Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea (68 page)

In one of the aborted dives of the previous few days, they had investigated an iron box lying in the silt forward of the bow. From a few feet away, it looked like a small rising oven mottled brown and orange from rust. Milt had photographed the box several times, then Moore had extended the manipulator slowly, paused, then moved it closer, then paused again. When the jaws reached the edge of the box and touched it lightly, the monitors suddenly filled with an orange cloud, and minutes later, when the water cleared, the box had vanished. “Just poof,” said Tommy. “All we had left were the images we’d taken.”

When they had filmed and photographed the foredeck, Scotty guided them through the darkness to a patch of sediment off the port bow, where earlier they had seen what appeared to be boxes made of iron. “There are bits of the historical record that talked about an iron locker in the hold,” remembered Bob, “and there’s a natural tendency to think
safes
.” Moore landed the vehicle, and for a half hour they studied the boxes, some of them ten feet on a side. But most of them had a metal pipe jutting out one side, or fit within the architecture of the ship in a way that indicated to Bob that they were probably tanks for storing fresh water.

After filming the port sidewheel for the next two hours, Moore flew the vehicle over the debris field about fifty feet out. As they passed over the debris, someone noticed a solid geometric shape lying alone. It appeared to be another box, only much smaller than the ones they had photographed earlier. Moore guided the vehicle over and hovered above the box. As he dropped lower, they realized it was a leather suitcase, and sitting about six inches away, straight up as though waiting to be sipped, was a white teacup.

In all of his days exploring sunken ships, Doering had never encountered a scene so eerie. “It looked like a … like a train platform in foggy London,” said Doering, “like somebody was sitting on his suitcase drinking his tea, and his train came in, and he set the cup down to catch the train and forgot his suitcase.”

They were always interested in boxes. “In the old-fashioned, storybook concept of treasure,” said Bob, “you have a chest about the size of a desk, and it’s overflowing with emeralds and diamonds and gold.” But a desk-size chest filled with treasure would weigh thousands of pounds and no ten men could lift it. Whereas a hundred pounds of gold would fit neatly into something smaller than a loaf of bread.

Bob thought the suitcase next to the teacup was small enough to contain valuables, and he told Moore to get as close as he could. When Moore eased the vehicle down, a huge cloud of sediment enveloped the suitcase. With the forward thruster trained on the scene and spinning slowly, a gentle stream of water pushed away the cloud, but when the scene cleared, the white teacup was gone and the leather suitcase had tumbled into the distant blue, where it sat, upright once again.

Moore brought the vehicle closer. A white feathery coral rose from the brown leather, and large pink anemones clung to the top and sides. Beneath where the handle had been was a name plate, but the letters were covered with sediment. Moore trained the forward thruster on the suitcase and spun it a few revolutions for a light wash. When they still couldn’t read the letters, he ran the thruster a touch faster, and suddenly the suitcase opened like a clamshell, hung open momentarily, then slowly closed again. It was packed with shirts neatly folded behind the webbing that covered each compartment. “The very notion that fabric could survive at such depths in these conditions,” said Bob, “opened up some interesting possibilities.” They photographed the suitcase several times from different angles, then left it once again to lie alone in the darkness of the debris field.

T
OPSIDE, THE DAYS
dragged on, the weather rising, then lying down, then rising again, and each time, it rose higher than the time before and remained longer, and the periods of benign weather grew shorter. Worse than the weather, the monotony of being at sea had frayed thin the nerve endings of the ship crew. In similar circumstances in the Merchant Marine, the first mate had seen a cook throw a mayonnaise jar and split open a seaman’s head; he had seen seamen hack each other up with fire axes. Tommy’s security policy only made the crew more surly, but his
security measures remained in place. He was responsible for protecting the investment of his partners, and if that caused problems with morale, he would have to deal with those, but he would not relax his security. “It isn’t a matter of trust,” he said, “it’s a matter of being responsible for the kind of information you have.”

