Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea (74 page)

B
EFORE HE LEFT
Columbus to return to sea that summer, Tommy consulted with an international coin expert named James Lamb, head of the Coin Department at the world-renowned auction house, Christie’s. When Lamb examined one of Columbus-America’s 1857 double-eagle twenty-dollar gold pieces, he pronounced it “gem” quality. “A coin expert can go through an entire career and see about two of these coins in this condition,” said Lamb.

One thing concerned Lamb: A small nick or scratch on a gem coin could reduce its value to one-third, and two blemishes could drop it another third. That was part of the reason Tommy refused to recover more than a small amount of gold in 1988: He wanted to make sure they were doing it right. The problem was that so many coins lay piled at the site
that meticulously plucking one at a time would require too much time and expense, yet to recover two or more at once might mar the finish. Tommy had to create ways to speed up plucking the coins from the site without one coin touching another.

T
HEY LEFT
J
ACKSONVILLE
on the
Arctic Discoverer
July 19 and arrived at the Galaxy 11 site the following evening. Tommy held a meeting that night on the foredeck, explaining to everyone, new and old, his policy on security dives: who would be allowed in the control room, who would not be allowed in the control room, and that everyone but Burlingham and the tech crew would have to leave the deck during launch and recovery.

For the next two weeks at sea, they tested the crane and the new thrusters and Scotty’s new logging system. Scotty had created software that allowed Bob to document and catalog all video, stills, and crew comments on the recovery of each artifact as it happened. As soon as they took a photograph below, they could print it out topside in the control room; they could freeze a video image, the computer would digitize it, and the printer would give them a hard copy of the scene. Later, for an investor considering the purchase of a coin, they could show the actual recovery of that coin; for a scientist wanting to see footage of a unique sponge, they could locate the video segment immediately or return to the sponge at the site for additional observation.

With all of the new capability and systems to be tested during those first two weeks, there was so much to do that often the tech crew operated on no more than four hours’ sleep a day, and sometimes that was composed of two two-hour naps. Just the day-to-day routine of keeping the vehicle maintained kept them up late and got them up early. “Then Harvey comes up with something new he wants to do,” said Battelle engineer Mike Milosh, “something a little off the wall, and the time to do this extra work comes out of your sleep.”

Over the winter and spring back in Columbus, Tommy had met frequently with Milosh and other engineers to discuss how they might recover the coins and bars faster than having John Moore pluck them from the piles one at a time. But whatever method they came up with
could not nick the treasure. “Our ground rules,” remembered Milosh, “were that we couldn’t scratch any of them, period. Harvey was very intent about this.” In 1857, stacking all of that gold on top of itself to be transported would not have diminished its value. But 131 years later, the value of that gold as historical artifacts had risen so dramatically that each piece had to be carefully handled.

Doering thought it would be impossible to recover all of the gold without one coin or one bar touching another; there was just too much gold. The coins far outnumbered the bars, and Doering couldn’t even estimate how many bars there were. Many times he had sat in front of his monitor and tried to count them, but he got so lost in the interrupting angles and the overlapping curves, in the sheer quantity of geometric shapes in orange and yellow, that he quit. When he had seen that first film strip of the gargoyle area lying on the light table, he couldn’t imagine gold being found in piles that enormous. “And there’s probably six, seven more piles like that,” said Doering. “There’s no way you can clean up this area in two months. You couldn’t do it with a bulldozer.”

Doering’s solution was to pick it all up with “big scoops” and be done with it. “Harvey wants to pick each coin up individually, photograph it, take a videotape of that coin, and then place that coin in a special holder. We’ll be here for a hundred years, for Christ’s sake, doing it like that.”

Milosh had been pondering another approach, simple and seemingly far-fetched, but just the sort of ingenuity Tommy prized: Place a mold over a pile of coins, inject silicone into the mold, let it harden, and raise the whole mass in a rubber block. You could pick up a hundred coins at once, and the silicone would envelop the coins and protect them. When Hackman heard the idea, he volunteered to take all of those silicone blocks to his house over the winter and peel the silicone away from the treasure while he sat in front of his fireplace. He’d do it for free. All they had to do was find a silicone that was heavier than water, figure out a way to mix the silicone with the catalyst, clean the nozzle regularly, and get the solution to flow and harden despite a temperature of thirty-eight degrees and pressure that would crush the steel hull of a nuclear submarine.

