The Sea Hunters II: More True Adventures with Famous Shipwrecks Page 16

  Benjamin Mallifert. I couldn’t believe we had met up again, three hundred miles away in Virginia and ten years after his salvage efforts in Charleston. There before my eyes was his illustration that interpreted detailed locations of the ships of the James River fleet scuttled by Admiral Semmes.

  A comparative analysis showed why we had missed the wreckage of the ironclads. The warships had been moored along shore when they were destroyed. As the years passed, they had built up a huge shoal of sedimentation that covered them over and moved the main channel of the river below Drewry’s Bluff 150 feet toward the opposite bank on the south.

  The team from Underwater Archaeological Joint Ventures that I hired probed the mud and discovered that Mallifert had called the right plays. Some wrecks were in bits and pieces. Most were pretty well scattered. But they were all there: the steamer Northampton; steamer Curtis Peck; pilot boat Marcus, steamer Jamestown; steamer Beaufort; ironclad Fredericksburg; and ironclad Virginia II. The third ironclad, Richmond, we found around the bend off Chaffin’s Bluff. It appeared that only five feet of sediment had covered the ironclads over the past 120 years.

  I owe a considerable debt to old Ben for Charleston and the James River. A fascinating man. I wish I could have known him. A great pity no one has written a biography on his life and the colorful salvage projects he directed.

  * * *

  Back to Charleston: Keokuk was the first warship on my list to be found and surveyed. A chart drawn by a Union navy officer by the name of Boutelle showed her almost in a direct line east of the old Morris Island lighthouse, which had once stood on land. Morris Island had eroded since the Civil War, and now the lighthouse rose out of the water nearly five hundred yards from the beach.

  Cussler’s Law: Riverbanks and coastal shorelines are very restless and are in a constant state of motion. They are never where they were when the target you’re looking for came to rest.

  I chartered a reliable thirty-two-foot wooden boat owned by a big German, Harold Stauber, a quiet man, dependable as a rock and completely unshakable. He knew the waters off Charleston, having fished them for many years. His boat was called Sweet Sue, after his wife. One cup of his coffee and you’d never have worms again.

  Ralph Wilbanks came on board. Those were the days when he worked for the South Carolina Institute of Archaeology. He was sent by the director of the institute, Alan Albright, to monitor our operation, along with a terrific guy named Rodney Warren who acted as Ralph’s assistant. Ralph and Alan didn’t quite know what to make of us. Shipwreck hunters who were interested purely in history and not treasure did not just drop out of the trees. In short, they didn’t trust us. Oh, ye of little faith.

  As we neared Morris Island and the lighthouse, I became cocky. I turned to Ralph and pointed to the lighthouse. “Bet you ten bucks I can find Keokuk on the first lap, and ten bucks a lap until we find her.” I was that sure of myself.

  Ralph gave me his best this guy must be a jerk stare and nodded. “You’re on.”

  I told Harold to aim the bow for the lighthouse and run a straight course until he was about a half-mile from shore before making a 180-degree turn for another try. Then I sat back and waited for the Schonstedt gradiometer to sing as it detected Keokuk’s iron hull.

  We reached the end of the lane. The needle on the instrument dial hadn’t so much as twitched, and the sound recorder had remained as silent as a tomb. Woe is me.

  As we worked north, the next ten search lanes refused to cooperate, and I began to feel like a fox that had found a coyote with indigestion sitting alone in an empty henhouse. I was out a hundred bucks, and my blood pressure had risen twenty points. Where was that dirty Keokuk?

  I looked at Ralph. Now he was blatantly smirking. “I’m going out tonight, and I’m going to have a blast.”

  “I’ll bet you are,” I muttered under my breath. I put my arm on Harold’s shoulder as he stood at the helm. “Run south of our first lane, and don’t turn until I give word.”

  “Will do,” Harold acknowledged, blissfully unaware of the silent skirmish between Wilbanks and Cussler.

  As we closed the distance to the lighthouse, Stauber kept one eye on the fathometer as we went beyond our normal turn mark. The depth began to rise beneath the keel from thirty feet to twenty, then ten. Another few minutes and the keel would scrape the sand. The lighthouse looked close enough to hit with a tossed rock. Yet, judging the distance by eye, it seemed to me that the beach was still too far from where I estimated Keokuk’s site to be.

