The Sea Hunters II: More True Adventures with Famous Shipwrecks Page 15

  Into the trough in advance of the wave, the lightship dropped. Then, all at once, the hull of the ship rose, and the gun came free and hung on the cable.

  “Can you steer with the gun weight off your bow?” La Coste asked the captain.

  “I can sure as hell try,” the captain said.

  Three nights later, they came back and raised the second gun. It was not until much later that the Union found out that Keokuk had been salvaged.

  * * *

  A few months after the debacle off Fort Sumter, Captain Rodgers was sleeping in his cabin on Weehawken. He had been reassigned farther south, and the ironclad was riding at anchor in the Wassaw Sound off Georgia. Nehant, a second Union monitor, lay a league away. It was hot, four degrees over eighty, and the air was still. Wispy Spanish moss hung from the trees nearby, and the croak of thousands of frogs filled the air. The Union ships were waiting to intercept the newest Confederate ram.

  * * *

  The pilot of the Confederate ironclad Atlanta was groping his way down the Savannah River. The channel was narrow, and to escape detection he had ordered no lights lit. Atlanta was unwieldy, underpowered, and deeply drafted, all the things that made a ship hard to handle. Converted from the fast blockade runner Fingal, Atlanta had been armored and a cast-iron ram mounted to her bow. Her firepower consisted of four Brooke-rifled guns and a lethal spar-torpedo stretching ahead of the ram. Slowly, she went downriver.

  Atop Atlanta’s casement, ordinary seaman Jesse Merrill was standing watch. Even in the darkness, he could see the difference in the river astern. Atlanta was dragging her keel and churning up the river mud. The ship was dragging bottom.

  Peering forward, Merrill strained to see through the mist on the river. He thought he caught the outline of another ship, but just as he trained his eyes on the spot, Atlanta ran aground and he was pitched forward.

  “Back her up,” he heard the pilot whisper.

  Spinning her prop in the mud, the big ironclad struggled to break free.

  After a few minutes of rocking the ship back and forth, she was freed.

  * * *

  Two hundred yards away, Weehawken was closest to the Confederate ram. Her lookout was struggling to stay awake and losing the battle. Time after time as he peered through the port upriver, his head nodded as sleep overtook him.

  It was warm, and there was little fresh air. His head bobbed up and down.

  * * *

  Atlanta backed up and started downriver again. Jesse Merrill continued to peer into the distance. There it was again. Low to the water and dark in color, he might have missed it except for the rounded sweep of the gun turret.

  Climbing down from the nest, he alerted the captain.

  “Take it slow,” the captain ordered. “The lookout sees a Yankee ironclad.”

  Seconds later, the pilot ran Atlanta hard aground again.

  First light poked through the view port and stabbed the lookout in the eye like a saber. Shaking his head, he wiped the slobber from his mustache, then scanned the water. Like a ghostly apparition some two hundred yards distant, Atlanta came into view. The lookout stared for a second, then sounded the alarm.

  He continued ringing the bell for a full three minutes.

  At the sound of the bell, Captain Rodgers leapt from his bed and ran to the pilothouse, still in his nightclothes. His second in command, Lieutenant Pyle, was already at his station.

  “She hasn’t moved, sir.”

  Rodgers scanned the water with his spyglass. “The crew is scurrying on deck,” Rodgers said. “If I had to guess, I’d say she’s run aground.”

  “I took the liberty of signaling Nehant, the lieutenant said, “and ordered a full head of steam from the engine room.”

  “Head straight at her,” Rodgers ordered.

  “Guns at ready,” Lieutenant Pyle said.

  “Commence firing” Rodgers said.

  It was impossible to miss. The first shot from Weehawken’s fifteen-inch gun scored a hit. It tore apart Atlanta’s casement like a fireman’s ax through a flimsy front door. And the rebel ironclad was powerless to reply. The grounding had keeled her over. Even with her guns depressed as far as they would go, when she tried to return fire, her shells sailed over the treetops along the riverbank. Weehawken’s second volley bashed in ten square feet of Atlanta’s armor and blew the gun crew off their feet.

  Number three tore off the top of the pilothouse. That was all it took.

