The Sea Hunters II: More True Adventures with Famous Shipwrecks Read online

  The career of Manassas had been short, but she led the way for armored ships. The first ironclad to do battle, she was soon followed by the Monitor and Merrimack/Virginia. Thanks to her, naval warfare would never be the same.

  II

  They Don’t Come Cheaper Than This 1981, 1996

  A few weeks after the unsuccessful conclusion of the 1981 Hunley expedition, I was sitting at my desk staring at the NUMA team’s graduation picture, a photo of everyone we always take before we head for home. I studied it carefully. The faces of so many dedicated and hardworking people brought back warm memories. Then, for some unknown reason, I counted those staring back at me. There were seventeen, excluding me. Seventeen! I began to wonder if all these bodies were critical to finding a shipwreck lying in no more than thirty feet of water. It seemed to me that three people could have achieved the same results.

  The simple fact is — and this has been proven time and time again by our government — there comes a time when too many people get in one another’s way. Bureaucracy breeds bureaucracy. Feeding and housing a large search team requires support people. Once breakfast is consumed, a large crew needs at least four rental cars to ferry themselves and their equipment back and forth from the boat dock. And let us not forget the vital use of transportation for the younger members of the expedition team to make whoopee in town after dark.

  More and more, it seemed that smaller might be better.

  Warming to the idea, I planned the next expedition to the Mississippi River to search for ships sunk during Admiral David Farragut’s battle past the forts and his ultimate capture of New Orleans in 1861.

  This time, there would be only two of us representing NUMA.

  * * *

  Walter Schob, an old faithful standby of NUMA, arranged to come with me on the expedition. All we brought was our Schonstedt gradiometer to detect ferrous metal and a golfer’s rangefinder. Walt met me at the Denver airport, where he had flown from his home in Palmdale, California, and was quite surprised when I rolled up to the gate in a little shuttle with my right ankle sticking out the side in a cast.

  The day before I was to meet him, I was jogging behind my house on a path through the woods when I stumbled and twisted my ankle. There was little doubt a bone was broken, because I actually heard the snap. After limping up the path to the house, I found that my wife had gone grocery shopping. With no choice, I drove myself to the doctor, using my left foot for both brake and accelerator.

  According to orthopedists who have looked at it twenty years later, the ankle bone didn’t mesh right and should have been screwed in place, or whatever it is they do in the twenty-first century to squeeze the parted bones together. As I aged, it developed arthritis. My advice is whatever you do, never get old.

  The airline obliged me with a front-row seat facing the bulkhead so I could extend my foot. Incredibly, a fellow with another broken ankle sat across from me. Odd how misery loves company. His break was worse than mine, as his cast ran almost to his knee. Mine came only part way up my calf.

  I always recall this flight because Walt had his carry-on bag sitting against the bulkhead at his feet. Now, you have to understand — Walt has a perverse sense of humor. When the flight attendant came along and asked him to move it under the seat or to an overhead bin, he said, “No, thank you, it’s fine right where it is.”

  The flight attendant, with red hair and penetrating dark eyes, was rather attractive except for the fact that her hips brushed both seats as she walked down the aisle. She gave him a stem stare. “I’m sorry, FAA regulations. The bag has to be stowed.”

  Walt stared back with an innocent expression. “There is no FAA regulation concerning a bag under my feet against the bulkhead needing to be stowed.”

  “You stow it, sir, or the plane won’t take off,” she said in a voice filled with crushed ice.

  “I’ll comply,” said Walt, “if you quote me the regulation, the section and paragraph.”

  I might mention that Walt is an air accident investigator. If anyone knows FAA regulations, it’s him.

  Now flustered, she said, “Then you leave me no choice but to get the pilot.”

  This lady was not going to take no for an answer.

  Walt smiled politely. “I’ll be more than happy to meet our pilot. I’d like to know his experience and flying time before we take off.”