When the vehicle came up after a dive, Tod and Bryan winched it under the awning, so the artifact drawer was facing forward away from the bridge, and placed a tarp over the front end. Then everyone had to leave the deck and clear the bridge except for the watch. Tommy even instructed the watch to step away from the windows until the artifact drawer could be emptied. Bob then opened the drawer, removed the artifacts, and took them to his lab to study and catalog.

On the eight dives so far, two had aborted after only minutes on the bottom. In the remaining six, they had spent most of their forty hours on the bottom, roaming above the ship, filming and photographing, each time dropping closer as they found some areas more interesting than others. Milt had bought film in 100-foot strips, then cut it and wound it into his own 250-frame cassettes, one for each camera. Using strobes to brighten the scenes, they shot as many frames as they could on every dive before the thrusters failed, or the topside software died, or a power glitch erupted in the subsea computer. Sometimes the strobes misfired or the apertures stuck.

After each dive, either Doering or Milt developed the film from the day’s shoot, cut the frames into strips, sponged them off, hung them up to dry, and laid the strips on a light table to study with a loupe. The pictures from these still cameras were closer, sharper, more detailed than what appeared on the monitors during the dive. The crew understood the site only by analyzing these close-in stills.

The ship had started at the surface as a mass of cultural objects in a narrow capsule, 278 feet long, 40 feet wide, about 30 feet high. Bob estimated that the site now covered over ten acres. “It’s an incredibly complex object that has an incredibly complex series of processes evolving upon it. You’ve got corrosion and biology and gravity and a little current all acting upon what originally arrived at the bottom, and that’s gone on for 130 years, so that further confuses the issue, Where is the gold?”

As they flew the vehicle lower and lower, each new wave of photography revealed another world, clearer, more vivid, more detailed, no longer a country junkyard dusted with snow, but a desert oasis created by the flotsam of civilization and inhabited by the creatures of the deep ocean.

Because water bends light, the colors of the rainbow washed out before they reached the cameras: Red went first, then orange, then yellow and green. By the time the light had traveled twenty feet, only the purples and blues remained. Photographs from the early dives came back in dull shades of blue, which masked many of the artifacts and most of the life forms. “The best example of that,” said Bob, “is a feathery life form called gorgonian coral. It’s about a foot long by two inches across. You can’t see them flying over, yet they’re strewn all over the site.”

As they worked the vehicle lower among the timbers and their shadows, the techs could distinguish more artifacts littering the site: small chips and splinters of wood, broken crockery, bottles, soap dishes, iron gratings, plates, vases, washbasins, copper sheathing, chunks of coal covered with rust. And the closer they got, the more color reached the cameras: On trunks and under beams, anemones quivered in the faint current a fiery red-orange or a yellow brighter than canary. Shiny black urchins and green sponges and blue and purple cucumbers perched among the wreckage. The white gorgonian corals stood in small forests, with tiny white crinoids stuck in their branches. In some areas, on slow patrol, swam a needle-shaped fish three feet long with a sharp face and translucent fins sweeping up behind its head.

The site teemed with another deep-ocean creature they never saw: the tubeworm. For over a hundred years, tubeworms had infested the site, boring holes into the wood until stout timbers had collapsed into pieces and disappeared. Tubeworms still lived all through the riddled wood at the site, but looking at a knee or a beam from the outside, no one could tell if the worms had bored it almost hollow, or if the beam stood firm.

T
HE BELL STILL
lay among the rotted timbers of the foredeck. Although it was the single artifact that could prove they were on the
Central America
, Tommy wanted to leave it alone until they could devise a way to recover it without destroying other artifacts.

With the wind still holding below ten knots and the sea under three feet, they deployed the vehicle again on the afternoon of September 23. For several hours, they ran flyovers, dropping closer to the ship to film and photograph among the timbers in areas that in the higher surveys had looked promising as high-value cargo sites. Then Scotty guided Moore through the darkness to a clear patch of sediment off the port side of the foredeck.

