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

  But that, and all subsequent searches, turned up nothing.

  II

  Dr. Graves, What Have You Done? 1987–1997

  Every time we return from searching for the Twin Sisters cannon in Harrisburg, we swear we’ll never go back. It’s the only sane thing to do. I don’t wish to demean the good citizens of Harrisburg, but I can envision more exotic locales to spend a holiday. Why we’ve come four times to torture ourselves, I’ll never know. That we go again and again borders on psychosis, which means we have definitely lost contact with reality.

  Like other searchers who have become addicted to the Twin Sisters, some of whom have looked half a lifetime, I believe that, despite the fragmentary and incoherent evidence, they are buried somewhere around Harrisburg. This isn’t all that inconceivable when you consider that I believed in the tooth fairy, Santa Claus, and virgins until my fortieth birthday.

  No one really knows what happened to the famed Twin Sisters cannon that were put to good use by Sam Houston at the battle of San Jacinto. Stories circulated that they were dumped in Galveston Bay to keep them out of the hands of Union soldiers, or sent north after the war where they were melted down, or — the most fabulous tale of all — buried after the war in Harrisburg. The truth is probably lost in the mists of time.

  The only good source is the eyewitness account of a Union soldier stationed in Houston who found the cannon lying in a pile with several others near his barracks. Corporal M. A. Sweetman, who was about to be mustered out of the army, wrote in his diary, on July 30, 1865:

  1 saw a number of old cannon, one and perhaps more of large size, and all of them dismounted. There were no caissons, limbers nor ammunition boxes, and the guns had the appearance of having been picked up somewhere, hauled in and dumped temporarily to await removal to some other place. Among these guns were two short and very common-looking iron 24-pounders.

  Sweetman also found another pair of guns that he thought interesting:

  On brass plates attached to the wooden carriages of each of the two guns, iron six-pounders, much more symmetrical in shape and appearance, was the following, the first line in old English.

  TWIN SISTERS

  THIS GUN WAS USED WITH TERRIBLE EFFECT

  AT THE BATTLE OF SAN JACINTO.

  PRESENTED TO THE STATE OF TEXAS

  BY THE STATE OF LOUISIANA

  MARCH 4, 1861

  HENRY W. ALLEN

  CHARLES C. BRUSLE

  WILLIAM G. AUSTIN

  COMMITTEE OF PRESENTATION

  From the condition of the guns at the time I saw them, it was evident that no person there at the time took very much interest in them, and if the only object was to get rid of them it is more likely they would be thrown into Buffalo Bayou than shipped.

  Sweetman then exits stage left while Dr. H. N. Graves enters stage right.

  * * *

  On their way home after the end of the war, Dr. Graves and his buddies step off the train at Harrisburg six miles south of Houston on August 15, 1865. In Graves’s own words:

  Arriving at Harrisburg, when alighted from the train we saw a number of cannon of various sizes dumped by the side of the railroad track Looking over the pile, I was surprised to note that the famous Twin Sisters were among them and felt that they, at least, should be protected from vandalism or confiscation by the Federal Troops, then preparing to take possession of Texas. Therefore, to my messmates, Sol Thomas, Ira Pruitt, Jack Taylor, and John Barnett of Gonzales, I suggested that we bury the Twin Sisters. One of them responded, “That’s right-we’ll bury them so deep no damned Yankee will ever, find them.”

  He goes on to say:

  Before burying the cannon, we took the woodwork apart and burned it. The carriages themselves, we threw in the bayou, after which we rolled the cannon some 300 or 400 yards into the woods.

  I have a problem with this statement. Number one, what woodwork? An entire gun carriage was built of wood. Number two, a fire would have caused suspicion. Union soldiers were camped within a mile and often walked to Harrisburg for food and drink. Number three, what was left of the carriages to throw in the river if they were burned? And number four, why roll the cannon 400 yards into the woods when you could have rolled them on carriages? Besides, you can’t roll cannon because of the trunnions, the pins opposite each other on a gun so it can be pivoted up and down. This scenario doesn’t make sense. Also, it was a hot, sultry night. These guys were toughened by war, but they weren’t at their physical peak, and one of them had measles. So I don’t believe they hauled the guns as far as Graves claimed, certainly not through a forest at night. They must have used a road or path most of the way before turning into the woods.

