Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea (60 page)

Craft was in the control room when they saw the first piece of evidence, other than coal, confirming they were on the right ship. John Moore had landed the vehicle a few feet from what they thought were remnants of the superstructure. “We looked at the plates that the shrouds of the masts were secured to on the side of the ship,” said Craft, “their configuration, the spacing, the general location of each set of plates; and they matched the
Central America
diagrams.”

A few days later, Moore lassoed an anchor and brought it to the surface: one thousand pounds of forged iron with curved flukes taller than a man. It matched the size and configuration of one of the anchors the
Central America
had carried.

As he piloted the vehicle on the bottom, Moore watched two monitors, each at a different camera angle. To understand depth on his two-dimensional screens, he studied the shifting of shadows and the crossing
of objects in the landscape. “If you want to see genius in action,” said Craft, “watch John Moore take a manipulator arm with metal fixtures and pick up a piece of ceramic. The jaws are strong enough to crush your arm, yet there was not one piece of pottery that came aboard that had any evidence that Moore had even nicked the glaze.”

During the weeks Tommy and Barry had been ashore, Moore had worked to refine the performance of the manipulator and gradually had coaxed it to precision. On the first dive after Tommy’s return, he retrieved a bottle and an ironstone plate. On the next dive, he picked up two earthenware jugs. On another dive, they spied in the debris field what appeared to be a tiny porcelain jar with a lid. Moore landed near it, reached out with the manipulator, and tried to pick it up, but the lid slipped off. He retrieved the jar first, then went back and recovered the lid. When they got the vehicle to the surface, they saw that the porcelain jar was only an inch high by three and a half inches in diameter. Inside was a grayish cream. “What in that day,” said Craft, “would be the equivalent of a lady’s cold cream.” In the cream were two things: a fingerprint and a strand of chestnut-colored hair.

As the artifacts came aboard, Bob studied them to determine when they were made. He kept several reference books in his lab, and he often called Judy Conrad, their historian back in Columbus, to track down trademarks, periods of design, pottery styles, and registry dates.

The
Central America
had sailed for only four years, from October of 1853 to September of 1857: Among the artifacts they recovered were two white ironstone mugs marked with the symbol of John Maddock, who made shipboard dinnerware from 1842 to 1855. They found an ironstone dinner plate by John Wedge Wood, who had produced his dinnerware from 1841 to 1860. The design of an oval Elsmore and Forster serving platter they recovered was first used in 1853. During one dive, Moore recovered a child’s white mug engraved with pictures and maxims from Ben Franklin’s
Poor Richard’s Almanac
: “God Gives All Things to Industry” and “Diligence Is the Mother of Good Luck.” Franklin dishes for children were popular in the early and middle nineteenth century. Moore plucked from the debris two two-gallon jugs hand painted with blue floral designs. One was pear shaped, which was
popular in the 1850s and earlier, and the other was cylindrical, a style that began in the early 1850s, as potters began to mass-produce their wares. “Two different items of stoneware crockery,” noted Bob, “and the 1850s was the transition between the two.” The Edwards family of Burslem, England, manufactured much of the dinnerware aboard American ships, and Moore brought to the surface an Edwards saucer with a British registry mark and a registration date of July 18, 1853.

The period artifacts impressed everyone but Doering. He didn’t even care about the anchor or the shroud plates. While Tommy was back on the beach, Doering had decided that because there were no paddle wheels, this could not be the
Central America
. Since Tommy’s return and their closer look at the wreckage, he had seen nothing that changed his mind.

Tommy did not doubt Doering’s eye, but even Doering had not seen a ship at these depths. And Doering was a treasure hunter, quick to pass judgment. Tommy was an engineer with a scientific bent and intent on following a reasoned course. He had researched how fast the iron of the paddle wheels would corrode in seawater, and experts had advised him that for each year the iron lay on the bottom, so many mils of thickness would return to the water as iron ions and drift away; multiply that times 130 years, and most of the iron would be gone. Already they had found rusted chunks of iron that were little more than deep-sea mirages; when Moore reached out to touch them, orange and brown smoke filled the water and the chunks vanished. How long ago had the deep ocean reduced the engines and the sidewheels to a thin shell that soon disappeared in a briefly roiling cloud?

