman, than eight feet square. Yet many of the thirty-one women and all of the twenty-six children huddled there, most of the children stuffed into the cabin’s seven berths. The women had no dry clothes to cover their children, so they took sheets and made them into small garments, and their life preservers became pillows. The women themselves wore the only dry clothes they could find on the ship: red shirts and pea jackets and other garb shared by the sailors.

“Mrs. Marvin sat in a cupboard,” remembered Almira Kittredge, “with a pair of gentleman’s white pants on and a gentleman’s coat on, looking just like a man. Mrs. Hawley had on a pair of gentleman’s white drawers and socks, and a blanket having a hole cut in it, through which she put her head, wearing it a la Mexicana. Mrs. Badger got the captain’s undershirt, his boots, and socks; this, with a large blanket wound round her, constituted her dress. Mrs. Easton wore the Captain’s old hat.”

Mrs. Kittredge had positioned herself next to the cabin door, never sleeping, the waves still breaking over the bow, still rushing across the deck and spilling through the doorway into the cabin. All night she sat
in water up to her waist, while outside, “the sea broke over us, and the ship was tossed to and fro like a feather in a gale.” And so they passed the night with no one but the children sleeping more than a few nods.

The men’s sleeping area was a smaller space in the after hold loaded with sugar and tar, but it was so difficult to breathe there that most of the forty-one men rescued from the steamer gathered topside, using spare sails for their beds and lying cold and miserable, but content to be alive.

For Addie Easton and another woman, who chose to bed down on deck, Captain Burt spread a piece of sail across the hatch cover for them to lie on and then covered them with canvas. But Addie could not close her eyes without seeing and hearing the struggles of the drowning. “I reproached myself,” she later wrote, “that I had not stayed to share my dear one’s fate.”

When the captain was not on duty, he would prop himself on his elbows next to her and try to quiet her fears for her husband. “The Captain’s kindness I can never forget …,” she continued. “He is an intelligent true hearted, good soul yankee Captain, and very particularly kind to me, though he did everything he could for everybody…. He told us of the many wonderful rescues he had known and ended with the cheering words, ‘Something tells me that you will meet your husbands when we get in port.’”

Late that night, with the sea still high but the wind beginning to drop, Captain Burt slowly worked the
Marine
back and forth, edging north to where the steamer had suddenly disappeared. But the storm had so thrashed the
Marine
’s rigging that she lacked the tautness to set before the wind. Captain Burt could only hope that the sea would push survivors and wreckage to him faster than it would force him away. But they saw no survivors and no wreckage, only the light of a schooner several miles distant.

Dawn brought light to a clearer sky and revealed a sea now rounded and rolling. The wind blew sharp but not with the fury of previous days. As the
Marine
creaked and tottered in the swells, the survivors breakfasted on hard crackers and tea passed from hand to hand in the same five cups. Captain Burt raised more sail, continuing to tack through the waters where, by the best he could calculate, they had last seen the
Central America
the evening before. But after searching in the vicinity for hours, they saw not a trace of the carnage, no indication that the evening before five hundred souls had clung to a once proud vessel, three hundred feet long with stout masts and sturdy engines, while the sea ravaged her, beat her into splinters, crushed her, and sent her to the bottom with a roar unlike anything human ears had ever heard. As far as the horizon, gray waves rolled onward, incessantly, raking the site clean, as if only they had been there and only they would remain. About 2:00
P.M.
, Captain Burt decided that he had searched as long as he could, that he had a hundred passengers now who needed food and water and to be off the sea. He made all the sail he could and bore up for Norfolk.

COLUMBUS, OHIO

1981

B
ATTELLE
M
EMORIAL
I
NSTITUTE
, a privately funded, not-for-profit facility engaged in contract research for government and private industry, had opened its doors in 1929. One of the terms of Gordon Battelle’s will was that the institute would be “for the making of discoveries and inventions.”

During World War II, five hundred Battelle scientists worked on the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb. In the 1940s and 1950s Battelle scientists helped a nighttime inventor named Chester Carlson refine a crude process that lay concealed inside a dirty wooden box and required fourteen manual operations. Then Battelle and Carlson licensed the process to a small company called Haloid, which in 1961 changed its name to Xerox. In the mid-1960s, scientists at
Battelle created for the Treasury Department the “sandwich coin,” bonding cupro-nickel layers to copper cores, eliminating the need for silver. Battelle scientists developed the insulating tiles that protect NASA space vehicles from incinerating when they reenter the earth’s atmosphere.

When he was no more than twelve, Tommy Thompson had run downstairs one day and showed his mother a newspaper article about Battelle. “It’s a scientific research organization,” he told his mother, “and that’s exactly what I want to do.”

Battelle headquarters, home to three thousand scientists and engineers, was in Columbus just south of the Ohio State campus. Don Frink headed Battelle’s Equipment Development Section, 60 percent of whose research and development was for the government, the majority of that work for the Department of Defense.

“Our group does oddball things,” said Frink, “in space or underground or behind enemy lines or underwater. A large portion of the work is ocean engineering, which is even more unique than standard contract research.”

Each year, out of two hundred applications from top engineering graduates across the country, Frink would interview about twenty and give offers to five. Four would accept. Frink was looking for the young engineer who had worked in a garage or a shop, or was raised on a farm, where a tractor busted in the afternoon had to be back out in the field by sunrise—no time to order parts, just improvise with whatever they could find in the barn. Battelle engineers didn’t wallow in theory, they had to put the thing on a table, flip the switch, and have it perform.

In the spring of 1981, Tommy had finished his perambulations about the country in search of experience and knowledge and returned to Columbus. He arranged an audience with Don Frink, and Frink thought the young man fit his formula for new engineers—SWAN, he called it: Smart, Willing to work hard, Ambitious, Nice to work with. Battelle was big and had its rules and procedures, but Frink liked to provide an atmosphere where an inventor’s soul could flourish, and he liked his engineers with a strong entrepreneurial bent. But he wondered
if Tommy was too entrepreneurial even for him, if after he had brought Tommy along and invested a lot of money in him, Tommy suddenly would be gone, off pursuing something on his own.

“You’re gonna come here a few years,” said Frink, “and then the bug’s gonna bite you again and you’re gonna take off, ‘I gave it my five-year shot and I’m done.’”

“No,” said Tommy, “I have always wanted to work here.”

Frink called Tommy’s professors at Ohio State, and they all confirmed that Tommy fit the SWAN formula. “His IQ has gotta be sky high,” said Frink, “although he might not test very well. He didn’t graduate at the top of his class, but he made the Dean’s List, and he impressed almost every one of his professors. They said, ‘That guy’s going somewhere, I don’t know where, but he’s going somewhere.’ It was the fact that he was interested in the why behind everything.”

A week after their first meeting, Tommy called again and set up another interview, and this time, Frink invited four of his engineers. One was Don Hackman, the world’s foremost expert in underwater tooling. Tommy had read about Hackman and his work.