The Sea Hunters II: More True Adventures with Famous Shipwrecks

Introduction

We all have a fascination with the sea and the mysteries that lie in the deep. It is still one of the great unknowns. Adventurers climb the highest mountains in order to reach the summits and feast on the horizons fifty miles away. A diver does not share that pleasure. Unless he is diving in the clear water of the tropics, his visibility is seldom more than twenty feet. He can only wonder what lies in the murk beyond.

Men and women have hiked over most of the world’s landmass, and what little we have not encountered has been photographed from satellites. Giant observatories and the Hubble telescope have shown us the wonders of deep space. But the human eye and the camera lens have recorded less than 1 percent of the wonders that lie hidden below the surface of the seas.

The deep liquid void is still a great enigma.

Thanks to mushrooming scientific interest, however, deepwater technology has awakened. Probes have studied everything from bottom storms and the migration of sea life to currents, geology, underwater acoustics, and the increasing bugaboo of pollution. Because of new, sophisticated equipment that can probe thousands of feet down, great shipwrecks of history have been discovered in the silent darkness, after lying centuries in unmarked watery graves.

Men like Bob Ballard and companies like Nauticos have reached and photographed several of these lost wrecks, but many lie there yet, waiting. That’s what we do: We try to find them. The National Underwater & Marine Agency (NUMA) searches for lost ships of historic significance, in the hopes of finding and surveying them before they have deteriorated and are gone forever. Since we are a shoestring operation funded mostly by my book royalties, our expeditions concentrate solely on wrecks in shallow water.

NUMA was formed in 1978 after our first venture — the unsuccessful hunt for John Paul Jones’s Bonhomme Richard— and while we were preparing for our second crack at the same ship. Wayne Gronquist, a prominent Austin attorney, suggested that it would be more advantageous as a legal entity if we incorporated as a not-for-profit foundation. I agreed, and Wayne, who served twenty years as NUMA’s president, filed the documents. And, yes, it is the same name as the government agency in my Dirk Pitt adventure books. The trustees thought it would be sporting to name the foundation after my own fictional creation, so I could say, “Yes, Virginia, there really is a NUMA.”

When it comes to salvage, we leave that to others. No member of NUMA has ever kept an artifact. People who visit my home and office are always surprised to find only models and paintings of the ships we have discovered, never any relics. Any item brought up from a wreck is preserved and turned over to the state in whose waters it was found. For instance, the artifacts from the Confederate raider Florida and the Union frigate Cumberland—both NUMA finds — were preserved by the College of William and Mary before they were put on public display at the Norfolk Naval Museum in Virginia.

My desire is that our discoveries should be followed by federal, state, or local governments; by corporations, universities, or historical organizations with the funding either to raise the wrecks or retrieve the artifacts for exhibit in museums.

In the twenty-three years of its existence; NUMA’s search and survey teams have conducted more than a hundred and fifty expeditions and have discovered or surveyed sixty-five wreck sites. We’ve also searched for a lost locomotive, a pair of cannon, an airplane, and a zeppelin. The successes, I’m sad to say, have been outnumbered by the failures. When you tackle the hunt for a lost object on land or sea, you quickly learn that the odds against finding it are far steeper than your chances of winning at a Las Vegas roulette table.

To look for a shipwreck is at best a crapshoot, and to launch and fund a search, it helps to be the headmaster of the village idiot school or else the kind of stubborn lunatic who tries to walk through walls simply because they’re in the way. I probably fall in the latter group.

You have to live with failure — all too often, it seems. Let me describe just a few of our recent disappointments.

In 2000, we hunted for John Holland’s sixteen-foot, one-man submarine in New York’s East River. Along with his competitor Simon Lake, John Holland is considered to be the father of the modem submarine. Their designs established the underwater navies of Europe and America just around the turn of the century.

Holland’s tiny submarine was thought to be quite sophisticated for its time. Unfortunately, plans and reports on her construction are sparse. She was lost when she was stolen by the Fenian Brotherhood, an early parent organization of the Irish Republican Army, who funded Holland’s early experiments with submarines for the express purpose of putting the British navy out of business. For the Brotherhood, Holland designed and built the most advanced sub of the time, aptly titled the Fenian Ram. Though never created to ram a steel-hulled ship, the three-man, 19-ton boat was 31 feet in length, with a 6-foot beam, and was propelled by a 15-horsepower Brayton twin-cylinder gas engine.

