Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea (43 page)

They lowered the sled back to the bottom, and immediately they could see the ocean floor, but they couldn’t see the shipwreck. They drifted until they were certain they had passed the site, then they set up the drift again and went back across the area and again saw nothing. On the sonagrams, the shipwreck appeared to be about the size of a 400-meter oval of track with a football field and both end zones tucked inside, and they were drifting across it roughly on the perpendicular. How could they be missing it?

The second night into the close-in camera work, Lettow was asleep in his bunk when Watson woke him up. “You got to get up here,” said Watson. “These guys just aren’t keeping it together.” The atmosphere in the control room had gotten so tense for the night tower that Watson and the other pilot had started picking at each other, arguing about why they couldn’t find the ship and how each was doing his job, and finally, the pilot had said to hell with it and walked out.

Lettow dressed and returned to the control room and started running the system again, as Tommy and the techs talked and watched sea cucumber trails scroll by on the monitor. The trails reminded Lettow of a dry desert lake where motorcycles had crisscrossed in every direction. In the middle of a long silence, he said, “What are the chances of us picking up that anchor chain again in the middle of all these sea cucumber trails and then finding a shipwreck attached to it?” About five heartbeats later, big and dark and right in the middle of the monitor appeared the anchor chain, and Lettow had the camera running parallel.

“JEEEZUS!” yelled Lettow. “Look at that!”

Watson yelled, “Check it OUT!”

Everybody was watching the monitor now, including Tommy. The camera followed the chain for about a hundred feet, and the chain ran right up to the bow. Lettow already had started raising the sled so he wouldn’t crash it into the ship, and it flew up and over the side, and then he eased it back down.

Half the techs in the room started yelling at once. “Get it out of there! Get it out of there! You’re going to get it hung up!”

Lettow was already hauling in on the wire, and the sled lifted, but they still could see across part of a deck to what looked like cable shrouds from a mast and some sort of superstructure. As the camera glided forward, the decking appeared to be collapsed, and Lettow thought he saw cargo down in the hold. Then they saw the other side approaching, much of the gunwale eaten away, only jagged posts sticking up, and the techs yelled again to get the sled up or they were going to lose their camera system.

“I flew it up over that,” said Lettow, “and you could see the seafloor again. Then we drifted away.” The whole scene had lasted less than a minute.

Lettow started singing. “Chain, chain, chain …”

And the other techs raised their hands, and started dancing and singing with Lettow, all of them rummy from six weeks at sea.

“… chain of foo-ools.”

Beat, beat.

“Chain, chain, chain …”

Nobody knew the rest of the words, but it didn’t matter. Then, as if they had just discovered how magicians pulled rabbits out of hats, one tech said, “What are the chances of us seeing,” and he looked quickly at the monitor, “some engine works?”

Then another, “Wouldn’t it be nice to see a … paddle wheel.”

And another, “How about a … treasure chest.”

“We were getting out there on the reality mode,” said Lettow. “We were all kind of delirious at that point.”

But the magic never worked again. The weather had worsened since they began the camera runs two days earlier, the sea chopping into bigger
and bigger hills, the wind rising. Williamson had to get back; he had commitments with oil companies. Besides, the camera was not right, the lighting was not right, the
Pine River
was not right. Everyone could see it. They had reached the limit of their capability for that summer.

“We did not have an ROV available to go to that depth,” explained Craft. “There
were
no ROVs anywhere that could make that depth.” That was Tommy’s next challenge: to create an ROV, a robot, that could work that deep. If he was successful, he could return the following summer with a vessel capable of holding position on the surface and a stable camera platform and accurate navigation so they could drop the camera next to the site every time and reposition it a few meters away with small thrusters on the frame, not drift through the area and hope. They would have better electronics and better lighting and clearer pictures, and the capability of staying for long periods of reconnaissance and evaluation.

