Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea (41 page)

They had already imaged so many targets in the high-probability cells that Williamson now wanted to shut down the broad-swath survey,
drop the SeaMARC to a lower altitude, tighten the swatch from five thousand to one thousand meters, and go back for a much closer look at the good targets, especially Sidewheel. With the swath at five thousand meters, all they could tell was that something large sat on the ocean floor and stood out in contrast to its surroundings; at one thousand meters, even images produced by sound would look almost like a picture.

Williamson himself realized the irony in what he wanted to do: He was always the one to insist they complete the broad-swath search before they looked closer at any of the targets, because the target that appeared promising on sonar might not be the target they were looking for.

“We had made a big issue of this with Harvey,” said Williamson, “that the search plan would be followed. This is the bible for this cruise, and we will not deviate from it.”

Now Williamson was the one suggesting they deviate from the plan, and he had good reason. The weather had finally died down, and the one-thousand-meter search required these smoother conditions. They could run the five-thousand-meter search in much rougher weather. “It was my judgment,” said Williamson, “that we should take advantage of the good weather and do the stuff that we could do only in good weather, and then when the weather got bad again, we could go back to doing the stuff we could do in bad weather.” All they had to do was flip switches topside to convert the SeaMARC to the high-resolution mode.

Tommy saw another irony: The world’s best sonar technician, who had once accused him of being a treasure hunter, now seemed himself to be succumbing to what Tommy called “treasure hunter syndrome.” The SeaMARC had flown through every high-probability cell on the map, and right at the juncture of a quad of high-probability cells they had imaged Sidewheel, a dark, pencil-shaped target with little humps in the middle. As tempting as it was to think that the
Central America
was already safely imaged in their computer and now lay waiting to be explored, Tommy wanted to avoid the mind-set of the treasure hunter, that every promising clue was the thing itself.

Williamson argued that they had searched 80-something percent of the probabilities, and that if they had hot targets already, ship shapes about three hundred feet long, one with a hump in the middle, why not
shoot all of them at much higher resolution, maybe even drop a camera on Sidewheel? He wanted to give Tommy not just scrolls of strip charts and piles of diskettes, but pictures. If it was the
Central America
, they were through; he could move on to other clients, and Tommy could come back next year with a robot and recover it.

But Tommy reasoned, If it
isn’t
the
Central America
, and we waste all this time shooting high-resolution sonar of it, and the season ends, and we haven’t completed the probability map, and we come back next year with a robot ready to recover that site, and Williamson is off with the SeaMARC looking for black boxes and bombs when we discover it is
not
the
Central America
, what do we do? He told Williamson that he had paid to have the sonar crew search the entire probability map, and regardless of the likelihood that one of the targets already imaged was the
Central America
, he wanted the rest of that map searched.

Tommy wanted to complete the map, then analyze each of the targets, compare them with one another, and pick carefully the order of verification with the high-resolution passes. Williamson and his crew were the best sonar technicians available, and Tommy knew they were the best. But not even Williamson and his crew knew what the
Central America
was supposed to look like on sonar. No one had ever imaged a deep-water wooden-hulled shipwreck and then gone to the bottom with a camera to see what it really looked like. Just talking about how much Sidewheel looked like a sidewheel steamer concerned Tommy. “They could talk themselves into thinking that’s the
Central America
. I wanted to make sure we didn’t get into delusions of grandeur. We were extremely excited about the results so far, but you don’t want to be like everything you see is the main pile.”

Tommy had structured the search phase based on sixty days at sea, and he contracted for the SeaMARC from the first of June to the end of July. In May, Williamson had called him: The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration also wanted the SeaMARC in July; could Tommy cut his search down to forty days? The NOAA job was a good contract for Williamson’s young business, so Tommy agreed to a new arrangement. “We’ll just use that as analytical time,” he told Williamson, “and we’ll start up again August sixth and do the last twenty days.”