Not content with merely developing an efficient undersea boat, Holland conceived and perfected the instrument that turned the submarine into one of the most devastating weapons of warfare. Taking advantage of a missile developed by John Ericsson, the famed creator of the Civil War Monitor, who graciously allowed the sub builder to use copies of his experimental models, Holland fitted the missiles to a weapon of his own design in a 6-foot-by-9-inch tube. This gun, as it was called, was fired pneumatically by high-pressure air. The brilliant concept has changed little over the past 120 years.

The sub and its weapon worked incredibly well during tests conducted by Holland, tests that irritated the impatient Fenians. Angered because they felt he was taking too much time with his experiments and trial runs with the ram, the Fenians decided to snatch it. On a dark night in November of 1883, a group of maddened Irish tanked up on good whiskey at a Brooklyn saloon. After becoming properly fortified, they borrowed a tugboat and sneaked up to the dock where the Fenian Ram was moored and towed her away.

Enjoying the moment in an alcoholic haze, they became carried away and decided to make off with the small experimental sub, too. Then they headed up the East River toward Long Island Sound, intending to hide the two subs up a small river near New Haven, Connecticut.

By the time they reached Whitestone Point, the wind had begun to blow strongly from the north and heavily buffeted the small convoy. The Fenians failed to notice that the model boat’s hatch cover on the turret had not been tightened down, and water began spilling through the cracks. Rapidly filling, the little sub foundered in the rising waves, snapped her tow-line, and headed to the bottom, 110 feet below. Unaware of the loss, they calmly continued on their way to New Haven.

Happily, the Fenian Ram still survives in a museum in Paterson, New Jersey.

I took up the challenge of searching for the little sub. Ralph Wilbanks hauled his boat, Diversity, up to New York from Charleston, and we stayed on the New York Maritime College cadet training cargo ship in the passengers’ staterooms and ate with the cadets in their cafeteria. I am indebted to Admiral David Brown, dean of the college, whose courtesy and hospitality were a godsend to the project. The college maintenance people helpfully lifted Ralph’s boat in and out of the water and provided space at the dock.

The sidescan sonar revealed many pieces of junk on the river bottom in the area off Whitestone Point, where the sub reportedly sank — though how the Fenians could claim they knew the spot, during a dark and windy night in choppy water in the days before depth sounders, is a mystery to me. I doubt whether they even knew the sub was missing until they reached New Haven.

Many of the anomalies the sidescan picked up were fifty-five-gallon steel drums. We could not help but wonder if one of them contained Jimmy Hoffa. We also recorded a few small cabin cruisers and sailboats on the bottom and imagined them with missing bodies inside. No one was in the mood to dive and find out. The riverbed was littered with so much metallic trash, it was difficult to pick out a small sub under the river mud with the magnetometer since no sign of it appeared on the sonar. After three days of fruitlessly cruising up and down the scenic East River, we packed up and called it a day.

Was the little sub covered over by mud? Did it lie under the Whitestone Bridge, whose steel girders threw the mag into hysterics? Or does it lie farther out in Long Island Sound?

I’m not ready to throw in the towel just yet. I hope to return someday and pick up the search where the river fans out into the Sound.

Continuing my self-inflicted orgy of shipwreck hunting, I then launched a search for the Confederate raider Georgia, which had a short but successful career, capturing nine Union merchant ships from 1862 to 1864. Though not quite as fascinating as that of Alabama or Florida, which we found under the James River in Virginia in 1984, her history made her famous, and, as one of the first sea raiders, her exploits inspired the German raiders of two world wars.

During her cruise, she almost started a war with Morocco, when a group of her officers went ashore and were assaulted by the locals before they barely escaped back to the ship with their bodies still intact. Disturbed by the indignity, the captain of the Georgia ordered the guns manned and brought to bear. He then blasted the Moroccans until they dispersed.