  Did I mention Walt is a retired air force colonel with several thousand hours’ piloting fighters?

  She stormed off to the cockpit and returned with an exasperated pilot, who wanted to get the plane off the ground. In the meantime, Walt had stowed his bag and was reading a copy of an air accident investigative report.

  “Do we have a problem here?” asked a grandfatherly-looking uniformed man with gray hair.

  I looked up with my favorite dumb expression. “Problem?”

  “The attendant says you won’t stow your bag.”

  “I did.”

  “Not you, him!” snapped the frustrated flight attendant, aiming a manicured finger at Walt.

  Without looking up from his reading, Walt said calmly, “It’s stowed.”

  As I said: perverse. But you have to like Walt. You can’t excite him. I’ve never seen him mad. With his ready smile and Andy Devine voice, he charms everyone — most of the time.

  * * *

  After landing at the New Orleans airport, we rented a big station wagon, a model now extinct, and made the seventy-five-mile drive down the river to Venice, Louisiana, the last town at the end of the road in the heart of delta country. From here it’s another twenty miles by boat to the Gulf of Mexico.

  There’s not much to see in Venice: fishermen, boat dealers and part suppliers, a couple of miles of boat docks. We wondered why a huge parking lot was filled with acres of pickup trucks. Our answer came when a Bell Long Ranger helicopter approached, hovered, and settled to the ground. It was emblazoned with the company name, Petroleum Helicopter, Inc. A small army of offshore oil riggers poured to the ground. They had left their trucks parked when they were ferried out for their rig rotation.

  We checked into a motel, the only motel at the time. The oil field workers must have had some rather exciting parties, judging from the damage to the place. I have always been amused recalling the Plexiglas sign screwed into the wall above the television. It said:

  NO BATTERY CHARGING OR DUCK CLEANING ALLOWED IN ROOM.

  My shoestring expedition was off to a good start.

  Our saving grace was a terrific little restaurant called Tom’s that was in the town of Buras. Tom’s specialty was Gulf oysters, and after shucking them, he’d pile them outside the restaurant. Back then the mound was nearly as high as the restaurant’s peaked roof. I still recall with fondness the chili-vinegar sauce his mama made. Nothing ever enhanced an oyster like that sauce. I was so impressed that when Dirk Pitt was chasing villains through the delta in the book Deep Six, I had him stop to eat at Tom’s.

  We chartered a small fifteen-foot aluminum skiff from a local Cajun fisherman named John who lived in a mobile home near the river with his wife and tribe of kids. John treated Walt and me with great suspicion the first day and never said a word during the search. He was kind enough, though, to provide me with a lawn chair, so I could sit holding the gradiometer’s recorder in my lap with my ankle in a cast propped up on the gunwale, sticking over the bow like a battering ram.

  The second day, John opened up a little. By the third day, he had opened the floodgates of his personality and begun to regale us with a string of Cajun jokes and stories. I wish I could remember them. Some were semi-jolly.

  As we cruised up and down the Mississippi, trailing the gradiometer astern, I watched the needle on the recorder’s dial and listened to the sound recorder for any potential ferrous anomaly. With John in the stem of the skiff, steering, Walt sat in the middle, eyeing the shore with his rangefinder and keeping us in relatively straight lines until we neared the shore and he could guide John by eye.

  The
first day of the expedition, we concentrated on Manassas. The Civil War charts of the river were routinely matched to scale with modem charts and showed me that the east and west banks had not changed much over a hundred and twenty years. Only the bend on the east side in front of Fort St. Philip had filled in for a distance of fifty yards or more. I was quite sure Manassas had gone down near the west bank, because not only was it reported that the abandoned and burning ironclad had drifted past the mortar fleet, causing great concern, but Admiral Porter had tried to put a hawser on the vessel and save it as a curiosity. Unfortunately, at just that moment, there had been an internal explosion and Manassas had sunk into the river.

