Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea (76 page)

While preparations and celebrations continued throughout the afternoon and into the evening, lawyers representing thirty-nine insurance
companies filed a lawsuit at the federal courthouse a few blocks away. Tommy knew it was coming. The insurance companies claimed that they had covered the loss when the
Central America
sank in 1857, and that therefore all of the gold he had recovered from her timbers, and all of the gold he had yet to recover, belonged to them. They wanted it back. It was his greatest concern, that after all of the years he had spent achieving what many thought was impossible, someone would try to steal the rewards. Starting the following day, he fought the insurance companies for ownership of the gold, which would not be determined for another seven years.

EPILOGUE

I
N
A
PRIL
1997, William Broad, a science reporter for the
New York Times
, published a book called
The Universe Below: Discovering the Secrets of the Deep Sea
. An in-depth look at our endeavors to penetrate the deep ocean,
The Universe Below
offers perspective on two things: the enormity of the sea and the paltriness of our knowledge about it. Until the mid–nineteenth century, scientists assumed that beyond a depth of even a few hundred feet the ocean lay barren. In the latter part of that century, scientists on deep-sea explorations around the world deployed trawls and dredges to sample the bottom and found an abundance of deep-sea life. From these discoveries and the further sightings of Beebe and Piccard and those who followed, scientists realized that although vast deserts did lie at the bottom of the sea, the ocean beyond the shallows supported abundant life in many places at all levels all the way down to the seafloor. And with that understanding came the overwhelming realization that although the ocean may take up 71 percent of the earth’s surface, its volume accounts for as much as 97 percent of the earth’s biological habitat.

Broad reported that oceanographers in 1991 estimated that scientists had explored between one thousandth and one ten-thousandth of the ocean floor. But if you consider the volume of the ocean, wrote Broad, “humans have scrutinized perhaps a millionth or a billionth of the sea’s darkness. Maybe less. Maybe much less.”

“The main impediment to better understanding,” opined Broad, “has been a shortage of instruments that can withstand the deep’s crushing pressures and illuminate its inky darkness while advancing the exploratory job…. The entire history of deep exploration bristles with frustration, with jibes about having to blindly grope the sea’s boundlessness ‘by the square yard.’ Like astronomers before the invention
of the telescope, oceanographers often found the available tools inadequate for addressing the great questions at hand.”

Submersibles like the
Alvin
had been to the bottom, but only with human life at risk, only covering tiny areas, rarely back to the same area for comparative observations, and normally for no more than three or four hours on a dive. Tommy’s vehicle could reside on the bottom of the deep ocean and perform for days. And instead of having a pilot and one or two others in a submersible thousands of feet below, cold and risking their lives, ten people from different disciplines could sit in a control room topside, observing and advising.

When members of the deep-ocean community ask Don Hackman if he went down in the vehicle, he says, “No, I sat in an air-conditioned room and sipped on a cup of coffee.” When they ask him, “Well, what can you do down there—look around, maybe pick something up?” Hackman tells them, “Sure. I can also drill a hole, tap a thread, and put a bolt in it. From two miles away.”

No one Hackman has talked to can conceive of such intricacy at such depths. He showed pictures of the front end of the vehicle to ocean engineers in the navy, one of whom told Hackman he saw not one thing he recognized. Hackman showed videos of the vehicle working on the bottom to an admiral and his entourage of captains, and the admiral asked Hackman, “How do you protect the site when you’re not there?” Before Hackman could answer, one of the captains interjected, “Well, Admiral, they don’t have to worry about us.” No one can figure out how the vehicle works.

“This vehicle,” said Hackman, “is less sophisticated in most cases than anybody else’s vehicle, but it has capability that no one else even has on the drawing board right now. No other company, no government, has excavation arms and telescoping manipulators and hydraulic drawers and rotating thrusters; no one else even has them in the concept stages. I’m talking about all of the communities—the secret, the unsecret, the industrial, the oil companies. I know, because I work for all of these guys.”