A few months later, no longer considered fit to sail the seas as a raiding cruiser, she was sold and put into service as a mail packet between Lisbon and the Cape Verde Islands, where she was soon captured by a ship of the Union navy as a prize of war and returned to the United States. After a legal battle between the United States and Britain, she was sold to a series of shipping companies, before finally being bought by the Gulf-port Steamship Company for passenger and cargo service between Halifax and Portland, Maine.

When on a passage south from Nova Scotia in January of 1875, the old steamship, still named Georgia, struck the rocks known as the Triangles ten miles west of Tenants Harbor, Maine. The crew and passengers took to the lifeboats and rowed through a snowstorm to shore. No lives were lost, but the ship became a total wreck and was abandoned. She was the last of the Confederate raiders to die.

Historian Michael Higgins produced a small mountain of research on Georgia and her grounding, contacted me, and, soft touch that I am, I agreed to arrange a search off Maine for the remains of the fabled ship. After arriving in Tenants Harbor with Ralph, Wes Hall, and Craig Dirgo, we settled into a hotel reminiscent of a Steinbeck Monterey fish cannery. We passed time throwing rocks from one side of town to the other and watching the rails rust at the train depot, before finding an old-fashioned drugstore with ancient white octagonal tile on the floor and a genuine antique soda fountain.

I ordered my all-time favorite from my childhood, a chocolate malt with chocolate ice cream churned in a metal canister by a 1930s mixer. One sip and I was in paradise.

Early next morning, with Ralph at the helm, Diversity swept out toward Triangle Rocks, dodging literally hundreds of colorfully painted buoys attached to lobster traps. Every lobsterman has his own distinct color-coded buoy, and more and more they are being purchased by collectors.

Wes manned the sonar and I watched the magnetometer, and Ralph threaded Diversity in and around the rocks, while Craig kept a wary eye for lobster buoys or scallop divers. Waves were washing over the rocks all around us, but Ralph seemed oblivious to them as he grimly studied the echo sounder. At times, they seemed so close you could spit on them, and yet they yielded no hint of Georgia.

There were a few small mag hits, but nothing showed on the sidescan sonar. After crisscrossing the Triangles three times, we stared at one another in surprised disappointment. We had come up empty. There was no indication of a shipwreck to be found.

We knew we were in the right spot. The only other rocks were too far out of the area, according to the old reports. Just to play it safe, we checked those out, too. How could an iron-hulled wreck the size of Georgia simply disappear?

The answer came from local historians whom we consulted after the unsuccessful hunt. Since urchin and scallop divers had been all over those rocks for many years without sighting wreckage, the only answer was that Georgia had been salvaged. Records from the 1870s and 1880s are sparse, but it was suggested that, owing to the extreme economic hardships of the citizens of Maine at the time, they’d pulled up almost every pound of her, including the keel and boilers, which they sold for scrap.

Curses, foiled again.

Shipwreck junkies that we were, the gang continued on to Saybrook, Connecticut, to take a stab at finding David Bushnell’s famous Revolutionary War submarine, the Turtle. This was the first practical submarine in the world at the time — every submarine built in the following centuries owes its ancestry to the Turtle.

The son of a Connecticut Yankee farmer, Bushnell had a creative mind and was self-taught in his early years. Entering Yale at the advanced age of thirty-one, he roomed with Nathan Hale, who later became America’s most famous patriot-spy. While in school, Bushnell became fascinated with the untried concept of producing underwater explosions with gunpowder. He was perhaps the first in history to devise and build a powder-filled container that had a clockwork timer capable of being exploded underwater. Not content simply to allow his mines to float against enemy vessels, which he accomplished successfully by blowing up a British schooner and a smaller boat whose crew made the mistake of trying to pull one of the mines aboard, he decided the only effective way to sink a warship was to come up with a means of placing the mine directly against the hull.