  Graves went on:

  It developed that the earth at the spot selected for burial was more compact than anticipated, as a result of which we dug only about two and a half or three feet. Then we buried the little Twins in a single shallow grave, marking the spot as best we could by hacking a number of nearby trees. The earth was tamped down as firmly as could be done with our feet, and dried leaves and brush were heaped over the spot.

  This is the only detailed account Graves gave. If only he had said which direction he and his buddies took when they stole the cannon and pushed them off into the night. Regrettably, he left more questions than answers.

  Before leaving, the men all took a solemn oath that none of them would ever reveal the secret of their hiding place until all possibility of their cannons’ capture and confiscation by enemy hands was removed.

  In 1905, forty years later, Dr. Graves, Sol Thomas, and John Barnett returned to Harrisburg and attempted to relocate the site where they buried the guns. They drew maps separately, according to their memories of the landmarks, and compared sketches. The maps all coincided; however, the men were not successful in finding the exact spot, since the terrain had undergone marked changes — a situation I find all too often on NUMA searches.

  The three men actually found three of the original marked trees and two of the stones they had placed in the general area. This would indicate that they must have been within a dozen feet of the Twin Sisters.

  Another fifteen years passed, and then, in 1920, a reporter with the Houston Chronicle by the name of Mamie Cox persuaded Dr. Graves to come back to Harrisburg for another try at finding the Twin Sisters. In her story, Graves was driven around Harrisburg before stopping in the general location of the guns’ burial. Unfortunately, no record was left as to where the car stopped for the search or to whom the property belonged. Supposedly, Graves found two of the landmarks he left in 1865.

  So ends an intriguing tale of a mystery filled with bafflement.

  Texans have been drawn to search for their heritage over the decades. Many individuals and groups have probed the landscape around Harrisburg looking for the guns. They’re probably the only tourists who go there. Despite their efforts in analyzing clues and pursuing tantalizing leads that never pan out, they still search. And so does NUMA.

  * * *

  We first beat the bushes in the fall of 1987. Wayne Gronquist, Austin attorney and then president of NUMA, assembled a group of ten or so Texans who owned metal detectors and were fired up for the hunt. The first probe concentrated on the area west of the railroad tracks that run north across Bray’s Bayou into Houston. We spread out in a line and worked inland from Bray’s Bayou.

  It was like trying to pick up confetti with a nail on a stick during a windstorm. Over the years, industrial manufacturers had used this location to dump everything from scrap metal to steel fifty-five-gallon drums to old refrigerators. There was so much iron that the metal detectors and magnetometers almost burned up.

  I made the only discovery of the day. When sweeping through a field of high grass, I was startled down to my socks when two illegal immigrants leaped up and took off across the field. They must have been either hiding or sleeping when I almost walked on top of them. I shouted after them, “It’s okay, enjoy your day!” But they never turned or looke
d back before vanishing in the woods.

  * * *

  In 1988, Gronquist met up with another group of Texans looking for the cannon, led by Richard Harper and Randy Wiseman, who agreed to join forces with NUMA. Our people consisted of Bob Esbenson, Dana Larson, Tony Bell, and the Ross family. We all gathered in Harrisburg in March to begin the sweep. While we searched along the bayou, Harper and Wiseman hired a huge backhoe to dig a hundred-foot trench twenty feet wide and fifteen feet deep, but found nothing of interest.

  The next day, using the Schonstedt gradiometer, I found an iron rim that came off an old wagon wheel and dug it up along with several old bottles. I felt the rim was too narrow for a cannon carriage, more in keeping with the size of a buggy wheel. But Harper and Wiseman became enthused, and they felt sure the rim came from the Twin Sisters gun carriage. They later dated the bottles to sometime in the 1860s.