  One hundred yards, two hundred. Everyone on board wondered when I was going to give the order to turn. The tension began to build.

  “Now?” asked Harold, apprehensively. I didn’t doubt that he would throw me overboard before he ran his boat aground in the surf.

  The waves could be heard curling onto the sandy beach of Morris Island back of the lighthouse. “Give it another fifty yards,” I said, standing like Captain Kirk holding his fire on the Klingons.

  After a few minutes, Harold was sure that gray matter was leaking out of my ears, yet he stood firm.

  “Okay, now!” I burst out, looking up at the looming lighthouse.

  He swung the wheel to port. At almost the same instant, the gradiometer sound recorder squawked loudly. He had struck Keokuk in the turn.

  Only then did a happy Ralph do his Charleston jig on the stem deck.

  Divers Wilson West, Bob Browning, Tim Firme, and Rodney went over the side and probed the bottom. They found the wreck buried four to six feet deep in the silt. She lies north to south, almost under the shadow of the lighthouse. Without dredging, there is no way to tell how much of her hulk is still intact.

  Good old Ralph. He wouldn’t take my money and settled for a bottle of Bombay gin instead.

  It’s times like this that I take an almost sensual pleasure from shipwreck hunting.

  * * *

  Weehawken is buried deep, more than ten feet, a mile or so north of Keokuk Her bow points on an angle toward Morris Island, not far from where Fort Wagner once stood. The remains of the fort, famous for the attack against it by black soldiers from a Massachusetts fighting regiment, depicted in the movie Glory, now lie a hundred feet out into the water. This vast erosion came after the long rock jetties were laid along the channel into Charleston Harbor shortly before the twentieth century.

  Because of Weehawken’s fame as the only ironclad to capture another ironclad in battle, I hope that someday archaeologists will excavate her as a historic treasure.

  We spent half a day dragging the gradiometer all around the seascape before we passed her tomb in the silt. Hers was a tale so gripping, it shocked the world. Unfortunately, the crew slept through most of it.

  It was a hot, humid, miserable day without a breath of wind on the water, a day that made me wonder what the local temperature would be in the next life. Then a voice came over the boat’s radio and announced that the temperature was 96 degrees and the humidity pegged at 100 percent. I gazed up into a totally cloudless sky. Dumb westerner that I was, I couldn’t fathom how the humidity could be 100 percent when it wasn’t raining.

  To pass time during the search, I asked Ralph, “Did you know Shakespeare wrote Hamlet and Macbeth?”

  Ralph looked thoughtful for a moment, then replied, “Oh really, did they ever answer his letters?”

  This business requires patience sometimes — a whole lot of patience.

  * * *

  Finding Patapsco came as a surprise. Unlike the other vessels that rest under a thick blanket of silt, she rests upright and exposed on the bottom of the channel off Fort Moultrie. We gambled that part of her might be protruding from the bottom and engaged the sidescan sonar. The search took less than twenty minutes, and we found her on the first pass.

  Harold anchored the boat. No one wanted to remain on board when we had an honest-to-gosh wreck to investigate — especially one standing up proud out of the mud. The whole crew went over and swam down forty feet to the hulk. There were a
rtifacts galore, from ship’s hardware to cannonballs. None was retrieved. We had to maintain our squeaky-clean NUMA image of searching for history and leaving salvage to others. Besides, the U.S. Navy considers Patapsco a tomb, since the bones of sixty-two of her crew remain inside. Still, she is a historical treasure that should be studied in the future.

  Though she was extensively salvaged by Mallifert’s divers, he made no mention in his diaries of finding any remains of the crew.

  * * *

  We went on that summer to find several blockade runners that had been run ashore and destroyed. We also looked for the Confederate ironclads Chicora, Palmetto State, and Charleston, destroyed when Sherman marched into Charleston, but found no sign of wreckage. Benjamin Mallifert also salvaged these wrecks, and whatever was left when he finished was dredged out of existence by the Army Corps of Engineers when they deepened the ship’s channel to the navy base up the Cooper River. Some people just don’t have a love for history.