His solution was the Turtle, a technological marvel of the time. In a barn next to the house where he lived with his brother Ezra, the brothers constructed a submarine that looked like two turtle shells standing on end. The hull was carved out of solid wood and actually resembled a child’s toy top, set on a flattened lower point. David and Ezra designed a ball type of snorkel valve for air, a vertical-bladed propeller to pull the craft toward the surface, as well as a larger propeller in front for forward motion, an innovation that was seen on ships for fifty years. For submersion, they crafted water ballast tanks as well as detachable ballast weights.

The pilot entered and exited through a raised brass hatch and sat inside in an upright position. He steered with a stern rudder while he turned the forward horizontal propeller. The torpedo, a container with 150 pounds of gunpowder, a flintlock for detonation, and a clockwork mechanism that delayed the explosion until the Turtle had backed away for safety, was connected to the upper section of the submarine by a detachable twist lever that turned a screw that was supposed to penetrate the copper sheathing on the hull of an enemy ship. Once the screw penetrated the sheathing and the gunpowder container was gripped in place, the pilot frantically reversed his forward motion with the hand crank to make his escape.

A soldier from George Washington’s army by the name of Ezra Lee volunteered to become the first man in history to attack a submarine against a warship. The target was British Admiral Richard Howe’s flagship, the frigate Eagle, which was lying in the Hudson River off Manhattan Island. The Turtle worked flawlessly. Lee gave it his best shot and came within a hair of becoming the first submarine to sink a warship, but, unable to see underwater at night, he failed to deploy the explosive device properly. Its attaching screw struck an iron bracket holding the rudder instead of the soft copper nailed to the hull. Unable to attach the gunpowder container, Lee aborted the mission.

A second attempt was made, but Lee dove too deep, and the current was too strong for him to make headway. The third and final effort failed when the British sentries fired on the craft as it escaped. A week later, a British sloop fired on and sank the sloop carrying the Turtle up the Hudson River. The British failed to recognize the Turtle as an advanced instrument of war and left it aboard the half-sunken sloop.

In a letter written by Bushnell to Thomas Jefferson, he stated that he had raised the Turtle but, in his words, “was unable to prosecute the design any further.” Bushnell then experimented with floating mines in the Delaware River, with little success. After the war, he entered medicine and became a physician, practicing while teaching at an academy in Georgia. He died in 1824 at the ripe old age of eighty-five, without leaving a clue as to what he did with the Turtle.

After he recovered it from the Hudson River, did he take it back to Saybrook and scuttle it in the Connecticut River, or did he simply chop it up into firewood and burn it to keep it out of British hands? Neither he nor his brother Ezra left any mention in their correspondences regarding the fate of the famed Turtle.

And so the world’s first practical submarine became lost in the mists of time.

Well aware that it was an exercise in futility, we decided to make a search of the Connecticut River where Bushnell had built the Turtle, desperately clinging to the notion that if you don’t seek, you won’t find.

After our routine consultation with local historians, who were as much in the dark as anyone else about what Bushnell had done with the Turtle, we studied a working replica of the submarine that had been re-created by Frederic Frese and Joseph Leary at the Connecticut River Museum at Essex. The two men had actually performed open-water dives in it. Having soaked up all the available data on Bushnell and his extraordinary vessel, we then launched our boat and began a sidescan survey up and down the river. We were lucky to have a ballpark grid in which to search, since the house where David and Ezra Bushnell had lived while building the Turtle still stands about two hundred feet from the river’s west bank. We did not use a magnetometer, because there was very little iron on the Turtle for it to detect. The ballast was lead and the hatch and fittings mostly brass.

We swept the entire river a good mile in either direction from the Bushnells’ construction site. But the sonar recorded nothing that remotely resembled the Turtle. If Bushnell did indeed scuttle the Turtle off his old workshop — and that is a very big if — it could lie under a four-acre swamp that is impenetrable to man or boat, or it could be covered over with silt. Should that be the case, every target recorded by the magnetometer, no matter how small, would have to be dredged. It’s not an impossible situation, but it is costly and most inconvenient.

Once again, we chalked one up to disappointment. As we are so fond of saying in the shipwreck business, “We still don’t know where it is, but we well know where it ain’t.”

Those are the defeats, and they’re pretty frustrating. It’s the occasional successes that inspire us to sail onward.