In the dining room of the old Victorian that served as Tommy’s office, they set up a thirty-gallon fish tank filled with salt, water, and ice and began experimenting with various silicones. The pressure wasn’t there, but they worked with the salinity and the cold until they got the silicone to flow and set up in a reasonable amount of time. To test the method, they coated Krugerrands with bluing, then placed them in a pile at the bottom of the tank, and covered them with the silicone. “We did quite a bit of testing,” said Milosh. “Our criterion was that we couldn’t even mark the bluing. So we were being pretty strict.” The first time they tried it at sea, the catalyst was too weak, and the mixture ran out the bottom of the mold. But when they doubled the amount of catalyst, and then doubled it twice more, it oozed among the coins and solidified, encasing and protecting and uniting the coins into a block.

To prepare a small pile of gold for recovery, they first dusted the area lightly with the wash from the thrusters, then used a tiny suction picker to remove individual coins scattered at the edge of a small pile, or coins that might prevent the silicone mold from lying flat over the pile, and dropped them into a tray with foam-lined compartments. The new logging system allowed Bob to assign each tray a number and identify each compartment with a coordinate system that electronically recorded the time of collection and its location on the site.

When the pile was prepared, they placed the mold over it and injected the silicone. As that was setting up, they moved to another pile, dusted, picked around the edges, and placed another mold for injection. Later, they returned to recover each of the gray blobs—roughly a foot square and about eight inches thick with small gold bars and gold coins embedded in them, some of the gold at odd angles, some in neat stacks. Often they were filled with hundreds of coins and sometimes several small bars.

“The coins we bring up in that block of silicone are in beautiful condition,” said Milosh. “We’ve got ones that are untouched, just perfect.”

The gold bars that came up in the silicone ranged in size from little squares of about five ounces, what Bob called chocolates, to larger squares and rectangles of a few pounds that he called brownies.

In one block of silicone, they recovered the “coin tower,” stacks of gold coins each thirty coins high, the stacks three wide and five long, or about 450 perfect double eagles, all naturally cemented together.

The first dive after they had completed all of the tests was August 5, but they did not begin bringing gold to the surface until the first security dive on the 18th. “This thing went unbelievably well,” said Burlingham. They launched in the early morning and recovered in the early evening. Tommy planned the security dives that way, so that by the time they brought the vehicle back to the surface, night had come. The tech crew would rinse the vehicle with freshwater, pull the cameras off, hook up the battery charger, and remove pieces of the vehicle that needed to be worked on. Then they would clear the deck, turn out the deck lights, and in the darkness Bob would duck under the tarp, remove the trays filled with gold, and place them in a black trunk. Tommy and John Moore would help take the trunk below to Bob’s lab, where Bob removed each artifact, tagged it with a computer-generated number, cataloged it, and stored it, so it could be correlated later with the recovery footage.

Night after night the vehicle came up filled with gold bars and gold coins, nuggets, gold-veined quartz, even piles of sparkling dust. And then one evening, after a week and a half of security dives, they loaded the artifact drawer on the bottom, and before they could close it, the cable that carried all of the topside commands down to the vehicle suddenly shorted out, and they lost control. They couldn’t close the drawer, they couldn’t empty it on the bottom, and they couldn’t fix the problem without recovering the vehicle and having it on deck. Tommy had no choice but to recover with the drawer open. He decided to announce what had happened and allow everyone to view the treasure when it came on deck.

