The Sea Hunters II: More True Adventures with Famous Shipwrecks Page 8

  Clay’s Landing on the west bank of the Mississippi, a short distance above Baton Rouge.

  With optimism beating in my heart — my brain too used to failure to be confident — I launched a search for Clay’s Landing.

  That proved to be tougher than it sounded.

  In the meantime, I came across a delightful book by Mary Helen Samoset titled New Orleans. I quickly began correspondence with Mrs. Samoset and found her to be a wealth of information about the vessel.

  I learned that the owners of the boat salvaged her engines and most of her hardware. Engines were expensive and complicated pieces of machinery for their time. Boilers, however, were seldom salvaged, since prolonged use generally wore them beyond the value of the costly repairs that were usually needed. Any piece of equipment, such as an anchor, a steering mechanism, a helm, or hardware, was removed. These were placed in a new vessel, also called New Orleans.

  This removal of equipment would not leave much for our magnetometer to detect, but we thought there still might be enough iron to detect, and there was always hope that part of the hull might still be visible above the mud and could be picked up on our sidescan sonar.

  I began to wonder why no one had ever looked for such a historic ship before.

  Fortunately, I was contacted by Keith Sliman, who at the time worked for Seven Seas Dive Shop in Baton Rouge. Keith generously volunteered his time to probe the real-estate records in the Louisiana state capital in Baton Rouge and find the missing part of the puzzle. It wasn’t easy. Though ownership of the shore on both sides of the river was reasonably well documented, most records didn’t go back to 1814. Until now, no one had found a document recording Clay’s Landing. At first it looked as though that part of the west riverbank had been owned by a Dr. Doussan and was now called Anchorage Landing. This item of information did not look encouraging until Keith dug up a deed of transfer of the property from John Clay to Dr. Doussan, which included an 1820 plat map of the site.

  Thanks to Keith, we thought we were rounding third and heading for home. Craig Dirgo and I flew down to Louisiana to examine the shoreline and try to get an exact fix on Clay’s Landing. Baton Rouge, though a fine capital city, is like the surface of Mars, thanks to the humidity in August. Why is it every time I head south it’s August? I never seem to get it through my head to go in the spring, before the bugs and heat are bad.

  I am often asked how NUMA schedules shipwreck searches. We use a scientific formula that consists of who is available to go, when necessary permits are in hand, and what the tide and weather conditions are. The main factor, however, centers around whether I have the time to go between writing books.

  After landing at the Baton Rouge airport, renting a car, and checking into our motel, we drove to the site above West Baton Rouge across from the state capital on the west side of the Mississippi.

  It was not an auspicious beginning.

  On what was once the site of Clay’s Landing, where the famed New Orleans had snagged and sank, was a huge tank facility owned by the Placid Oil Company. On one side of the levee stood the tanks and pumping houses. On the other side, along the bank and out into the water, were the oil-loading platforms, pipelines, and tank barges, all built of steel. With more metal scattered about than what is found in a hundred-acre scrap yard, distinguishing what remained of New Orleans with our trusty Schoenstedt gradiometer would be next to impossible.

  Though we hadn’t planned on conducting an extensive survey on this first exploratory peek at the area, Craig and I decided to give it a try.

  That afternoon and most of the next day, we walked a systematic grid across the property we defined as having been Clay’s Landing. Other than a few buried pipelines, which are fairly easy to identify because of the narrow readings that stretch in a straight line, we found little of interest. By inspecting the ground in minute detail, we got a pretty good idea of the scope of our task in locating any remains of the steamboat.

  Since Sheriff Bergeron and his West Baton Rouge sheriff’s department had been so generous with their assistance back in 1981, when Walt Schob and I found the site of the Confederate ironclad Arkansas, we asked for their help once again. And they came through again, lending us their aluminum river search boat, which had been beautifully crafted and welded by a trustee who was in jail for murder. A deputy came along as pilot.

