The Sea Hunters Read online

  Everyone assembled in Bridlington, England, a blue-collar Las Vegas, during August of 1978. Several divers from the University of Wales showed up to participate. My son-in-law and daughter, Bob and Teri Toft, had arrived early to work with Sidney Wignall assembling the gear and gluing together an old boat that was to be used to ferry the search team and supplies between the Keltic Lord and shore.

  The devil-may-care GarY Kozak showed up to operate the side scan sonar, an electronic instrument that records acoustic imagery of the sea bottom. The image the sonar signal reflects looks much like a photograph that has been copied three or four times.

  Marty Klein, the little giant and CEO of Klein Associates, Inc the builder of the sonar unit, also came along on the hunt for the Bonhomme Richard. On thinking back, I realize the sonar was the only unit, manmade or otherwise, that performed flawlessly. I was also introduced to Colonel Walter Schob, who had come off the Mary Rose project and volunteered to dive when and if we found the remains of John Paul Jones's ship. If nothing else came out of my amateurish inauguration at mounting a shipwreck expedition, Gary, Marty, and Walt became my good pals and have remained so for nearly two decades.

  My wife, Barbara; younger daughter, Dana; and son, Dirk, also joined the expedition. I found it comforting to have friendly shoulders to cry on as the project began to unravel. We all stayed at a hotel on the beach, called the Excelsior, which I was told was a Latin form of "high excellence." An interesting place. I doubt if it's been remodeled since the Romans left tor home. My wife's perfume turned up missing, as did Teri's camera. Noticing that the bedding was unusually rumpled one evening, I asked the chambermaid if she had changed the sheets that day.

  She looked at me queerly and asked, "Did you want your sheets changed?"

  Ah, yes, innocents abroad. But we evened the score down in the dining room. At most English seaside hotels, you are given a particular table to eat your meals. Even single people chat across the room while sitting alone at their respective tables.

  I was usually the first one up in the mornings and read the paper over breakfast. When Gary and Marty walked into the room, I'd invite them to sit with me. Then Dana and Dirk would go over and sit with Teri and Bob. This threw the dining-room staff into a frenzy.

  "Sorry, but you are not supposed to seat other guests at your table," the maitre d' admonished me, face red with stress. "Each guest is assigned their own table."

  "Is it a privilege or a penalty?" I asked innocently.

  The humor escaped him. "These people cannot sit with you. They must dine at their required table."

  . I looked at Marty and Gary, who held their silverware in a death grip. "I believe these gentlemen are happy right where they are and would like a menu."

  "This is not the way we manage things here," the maitre d' hissed in total exasperation.

  "Then it's either my way, or I'll complain to the health commission about the sea gull droppings on the balcony outside my room."

  It was a small battle, but I was happy to win it.

  Dinner involved creative ways to eat boiled potatoes with catchup and Worcestershire sauce. Once I asked the hotel bartender for a martini straight up. I got exactly that, Martini-brand vermouth straight up. Teri was about eighteen at the time. Bless her heart.

  She took it upon herself to set the bartender straight and instruct him on how to make bloody Marys and screwdrivers.

  The opening day of the search didn't get underway until almost eleven o'clock in the morning. The sea was fairly rough and the boat ride from the dock to the Keltic Lord was an adventure in itself. When we came alongside, Gonzo and another crew member helped everyone climb aboard the ship but me. I was left ignored and forgotten on the leaky ferryboat in a rainstorm, knocked up and down against the hull by aggressive wave action, while clutching a briefcase containing my research material, charts of the search area, and a sack of cookies pressed on me by my wife.

  My faithful ship's crew, my loyal team of technicians, had all rushed into the galley for a cup of coffee.

  Struggling over the railing with my load, I reached the galley soaked through to my undershorts. No one gave me so much as a glance.

  Sid Wignall acted as though I didn't exist. it was then I introduced my hand routine, which became beneficial over the years in dealing with mutinous boat crews and dive teams.

  I raised my right hand into the air and inquired in a loud voice, "Does everyone see this hand?"

  They all stared indifferently and nodded silently. heN"atever happens," I continued, "a fire aboard ship, we strike an iceberg, or we're torpedoed by the crew of a U-boat who forgot to surrender, you save this hand."

  Good old Gonzo sailed into the net. "Why should we bust our arse to save that hand, mate?"

  I had the power, the Force was mine. I looked him square in the eye and said, "Because this is the hand that writes the checks. 9 @ It was amazing how I went from Rodney Dangerfield to Arnold Schwarzenegger in the space of thirty seconds. Now I was the first one helped on board the ship. Gonzo became my pal and always kept my coffee cup full. Even the captain began calling me "sir." I knew then that searching for shipwrecks was in my blood.

  Because of the late start during the first days into the search, by the time we began running our lanes in the search grid, which meant towing the side scan sensor back and forth as though we were mowing a lawn, half the day was gone and we had to return to Bridlington before dark.

