Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea (33 page)

On Friday afternoon Capt. Herndon came to my stateroom and asked permission to remove his instruments there from his stateroom on the upper deck. There was a possibility, he said, that his stateroom, from its exposed position, might be swept away, and his instruments. I complied with the request of course, and the instruments were removed accordingly.

To Bob that made sense. The captain’s quarters on the main deck were built of two-inch lumber, and Friday afternoon the storm had approached its height. Already it had ripped one of the lifeboats from its davits, sent it scudding across the deck, and slammed it against the deckhouse. Soon the deckhouse itself could weaken, buckle, and be swept away, and with it the most important items Captain Herndon kept in his quarters, his navigational instruments. Bob continued reading, slowly, trying to visualize the scene.

Shortly after daybreak on Saturday morning the clouds cleared away somewhat, and the passengers and crew felt greatly encouraged. The storm, they believed, had passed its culminating point. Capt.
Herndon stated to the men at the pumps that he thought the storm had abated, and that if they would keep at work bailing till noon the steamer might be saved. The captain made the same statement in the cabin in hearing of all the passengers who were there.

Monson’s account went on to describe how the captain’s words brought cheer to the men at the pumps and sent joy and gladness to the hearts of the lady passengers, and how the men worked with increased vigor and for a few hours had gained on the water rising in the hold. But soon, reported Monson, the storm had returned with an even greater fury. Then followed a curious paragraph.

About 8 o’clock Saturday morning Capt. Herndon came into my stateroom. I had been an old acquaintance of his, occupied a seat on his left at table, and had been his partner at whist on the previous evening of the trip out of Havana. The captain told me then that there was no hope for us unless the storm abated soon or some vessel hove in sight. I presume I was the only person on board to whom he communicated that fact. The captain was perfectly calm, and intimated that it was but to keep up the courage of the passengers and crew until the last moment.

The copy was on microfilm, white on dark gray, the letters slightly puffy, a few of the words illegible. Bob had to read each paragraph several times, deciphering as he went, and as he was reading this last paragraph for the fourth or fifth time, he asked himself, “Now, did the captain go there specifically to act depressed and talk to Judge Monson?” That didn’t seem likely. He had a ship full of people who were panicked and exhausted, and he would not be in Judge Monson’s stateroom unless he had good reason; baring his soul to the judge was not good enough.

Bob knew that on Friday afternoon the captain had stored his navigational instruments in Monson’s room, and that was the only reasonable explanation for his return the following morning, to retrieve his instruments. But this raised another question: Why would Herndon be concerned with navigational instruments in a storm at eight o’clock on Saturday morning? Sailors shot the solar meridian at noon, and that was only on days when they could see the sun. But there was another
clue from Monson in the previous paragraph, an observation supported by the accounts of several other passengers.

Early that morning, the wind had abated and the skies had begun to clear; the storm at last appeared to be passing, and for the first time in nearly four days the passengers and crew could see the sun lifting off the eastern horizon. “Everybody got all cheered about it,” figured Bob, “and thought, Yes, we are going to conquer this thing, and surely all will be saved,” and as he was picturing the skies clearing and the sun rising, he remembered another piece of information he had read a year earlier in the
Philadelphia Ledger
.

Arriving in Norfolk, Captain Johnsen of the
Ellen
had told his story about rescuing forty-nine men, but on the train to Philadelphia, other reporters asked the Norwegian captain again to recount his story. Johnsen then told virtually the same story he had related in Norfolk, with one major difference: Someone this time asked him where he had picked up the survivors, and he replied, “As the morning advanced, and we found ourselves at a considerable distance from the place where the steamer sank, I bore down for it again. It was in longitude 76° 13′, latitude 31° 55′. I first took an observation at eight o’clock in the morning and again at noon.”

The celestial event at noon was obvious, the solar meridian. But Bob had wondered then, How did he get a coordinate at eight o’clock in the morning? Was it dead reckoned? Did Johnsen take the force of the wind and the height of the seas and the direction of his sail and the number of hours he had spent tacking back and forth and simply distill it all into an approximate location? Was it one of those, as Bob called them, seat-of-your-pants-I-don’t-know-where-the-hell-I-am coordinates? Not likely, thought Bob, because longitude had to be determined using a celestial observation. But what celestial event could possibly have occurred at eight o’clock in the morning?

Bob tracked down a nautical ephemeris from the mid–nineteenth century, and reading the charts that logged every celestial event, he realized that Johnsen had not determined the coordinate by the seat of his britches. According to the ephemeris, a significant celestial event had occurred just after eight o’clock on Sunday morning, and that is what Johnsen had shot with his sextant. And now, as Bob read Judge Monson’s account over and over, he recalled that story, and suddenly it all made
sense: That same celestial event had also occurred a little after seven o’clock on Saturday morning. After shooting the event to take the coordinate, Herndon had probably returned his navigation instruments to Monson’s stateroom, and that’s when Monson saw him. And that was the same coordinate that Herndon had then shouted across the waves to the captain of the
El Dorado
nearly twelve hours later,
his last known position
.

“It was that moment of excitement,” said Bob, “when I figured, THAT’S IT! I remember telling Harv about it. I remember talking in a very animated fashion to him about how I felt I had reached a very key piece of information!”

Bob told Tommy that Herndon was trying to save his ship. He hadn’t seen the sun for four days, and he had no idea where he was. He was a great explorer, and for three years he had worked with his brother-in-law Matthew Fontaine Maury at the navy’s Depot of Charts and Instruments in Washington, charting astronomical calculations for Maury’s work in marine navigation. He was fully versed in wind and current charts and all the latest navigational science.

“And being the intrepid guy that he was,” said Bob, “he was not about to waste an opportunity to figure out his position.”