  We began soon after sunrise. Once Clay’s Landing was established from the riverside, we began sweeping back and forth. By nine that morning, it was already hot. The Mississippi was as flat as a mirror, and the only wind we enjoyed came from the movement of the boat. For the next few hours we swept, beginning two hundred yards out and working toward the shore. We received no readings of more than a few gamma, certainly no more than what a hammer lying in the mud would record. Closer to shore, we received a strangely consistent mag reading that made no sense to us at the time.

  While I ran the gradiometer, Craig killed time perusing the boat’s logbook. It made interesting reading, since the little craft was primarily used for retrieving bodies from the river. There wasn’t any finesse to it. A large grappling hook on a line was tossed from the stem, and the deputies trolled until they snagged something.

  “How do you know if you have a body or a big fish on the line?” Craig asked the deputy.

  “A waterlogged body creates a lot of drag,” the deputy replied. “It slows down the outboard motor real good.”

  Craig held the stainless-steel hook in his hands and examined it. “What do most of the bodies look like when you find them?”

  “They can be real ripe,” the deputy answered casually. “The skin can slide off like a tangerine.”

  Craig’s face wrinkled as he quickly replaced the hook in its holder and wiped his hands with a rag.

  “Sometimes they’re gassy and explode like a flesh bomb when they reach the surface,” the deputy continued matter-of-factly. “But mostly they’ve been chewed up by fish and turtles. Sometimes boats go over them, outboard props ripping them up. Once I just hooked a head and part of the shoulders and chest. I ain’t got no idea where the rest of the body went.”

  Craig stared at the grappling hook he’d been handling.

  I couldn’t resist.

  “Lunchtime,” I announced. “Want a raw beef and gooey cheese or tainted tuna sandwich?”

  Craig shook his head. “Maybe later,” he said, finally taking his eyes off the hook.

  It was four o’clock when we called it quits. We could not mag close to shore because the steel barges blew the gradiometer off scale. We had gotten no magnetic signature that indicated we had found New Orleans. On top of that, we had run out of water two hours earlier.

  As we began to cruise back to the boat ramp where the deputy had left the trailer, Craig turned to me and asked, “You sweating?”

  I checked and found my skin dry. Strange, I thought, since the atmosphere was like a steam bath. “No,” I answered.

  “I noticed I’d stopped a half hour ago. I don’t think that’s good.”

  “We’re dehydrated.”

  “My thoughts exactly.”

  By the time we reached the ramp and had helped the deputy load the boat on the trailer, the inside of our mouths felt as if they had been filled with talcum powder. Our faces were sunburned, and our eyes had the vacant look of men dying of thirst in the desert. Climbing into the superheated car that had been left in the sun only made things worse. We were about to stop at a house to ask the owner if we could drink from a garden hose when I gasped and pointed to a Circle K convenience store on the next corner.

  “There!”

  Craig hurtled the car into the parking lot. We jumped out and ran inside almost before it stopped moving. This being 1989, there was no such thing as cold bottled water as there is today. The only water for sale then was distilled in plastic gallon jugs. We snatched the biggest cups we could find and filled them to the rim at the soda fountain. Downing them in seconds, we again held them under the spigots for seconds. We
had become almost completely dehydrated.

  “Hey,” the clerk yelled at us, “you can’t do that.”

  Craig, a reasonably large man, scowled at him. “When we’re done, charge what you will. We’re dying here.”

  The clerk nodded and backed off. He’d probably assumed, judging by our bedraggled appearance, that we couldn’t pay. When we’d finished at last, Craig handed him a ten-dollar bill. “Keep the change, and buy the next thirsty travelers a drink.”

  After a cool shower in our air-conditioned rooms, we met for dinner and discussed the day. Nature and man had thrown every obstacle in our path. We hadn’t really expected to find New Orleans the first time out. That rarely happens. But we had not expected such a tough project in searching for a ship we knew we could pinpoint within a rectangle the size of a football field.

  It was time to head for the old corral and do some homework.

