Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea (35 page)

“We began to realize,” said Bob, “that the more minds from divergent areas of thought you can get to agree on a given subject, the sounder the idea.”

No one worried that he would be judged by what he said in front of the other two. Ideas were not divided into good and bad, only those that worked and those that didn’t work. And although an idea might not work for several reasons, one part of that idea might have merit. But you couldn’t pluck the ripe part if the whole idea went unspoken, and Tommy had observed subtle ways that that happened, that words, looks, even demeanor from others could prevent someone from stretching
into an area new and creative. “That’s where the right chemistry allows people to take stands and not be ostracized for their positions,” said Tommy. “It’s all part of the process: Be sensitive to each other, yet give each other enough resistance.”

Bob could get so revved up he would shake off one point for another and then another, until he was so far removed from the original conversation, he had to stop and think his way back. He always had a reason for the story, but it often took him a half-hour to get there. He started out one night telling Tommy and Barry how the year before the
Central America
had sailed on its final voyage, Captain Herndon’s book,
Exploration of the Valley of the Amazon
, had rendered the exotic Amazon so vivid in the imagination of a young man in Keokuk, Iowa, that the young man had quit his job in a print shop and left for Brazil. Tommy and Barry wondered where he was headed with this one, but they had been at this juncture before, so they sat and listened. Bob told them that before the young man left he had written to his brother, “I shall take care that Ma and Orion are plentifully supplied with South American books. They have Herndon’s report now.” Bob could quote this stuff from memory. He told them that the young man had gone by way of Cincinnati, down the Ohio and the Mississippi. The way the young man figured it, said Bob, when he got to the end of the great river, he would book passage on the next ship out of New Orleans bound for Para, Brazil. Once there, he would work his way up the Amazon and thence into its tributaries to experience the region Captain Herndon had rendered so lively in his report. However, in New Orleans, said Bob, the young man discovered not only that no ship was leaving for Para, but also that no ship had ever left for Para, and that was the point: the guy was stuck at the dock in New Orleans at the mouth of the Mississippi River. The intrigue and romance of Herndon’s chronicle had lured him onward on this long journey, but there he was stuck at the dock … with little more than the experiences culled from traveling the length of the Mississippi and a recollection of boat men sounding “mark twain.” Had Herndon’s book not inflamed the imagination of young Samuel Clemens, he might never have traveled the backwater where he later set so many of his stories, might never have changed his name, might never have gone on to write of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.

Tommy and Barry let him run because they never knew where it might lead. And that was Tommy’s point: Don’t categorize at the outset; don’t look for answers prior to mixing it up; don’t confine yourselves to merely the task at hand. Don’t discourage Bob from exploring arcane bits of history just because they have nothing to do with locating the wreck site. “With most people there’s a tendency to diverge slightly,” said Tommy, “and then come to a convergence, and by not diverging all the way before converging, you’ve missed out on all kinds of opportunities.”

So they let Bob run, and Barry sat in the round tables night after night listening to Bob ramble about history before he began to appreciate the richness of the stories. “One night it dawned on me,” said Barry, “how useful these stories were outside of Bob’s own personal fascination with them.”

By allowing Bob to wander far beyond the details that might help them find the ship, Barry and Tommy realized the richness of the history and its value to the project. Here was our country in one of its finest hours, and few people had ever even heard of the
Central America
. Tommy encouraged Bob to find out more about the California Gold Rush and the burgeoning of San Francisco and the San Francisco Mint and the political climate back east and the personalities on board the ship. The information might not help them find the ship, but it would help them understand the significance of what they were about to do and would enrich the whole experience for everyone.

As they met night after night to talk and dream, Barry began to appreciate a mind-set Tommy had been cultivating for a long time, something he had honed at Battelle, “this wonderful research institute approach of setting out deliberately to do something that hadn’t been done before and taking a very methodical approach to discovering how to do it.”

Working on the bottom of the deep ocean wasn’t impossible, it was only considered impossible, and that was the distinction Tommy had learned: Other people labeled things impossible not because they couldn’t be done, but because no one was doing them. He had revisited all of the old assumptions, found many of them no longer valid, and saw ways around the others. Bob had talked to Tommy for years about the project but not till now did he begin to see the whole thing as “a series of incredibly nonexistent barriers.”

Realizing that impossibility dwelt only in the imagination was the gateway to a new world of thinking, and this was the world in which Tommy lived. The idea of finding the
Central America
and recovering her “treasure” quickly became a rich metaphor for all that was possible: We find the ship, we recover the gold; what can we learn along the way?

“We were into the idea,” said Tommy, “that within this project, all kinds of things can happen. We might be successful at this; we’re going to give it our best shot. In the meantime, we’re going to learn all these other things.”

W
HILE
B
OB AND
Barry and Tommy dreamed and theorized, Mel Fisher finally found the hull of the
Atocha
, on July 20, 1985, somewhere between sixteen and twenty-one years after he had begun the search, depending on whose start date you chose, and one decade to the day since his son and two others had drowned. He had spent most of that decade searching the area where his son had found the nine bronze cannons. “We were right there for umpteen zillion years, it seemed like,” said Tom Ford. “We airlifted and we dug and we searched and went back and forth by the hunch method. We just beat ourselves senseless.” Finally, over nine miles southeast of the cannons, one of Fisher’s other sons had anchored on top of the treasure for another day of diving, and when he sent two divers down in fifty-five feet of water, they found thirty-two frozen black masses of silver coins and nine hundred large bars of silver, some small gold bars, and about four hundred emeralds, all of the treasure mounded into a reef now encrusted with coral and overrun by lobsters.