If the paddle wheels had not corroded into hollow wisps of orange and disintegrated, perhaps they had spun off—on the way down, when they hit bottom; nobody knew. But all of Tommy’s research and experts would not dissuade Doering.

Not only did the absence of paddle wheels bother Doering, he still thought the ship was too short. Tommy knew there was some question about the length. “But we didn’t have enough information to make any valid judgments,” he said. “We couldn’t even see the site.” If they could, without doubt, identify the bow and the stern, and if Scotty measured the distance from one to the other as considerably greater than 280 feet,
then Tommy would be worried about length. Little could account for a target being longer than the
Central America
, but many theories could explain a shorter ship. The stern castle of the
Atocha
had ripped loose and floated off with tons of bronze cannons aboard and swept nearly ten miles across a shallow sea. The
Titanic
had snapped in two on the way down, and it had a steel hull. The
Central America
could have broken in half and the engines fallen out. It could have broken in half and the engines remained in one half, and that half could have gone straight down and the lighter half floated on downstream. Maybe one of the smaller targets they had seen with the SeaMARC was the rest of the ship. Hackman had another theory: that the ship had descended to the bottom at a severe angle and plowed into the ocean floor, sticking half upright in the bottom; then it had degraded straight down, making the ship appear shorter.

“So that wasn’t negative proof,” said Tommy. “All that it was saying is, We don’t know that the length of the site is a significant issue.”

Negative proof would be a plate dated later than 1857, or a stanchion not used in ship architecture till after the Civil War, or a bottle whose design they could trace to later in the nineteenth century.

“Yet artifact after artifact kept going period,” said Bob. “‘This is the right period. Look at this thing; this is the right period again!’ How many period sites could there be with women, children, iron, coal, and a wooden hull? We even did a probability analysis that said there was a less than ten percent chance of that not being the
Central America
.”

But by September, one thing bothered Bob: The coal seemed too plentiful. The
Central America
had left New York with a full load of coal. The big sidewheel steamers burned about fifty to sixty tons of coal a day, and Bob estimated they kept a reserve of about two days. The engines stopped four days short of their destination, so that left about three hundred tons on board. The Galaxy site appeared to be covered with far more coal than that, but with the limited viewing range of the cameras on the E-vehicle and no way to move some of that coal to see what lay underneath, Bob couldn’t be sure of anything.

“I had all these doubts,” said Bob, “and yet was pretty sure that we still had it. But I couldn’t figure out the form of the site well enough to
even decide where to begin digging. I’ve got this big pile of coal down there, but where’s the gold?”

W
ALLY
K
REISLE WAS
a big man, about 260. He suffered from intense migraines, lightning bolts exploding inside his head, and he was in no mood to be trifled with. Tommy Thompson might have an injunction, but Kreisle wasn’t about to let something as piddling as a federal judge’s decree stand in his way. Before leaving port in late August with Kutzleb’s sonar crew from Steadfast Oceaneering, Kreisle announced in the Georgetown, South Carolina, paper that the Columbus-America Discovery Group was on the wrong wreck, and that he was going to recover the real
Central America
in water one hundred feet deep about twelve miles off Cape Hatteras; he had already seen her sidewheels, and he had brought up pieces of steam pipe and copper sheathing from her hull. Then Kreisle left port aboard the
Cameron Seahorse
with a side-scan sonar capable of imaging a wreck at eight thousand feet and sailed straight for the Galaxy site two hundred miles out.

Rick Robol knew that Kreisle was mounting an expedition and had served him with notice of the court’s injunction before he left the dock. When the
Cameron Seahorse
arrived near the site on August 29, Burlingham radioed her captain and described the box that no one else could enter. Then Burlingham asked for the name of the charterer, but the other captain refused to say. When Burlingham asked to board the
Cameron Seahorse
to serve the papers himself, the captain replied, “I don’t see any necessity of you coming over here. I understand the boundaries, and if we at any time come into that area we would be more than happy to receive those papers from you.” Then the
Cameron Seahorse
set up five miles to the east and began running track lines north to south, each track creeping closer to the eastern edge of the box.