  I am reminded of personal loss in my past. I hate to belittle my poor old mother, but I find it hard to forgive her for throwing my comic book collection in the trash after I enlisted in the air force. Many years later, I found a list of my comics in my old Boy Scout manual. I asked an expert to appraise the first Superman, Batman, Torch, and a hundred others I’d owned. The results hurt badly. According to the appraisal, if I still owned them today, they would be worth three million dollars to collectors.

  My mother also sneaked stamps out of my collection and mailed letters with them. I wish I could have seen the face of the postal worker when she handed over a letter with a two hundred-year-old stamp worth $500. I suppose most men have the same stories about their mothers.

  * * *

  In February 2001, I asked Ralph to go back and correct the positions of the wrecks we had located with the Motorola Mini Ranger system using the newer differential global positioning system. He also completed a magnetic contour map of the wreck sites. All neat and tidy.

  Keokuk was relocated and now found to have 6 feet of silt covering her. The water depth was only 16 feet, and her contour indicated a mass at least 130 feet long, so much of her lower hull had to be intact.

  Weehawken was also pinpointed and found to be resting northwest to southeast in twenty-two feet of water under twelve feet of silt. Ralph also located a magnetic target about a hundred feet from the suspected bow. This could well be Weehawken’s anchor and chain, since the mag contour runs in a straight line.

  Ralph’s report brought down the curtain on the Siege of Charleston shipwreck hunt. My fondest wish is that once the Hunley is finally conserved and mounted for public viewing, the museum building will be large enough to accept and display hundreds, perhaps thousands, of artifacts from Charleston’s glorious maritime history that wait in the silt to be retrieved and preserved.

  PART SIX

  The Cannon of San Jacinto

  I

  The Twin Sisters 1835, 1865, 1905

  “Damn them,” Henry Graves said, “Damn them straight to hell.”

  “What is it, Hank?” Sol Thomas asked.

  Graves wiped the sweat from his brow and motioned with his head for Thomas and the others in their party to follow. The afternoon was sweltering, the land covered with a blanket of wet, oppressive heat. August in Houston is never temperate, and this, the fifteenth day of August 1865, was no exception. Climbing off the Galveston, Houston & Harrisburg Railroad platform, Graves led his party around the back of the wood-framed whitewashed building until they were out of earshot of any Union sympathizers.

  “You see that pile of cannon?” Graves whispered.

  “Sure,” Jack Taylor noted, “damn Yankees are probably shipping them north to the smelter.”

  “Well,” Graves said, “two of them are the Twin Sisters.”

  “You sure?” Ira Pruitt asked. “You sure those are Sam Houston’s San Jacinto guns?”

  “Positive,” Graves said. “I read the plaques mounted on the carriages.”

  Sick with measles, John Barnett crouched in the dirt before he fell over. “Lord,” he said.

  The men were standing in a semicircle on the packed dirt. Off to the side was Dan, Henry Graves’s friend and servant. It was four months after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, and other than a few skirmishes in Texas, the long War Between the States was finally over. The five soldiers were dressed in the Confederate butternut-colored wool uniforms used in the last years of the war. The uniforms were tattered, dirty, and soaked with sweat. The men didn’t look much better.

  Thomas had a swollen jaw, the result of a rotting rear molar he had been unable to have extracted. Pruitt looked like a walking skeleton. The scant rations available to a common soldier on the losing side of the war had caused him to shed nearly fifteen pounds. His uniform hung on his frame like coveralls on a scarecrow. Taylor was limping. The soles of his boots had worn through in several places, and he had stepped on the bent end of a rusty nail while aboard the railroad cattle car.

  And then there was Barnett, a proud citizen of Gonzales, Texas. Barnett had emerged from the war relatively unscathed, only to be infected with measles upon mustering out. His face was splotchy and covered with tiny spots. The skin that was unaffected was a pale white. Bamett had a temperature of 101 degrees — not much higher than the temperature outdoors. Only Graves looked reasonably healthy.

  Graves stared to the west at the sun, a glowing red orb clouded in haze hanging low near the horizon.

  “Be dark in a few hours,” he noted, “and the train north doesn’t leave tomorrow until midmorning.”