  * * *

  We now went back to the basics and overlaid old charts with new ones. The shoreline since the building of the levee seemed vague. From what we could conclude, the bank had receded over the years. But how far?

  Then, a few months later, we received a report from the Army Corps of Engineers that came within a hair of halting the search in its tracks. In 1971, during a project to strengthen the levee, they’d laid an articulated concrete mattress along the bottom of the levee just below the waterline. The mattress contained iron rebar inside and hinges made of steel. This is what had given us our continuous mag reading near the west bank. It appeared that the mattress had been laid directly over what was once Clay’s Landing.

  This dilemma, combined with the steel barges, docks, and pipelines along the shore, made it impossible to detect any remains of New Orleans. With a sinking heart, I put the search data in the file marked “Improbable” and turned my thoughts to other lost ships.

  * * *

  Three years later, I was at a cocktail party when I was introduced to a fan of my books. I hate myself for not remembering his name, but we never made contact again. He was an older gentleman with a bald head rimmed with white hair, and deep-blue eyes behind rimless spectacles.

  During the course of the conversation, he mentioned that he lived in West Baton Rouge parish. I mentioned our work there on the Arkansas and New Orleans, and we talked a bit about the history of the Mississippi. He had been diving in the river off and on for many years, a feat most divers from Louisiana or Mississippi don’t care to experience. He regaled me with stories of being dragged more than a mile underwater by the four-knot current and of suddenly meeting up with an eight-foot-long, five-hundred-pound catfish in the murky water. He also talked about a strange phenomenon: once you reach a depth of eighty feet, the water visibility suddenly turns from two feet to a hundred feet.

  At his urging, I described my search for New Orleans in more detail, narrating our failure to find her.

  He looked at me and smiled. “You didn’t look in the right place.”

  I hesitated, wondering what he had in mind. “We had Clay’s Landing pegged to within a hundred yards,” I argued.

  “Not the right direction.”

  “Where would you have us look?”

  He leaned back, sipped from his scotch and water, and peered over his glasses. “Certainly not up and down the bank.”

  “Where else could it be?” I asked, my interest mushrooming.

  “Out in the river. Since I was a boy, the west bank has receded anywhere from two to three hundred yards. Clay’s Landing must be way out in the river.”

  I digested that for a few seconds as the revelation began to build and flood inside my mind. “Then it’s beyond the concrete mattresses.”

  “Way beyond.”

  Suddenly the siren’s call of New Orleans began to sound again. Thanks to this chance encounter with a stranger at a Telluride cocktail party, we’d been given a second chance at finding the first steamboat on the river.

  * * *

  In August of 1995, we tried again. Why do we always go south in August? After excavating a wreck off Galveston that we hoped would be the Republic of Texas Navy ship Invincible but were unable to positively identify, Ralph Wilbanks, Wes Hall, Craig Dirgo, my son Dirk Cussler, and I headed to Baton Rouge with Diversity and all the equipment in tow. After arriving and losing a small wad of hard-earned cash on a riverboat casino, we turned in for the night. High rollers that we are, our combined losses came to all of thirty dollars. It might have been more, but I think Ralph actually made a couple of bucks. Interestingly, under Louisiana law, the riverboat cannot dock along the shore but must move along rails attached to the keel in the water. I guess that by using that ploy, the esteemed state legislators can claim that the evils of gambling do not touch sacred Louisiana soil.

  Before launching the search, Ralph and I interviewed several of West Baton Rouge parish’s senior citizens. They all agreed that during their lifetimes the river had eaten away the west bank, and the present shoreline was three hundred yards west. The next morning, we found a ramp beneath the bridge spanning the Mississippi River and launched Diversity.

  We began mowing the lawn of the search grid, beginning almost in the center of the Mississippi and working toward the west bank. We ran very tight lines, using both the magnetometer and the sidescan sonar. The day went slowly. Thanks to Ralph and his big ice chest, Craig and I did not become dehydrated again.