For this dive they had removed the rotating base from the vehicle and mounted a small winch up inside the framing. At the end of the winch cable hung a grappling hook that held a basket snug against the bottom cube. Moore lowered the basket onto the clear patch, then flew the vehicle to hover a few meters above the bell. Half buried in silt, it looked small.

Doering had stood in front of the ship’s bell on the
Queen Mary
, dumbfounded that on that huge liner the bell took up less space than the average lampshade, maybe eighteen inches across. He studied the bell now on the monitor and calculated it could be no wider at the mouth than fourteen inches.

Moore landed the vehicle gingerly within three feet of the bell, directed the arm outward, tipped the bell upright, and slipped the jaws up under it like a fist in a slow-motion uppercut. As white silt trailed away, he guided the arm upward and held the bell up close in the lights, rotating it slowly in front of the cameras. It had a greenish cast and was mottled in orange and brown. An inscription encircled the upper portion, and another wound around the flange at the bottom. Out of both inscriptions, they could read only a few random letters, maybe an “e,” maybe a “w,” maybe an “a,” maybe an “r,” and one word, “York.” They still couldn’t tell its size.

After shaking the bell to check its stability atop the arm, Moore lifted off, flew the vehicle away from the core, and landed next to the basket. There he laid the bell on its side, partially buried in silt, and they photographed it from various angles another dozen times. Then Moore lifted the bell again and lowered it on its side in the basket. A small cloud rose, the mechanical arm pulled slowly away, and the camera came in closer. The basket was eighteen inches deep, and as the cloud cleared, they could see that the bell poked up at least another six inches. Doering was amazed. “I can’t envision why anyone would have a bell that big.”

After they had photographed the bell from several angles and everyone had wondered at its size, it was three-thirty in the morning. If they retrieved the vehicle now, by the time it arrived at the surface, the sky would be light, and Tommy wanted the bell to come aboard in darkness; he wanted no one but the tech crew to see it. He told Moore to leave the basket and the bell in the silt outside the ship, and they would retrieve it the following evening.

T
HE TECHS RECOVERED
the vehicle at dawn and slept till noon. When they awakened, Bob, Doering, and Milt went to the lab or returned to the darkroom to develop more film and continue scrutinizing earlier photographs of the site. Understanding what they had seen in previous dives would help them see more clearly what appeared on the monitors in the next dive. Tommy called it the learning curve, and having followed this procedure for one extended season and now part of another, they had become more skilled, yet ever more cautious with their underwater vision. They knew that colors and shapes and textures could all combine to turn lumps of coal and bits of wood into what appeared to be a bottle of wine, or a pile of coins, or a mottled bar of gold. On one dive they had landed close to the core, and as they were studying the near landscape, Bob and Milt both thought they saw a brick lying in the timbers. Moore closed in with a camera, and the bluish scene evolved with more color and detail, and now everyone could see the sharply delineated corners dusted with sediment.

Moore reached out with the manipulator and caught the brick from the side with the tip of the jaws, nudging it upward until it flipped over, raising a tiny cloud of sediment. Bricks made of clay weighed two and a half times as much as water, but bricks made of gold weighed seventeen times as much and would not flip over so easily. They now knew that this brick was made of clay, that it was probably a fire brick, and that hundreds or even thousands of these fire bricks might litter the site: sharp angles, perhaps in piles, hidden beneath a fine coating of white sediment, and masquerading as a shipment of gold bars.

Another time, they saw an octagonally shaped coin standing on end, and just to the right of it lay a small gold bar. As Moore brought the camera
in closer, the two artifacts looked even more like a coin and a bar, and then the camera got within two or three feet and the coin magically transformed into a dark blotch smeared with orange color on the surface of a decaying timber, and the small bar became the bloated grain of the wood.

“It’s good to maintain your enthusiasm,” said Bob, “but it’s frustrating when what you thought was gold turns out not to be gold.” It had happened so many times that now when anyone thought he saw gold, his second thought was, No, it must be a fire brick, wood grain, a knot, a lump of coal, a tubeworm.