But about halfway into the cruise, Barry started seeing telexes coming to the ship from Amoco, who wanted the system in August. Williamson was negotiating with them via the fax machine. “It became apparent through the faxes,” said Tommy, “that they were going to do the Amoco job and just blow off our option to come back in August.”

Williamson told Barry, “In this business, there’s the oil companies, the oil companies, and the oil companies. You can’t deliver for one of them, you think they’re going to call you again?” Besides, and Williamson kept coming back to this, he had already imaged the
Central America
, and Tommy was just being stubborn tying up the SeaMARC with an option so he could
maybe
spend that last twenty days looking out in all of those less-than-one-chance-in-a-thousand probability cells. “But the odds were high,” Tommy said later, “that if I needed that twenty days to finish the map and couldn’t get it, that would be the end of the project.”

For a couple of hours each day, Tommy told the captain to turn off the radar sweep, and he and Williamson would sit on lawn chairs up on the fly bridge and try to resolve their differences. The techs remembered Williamson coming down from the meetings flexing his jaw, so frustrated he could not repeat what he and Tommy had just discussed. Williamson was an easygoing, likable guy and a professional, “an officer and a gentleman,” one of his men described him, yet Tommy would leave him in the middle of the control room, or standing on the back deck, or up on the bridge, with his jaw dropped, shaking with rage, blue veins popping out in his neck. “Beet red with anger,” said navigator Alan Scott. Things got so bad one day that with Tommy sitting on a table in the galley four feet away, Williamson turned to Barry and barked, “Barry, you tell Harvey …”

Tommy just had this way of blinking slowly, long eyelashes accentuating the pace, and he wouldn’t be adamant, he wouldn’t raise his voice, he wouldn’t gesticulate and gyrate, he would say, “We’re not going to do it that way.” And something in the way his eyes locked on yours behind those slowly blinking eyelashes, something about the cadence of the words as they came out let you know that what he said was final. He didn’t care how much conventional wisdom dictated otherwise, he had already confronted conventional wisdom, he was painting on a bigger canvas, and he knew other truths about the big picture.

Williamson had brought a rowing machine on the ship, and after a session with Tommy, he would descend to the control room, fuming and mumbling to himself and running up a six-thousand-dollar bill on the satellite phone negotiating with Amoco, then hit that rowing machine like a man trying to exorcise his demons. Brockett figured he was forty miles downriver before he cooled off.

Ten of the twelve technicians on board thought about the same as Williamson. Lettow said it made no sense if you were looking for the
Titanic
, and you found a target that resembled the
Titanic
in every way, but you decided to go on searching anyhow. Alan Scott and Will Watson figured that since Tommy was paying the bill, and he was not being completely unreasonable, they should first cover the entire grid in the broad swaths. “The thing is,” Watson admitted, “we’d found the thing early on, so it was like being in Eden trying not to eat the apple. It took some discipline.”

I
N THE CONTROL
room, the techs had Sidewheel frozen on the computer screen, taking Polaroids, measuring parts of the ship, and pulling more information from the image. “We were pretty happy,” said Watson, “because things were looking pretty good. It looked like a wood vessel, and we could see the sidewheels.”

While feelings over the August option simmered, Tommy agreed to let Williamson run high-resolution passes on each of the promising targets, not because Williamson insisted or the other techs pressured him, but because he had calculated how much time they needed to complete the broad-swath search, and they still could get it done in what remained of the forty days, if the SeaMARC held up and the weather did not kick them in the teeth any harder than it already had.

On June 24, they narrowed the swath on the SeaMARC, retuned the recorders, and began reacquiring the targets on the hit parade for the high-resolution flyovers. The techs now had something to play with and ponder: bigger, tighter, finer images of shipwrecks on the ocean floor eight to ten thousand feet below.

Each tower calculated from its previous navigation where a target would be, then aimed for that spot at a ninety-degree angle with the SeaMARC set for one thousand meters. On the night tower, the
navigator called it play by play, as the
Pine River
, with the SeaMARC behind, approached a target.