  The next day, there was a conflict between the two groups. Harper and Wiseman became angry because one of the people who had volunteered to bring his metal detector was a known treasure hunter. Why this bothered them, I’ll never know. If found, there was no way the guns were going anywhere but to the state capital in Austin, and from there to the conservation labs at Texas A&M. They were also disappointed that we had not rented a bigger backhoe, even though we had excavated along the railroad tracks where they requested. Then there was a problem of proprietary rights. I got the idea that they thought the Twin Sisters belonged to them and that we were interlopers cutting into their territory.

  I figured this was the perfect time to steal off into the night and head to the nearest saloon for a tequila on the rocks.

  * * *

  For the next safari through the. tick-infested Harrisburg bush country, I called on the services of Connie Young, the noted psychic from Enid, Oklahoma. Along with Craig Dirgo, on his first expedition with NUMA, we drove through Harrisburg while Connie worked her magic. She sensed a pair of hot spots between the Southern Pacific railroad tracks and Bray’s Bayou. We then continued to Galveston, where Wayne Gronquist and a group of volunteers were searching for the Republic of Texas warship Invincible. Connie thought there was a possibility that Invincible might be under the sand on the beach, since the shoreline had worked out nearly half a mile after the long rock jetties were built around the turn of the century. A Texas rancher, who had volunteered his services, drove up and down the beach in his SUV while I dragged a gradiometer out the rear end. Connie, Craig, and a Boy Scout came along for the ride.

  We were passing time waiting for a target to make itself known on the recorders, when I turned to Connie and said, “Time sure flies when you’re having fun.”

  The words were barely out of my mouth when the rancher drove over a ditch in the beach without slowing. Craig and I both tumbled from where we were sitting on the tailgate. He rolled on the sand and back to his feet. I went straight up into the air and down onto my head. The blow crushed two of the discs in my spine. Anguish and torment can’t describe the pain. I could only gasp, unable to utter a word. Everyone stood around in a daze, thinking I had broken my back, until Craig walked over, picking sand from his ear, then looked down at me on the ground.

  “You don’t look so good,” he said, tilting his head to allow the sand to run from his ear.

  Over time Dirgo has proved to be a master of the obvious.

  “Move your leg for me,” he said.

  I did, though in much pain. He reached down to help me to my feet.

  “I think you’ll live to write another day,” he said, as I slowly rose to my feet, “but we might want to take a side trip to the hospital.”

  A trip to the hospital and an X ray told the story. I’ve lost half an inch in height due to age and another inch and a half to a pair of mashed discs. I had compressed from six feet three to six feet one in two seconds and was no longer as tall as Dirk Pitt, the hero in my books. A year and six months would pass before the pain slowly receded.

  I think Craig said it best that day after we left the hospital and were driving back to the motel in the rental car. “I thought we killed the goose that laid the golden egg.”

  “I’ll make it,” I said through gritted teeth.

  Craig steered along the road running down Galveston’s sea-wall. “You know the good thing about motels?”

  “What’s that,” I asked.

  “Ice machines.”

  Craig, who over the years has proven to be a more than an adequate scrounger, continued. “I’m going to get a trash bag and fill it with ice,” he said, “then I’ll take some duct tape and wrap it around your body to hold it in place.”

  It worked, but I looked like a hunchback.

  * * *

  Unable to go out on the search boat the following day, I instructed Gronquist to begin running search lanes at the outer edge of the grid and work in while hunting for Invincible with the gradiometer. Not wishing to sit around, I thought I could take my mind off the pain with a side expedition. So Connie, Craig, and I took a little handheld magnetometer and drove the short distance to Harrisburg and looked for the Twin Sisters.

  Craig ran the mag over the area while Connie experienced vibes. There was a low reading, perhaps suggesting a buried target. Craig then drove into town and rented a backhoe and operator. I was still in the throes of anguish when Connie, bless her heart, bought me a lawn chair to sit on and relax my aching back during the dig.