  The captain hauled down the flag and surrendered.

  Later, Atlanta was taken to the Philadelphia Naval Yard, where she was refitted and returned to service as a Union navy vessel. Rodgers was hailed as a hero and promoted to commodore. As captain of the first monitor to defeat an ironclad in individual combat, he returned to Charleston to continue the fight against Fort Sumter.

  * * *

  Eight months after capturing Atlanta, Weehawken was a seasoned veteran. Her crew was honed by combat and their on-board routine entrenched. Day after day, she lobbed shells toward Sumter. So it was nothing unusual when she anchored off Morris Island to refill her magazine.

  Harold McKenzie was an ordinary seaman. And ordinary seamen followed orders. Even so, McKenzie could not help but mention his apprehensions to his friend Pat Wicks.

  “The weight is not being distributed correctly,” he whispered, as the two men carried a wooden crate filled with shells. “We’re putting too much forward.”

  But Wicks had other matters on his mind.

  “We’re taking on a full load. The officers must be planning another run at the forts.”

  Wicks had been wounded by shrapnel in the first attack on Sumter, and ever since he had been more than a little gun-shy. By contrast, McKenzie had just transferred to Weehawken. He was still itching to see combat.

  “Good,” McKenzie said. “It’s high time we taught the rebels a lesson.”

  But that was not to be, for McKenzie’s worst fears would soon be realized.

  That evening, as the sailors slept in their berths, a stiff wind came from land. The misplaced load of fresh munitions was making Weehawken ride low in the bow, and it took only a matter of moments for serious trouble to arise. As the first series of waves washed over the bow, the water flooded into an unsecured hatch. As the bow dropped a few inches lower, water raced into the anchor chain hawse pipe. As the water filled the lower hold, the bow quickly settled lower. Now the bilge pumps in the stem were of no use, and the ones forward could not handle the volume of water.

  A simple mistake, but it doomed Weehawken to an early grave.

  Wicks was in the top bunk, and he felt it first. A sharp jolt as the bow slipped down made his head strike the deck above, jarring him awake.

  “Mac,” Wicks shouted, “wake up.”

  McKenzie struggled to free himself from his berth, but Wicks’s warning would come a moment too late for either man. Weehawken was already going through her death throes. As the flow of water increased, her trim was upset. The water flowed into the lower hold, then quickly to one side. Like a toy ship in a bathtub, Weehawken rolled onto her starboard beam. Within seconds, the sea flooded in through the open turret ports and deck hatches and made contact with the boilers with a burst of steam.

  Then Weehawken slipped beneath the waves, taking thirty-one souls to their graves.

  * * *

  It was January 15, 1865, and the long and bloody war was drawing to a close. On board the monitor Patapsco, Commander Stephen Quackenbush looked forward to going home. His vessel had seen nearly constant action since the first assault on Fort Sumter, and he and his crew were weary from war. While similar in design to the rest of the monitor class, Patapsco had heavier armament that kept her constantly utilized. With the only big Parrot gun in the fleet, Patapsco could lie out of reach of the forts’ guns and fire without fear of damage. Because of this fact, Patapsco had fired more shells at the rebel defenders than any other vessel.

  With her record of accomplishments well recognized, it was li
ttle surprise that in early 1865 Patapsco was assigned the dangerous task of picket duty. Picket duty was no picnic; it was a dangerous combination of nightly scouting sorties and minesweeping in the outer harbor. Captain and crew hated it soundly.

  “We have a strong flood tide,” executive officer Ensign William Sampson said to Quackenbush, as the two men stood on the top of the turret, staring through the moonless night.

  “We’ll escort the launches and minesweeping boats inside the channel before we drift back out and provide fire support,” Quackenbush said quietly.

  “Shall I go below and give the order to the helmsman and chief engineer for slow speed?” Sampson asked.

  “Do that. I’ll remain here and keep watch.”

  It was a choice that would save Quackenbush’s life.

  Patapsco steamed closer to the Confederate forts. Behind came the small, steam-powered launches equipped with grapnels and drags. Slowly, they passed the monitor and began the tedious task of sweeping for mines.