A few days later, Burlingham notified the other captain that the
Nicor Navigator
would be temporarily away from the site to rendezvous with a supply boat and warned him not to enter the injuncted area. The following morning, the
Navigator
’s radar picked up the
Cameron Seahorse
angling inside the eastern boundary of the box, then heading out and continuing on her track line.

Three days later, the 5th of September, Burlingham’s first mate was patrolling the injuncted area along the northern border. Overnight, the weather had risen, the wind coming in at twenty-five knots and the seas cresting at nearly ten feet. With seas too rough to launch, the tech crew planned to leave the vehicle on deck and run about eight thousand feet of cable off the winch to unkink the “assholes.” Earlier, the
Cameron Seahorse
had passed two miles to starboard, steaming north; when she reached a point three miles off the northeast corner of the box, she swung 180 degrees to port, now headed south, and appeared ready to skim the eastern boundary. But suddenly she altered her course to the west and was now angling toward the box, headed for its center, and flying the colors and shapes of a vessel with an object in tow.

Burlingham had nothing in the water. He had assumed that no one who knew anything about running deep-water sonar searches would have a tow fish in the water in such weather. “Their data had to have been shit, as far as I can tell,” said Burlingham. With the
Cameron Seahorse
only one thousand feet from the boundary, he radioed the captain and asked his intentions. The captain replied, “I intend to hold my course and speed.”

Burlingham told him that if he continued on his present course, he would enter the injuncted area, and that if he entered that area, he would be held in contempt of court.

“Roger,” the captain replied.

Two minutes later, the
Cameron Seahorse
entered the box a little over a mile to the northeast of the
Navigator
. Burlingham turned to the southwest, took up position over the site, his stern aimed at the
Cameron Seahorse
, and cleared the bridge of everyone but Tommy. Then Burlingham heard Tommy instruct Craft to hook an empty aluminum cube to the cable, throw it overboard, and run up the RAM colors and shapes. Burlingham was furious. “You can’t change it! Once you have achieved status, you maintain that status!” Tommy argued that unkinking the cable had already been planned for that morning. “We have no obligation to reschedule our work requirements to conform to another vessel’s movements!”

This time, Craft sided with Tommy. “I got in a real argument with Don,” said Burlingham, “and he put that sonofabitch over anyways, and he knew I was pissed.”

The
Cameron Seahorse
had closed to within two thousand feet of the
Navigator
, which was directly in her path. The captain radioed Burlingham and asked for his intentions.

“Harvey wanted me to get in his way,” said Burlingham, “physically get in his way. Hell, he wanted me to almost ram ’em if I could.”

Burlingham told Tommy, “I’m not gonna hamper ’em. That is grossly against the Rules, and that’s what they’re gonna look at with me. They’re gonna say, ‘It’s in black-and-white, here’s the book!’ I have to stay out of his way.”

He stood until he could stand no longer, then he radioed the
Cameron Seahorse
. “Be advised, I’m going to peel off to the west now just to ensure no entanglement of the equipment.” He reminded the captain of his promise to allow Burlingham to serve the papers if the
Cameron Seahorse
entered the injuncted area.

“I said that with sincerity,” replied the captain. “However, I’ve been advised not to allow anyone to approach this vessel.”

Burlingham was livid that the captain had lied to him, and that he had so blatantly defied the court order. The
Cameron Seahorse
veered slightly to the east away from the
Navigator
, and Burlingham crabbed to the west to get out of her way. Both crews stood on deck watching the other through binoculars as the two ships passed no more than three hundred feet apart. An hour later the
Cameron Seahorse
had exited the box on a southerly bearing and was nearly two nautical miles from the
Navigator
. Burlingham watched the
Cameron Seahorse
slowly begin a wide sweep to the west and knew that the captain was getting ready to swing back in a crossing pattern that would cut an X through the box.