Tommy decided he would not need to exercise the option on the SeaMARC in August, that Williamson could pursue his contract with Amoco. He would like to have had more high-resolution work on other promising targets, but he had at least one high-res look at each main target, and he had now dragged the SeaMARC across more than 90 percent of a large and carefully calculated search map, and two teams of the finest sonar technicians in the world were confident they had imaged the
Central America
. He would further analyze the strip charts and the computer images, the stills and the video footage, and he would report to his partners, and he would begin his next round of funding for verification and recovery, and he would modify or build a vehicle that could do all of the work he needed to study that wreck, to verify it was the
Central America
, to preserve the history and initiate the science, and to recover the gold for his partners. For now, even if it was a mid-nineteenth-century sidewheel steamer laden with gold, they had no way to study the site properly, no way to document and preserve it, and no way to retrieve the treasure. And there was no better place to secure it anyhow than under eight or nine thousand feet of water somewhere out in the Atlantic.

Tommy and Barry asked the techs to cast a confidence vote on Sidewheel. Each would put his vote on a piece of paper, fold it, and toss it into a hat. The question was this: What chance does Sidewheel
have of being the
Central America
? Tommy and Barry did not vote, although Barry admitted that even he thought it looked good. “It had a beautiful outline to it. It was very thin, very long, pencil shape like the
C.A
., and it had this curious half-moon rise right under the gunwales and dead in the middle of the ship.”

When they tallied the results, the techs collectively had voted that Sidewheel had a 90 percent chance of being the
Central America
.

“The percentages were pretty damn high,” said Tommy. “But it still wasn’t good to get cranked up.”

At seven o’clock on the morning of July 9, they recovered the depressor and the camera sled, secured them both and unloaded the cameras, then pointed the bow of the
Pine River
toward the beach.

COLUMBUS, OHIO

F
ALL
, 1986

T
HE PUBLIC
’
S AWARENESS
and excitement over all that was possible in the world beneath the sea heightened in the summer of 1986 while Tommy was quietly searching for the
Central America
. George Bass from Texas A&M’s Institute of Nautical Archaeology had uncovered ornate gold pendants, weapons, and stores of bronze, tin, and glass while exploring a wooden vessel that had sunk in 150 feet of water off Turkey thirty-four centuries ago. Mel Fisher had recovered more treasure from the
Atocha
: an additional thirty-two hundred emeralds, more silver coins and bars, ornate reliquaries, and finely cast gold artifacts. Less than a quarter mile off Cape Cod, Barry Clifford had begun recovering the spoils from the pirate ship
Wydah
.

That same summer, Christie’s had auctioned the Nanking Cargo, 150,000 simple porcelain pieces Michael Hatcher had found at the bottom
of the South China Sea, where it had lain since 1747 preserved in wooden chests of tea. For a presale viewing of the porcelain, over twenty thousand of the curious from around the world had gone to Amsterdam, and for five days, five hundred to a thousand bidders had crammed the Christie’s auction room. Every lot had sold, and the excitement over these treasures reclaimed from the ocean had caused some lots to bring more than ten times their appraised value.

But what truly inflamed the public’s collective imagination that summer was Bob Ballard’s return to the queen of the deep, the
R.M.S. Titanic
. For twelve days in 12,500 feet of water, Ballard and his crew had dived to film her for sixty hours and photograph her thousands of times. Memories of a lifetime ago awakened, and though everyone thought she had been lost forever among the mountains of the deep North Atlantic, in Ballard’s photographs and film the
Titanic
dramatically lived again in all of her decaying splendor.

B
Y LATE FALL
of 1986, Tommy had evaluated the SeaMARC records and studied the sonagrams of the key targets. He called Larry Stone to thank him for his work on the probability map and told him the site wasn’t in the highest-probability cell but was in one of the highest-probability cells. “Not only that,” remembered Stone, “he said, ‘We think we detected the
Central America
on the second leg.’”