  Sampson reappeared topside. “I’ve ordered the guns run out, sir.”

  Quackenbush nodded. His command was now ready to provide fire support.

  The night passed with agonizing slowness as the Union ironclad drifted in and out of the channel. It is said the third time is a charm, but this did not ring true with Patapsco and her crew. As the tidal current carried the ship out of the harbor entrance for the third time after midnight, the hull struck a floating mine set only a day before.

  The device was a wooden barrel torpedo carrying a hundred pounds of gunpowder.

  Igniting when jarred, the torpedo ripped a huge hole on the port side aft of the bow. The explosion lifted Patapsco’s bow up in the air. Quackenbush and Sampson were thrown to the deck as a giant column of water rose into the air before slamming down on the gun turret.

  “Man the boats!” Quackenbush shouted.

  But it was too late. Patapsco dove beneath the waves in less than a minute and a half, down forty feet to the seabed. Sixty-two of the officers and crew went with her. Only the tip of the smokestack remained above water at low tide.

  Quackenbush and Sampson barely escaped being sucked under by the doomed monitor and were rescued by a launch.

  It was a fortunate rescue for the U.S. Navy.

  William Sampson later became superintendent of the Naval Academy and was named commander of the Atlantic squadron during the Spanish-American War. When the Spanish fleet attempted to escape Santiago, Cuba, Sampson’s fleet, utilizing his battle plans and temporarily under the command of Winfield Scott Schley, destroyed it.

  Honed by their combat experience in the Civil War, Sampson, Schley, and Dewey all died as heroes with the rank of admiral.

  II

  Three for the Price of One 1981, 2001

  When possible, I always try to piggyback expeditions. It makes perfect sense on an obtuse level. If NUMA is searching for a certain ship, it becomes cost- and time-efficient to look for other wrecks in the same general area.

  Charleston is a case in point. During the 1981 expedition to find the Confederate submarine Hunley, we used two boats, one to mow the search grid line with a magnetometer and the other to carry a gradiometer and divers to investigate any interesting targets.

  You might want to scan over this paragraph, since I think it’s a good time to differentiate between a magnetometer and a gradiometer. The Schonstedt gradiometer, which we have used over the years with great success, reads the difference in magnetic intensity of a ferrous object between two sensors placed twenty inches apart and can be towed at speeds up to twenty-five knots. By comparison, a magnetometer reads differences in the earth’s magnetic field, which, because of various atmospheric conditions, may often cause bogus readings. It must be towed at relatively slow speeds.

  While the survey boat went about its business hunting the sub, the dive boat drifted around with nothing to do, waiting for a call that rarely came. Having learned that time is money, I sent the dive boat prowling after other shipwrecks that sank during the siege of Charleston in the Civil War.

  The waters in and around Charleston Harbor are a veritable salvage yard of old shipwrecks. From the late 1600s until the eve of the twentieth century, hundreds of ships of every size and rig have gone to the bottom within sight of the city. Nearly forty New England whalers were scuttled in a vain attempt to barricade the channels to keep the Confederate blockade runners from entering and leaving. Twenty or more greyhounds of the sea were sunk by Union navy gunfire attempting to run the blockade.

  Union ships went on the bottom too: Housatonic was torpedoed by Hunley. Weehawken sank accidentally in a squall. Patapsco was sunk by a mine. And Keokuk sank after being struck nearly a hundred times by Confederate cannon shells. They all lay in the silt in a common burial ground.

  At first it appeared as if finding them would be a kindergarten hide-and-seek operation. We had a chart drawn by a Union navy officer in 1864 that showed the approximate position of ten blockade runners and the Union ironclads that had been lost. It seemed a simple matter to transpose them onto a modem chart. The only catch, as I discovered quite by chance, was that the longitude meridians sometime prior to 1890 ran four hundred yards farther west than later projections. I caught this when I noticed that the fifty-second meridian appeared much closer to Fort Sumter on an 1870 chart than on a 1980 chart. The revelation seemed to be confirmed by the fact that every wreck we found was a quarter of a mile west of where it should have been, which goes to show that you can never do enough homework.