  Six hours later, we had covered the entire search grid three times. Except for a few minor hits, the mag had recorded nothing worth pursuing. The sonar had found a target at about the right distance from shore, but it was a good two hundred yards downriver from the southern boundary of what had been Clay’s property.

  Because we were running out of time, and everyone had commitments back home, we decided to return and investigate the target another time. And since none of us was experienced at diving in a muddy river with a four-knot current, we thought it best to line up and work with local divers who were more knowledgeable about the local conditions.

  We were in an optimistic mood now that we had a target in the general area. Sadly, we abruptly met with another disappointment.

  As we were pulling in the mag and sonar sensors, we watched, stricken, as a huge Army Corps of Engineers dredge came down the river, its buckets digging deep into the mud of the river and depositing it into barges. Though it missed our target by a good hundred yards, we could not help but wonder if this had been the ultimate fate of New Orleans.

  I once suffered the same discouragement when we arrived hours too late to save the remains of the famous Union ironclad Carondelet. A great dredge had gone over the site and ripped it to shreds the day before we launched our search — a hundred and ten years after she had sunk in the Ohio River.

  Chances are that the famous old New Orleans is gone. But she left a fabulous legacy, and who knows, maybe there is a tiny chance our one-and-only target might just be it. The odds are against us, but hope springs eternal, and someday we’ll return and check it out.

  PART THREE

  The Ironclads Manassas and Louisiana

  I

  Civil War Turtle 1861–1862

  “Curse this boat,” Lieutenant Alexander Warley said loudly. “I feel like a horse wearing blinders.”

  His command, the Confederate ironclad Manassas, was less than fifty yards downriver of Fort Jackson, some seventy-five miles south of New Orleans. Warley peered through the single bow port into the misty night. The clattering of the machinery, combined with the hissing of the steam boilers, was magnifying the tension Warley already felt. The Confederate ironclad was untested and only weeks from completion. And although the night of October 11, 1861, was unseasonably cool, Warley was sweating.

  Fourteen feet of Manassas was underwater, with only the top six feet of the convex hull and the twin smokestacks rising into the air. Because of an Indian summer, the temperature of the Mississippi River had remained warm longer than usual. With the shroud of warm water around her hull, combined with the he
at from the boilers, Manassas was being warmed from without and within. Slipping downstream with the current, Warley wondered how he and his crew had found themselves here.

  * * *

  Farther south, at the Head of the Passes, the area of the Mississippi River Delta where the river forked into three separate channels, Commander Henry French, aboard the ten-gun Union sloop Preble, finished writing in his log and prepared to turn in for the night. After waiting for the ink to dry, he closed the logbook, capped his inkwell; and set his quill pen in the holder. Stretching in his chair, he rose to extinguish his whale-oil lamp, then changed his mind. Leaving the lamp burning, he walked through the passageway and up the ladder onto the deck. Saluting the deck sentry, he pulled a leather pouch from his jacket pocket and began to stuff tobacco into the bowl of his newest pipe.

  Striking a wooden match, he waited until the strong sulfur smell was carried away by the wind, then touched the match to the bowl and puffed the pipe to life. Then he stared across the water. The night was black, with no moon, and a mist hung low over the water. The scant illumination came from lanterns on the deck of the twenty-two-gun flagship Richmond, and the few on the deck of the Union sloop Joseph H. Toone that was tied alongside. The sloop was off-loading coal for Richmond’s boilers, and French wished the loading operation was finished.

  No captain enjoys having the maneuverability of his vessel compromised, and French’s feelings were heightened by the fact that he was at the mouth of an inland waterway and not far out to sea, as he preferred. Rivers were for flatboats and barges, not warships, French thought to himself. He drew in a mouthful of smoke.

  “Sights or sounds?” he said to the sentry, after he exhaled.

  “No sights, sir,” the seaman noted. “With the bunkers being reloaded, it’s hard to hear anything from upriver. Nothing indicates it won’t be a quiet night, though, sir.”