“They told us beforehand that there was stuff in the drawer and we had to be careful,” remembered Burlingham. “The drawer was out, full of coins and some bars—everybody saw it. It was a pretty good haul, well over a hundred coins and a couple of bars, all in their little cases and boxes.” Burlingham saw one coin much larger than the others and over an eighth of an inch thick, a fifty-dollar gold piece cast in 1851 and shaped octagonally. “This thing looked awesome,” remembered
Burlingham. After all of his research on pioneer coinage in California, Bob recognized immediately the uniqueness of the piece. “This coin paid for the dive,” he said. Besides the coins, brownies also sat in the tray and one bar five inches long and weighing about 150 ounces. “We were all there,” said Burlingham. “Harvey made the best of what he probably felt was a terrible situation. But everybody got a chance to see the stuff.”

T
HE INSIDE OF
Bob’s tiny lab was painted lime-green. The basin was stainless, the microscope beige, and the lime-green bookshelves above the basin lined with books like
Conquering the Deep Frontier, Ocean Salvage, Exploring Ocean Frontiers, American Seashells
. A refrigerator and a computer sat opposite the sink. Around the sink, carefully placed on terry-cloth towels, Bob had samples of coins, bars, and quartz-lined nuggets, parts of the treasure he was examining and cataloging. Most of the gold remained in a storage locker just forward of the lab, where Bob left it in the trays and silicone blocks until he had time to work with it. “The bottom is just covered with this stuff,” he said. “It’s astonishing.”

Bob spent most of his time now in the lab, studying the gold, noting peculiarities, searching for understanding and connection. As a geologist, he was particularly fascinated by the chunks of quartz veined with gold. “There’s something almost spiritual about reperforming the type of work that these same people did over 130 years ago,” he said. “I’m gold-panning on a ship in the Atlantic Ocean, whereas before it was in a gold pan with a guy wading in a stream along Grizzly Flats or Mormon Island. You find these nuggets and you reexperience the thrill of the original discoverer.”

About the fourth time he examined the Harris Marchand gold bar they had displayed for the partners, he noticed something peculiar: The bar was thicker on one end than it was on the other, which meant that the ingot mold back in 1857 had sat on a lopsided table. “I could imagine the Harris Marchand office in Sacramento, where this bar was stamped,” recalled Bob. “He had his ingot molds on this rough-hewn table. The whole picture came flashing back to me, this snapshot, and it gave me such a sense of connection with the historical story. It’s like
the scales fall from your eyes and you go ‘Wow.’ Finding the gold on the bottom was not the great historical connection moment for me. Some of the things that have happened to me in the lab have been more along those lines.”

I
N
S
EPTEMBER
, J
AMES
L
AMB
, the coin expert from Christie’s, visited the
Arctic Discoverer
dockside in Wilmington to see more of the treasure. Back in Columbus, Lamb had seen only two double-eagle twenty-dollar gold pieces and had been told there were others like them at the site. He knew nothing about the quantity or the diversity of the coinage, but he remained concerned. “I didn’t know what state of preservation the vast majority of the coins were going to be in.”

Lamb arrived at the ship wearing a gray suit and a gray tie, but within minutes of entering Bob’s laboratory, he had his coat off and his sleeves rolled up and an 1857 double-eagle twenty-dollar gold piece between his thumb and forefinger, holding it at an angle to catch the light. “That’s how it looked when it came out of the mint,” he murmured, “and the more the coin looks like the minute it was made, the more valuable it is, and this is just about perfect. This coin has a wonderful and complete mint luster and no wear whatsoever.”

Not all of the coins from the San Francisco Mint were twenty-dollar double eagles. Some were ten-dollar eagles or five-dollar half eagles or two-and-a-half-dollar quarter eagles. According to Lamb, one 1857 ten-dollar eagle gold piece recovered from the
Central America
was “by a considerable margin the finest example known to exist.”

Many of the coins coming up from the bottom had been struck by small, private mints that existed before the San Francisco Mint opened in 1854, and the coinage produced by those mints was extremely rare. From 1848 to 1854, miners coming out of the mountains had only nuggets and dust, neither of which made a good medium of exchange when purchasing food staples and supplies. Business often was conducted with a “pinch”—two pinches of dust for a sack of flour, one pinch for a shot of whiskey. Since miners in from the hills often hit the saloons first and had no way to pay except with gold dust, saloon owners hired bartenders with big thumbs.