“It focused you,” said Watson. “You’re coming in, you’re looking, and he’d give this entry into the line, like, ‘Okay, gentlemen, you’re on line da-da, at a heading of da-da, coming in with a fish altitude of dada.’ And then he goes, ‘And we’re going to get this one LIKE A BIG DAWG!!’ We’d sit back and laugh. He was great. By that point we were really having a ball. Everything was so exciting.”

By the end of the second day, averaging six to eight hours per target, they had reacquired and shot several, including Sidewheel, at close range. Tommy unrolled blueprints none of the techs had known existed, and for the first time they saw a sharp outline of the sidewheel steamer they had been looking for. They measured different parts of the ship and compared the dimensions to what they were finding on the higher-resolution images. More than one target looked good in this second round.

“They had maintained their integrity,” said Williamson. “You could see individual ribs, they were standing proud off the bottom, they were shaped like a ship, looked like a ship, had a shadow behind them.” Every time they ran a tighter swath over a promising target, Tommy reviewed it with Williamson and the other techs, but no matter how good it looked, Tommy wanted to continue searching.

When Williamson saw the computer enhancements of these closer, high-resolution passes, he wanted to skip even the close-up work on the other good targets and immediately drop an underwater camera on Sidewheel. Tommy insisted they continue to take advantage of the good weather to shoot one high-resolution pass on the other major targets already imaged at five thousand meters, even though some of those targets lay in low-probability cells in the southwest corner of the search map, forty miles away. Williamson argued that that was a long trip that would eat up at least a day when time already was getting precious, and he wasn’t the only one pushing Tommy to drop a camera on Sidewheel.

“We were real sure we had a sidewheel steamer,” said Watson. “Scotty had done some pretty good image processing, and you could actually see this wheel on the vessel.” Alan Scott favored Tommy’s argument that they first shoot close-ups of all the promising targets, but even
he couldn’t deny the irresistibility of Sidewheel. “I swear,” he said, “looking at it on the image-processing system, it appeared that the wheel had spokes to it.” But Tommy insisted they leave Sidewheel and the others behind, head forty miles downstream to the southwest corner of the search map, and shoot high-resolution images of those targets.

At midnight on the 25th of June the
Pine River
was en route to the new location, and by midmorning on the 26th they had a high-resolution image of another target. By noon, they were in the middle of a new track line, headed almost due west. On the first pass, they saw nothing but more ocean bottom. “No joy,” Williamson wrote in the watch leader’s log. Into the second run no more than fifteen minutes, they began to see what appeared to be rock outcroppings or drifts of sand. A little farther, the recorders sketched a target two hundred meters to port, but the return was weak and surrounded by a scattering of little pinpoints of reflection, similar to the geology they already had seen. It looked nothing like the high-resolution returns from Sidewheel and the other targets where they could see the outline of a ship’s hull. The navigator wrote on the strip chart, “Contact 200 meters port—geology?”

This was the problem Bob Evans had predicted would arise if the
Central America
had sunk closer to shore in shallower water: an abundance of outcropping material that would confuse the sonar returns of a shipwreck. But they couldn’t figure out what had caused the bright return on this target when they swept the area on the broader swath a few days earlier. Then as they neared the end of that track, the EPC recorders began to sketch another anomaly, one at the far northern edge of the sonar range. They turned the ship, shifted eight hundred meters to the north, and began their third run at the target.

Early in the line they saw more of what appeared to be geology. Then suddenly the recorders began to paint what someone later described as “a real banger.” The navigator wrote on the chart, “Contact off port 150 meters.” But when the recorders stopped painting, the techs studied the image, and the target, for all its brightness, seemed no longer than maybe thirty meters. Someone suggested it might be a shipping container, but it was too long. Whatever the anomaly, apparently it was what they had seen earlier on the original broad-swath run. It was big
and it was bright, but not big enough and maybe too bright for a historic wooden ship.