  When I discussed this problem with Sidney, he came up with a brilliant solution: "Tomorrow we'll pull up the anchor and head to the search area Promptly at six o'clock in the morning." There was groaning in the ranks, but they all agreed that if we were to accomplish anything we had to get off the mark early.

  The shore team showed up at the dock promptly at 5:30- Solid Walt Schob was already there with the boat, standing by to ferry us to the Keltic Lord. Poor Marty Klein looked as miserable as a lobster in the desert. Gary Kozak had one of the worst hangovers I'd ever seen. It was not a pretty sight.

  When we reached the boat, after groping our way through a thick fog, we boarded and found the decks devoid of life. The crew, the British dive team, and Sidney Wignall were all sound asleep, no doubt with visions of Yorkshire pudding dancing in their heads.

  Eyes brimming with malice and undisguised contempt for those who hadn't suffered as we had, I stormed into the crew's quarters, kicked Wignall's door off its hinges, and yelled, "If this boat isn't underway in ten minutes, I'm tying you to the propeller!"

  I'll give Sidney credit. He showed great depth of understanding.

  The anchor clanked up, the ancient engine coughed up a cloud of black smoke through its stack, and the bow cut the water in eight minutes flat.

  The wreck that Sidney thought might be the Bonhomme Richard turned out to be a cargo ship sunk by a German U-boat during World War I. And so the curtain came down on my introduction to the intrigue and adventure of hunting for shipwrecks.

  Six months later, I was saddened to learn that the Keltic Lord, along with its entire crew, vanished without a trace in the North Sea during a winter storm. I'll bet the pubs in the seaport city of Hull haven't been the same since Gonzo's been gone.

  Much to everyone's surprise, I got up off the mat and came out for the second round. I organized another expedition for the following year. Wayne Gronquist, Austin, Texas, attorney and eventual president of NUMA, suggested that for tax purposes we should incorporate as a nonprofit foundation. Wayne filed the papers in Austin, and we became a Texas not-for-profit corporation. Early on, the trustees wanted to call it the Clive Cussler Foundation. Humble Herbert I ain't. But my ego isn't quite that monstrous. I nixed the idea. So they decided it would be humorous to name it after the government agency that employs the hero in my books, Dirk Pitt. I was outvoted and the National Underwater & Marine Agency was born. Now I could say, "Yes, Virginia, there really is a NUMA, a NUMA dedicated to preserving American marine heritage by locating and identifying lost ships of historic signi
ficance before they are gone forever."

  This second attempt to locate the Richard was headed by former Navy Commander Eric Berryman- We covered ten times as much territory with a cost factor less than half the first effort. This trip I had the good fortune to meet and work with Peter Throckmorton and Bill Shea of Brandeis University, both of whom became trustees of NUMA. I also found a solid and comfortable boat called the Arvor III, a yacht that was strangely built to the specifications of a Scottish fishing trawler. An indomitable Scot by the name of Jimmy Flett was the Arvor's skipper, and a finer man I've never met. Even with a top-rated team, we still failed to find the elusive Bonhomme Richard. We did, however, run onto and identify a Russian spy trawler that had mysteriously sunk a short time prior to our discovery. The Royal Navy was immediately notified, and they initiated a classified underwater investigation. I never did learn what secrets they found.

  Someday, I'll give it another try. Gary Kozak once said, "Shipwrecks are never found until they want to be found." Hopefully, next time the Richard will be ready to show a beckoning finger.

  NUMA was now a reality, and with very canny and respected people on board as trustees and advisors, including Commander Don Walsh, who made the ocean's deepest dive aboard the Trieste; Doc Harold Edgerton, the energetic and prodigious inventor of the side scan sonar and the strobe light; and Admiral Bill Thompson, who almost singlehandedly directed the funding and construction of the Navy Memorial in Washington, D.C we began an earnest program of shipwreck search projects.

  After the unsuccessful '78 and '79 expeditions, we turned our ventures to home shores and made our initial try for the Confederate submarine Hunley in the summer of 1980. This preliminary search took in a small grid extending one-half mile from the inlet the Hunley sailed through outside Charleston, South Carolina, before she torpedoed the Union sloop-of-war Housatonic. After the attack, she and her nine-man crew vanished, never realizing they had gone down in history books as the first submarine to sink a warship.

  It soon became apparent, after research and initial probing into the seafloor outside of Charleston, that the Hunley had slowly become buried in the soft silt that covers the seabed off the coast. We found that the remains of Housatonic had also worked their way under the seafloor.

  The only instrument generally used to locate a hidden object entombed under saltwater and sediment is a magnetometer. If the side scan sonar is the right arm of any shipwreck search, the magnetometer is the left. The two metal detectors used most frequently for finding and measuring the magnetic intensity of a buried iron object are the proton mag and a gradiometer. Both basically do the same thing, but use different systems of measurement.

  After finding no trace of the Hunley near shore, we realized the search grid had to be greatly expanded.

  In 1981, we returned with an efficiently organized expedition.

