Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea (67 page)

Day after day, Bryan and Tod and the ship crew would see nothing except the same faces on the same deck and the same water stretching to the same horizon. And only feet away, the rest of the tech crew would be looking for gold on a ship from another century. But the delicate balance between Tommy’s need for secrecy and his desire to share the story with those who had helped make it happen had to be tipped in favor of security. The experiences in the control room would remain in the control
room, and as difficult as it was for Tod and Bryan and the others to be on the outside, the secrecy would be an even greater burden for those inside; for they could share with no one the extraordinary sight they were about to see.

A
T SIX O
’
CLOCK
the next morning they were up working on the vehicle, a stiff breeze coming in from the northeast. With the
Discoverer
rocking in moderate seas, they worked on the vehicle all day, preparing for a more intensive study of the site. They wanted to explore and photograph the engines, examine the anchors and foredeck, and drop five-foot measuring sticks at selected points.

They launched again at eight-thirty that evening, the vehicle arriving at the bottom near ten o’clock. During those night hours on that day, September 12, 131 years earlier, the
Central America
had crashed into the seafloor. The miners trapped on board the steamer had died long before she hit, and their remains long ago had become one with the sea, drifting away slowly with the current. The only ghost left was the ship herself, alone in the dark, her captor quietly destroying her. When contrasted with the raging and relentless storm, the breaking apart, the final explosion and roar, the screams of that night in 1857, it was difficult to decide which was more surreal: the silence and monotony of the world in which she now lived, or the computerized world from which she now could be seen, with the monitors casting blue and the digital readouts glowing orange, and the steel umbilical running off the back deck down to a two-and-a-half-ton aluminum robot that illuminated the darkness of the world below.

By ten-thirty they had located targets on the Mesotech and had video contact with the site. Careful to avoid the starboard wheel shaft rising thirty feet above the core, Moore began flying the vehicle over the engine works: five meters northeast, five meters north, ten meters north, ten meters north, ten meters east, as the vehicle cast its light from only six meters above the site.

When it hit the ocean floor, the
Central America
was as big as a four-story building, three hundred feet long. Now, most of that building had collapsed in on itself, and they were looking down on it from above. The starboard side appeared to be collapsed onto the port side. The two remaining
masts had fallen. Most of the deck was gone, the thick pine planking long ago eaten through. The supporting beams had also disappeared. Only the hanging knees remained, the braces for the supporting beams that shipwrights carved from the trunk of a solid oak tree and its first arcing branch, and they, too, were worn and riddled. Even the thick iron hog strapping that once girded the hull had broken loose and lay flat at the sides of the ship.

At the center, corrosion and time had buckled part of the cast-iron engine works, the broken shapes now further distorted with dripping rusticles. As Doering watched his monitor, he sometimes turned to Bob, pointed at the screen, and said something like, “That’s the, uh, three-quarter deck.” And then he would say, “Now, look at this thing here, that looks like one of those …,” and he would name some part of the ship they had discussed earlier. “I wouldn’t see it at all,” remembered Bob, “and after I’d talked to him, I couldn’t not see it.”

As Bob directed the dive, Moore fired scores of still shots, and Milt recorded everything on video. They searched the midships area for shapes that would help them identify the engines. That was a key element to Bob, for the ship was either the
Central America
or another sidewheel steamer that reportedly had sunk a hundred miles to the west, and the only way he could distinguish the two steamers was by their engines: Although similar in size to the
Central America
, the other steamer had a single “walking beam” engine that Bob described as looking like “the drinking ducks you see pumping oil out of the ground.” The
Central America
had two oscillating engines. As they studied the engine works, Bob thought he was seeing the pieces from two engines, and he saw no drinking ducks.

From the engine works amidships, they gradually moved west and south toward the bow of the ship. At midnight they were hovering above an area they guessed had once been a little fore of the pilot house, near the foremast that Second Officer Frazer and Captain Badger had chopped down at the height of the hurricane. Among the silt and decayed hanging knees that once supported the cross beams under the deck, they saw two straight pipe stalks each with two large cylinders branching off in opposite directions. The stalks were horizontal, but rounded, so little silt had collected on their surfaces. Bob recognized
them as the ship’s whistles. At one time, the pipe stalks had led down to the boilers in the engine room, and the steam rising in the pipes, when released, had whistled out, like water boiling at tea time.