  Walt, John, and I began our runs from the east bank and worked across the river to the west from Venice to the bend below Fort Jackson. I way overextended the search grid, because I wasn’t going to take any chances of missing Manassas. As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve found that old contemporary reports are not necessarily the gospel truth.

  The hours dragged by as we slowly approached the west bank, dodging big ocean cargo ships coming and going to New Orleans. This part of the river was devoid of any shipwrecks. I failed to receive more than the occasional one- or two-gamma reading, suggesting that we were passing over nothing larger than a steel drum or anchor. We were pretty discouraged as we made our final run, brushing the edge of the little rock jetty that ran along the west bank below the levee.

  Abruptly, halfway into the last lane about a quarter of a mile above Boothville-Venice High School, the recorder screamed and the needle went off the dial, as we crossed over a massive anomaly. The hit was not in the river, but alongside and beneath part of the levee. Normally under a foot of water, the area between the jetty and levee was dry because the river was low this time of year. This enabled Walt to jump from the boat and walk the gradiometer sensor along the base of the levee as I received a prolonged reading on the recorder.

  Obviously, we couldn’t say with certainty this was Manassas. The fact that this was the only massive target in the approximate area where she was recorded to have sunk was all we had going for us. I marked the site on my chart, noting the landmarks on the other side of the levee, and called it a day.

  The next morning, we headed across the river and began our search of the water just off Fort St. Philip for the Confederate ironclad Louisiana. She was a monstrous ship, one of the largest the South built. She was 264 feet long with a beam of 62 feet. Her construction had not been completed before the battle, and she was towed down from New Orleans and moored to the bank slightly above Fort St. Philip as a floating battery. If her engines had been functional, the battle might have taken a different turn. But she could contribute little in keeping the Union fleet from running the gauntlet and taking the city of New Orleans.

  After the battle, the Confederates set her on fire. Her mooring lines burned, and she began to drift downriver a short distance before being ripped apart by a massive blast when she was opposite the fort. We found a gigantic anomaly in the first hour of the search: no great feat, since I had studied a sketch of the exploding ironclad, showing a mushroom cloud of smoke erupting from the top of her casemate, done by Alfred Waud, the famous Civil War artist for Harper’s Weekly. The sketch put her directly off Fort St. Philip. She lies quite deep under the present shoreline in front of Fort St. Philip in a swampy area off the river. Her massive bulk contributed to the buildup of silt at the bend where she originally went down. Chris Goodwin, an archaeologist with an office in New Orleans, conducted an extensive survey over the site and, I believe, actually cored down to her wreck.

  The third day, we searched the river for two other boats that went down in the battle: the Confederate gunboat Governor Moore and the Union gunboat Varuna—fittingly sunk by the Governor Moore. Moore has the distinction of having fired through her own bow after ramming Varuna, because her forward gun would have hurled its shot over the Union boat if she’d fired through her own port. Both ships went ashore within a hundred yards of each other.

  We struck a large target to the south on the east bank around where Varuna ran aground to keep her from sinking, then continued upriver and found Governor Moore. She was easy to identify, because part of her, including the top of her boilers, was protruding from the water along the bank. The local boys often dive off of her boiler.

  Walt and I had accomplished all we could. After bidding John farewell, we reluctantly departed our ritzy accommodations and headed for Baton Rouge, where we discovered the final resting place of the Confederate ironclad Arkansas.

  * * *

  I hope I’m forgiven for not spotting our targets with transits, as a true professional archaeologist would. By simply marking the wreck sites on charts with nearby landmarks, however, we’ve made it possible for anyone who follows our trail to have little trouble relocating the targets.

  Total cost of the expedition?

  $3,678.40.

  Now, how can you beat that?

  The story of Manassas, however, does not end here.