B
EFORE HE FOUND
the gold, Tommy already had been planning for the scientific studies to be conducted at the site. Since 1989, he has used his new technology to provide an opportunity never before available to science
: data, specimens, photographs, film, and on-site time at sea observing and experimenting in the deep ocean for over 150 scientists, researchers, and educators in the United States, Canada, Germany, Monaco, England, and New Zealand. They are corrosion experts, underwater archaeologists, marine biologists, marine geologists, ocean chemists, ocean physicists, material scientists, bacteriologists, fisheries scientists, and maritime historians. The scientists have been identifying life forms, determining life cycles, evaluating data, and providing insight.

Tommy asked professor emeritus at Ohio State University and his mentor from Put-in-Bay, Dr. Charles E. Herdendorf, to head the adjunct science program. Dr. Herdendorf calls it “a modern-day adventure which rivals the discovery of the New World explorers. When you’re out there working, you’re part of something really special and different. You always feel a little glow, because you realize this is something that’s just not being done anywhere else.”

Columbus-America now has several thousand hours of videotape and thousands of slides shot over a period of four years of bottom time, all at the same site. In 1991, one dive alone lasted for over a hundred hours. And by that year, Tommy and his engineers had incorporated fiber-optic cable to transmit broadcast-quality images from the ocean floor and display them on seventeen monitors in the control room, so the scientists could observe this living and growing environment with their own eyes, not through specimens and fossils. The scientists have now observed what they think are thirteen new life forms, or species. A new species of sponge has already undergone the rigor of identification, classification, and naming.

One afternoon, an octopus embraced the vehicle, and the crew captured the creature on film for an hour while it probed, its arms in constant motion. Most octopuses measure no more than one foot from the tip of one arm to the tip of the opposite arm. This one measured over six and a half feet, tip to tip, and the bulbous upper portion of its body was a foot and a half wide. After studying the film and the stills, four authorities on octopuses, two of them from the Smithsonian, agreed that the sucker alignment and the siphon design on this animal differed from those on all other species of octopus, that this was a species of animal no one had ever seen before.

Late one night, while Dr. Herdendorf and the tech crew were conducting experiments with fish carcasses and cornmeal placed at the site, a shadow rippled across the bottom, and then a creature passed within inches of the video camera lens. Later, the “shark lady,” Dr. Eugenie Clark at the University of Maryland, identified it as a Greenland shark, one of the largest sharks ever captured on video at any depth, and by far the largest ever sighted in the deep ocean. The previous record was three and a half feet; this one was twenty-two. For scientists, the presence of so huge a fish, with its enormous need for food, provided more evidence that the food chain even at those depths was consistent and abundant.

Many of the scientists had assumed that at those depths, they would find little life except for fungi. They had assumed that microorganisms that die at the surface were consumed before they could reach the bottom. But these tiny organisms, the first step in the food chain, actually sank to the bottom and the
Central America
site acted as a mechanical break, collecting them into one large food source, creating what scientists call “a bloom and pulse of life.” Some of the scientists were startled to find that in this barren and hostile land was a world of remarkable stability and great abundance, a world providing many interesting avenues for further study.

Scientists had thought that deep-sea borers, or shipworms, were mostly shallow-water life forms, but in experiments set up at the site, Dr. Ruth Turner at Harvard found a whole new species of deep-sea wood borer. Evidence of deep-ocean borers had been found in the past, but the borers were no larger than a pencil. At the site, Turner found this new species as fat as a cigar and up to half a meter long. Her experiments continue.

Other scientists have found a new species of gorgonian, or fan, coral. All species previously described had been found on a sandy seafloor in shallow water, and they had stringy rootlets that burrowed and grabbed in sediment, the way a plant holds soil. But this species had a different “holdfast” that enabled it to grasp, like a hand, so it could live on coal or iron or gold, an adaptation to survive in the environment.