Fisher’s vision stopped at the treasure of the
Nuestra Señora de Atocha
, and finally his dream was over. Along the way he had fought incessantly with other treasure hunters and the State of Florida and the IRS and incurred the wrath of creditors and suffered through the deaths of five young people. He still faced protests from archaeologists and environmentalists and lawsuits from investors.

Tommy, Bob, and Barry could have taken the same approach. Nothing prevented them from finding the wreck site of the
Central America
, scooping up the gold with a clambucket, bringing it back, melting it down, selling it for bullion, divvying up the proceeds among
the investors, and going back for another wreck. In the beginning, some of the investors proposed they do just that, what Barry called “the thief in the night syndrome.” But that wasn’t the responsible way, and nobody learned from it.

Barry likened it to the difference between Columbus and Prince Henry the Navigator, an idea that had intrigued him in Daniel Boorstin’s
The Discoverers
. Columbus explored blindly; Prince Henry consciously pursued something that had never been done.

“Columbus’s approach was fraught with much higher risk,” explained Barry, “and don’t forget he died not realizing what he’d done.” Columbus led the way to the gold, but he never saw the implications. Prince Henry also had heard of gold, off the West Coast of Africa. He made the gold his draw, but his purpose was to build a trade route and shipping network all the way to the wealthy destinations of the Orient. He instructed his explorers to go to the West Coast of Africa and find the gold, but also to learn everything they could along the way about the routes, the winds, the seasons, the people, the other resources. In the long run, that information had greater value. “That’s what entrepreneurial vision is all about,” said Barry. “We didn’t go after the
Central America
as an end in itself, but as a way to learn how to work in the deep ocean and then to discover the resources there. It’s just the beginning. Harvey had already thought about it.”

The round tables continued through the summer and fall into the winter of 1986, and gradually thousands of ideas had sprouted and received a warm welcome and been explored and stretched, then revised and refined and finally distilled. They had anticipated possible failure modes and formulated plans to negate them; they had considered possible success modes, then devised ways to increase their likelihood. As the project moved forward, they had only to keep alert for more opportunities.

“What was exciting to me happened on paper,” said Barry. “It doesn’t have anything to do with the gold itself. It was in discovering how to discover.”

T
O RAISE ENOUGH
money for the seed phase, Tommy had needed twenty to forty investors to part with $5,000 to $10,000 apiece. Now he
needed fifty to one hundred investors to put up $14,000 to $28,000 each to raise $1.4 million for the SeaMARC search. But three things happened that summer that made the
Central America
project seem even more attractive: Fisher found the
Atocha;
a deep-ocean contractor retrieved the flight deck recorders off Air India flight 182, the 747 that exploded in the air and plummeted into sixty-six hundred feet of North Atlantic water; and Bob Ballard and his crew located the
Titanic
on a depth sounder and glimpsed one of her boilers. “It was like all these things that Tommy had been talking about really can happen,” said Ashby. “It had a very positive impact on the people that Tommy was talking to.” Out of the thirty-eight partners in the seed phase, all but half a dozen anted up for the search phase.

One of the new people Ashby introduced Tommy to in the second round of fund-raising was a former naval officer named Mike Ford. Ford had bounced around on cruisers and destroyers and now managed money for pension funds and trusts. As soon as Tommy summarized the project and his experience at Battelle, Ford realized how much Tommy had at stake. “Man, you do not leave the hallowed halls of Battelle,” said Ford. “Battelle is like the papacy. If he came out of there and fell flat on his face, that failure would put him back to his graduation date.” Ford liked that; he wanted Tommy’s neck well into the noose.

Ford had chased submarines, and he knew you could lose one even when you knew where it was. He understood the vastness of the sea and the problems in trying to find something only three hundred feet long. He also knew Mel Fisher’s story and the problems with investing in treasure hunts, but there was something different here. “Fisher blundered around in the same waters and finally found it and couldn’t believe he did it,” said Ford. “That to me was luck. This wasn’t the same thing.”

Ford liked to see what American ingenuity could come up with next, and he liked Tommy. First, the young man was extremely methodical. Second, he had a dream; most scientists didn’t. Third, he had a way of convincing you without making a great effort. “Occasionally,” said Ford, “a smile would race across his face for an instant, and it was that smile that gave you the signal that this was something special. He was living
this thing day in and day out.” Ford had invested in a lot of companies, but he had never seen this combination in the key man. He persuaded a friend to invest, bought half a Search Phase unit himself for $14,000, and eventually put in over ten times that amount.

By the end of 1985, the Search Phase, nearly one hundred investors, was fully subscribed, and Tommy had $1.4 million to go find the
Central America
. Already, Tommy, Bob, and Barry had found her in thought and on paper; now they had to find her in the deep blue sea.

T
WO WEEKS AFTER
Larry Stone had met with Tommy and Bob at Antioch College, he signed another nondisclosure agreement, and Tommy sent him a check for ten thousand dollars to begin the first analysis of the data. Bob then mailed four things to Stone: the Data Correlation Matrix on the full Lotus spreadsheet with all data organized in three-hour time slots; a map, complete with coordinates, that traced the final voyage of the
Central America;
a three-page historical narrative, beginning when the
Central America
left Havana and noting key events in the time line, like when the storm hit and when the engines stopped and when the
Marine
arrived; and a wind chart that estimated wind direction and velocity each hour, beginning when the steamer lost power and running till Captain Johnsen of the
Ellen
abandoned the search for survivors the day after the sinking.

Bob had created the wind chart from information culled from survivors’ observations. The actual mariners’ accounts were the more reliable ones, like the second officer’s account and the engineer’s account and the accounts of other sea captains. If a mariner used a term, it had specific meaning. When Captain Badger noted, “A perfect hurricane was blowing,” he had read the surface of the sea and he knew that the wind whistled upward of sixty-five knots.