  As soon as the operator with the backhoe arrived, it began to rain. We sat there under newspapers, teeth clenched, as Craig, crammed into the scoop, went down in the trench every few feet, and swept the mag around the bottom, which was now rapidly filling with water. The mag target petered out as we went deeper.

  I paid off the patient backhoe operator, and we drove back to the motel where we stay in Galveston, Gaidos Motor Lodge. No sooner did we walk in, Connie drenched, Craig looking like a snowman built from mud, and me sloped over like the Hunchback of Notre Dame, than we find Gronquist and crew packing and almost ready to depart.

  I said, “What’s going on? We have another four days scheduled for the project.”

  Gronquist snapped his bag shut and began walking out the door. “We overturned the boat in the surf, and the gradiometer was immersed and shorted out in the salt water. So we’re calling it quits and going home.”

  I was somewhere between enraged and infuriated. “But you finished the search grid.”

  “Nope,” muttered Gronquist. “We were running the first lane when a wave spilled over the side.”

  “I told you to begin out where it’s calm before working toward the surf.”

  Gronquist merely shrugged. “I though it best to start in close where I thought the ship might be.”

  I thought it was a pity it wasn’t Sunday and Gronquist could have stayed in bed.

  Craig wiped some mud from under his eye and looked at me. “I might be able to fix the mag,” he said, “but do you mind if I take a shower first?”

  Later that night, he repaired the damage with a hair dryer borrowed from the front desk, along with some WD-40, solder, and a soldering gun from the hardware store. By that time the volunteers had already given up, but Connie, Craig, and I managed to spend the remaining days in a fruitless search for the cannon.

  So ended the great calamity of 1989.

  I should have scratched the Twin Sisters off my list of things to do, but I was swept away in an orgy of obstinacy. We’d be back.

  * * *

  The next few rounds of battle were fought by Craig and me, along with my son Dirk. When Craig was running the NUMA office, he would drive up to my house on Lookout Mountain outside Denver a couple of times a week to report on what was happening, and we’d spend hours talking. One of the topics was the Twin Sisters. He didn’t want to give up and neither did I, so we would occasionally reread the tale and format strategies. Our flights of fancy could become quite elaborate and detailed.

  My personal favorite was the time we waited until dark and then set off int
o the woods near my home with a pedometer. After walking four hundred yards in a random direction, we marked several trees with dabs of spray paint and returned by a different route. We then waited a week and set out to find them. We never did. Not only that, when we later checked the distance once again with the pedometer, we found that the area where we had searched for the marked trees was more like two hundred or two hundred and fifty yards from my house. That showed that, without accurate aids, estimating distances in a forest at night is at best a hit-or-miss proposition.

  Next we tried carrying a bag of Portland cement, which weighs a lot less than a heavy iron cannon, a distance into the woods. I think I can now tell you that if they were carrying the guns, they didn’t go four hundred yards. More like a hundred and forty yards.

  * * *

  In 1989 and 1994, Craig stopped in Harrisburg for a day here and a day there while going to or returning from other searches, but to no avail. In 1995, when NUMA returned to search for the Texas Navy ship Invincible, Craig and I had a go at it again. I still laugh about this. My son Dirk was due to arrive from Phoenix to lend a hand that afternoon, and since Harrisburg is close to Hobby Airport, where Dirk was arriving, Craig and I figured we could search almost right up until his plane was due to arrive and then rush over and pick him up.

  Over the years, we had moved around our search area and were now concentrating in an area north of the old railroad station and east of the current north-to-south running line. This area is heavily wooded and brushy. Long sleeves and a machete are good things to have. Craig and I marked off a grid and began methodically covering the area. Every chirp from the detector needed to be dug, and we’d brought along a pick and shovel for that purpose.

  My first big find was a bum that was living in the woods — I scared him awake by nearly stepping on him as I walked along, head down. He ran off into the woods like a deer frightened by a bear. He even left his cardboard box behind. I moved it to the side I’d already searched and checked under it — nothing.