  * * *

  I turned over my records to the chief archaeologist for the Army Corps of Engineers, who contracted with Texas A&M University to do a magnetometer study of the site. I returned the following year with my wife, Barbara, and pinpointed the spot where Walt and I had found a huge magnetic anomaly. The investigation was led by Ervan Garrison and James Baker of the university.

  The survey was conducted with a magnetometer, sidescan sonar, and subbottom profiler. The project determined that, indeed, a very strong anomaly existed over a large shoal that had formed over the site. The magnetometer readings of 8,000-plus gammas and the hard subbottom reflections indicated that an object the same size as Manassas was buried beneath the shoal where contemporary reports put the ironclad. They also found a large mass of steel dredge pipe directly opposite the site and eighteen feet deep in the river. I was surprised at this, since Walt and I recorded no ferrous activity away from the bank.

  Everything was fine and dandy, until Garrison and Baker turned over their report to the Corps’s chief archaeologist. He blew a fuse, then caused an uproar, when he claimed the report was totally inconclusive and proved nothing. His refusal to accept the report was almost vehement in its condemnation.

  The good people at A&M were dumbfounded. These were the nation’s leading experts in remote sensing. I read over the report and found it one of the most concise and detailed I’ve ever read. I was as mystified as Garrison and Baker.

  The Corps archaeologist then called in a local marine archaeologist to do another survey of the site. After investigating, he went on television to bemoan the agony of defeat by proclaiming that the magnetic anomaly was not Manassas but a pile of old pipe dumped there in the 1920s.

  This made absolutely no sense to anyone. Our target was practically under the levee, not eighteen feet deep and thirty-six feet out into the river. That was the pipe, but where had it come from? The Army Corps’s rejection of A&M’s mag study struck me as strange. The mystery wasn’t solved until much later.

  * * *

  Fifteen years passed before I returned to the Manassas site. Ralph Wilbanks, Wes Hall, Craig Dirgo, Dirk Cussler, and I had just finished an expedition to find the Republic of Texas Navy ship Invincible, without much luck. Working off Ralph’s boat, Diversity, we dredged a site off Galveston and identified it as a shipwreck, but nothing more specific, since we couldn’t find any artifacts. From Texas, we towed Ralph’s boat to the Mississippi River Delta.

  My thought was that since mag technology had improved and Ralph and Wes were far more professional than Walt and I, it was time to go back and check out the Manassas site again.

  We lowered Diversity down a boat ramp in Venice and leisurely studied the west bank of the Mississippi with Ralph’s state-of-the-art magnetometer. While Ralph steered, Wes ran the mag. Just as it had fifteen years earlier, the recorder’s needle showed a steady line that meant the cupboard was bare of wrecks.

  I watched the shoreline carefully, ke
eping a keen eye on the landmarks across the river and the top of a big oak tree that was not far from the site. I also noticed that many huge rocks had been laid against the shore by the Army Corps of Engineers.

  Before I could alert the team that we were entering the target zone, Wes let out a gasp as the magnetometer went into hysterics.

  “What’s your reading?” Ralph asked, turning.

  “Eleven thousand gammas,” Wes muttered. He’d rarely ever seen a reading that huge.

  “We’ve passed between the pipe and Manassas,” I explained. Ralph finished the run almost to Fort Jackson before turning around and making another survey along the bank. This time, by hugging the base of the levee, we got a lower reading, since the sensor was farther from the submerged pipe.

  “There’s something big running on an angle under the levee,” Wes announced, examining his mag records.

  We couldn’t get ashore, because the river was running too high and the shoal between the bank and the levee was underwater. Returning to Venice, we pulled Diversity out of the water and hauled it to the Manassas site. There we walked the mag up and down the levee. The signals were still there, but not as strong.

  After dinner, a few of us were sitting in the bar of the boat marina in Venice when an older fellow came up and offered to buy us a drink. He was of medium height, with a tanned face and a finely brushed mane of white hair. He said he had retired a few years before from the Army Corps of Engineers and lived just outside Venice.