In the heavy rusticles dripping from the ironworks at the site, scientists identified a strain of bacteria; later, they secured a rust sample
from the
Titanic
, collected from the luxury liner when a sub accidentally collided with the steel hull. From that sample, they were able to culture the same bacteria they had found at the
Central America
site. With that knowledge, they can develop ways to prevent deep-ocean corrosion, which will be one of the major problems to solve when someday we build deep-sea mining facilities or lay cable or establish monitoring stations on the floor of the deep ocean.

One of the most exciting outcomes of exploration for scientists is simply a description of the diversity of new life forms available for pharmaceutical testing. “We now have the location and the population,” said Dr. Herdendorf, “for a ready, rich source of new life forms of the type in which we have found medicinal drugs in shallower-water cousins.” These new life forms might provide anticancer drugs called “tumor inhibitors.” Scientists have observed such qualities in the Sydney Opera House sponge, which was found at the site. Living within the sponge is a tiny white gallathiad crab that scientists surmise is protected by the sponge secreting a chemical retardant that repels predators. Immune to the retardant, the crab in turn removes large food particles that clog the pores of the sponge and could cause the sponge to starve. This same symbiosis is found in shallow-water sponges that scientists associate with having beneficial medicinal properties.

The scientists who have worked at the site or have evaluated data collected at the site have come from the Smithsonian, Woods Hole Oceanographic, Harbor Branch Oceanographic, Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Ohio State University, the U.S. Navy Civil Engineering Laboratory, the University of North Carolina, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, the Field Museum of Natural History, the United States Geological Survey, Texas A&M University, California Academy of Sciences, United States Naval Academy, and other government, educational, and private institutions. Their efforts continue and will intensify when Tommy takes the vehicle on to explore new areas of the deep ocean.

I
N
1989,
WHEN
the Columbus-America Discovery Group announced publicly its finding of the
Central America
, historian Judy Conrad organized a media campaign to contact descendants and relatives of the
people aboard the
Central America
. First, she assembled a list of every city and town in which anyone on board the ship was said to have lived. Then she sent press kits to the newspapers in those towns, including the names and any other information she had on the passengers or crew who once had resided there.

Genevieve Gross, from Ohio, was the first relative to contact Judy. “I’ll never forget that moment,” said Judy, “a connection right back to those people I had been studying so long. It makes them come alive.”

Judy’s initial effort brought twenty-nine responses, including two direct descendants of Oliver Manlove, who provided her with Manlove’s writings about his trek across the plains to California and his voyage aboard the
Central America
. She began corresponding with several descendants, sharing information with them, often enlightening them to details not known in the family lore, but more often learning things about the people she had not known. She has located four relatives of Captain Herndon, one named Herndon Oliver III, a graduate of Annapolis and himself a captain (ret.) in the U.S. Navy; twelve relatives of the Eastons, three of whom are direct descendants; three relatives of the Badgers; four great-granddaughters of the ship’s purser.

Judy found one direct descendant of Mary Swan, whose husband died in the sinking, leaving her with a baby not yet two. Upon arriving in New York, Swan was the woman who told a reporter, “I have no friends in New York, nor in all the world, now that my husband is lost.” The descendant, a great-great-grandson, told Judy that Mary Swan had later remarried, become a nurse during the Civil War, and returned to California, where she had seven more children.

Jane Renard of Seattle is the great-granddaughter of a steerage passenger named Samuel Look, who was traveling with his brother, Prince. From her, Judy learned that when the ship sank, the two brothers ended up floating on the same timber; and that during the night, Prince died, and Samuel held on to his brother’s body until another survivor floated within reach and needed help. Samuel allowed his brother’s body to slide into the sea, and took on the other man, Billings Hood Ridley. A few hours later, the crew of the
Ellen
rescued them both, and Samuel and Billings became the closest of friends. Billings’s great-great-grandson lives in Maine.