Moore eased the vehicle to within three meters, and they were studying the whistles, when Milt said, “What’s that?”

Everyone searched the gray-and-white landscape of the foredeck but saw nothing except more silt and odd gray lines angling through it.

“It looks like a bell,” said Milt.

“The year before,” recalled Doering, “Milt kept seeing gold coins and gold bars and paddle wheels and all kinds of stuff, so it was like, ‘Oh, Milt, you’re seeing things again.’”

“No, here,” said Milt. He walked over to Doering’s monitor and pointed to it on the screen.

A gray hump nestled in the silt, something that appeared to be rounded with perhaps a slight flange. But with the scene only in black-and-white, and pools of silt collected on so many of the timbers, and shadows crisscrossing the silt, it was difficult to tell. They looked and they debated and they drifted around it at different angles, until some agreed with Milt: It might be a bell.

“But it could be like a spittoon,” said Bob.

They drifted a little more, and Bob got a different perspective on it, and he too began to see what Milt was talking about. “It might be a bell,” he said.

Moore eased the vehicle closer, and they studied the artifact for twenty minutes. Moore tapped lightly at the forward thruster for a gentle wash of water to tumble the silt from the flange. When the scene cleared, Bob and Doering both agreed with Milt: Not only was it a bell, but it was also inscribed, although it was so mottled they could not read the inscription. Even though the inscription could prove that this was the
Central America
, Tommy would touch nothing until he understood the site and could discern safe places to land. They left the bell half buried in silt.

For the last hour, they continued their flyover of the fore area, stair-stepping up the ship, first ten meters south, then ten meters west, ten meters south, ten meters west. When they arrived at the bow, they couldn’t locate where the short bowsprit had pointed onward, because
that whole portion of the ship had cleaved open like a book and crumbled.

At 3:00
A.M.
, they ended the survey and retrieved the vehicle. The following day, they launched again and explored the site for another seven hours. They placed a measuring stick close to the bell, another stick near the engine works, and another off the port bow. Between dropping the measuring sticks, they continued their survey, still hovering, touching nothing, documenting the site on video and with hundreds of stills.

O
NE SPRING AFTERNOON
in Columbus, Bob’s curious mind had wandered back to that final scene: The men standing on the deck of the
Central America
, tossing coins into the sea and flinging gold dust about the cabin. That gold dust, Bob surmised, probably became part of the hydrodynamic plume, the cloud of debris that began heading down as the last waves washed over the decks of the
Central America
. With the ship plummeting at its center, the cloud had descended through the long column of water, expanding until it sprinkled onto the floor in plumes surrounding the ship. Bob hypothesized,
If this
is
the
Central America,
in those plumes one might find gold
.

Historical references agreed that apart from the gold shipments, the passengers themselves had carried about a million dollars in gold. At twenty dollars an ounce, that would be about fifty thousand ounces of passenger gold. Much of that would be in coin, but Bob had read many accounts of passengers stashing gold dust in pouches and treasure belts, which they upended in the final hysterical moments. Let’s take a SWAG, he thought, a Scientific Wild-Ass Guess, and say that 10 percent of the passenger gold was dust. That would mean there were about five thousand ounces of dust on board. The grains of gold would be tiny, maybe half a millimeter on a side, he figured, so a cubic centimeter would be twenty grains times twenty grains times twenty grains, or eight thousand tiny pieces of dust for every cubic centimeter. Then he calculated how many cubic centimeters five thousand ounces of gold would occupy and multiplied that times eight thousand and came up with a number upward of a hundred million grains, and those grains would have been distributed throughout the pteropod ooze at something like one part per
trillion. Whether four or five hundred miners could find, pluck, and store so many grains of gold seemed unlikely, but he concluded that in a fairly decent sediment sample one still might expect to find gold.