  * * *

  Walt Schob acted as our advance man, arriving in town with his wife, Lee, to charter a boat and arrange quarters for a crew whose eventual size could have fielded three hockey teams. The house he rented was a large two-story affair on Sullivan’s Island with a long boardwalk that stretched over the dunes to the beach and ended in a comfortable little gazebo. Walt hired a lady named Doris to cook for the guys. Doris turned out excellent meals, but for a reason she would never explain, she refused to fix me grits for breakfast. She also had a strange habit of making only baloney sandwiches for our afternoon picnics at sea. No cheese, tuna, or peanut butter. Not until much later did I find out that it was at Walt’s insistence. He laid out the afternoon one-course menu because he liked baloney sandwiches. I still become drowned in nostalgia whenever I see baloney in a delicatessen showcase.

  Sadly, during Hurricane Hugo, the house was completely swept away and destroyed. The same is true of the motel we all stayed in during the 1980 expedition. All that was left were the concrete slabs where the cottages once sat.

  * * *

  A brief detour here: No historical saga of the Civil War ships lost in Charleston can be written without a mention of Benjamin Mallifert, a former Union officer of engineers, who became the most renowned salvage specialist of his time. One of his descendants sent me a photo of him in the uniform of a Union army major. The ladies would have considered him an attractive man; his eyes burned with a humorous twinkle, and he sported a neatly trimmed thick beard. He was energetic, and no slouch when it came to stripping a shipwreck of anything that was valuable, including scrap metal.

  Mallifert ruled over an operation that salvaged more than fifty Civil War shipwrecks in the years after the war. In Charleston alone, he raised millions of pounds of iron, brass, and copper from the sunken warships, Union and Confederate alike.

  His diving operations are recorded in his diaries that rest in the Charleston Fireproof Building archives, and they make interesting reading. He must have been a congenial man with a droll wit. One of his entries reads, “My divers reported bringing up five hundred pounds of iron today, more or less… probably less.”

  His description of each wreck, and his accounting of the metal removed, was valuable in determining how much wreckage remained after he moved on.

  Ten years ago, I ran across him again. Not in Charleston, but on the James River of Virginia. My NUMA team and I were searching for Virginia II, Richmond, and Fredericksburg
, three Confederate ironclads that made up the James River fleet. When General Grant took Petersburg near the end of the war, the commander of the fleet, Admiral Raphael Semmes, former captain of the famed Confederate raider Alabama, ordered the fleet blown up and scuttled.

  There was a crude drawing of the ships exploding below Drewry’s Bluff on the river below Richmond. We found nothing on the sidescan sonar. The magnetometer registered large targets, but they seemed indistinct and scattered. Since they were all buried in the river’s mud, Doc Harold Edgerton, renowned inventor of the sidescan sonar and strobe light, came along with his subbottom profiler — or penetrator, as he called it.

  Doc tried hard but had no luck. His penetrator could not see through the gas pockets under the mud formed over the decades by decomposing leaves from trees along the banks. We were about to throw in the towel when I decided to take a day off from the search to comb through the Army Corps of Engineers archives in Portsmouth, Virginia. I was determined to study every drawer and cabinet in the place if it took me all week.

  At two o’clock in the afternoon, I pulled open a drawer labeled Survey of the Pamunkey River, 1931. One by one, I went through a stack of old photographs, survey drawings, and sheets of statistics. Then, out of the blue, I ran across a sheet of thick transparent paper 28 inches by 18 inches, with a scale of 3/4 of an inch equaling 50 feet, and pulled it from the drawer. At first glance, it appeared to be a drawing of the banks along a section of the James River. It clearly didn’t belong in the Pamunkey River drawer. How it got there, and for how long it had been there, was anybody’s guess.

  I stood spellbound as I examined the artwork that was uniquely tinted from the back of the transparent paper. The wording at the top in front read, “Disposition of wrecks below Drewry’s Bluff, 1881.”

  The illustrator signed his name Benjamin Mallifert.

  I felt as though I’d stepped into the Twilight Zone. This had to be more than mere luck. It could only come under the heading of fate. Researchers spend half their lives stalking the mother lode. I found it after only four hours of looking in what should have been the wrong place.