  Alan Albright, chief marine archaeologist with the University of South Carolina, was most cooperative, loaning us a boat and a team of divers.

  Bill Shea operated his home-built proton magnetometer along with Walt Schob, who steered the search boat back and forth along the grid lines.

  A second vessel, a dive boat, followed behind to check out any interesting anomalies found by Bill's mag. The diving operation was headed by Ralph Wilbanks, the state archaeologist who represented the university.

  To keep the mag survey boat in precise position at all times, the Motorola NEni Ranger Navigation Unit was used, with my son, Dirk, sitting in an oven-hot rental van on shore, staring at a graph and giving directions that kept Schob on a straight course while running narrow lanes of thirty meters.

  Although we ran over five hundred miles of search lanes, we failed to pass over the grave of the Hunley. Our dive boat, however, discovered the remains of four Confederate blockade runners, the Union ironclad monitors Weehawken and Patapsco, and the dual-citadel ironclad, Keokuk. We were finally getting our act together.

  After every expedition, we always take what we call a graduation picture of everyone involved with the project. As I studied the seventeen volunteers who worked so hard to find the Hunley and accomplished so much in the discovery of other Civil War shipwrecks, I wondered what a leaner and meaner crew could do.

  In the spring of 1982, armed with the faithful Schonstedt gradiometer, always loaned to us by a wonderful and kindly man, Erick Schonstedt, who supported NUMA every inch of the way, Walt Schob and I set out for a wreck survey on the lower Mississippi River. Renting a station wagon, when they still built them, at the airport, we drove through New Orleans and down into the river delta until we reached the end of the highway at a town called Venice, the jumping-off point for supplies and crews heading for offshore oil-drilling rigs.

  Here we charted a small sixteen-foot aluminum skiff that was owned by a taciturn Cajun fisherman. The first morning, he took my money and never spoke a word to us. By the third day he realized we were nice guys and began telling Cajun jokes. Because I had broken my right ankle two days before, and had a cast halfway to my knee, he kindly loaned me a lawn chair so I could sit comfortably in the bow, my plaster cast propped on the boat's gunnel, hanging out over the muddy water of the river like a battering ram.

  During three days of magging, we found the Confederate ironclads Manassas, next to a load of iron pipe, and Louisiana, both later identified in an on-site study by a scientific team from Texas A & M.

  We also discovered the remains of the gunboats Governor Moore and Varuna, sunk during the battle of the forts when Admiral David Farragut's fleet of Union warships captured the city of New Orleans.

  Walt and I then bade fond farewell to the fisherman and drove to Baton Rouge to search for the famous Confederate ironclad Arkansas, which is covered in more detail in a later chapter of the book.

  This was truly a sublime shoestring operation. If nothing else it proved that you can accomplish a lot if the commitment is there. The biggest expense of the entire project was the airfare. One thought to remember, if something is still missing after the passage of time ninety percent of the time it is because nobody has looked for it.

  Also, unavoidably, time buries all memory of the location.

  To embark on a search for a lost shipwreck, an Indian mound, gold bars, silver coins, or porcelain chamberpots, you don't need the backing of the government or a university. You don't need a truckload of expensive equipment. You don't need a million-dollar inheritance.

  All it really takes is dedication, perseverance, and a grip on your imagination, so you don't get carried away on a wild-goose chase.

  Some artifacts can never be found. Some were never lost to begin with, some were figments of somebody's imagination, and all too many are not anywhere near where they are supposed to be.

  The Mississippi side-paddle riverboat Sultana is a prime example.

  She was a luxurious boat that carried passengers from New Orleans to St. Louis. Shortly after the Civil War, a greedy Union officer, receiving $22 a head from the shipping company for every military passenger, crammed 2,400 troops aboard. Many of them were badly treated prisoners recently released from the infamous Confederate prison camp Andersonville and heading home to their families. The Sultana also carried eighty paying passengers and forty mules. A photograph taken of her when fully loaded has an eerie look about it.

  All the shadowy figures clustered on the roof and crowding the decks, including the mules, look like phantom wraiths.

  About fifteen miles above Memphis, Tennessee, at 2 A.M. on April 27, 1865, a boiler on Sultana exploded and turned her into a holocaust before she sank in a cloud of steam and smoke. At least 1,800 died, and perhaps as many as 2,100. The disaster still ranks as the worst marine tragedy in American history.

  In the sunnner of 1982, Walt Schob and I worked with Memphis attorney Jerry Potter, the leading expert on the disaster and author of the book The Sultana Tragedy. Using the gradiometer, we ran search lines over several sites north of the city on dry land because the Mississippi River has considerab
ly altered its course since 1865.

  Potter recalled that Mark Twain once wrote "that someday a farmer would Turn up a piece of the old Sultana with his plow and be much surprised."

  Twain was very prophetic. The burned-out hulk of Sultana was eventually discovered within fifty yards of the position I had reckoned, two miles from the present banks of the Mississippi, twenty-one feet deep under a farmer's soybean field in Arkansas.