“But I don’t think anyone else believed it,” said Bob. Even Tommy had laughed when he mentioned the idea.

At the next launch, on the 16th of September, the dive objectives were to complete the photo coverage of the collapsed bow, survey the debris field off to starboard, and inspect the foredeck for a place to land near the bell. From midafternoon till well after midnight, they roamed, filming and photographing, and landing three times to retrieve four bottles and a plate. Each time they landed, Moore powered the arm out toward the artifact, and the shaft supporting the arm slid along the bottom, packing sediment into the shaft.

When the vehicle returned to the surface at 5:00
A.M.
, Bob removed the bottles and plate from the artifact drawer, then carefully scooped the mud from the shaft and carried it to his lab. He placed part of the sampling in a petri dish and dripped hydrochloric acid over it to dissolve the tiny skeletal remains of plankton that formed most of the sediment. Then he studied the petri dish under a microscope, poking through the remains with a pair of tweezers. Most of what remained were fragments of wood, bits of copper, coal, and iron, and even a few minuscule drops of solder from the vehicle itself. But just as he was about to quit his poking, at the edge of the dish he saw the tiniest flash of color. Everything else was brown or gray or black or all three, sometimes with a slight orange cast. This little pinpoint under the microscope, almost invisible to the human eye, was bright yellow.

Bob didn’t know if it was gold, and even if it was, he thought, “You can’t go to your investors with a piece of gold the size of a grain of salt and go ‘Gold!’” Still, if the speck was gold, that was one more bit of evidence they were on the right ship, and if they were, that same particle of dust sitting in his petri dish had once winked back from a miner’s pan along a stream in the Sierra Nevada.

He left the microscope on, locked the door to his lab, and went up to the foredeck, where some of the crew were casting for dolphin. He watched for a while, then fished for a while. When he saw Tommy and Doering, he asked them to come down to his lab, where he showed them
the speck under his microscope. They decided to test it the same way James Marshall had tested the first gold he pulled from the American River that cold January morning in 1848, the original nugget that had started the California Gold Rush: Marshall had tried to break it by mashing it with another rock. This flake was too tiny to mash with another rock, so Bob left it under the microscope, angled the sharpest edge of a spatula against it, and pressed down. It didn’t snap or crumble, but gave way softly. “Which confirmed,” said Bob, “that this little fleck really was a fleck of gold.”

Later, Bob parceled the rest of the sediment into petri dishes and gave each dish an acid bath. When he searched the cultural remains, he found a dozen more grains of gold, one stuck with a tiny plankton snail. He placed all thirteen in a vial, the original fleck marked with a groove from the spatula.

P
ASSING INTO THE
latter half of September, the late-season weather held steady at just shy of marginal, with winds bucking up to twenty knots and seas cresting at six feet. But any day, the winds would whistle up to thirty or forty knots and the seas swell to ten or fifteen feet and neither come down for a week. Regardless of threatening weather, their continuing exploration of the site had to be methodical: Finish filming and photographing from high altitude, then drop lower and continue to explore and analyze the more interesting parts of the ship, then drop lower again, and again, until the outline of artifacts sharpened and their bluish cast filled with color, and they had documented the site and knew where to begin their search for the gold.

But for the next five days, the vehicle was in and out of the water with a series of equipment problems and aborted dives. Not until the 22nd did they get the vehicle to roam the site again from early afternoon until late evening.

As Moore flew the vehicle over the collapsed foredeck, Milt fired the still cameras, one photograph after another from the captain’s quarters up to the pilot house, and from there up to the bow. But the captain’s quarters were gone, as was the pilot house; and the stump of foremast left behind by Frazer and Badger had disappeared. On the monitor, beams of light trailed across the soggy and riddled remains of thick planking once
trod by hundreds of passengers, but now jutting only a short way into the wreckage before tapering into blue shadow. Among the shadows, they saw the shapes of bottles and the contours of ceramic pitchers and washbasins and hints of other artifacts, but at fifteen feet above the site, the picture on the monitors was too muted to see detail.