  Thomas reached into his pocket and removed a tattered piece of paper. “My commanding officer said there was a hotel here that was supportive of Confederate soldiers.” He handed the paper to Graves, the de facto leader of the defeated soldiers.

  “Harris House,” Graves read. “Let’s make our way there and talk this over.”

  The Confederates walked down Magnolia and into the town of Harrisburg. Dan followed a short distance behind.

  1835: THIRTY YEARS BEFORE

  “You need to sign that you are accepting,” the clerk said.

  Inside the shipping office along the levee in New Orleans, Dr. C. C. Rice checked the receipt and initialed it. Then he walked up the gangplank and joined his family on the deck of the steamboat. The United States had a policy of neutrality concerning the war between Texas and Mexico, so the two cannon in his control had been listed on the manifest as Hollow Ware.

  The pair of cannon had been forged at the Cincinnati foundry of Greenwood & Webb in secrecy, paid for by funds donated by the citizens of Ohio who were sympathetic to the Texas cause. Lacking foundry marks, ammunition, caissons, or limber chests, they weighed around 350 pounds each.

  Two metal tubes—700 pounds aggregate weight — were destined to free a nation.

  “They’re raising that big board,” Eleanor Rice said.

  “That’s called the gangplank,” Mrs. Rice said sweetly. “It means the trip has started.”

  Eleanor’s twin sister, Elizabeth, smiled. “That means we’ll soon be in Texas,” she said to her father, who clutched her hand, “and then me and Ellie get our horses, right?”

  “Yes, dear,” Dr. Rice said, “soon we’ll be at our new home.”

  The trip of 100 miles down the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico, combined with the 350 miles across the Gulf to Galveston, took ten full days. It was just past 9 P.M. when the boilers were stoked and the boat made her way into the Mississippi River current.

  * * *

  “It took us longer than scheduled,” Mrs. Rice said, as the steamboat passed over the bar into Galveston Harbor. “Will there be someone to meet us?”

  “I don’t know,” Dr. Rice said. “We’ll just have to see.”

  “There she is,” Josh Bartlett shouted.

  The ship was several hours overdue, and his hastily assembled band had grown more and more drunk as each minute had passed. Bartlett reached over to support
a tuba player as he struggled into his instrument. The fife player was laughing hysterically.

  “Get ready, girls,” Dr. Rice said, as the ship was tied fast to the pier.

  The crate carrying the cannon was rolled out of the hold and down the plank, followed by Dr. Rice, his wife, and the twin girls. The makeshift band was playing a crude medley of Texas revolution songs as Dr. Rice set foot on the wood-planked pier. Bartlett, dressed in an ill-fitting suit covered by a red sash denoting his largely ceremonial position in the Republic of Texas government, walked forward and shook Rice’s hand.

  “Welcome to Texas,” he said, over the noise from the band.

  “Thank you,” Dr. Rice said.

  Rice opened the top of the crate to show off the two guns, then nodded to his twin daughters, who stood next to him on the pier.

  “On behalf of the citizens of Cincinnati,” Eleanor said.

  “We present you these two cannon,” Elizabeth finished.

  The drunken fife player stopped playing for a moment and yelled over the heads of the small crowd of people assembled. “Looks like we have two sets of twins here.”

  “Twin sisters for freedom,” Bartlett said, laughing.

  * * *

  A straw-haired lad of sixteen climbed from a mare flecked with sweat.

  “Mr. Houston,” he said breathlessly, “the guns have arrived.”

  Houston was crouching in front of his tent, sketching out battle plans on the dirt with a stick. He smiled broadly, then turned to his aide.

  “Make sure they are brought forward immediately,” he said to the aide, Tommy Kent.

  “Right away,” Kent said.

  “This changes everything,” Houston said, rubbing the dirt clear with his boot.

  The odds were against the Texans. Houston commanded an army of 783 troops. The invading Mexican forces, capably led by General Santa Anna, numbered 7,500. The Mexican soldiers had uniforms, regular rations, and numerous field pieces to lend them support. The Texan troops were ill equipped, underfed, and, until now, lacking even a single cannon. Most of the Texans had little or no combat experience. The Mexican troops had been drilled and honed into a cohesive fighting force.