He might be close to shore, and if he’s close to shore, they might have more hope for being rescued. Monson didn’t say that Herndon had his instruments with him, he said that Herndon was depressed, a little upset.

“Well,” said Bob, “you know why he was depressed? He’s just figured out that they’re two hundred miles offshore! I think he had hoped that maybe he was closer to a shipping lane, that maybe the Gulf Stream had carried them farther north, I don’t know. But if Captain Herndon were offered an opportunity to determine his latitude and longitude, he would not have missed it, and I said to myself, simply, there was not another opportunity.”

The storm that had raged for three days was asymmetrical, and its eye was passing over the
Central America
early that Saturday morning. After this brief clearing the wind again would rise, and the waves would tower above the ship, and the storm would drive her deeper into the sea. But for a short while on that morning, as the clouds parted and the sun shone low in the east, Captain Herndon saw directly above him, cresting at its meridian, the pale white disk of the moon.

The coordinate that had appeared in the underwriters’ report, that had come from the
El Dorado
, that Herndon had shouted across the waves, Herndon himself had taken almost twelve hours earlier during the eye of the storm, and in those twelve hours the
Central America
had drifted from that point to where the two ships met just prior to her sinking, and her wreckage had drifted on to the coordinate reported the following day by the
Ellen
. Finally, Bob had reconciled the odd coordinate, and it fit neatly into the pattern created by the others.

E
ARLY IN
W
ORLD
W
AR
II, U-boats from the German Wolfpack would drift silently in the Gulf Stream along the East Coast of the United States, waiting to torpedo American convoys as they crossed the Atlantic. The German High Command orchestrated the stalking from Germany, transmitting orders across the Atlantic by radio. The U-boat commanders responded by radioing their positions back to Germany. Although the communications were coded, the radio signals from the submarines were powerful and broadcast in all directions. To intercept these signals, the United States and Great Britain developed a net of High Frequency Detection Finding radio outposts encircling the Atlantic Basin, from Cape Hatteras up the eastern seaboard of the United States to Newfoundland, around Greenland and Iceland and over to Ireland and England, down to North Africa, across to South America and up the Caribbean to Florida. Often, when a submarine commander radioed back to Germany, at least one outpost picked up the signal, and the operator then estimated the direction from which the signal was broadcast. The direction was always approximate; on a chart it looked like a V-shaped beam emanating from the outpost and spreading, and somewhere within that beam lay the precise bearing of the submarine. With only one outpost picking up the transmission, the operator couldn’t estimate the location of the U-boat, only the direction in which it lay; but sometimes two stations locked on the same signal, and the V-shaped beams intersected. They now had circumscribed a larger, roughly square patch of ocean, and the submarine from which the signal had been transmitted lay somewhere within that patch.

The German U-boats had limited fuel capacity and were powered by suffocating and smelly diesel engines. The commanders dived the vessels and maneuvered with the engines only when preying on enemy
ships. The rest of the time, they conserved fuel and vented fumes by drifting on the surface, where antisubmarine aircraft could spot them from the air if the pilots knew where to look. But the ocean was big and the U-boat was small, and the winds and the sea and the currents moved the U-boat, so that from the moment two radio outposts locked on a signal, the likelihood that the U-boat lay in one part of the patch instead of another was constantly changing. Since the aircraft had enough fuel to search only five or six hours, a pilot had to concentrate his search effort in the area most likely to hold the submarine. But how did he determine that area, and how much effort did he put into searching it before he spread his search to other high-probability areas to maximize the probability of finding the submarine in those five hours of search?

To deal with a variety of scientific problems early in the war, the navy recruited an elite corps of physicists, mathematicians, and chemists to form the Operations Evaluations Group. High on the group’s list of problems to be solved was how to counteract the German U-boats. One of the first reports the group created in 1942 was a rudimentary concept called “search theory,” which applied mathematical optimization techniques to varying sea conditions, such as wind and current, to predict the probability that a submarine would end up in a certain location. From that they produced a formula for how intensively a pilot should search a given area. The navy then brought in a well-known mathematician named Bernard Koopman to refine the research and form a coherent theory, and within a year, the navy was relying on Koopman’s theories to sink German U-boats. Koopman’s final report, “Search and Screening,” remained classified until long after the war had ended.

One of the late-night letters Tommy wrote at Robbie’s house in 1984 had gone to Dr. Lawrence Stone at Wagner Associates in Sunnyvale, California. Stone had graduated from Antioch College with a B.S. in mathematics and from Purdue with a master’s and a Ph.D. in probability theory. After Koopman died, Stone inherited the mantle as the authority on search analysis. In 1975, he had written
Theory of Optimal Search
for the United States Navy, and the book had remained the premier reference in search theory.

During World War II, Koopman had used a slide rule and sines and cosines to render his formulas. When Stone began refining Koopman’s work in 1967, he had a computational tool not available to Koopman: the
computer, which could process information far more numerically intensive than Koopman could ever have conceived. While Stone was advancing search theory, his colleague Tony Richardson was using computers to reduce the theories to coordinates on a grid. Richardson had worked with the navy during the recovery of the H-bomb dropped off Palomares, Spain, in 1966. Two years later, Stone and Richardson directed the successful search for the navy submarine
Scorpion
. Then the two men had developed a system for the Coast Guard to find persons lost at sea. They used principles similar to those used to find the
Scorpion;
only now the targets were moving. If the search was unsuccessful the first day, they had to reconsider wind and current and project ahead to the next day. Although the persons missing often had been lost for weeks in the Pacific, the system sometimes still found them, and the Coast Guard attributed several spectacular successes to Stone and Richardson. From there, they developed computer-assisted search systems for the navy to track Russian submarines, which moved according to a patrol pattern. For the past ten years, the Office of Naval Research had kept Stone under contract as the principal investigator working on problems in search theory.