Tommy now had to raise $3.6 million for the verification and recovery phase. In November, he sent to his partners a letter announcing a meeting on December 13 at the Great Southern Hotel in downtown Columbus. He piqued their curiosity and ensured a good turnout when he promised, “Our presentation will be highlighted by color sonar images of the target shipwreck as she appears 129 years after she came to rest on the ocean floor.”

At the meeting, Tommy showed color slides of some of the more interesting sonar targets. He finished his presentation with the suite of high-resolution images they had of Sidewheel, explaining how the sonar techs had interpreted the colors in the sonagrams. Buck Patton was trying to be skeptical, wondering what could go wrong now. “But here’s this target,” he remembered, “and you can see the sidewheel on it. Tommy’d measured the thing in centimeters and correlated it to the
pictures, and this is the
Central America
, a 90 percent probability. It was a great presentation, and we all walked out of there feeling like, ‘We’ve got it!’”

In less than a month, Tommy had sold 41½ of the 50 Recovery Phase units at seventy-two thousand dollars a unit, all to partners who had invested in the Search Phase. The partners were confident now, even excited. But as always, Tommy was advising caution. In a postscript to one letter, he admonished the partners again to keep quiet; their security policy had served them well, had allowed him to consider all options without pressure from potential competition or unwanted publicity. “Such freedom,” he wrote, “will become more important than ever leading up to recovery operations.”

Harry John already had ventured into deeper water in search of the
Central America
, and Tommy could name half a dozen other men who had led expeditions to find the
Central America
and still had designs on the ship. “If people like that get wind of what we’re doing,” said Tommy, “we could easily end up with one of these guys coming out there trying to interfere any way they could.” In the offering circular for the Recovery Phase, he mentioned the possibility of being challenged by competition and he outlined a backup or emergency plan if they were. “I was taking a chance even bringing it up with the partners. ‘What do you mean, competition?’ But way before I even got money for that phase, we were already thinking: With that much gold on it, the
Central America
is not going to remain undiscovered forever.”

T
OMMY ASSIGNED
T
ED
B
ROCKETT
, who had sailed as part of Williamson’s crew the previous summer, to snoop around in the ocean community and learn about deep-water recovery systems for sale and for lease: He wanted to know their availability, their capability, their limitations, and their cost. He was looking for “a next-generation system.”

Brockett was a good choice; he knew the community. In 1978, he had helped design the collectors that went to twenty thousand feet and brought back two thousand tons of manganese nodules for Inco USA, the first successful mining of the deep ocean. For Bob Ballard, he had designed the camera sled
Argo
, which Ballard was using when his cameras sent back the first pictures of the
Titanic
in 1985. He had designed
the sled for Williamson’s SeaMARC IA, and he had designed and built other deep-water recovery systems working with several of the ocean engineers he would need to consult for Tommy. So his connections were an advantage, but they were also a disadvantage, for he had to proceed surreptitiously. “I was insistent on that,” said Tommy, “because I knew the dynamics that could occur if it got out of hand early on.”

The deep ocean was such a hostile environment and it cost so many millions of dollars to go there that no one ever went unless there was good reason. Half the time that reason was a top-secret, national security interest of the government, and the other half it was a highly proprietary big business venture. Everybody in the deep-ocean community ran around with little secrets ricocheting off the insides of their skulls like billiard balls at the break and talked like good ol’ boys, sizing each other up. And since everybody always wanted to know what everybody else was doing, they listened real close to what you said, so you had to be careful how you phrased your questions: The community was so small and incestuous, the equipment so rare and specialized, that one word too specific and the listener could quickly calculate what you were about to do and where you were about to do it. It all had to do with depth. The deeper you went, the greater the pressure; the greater the pressure, the stronger the seals had to be or salt water seeped into the electronic housings. If you ordered electronic housings good to a certain depth, that provided a big clue. And the cable required to run an ROV was so complex and expensive no one ever ordered more than they had to; if you worked in about four thousand feet of water, you used about five thousand feet of cable. You couldn’t use less; you couldn’t afford more.