Some of them we described in the first Sea Hunters, and some of them are in this book (though they’re not all successes, as you’ll see). But probably the most satisfying one of all was the discovery of the Confederate submarine Hunley and her heroic crew, hidden in the silt off Charleston, South Carolina. I was convinced she had to be there, even though several NUMA search expeditions had failed to find her, and I simply refused to give up.

The story of her discovery was told in the first Sea Hunters. After running 1,154 miles of search lanes dragging a magnetometer sensor, an anomaly that indicated the mass and dimensions of the Hunley was finally discovered. Marine surveyor Ralph Wilbanks and marine archaeologists Wes Hall and Harry Pecorelli III then excavated and made a positive identification of the long-lost sub.

If we hadn’t found it in May of 1995, I’d still be out looking for it.

What couldn’t be told then is what happened afterward. Due to the efforts of South Carolina state senator Glenn Mc-Connell, and of Warren Lasch — who launched the Friends of the Hunley and acquired the funds to raise and preserve the vessel so future generations may view this remarkably advanced craft that became the first submarine in history to sink an enemy warship — the Hunley was raised from the water.

The day she was lifted from her watery shroud of 28 feet and saw the sun for the first time in 136 years, no one present will ever forget.

The recovery team, the true unsung heroes in the drama, labored for months in round-the-clock shifts, excavating and building a truss around the hull so it could be lifted onto a barge. This was no easy feat, especially when it was found that the sub was filled with silt that quadrupled its weight. The international salvage companies that performed the magnificent recovery effort and directed the lift were Oceaneering and the Titan Corporation.

When the moment came, the lifting cables became taut, and the little submarine began to rise from the silt where she had lain for so long. There was hushed expectation from the divers, the engineers, and the thousands of people who had gathered in hundreds of boats for the landmark event. Every eye was on the huge crane that stood on the great salvage barge, its own great pilings driven into the sea bottom. When the sub’s dripping hull, supported by the truss and foam cushions, appeared under a cloudless blue sky, cheers, whistles, and air horns shattered the early-morning calm, while the stars and bars of the Confederacy flew from a forest of masts.

Standing on the press boat and leaning over the railing, I felt an indescribable thrill. Finally, I would lay eyes on her. My son, Dirk, friend and cowriter Craig Dirgo, and I had hoped to dive on her soon after Ralph, Wes, and Harry made the discovery, but several days of rough weather and high seas beat us out. By then it was too late. A Charleston press conference was scheduled to announce the discovery, and we could not venture to the site again for fear of giving away her location to shady Civil War artifact collectors who were already offering $5,000 for a hatch cover and $10,000 for the propeller to anyone who would dive to the wreck and remove them. The Hunley hung poised and elegant, coated in rust and ancient sea life that had attached to her iron plates before the silt covered her entirely. She was gently lowered onto a smaller barge and then towed by two tugboats on her final, belated voyage into Charleston Harbor. Flags on Fort Sumter were lowered to half-mast, as reenactors in authentic Civil War uniforms, both Union and Confederate, shot volleys to the sky, accompanied by muzzle-loading cannon, whose salutes filled the air with puffs of black powder smoke. Women lined the shore wearing antebellum dresses, nine of the garments black in honor of the submarine’s nine dead crew. Thousands of spectators lining the shores cheered as the barge, with its precious cargo, and the fleet of pleasure craft made their way past the town Battery and up the Cooper River to the old navy yard.

The men behind the project had pulled off an amazing feat. The entire operation had gone as smoothly as a ticking clock on the dashboard of a Rolls Royce. A crane lifted the sub off the barge onto a rail car that carried her into the Warren Lasch Conservation Center, where she will spend the next several years in a tank. Here, during her preservation process, her hull plates will be removed so the interior can be excavated and all artifacts and the crew’s remains can be removed and studied. Eventually, Hunley, in all her glory, will be put in a museum for permanent public display.

I was numb with disbelief and exhilaration that the event had actually happened, as numb as I was the day five years earlier when Ralph Wilbanks had awakened me at 5 A.M. and told me he wasn’t going to search for the Hunley anymore — because he and Wes and Harry had just touched its hull!

Dr. Robert Neyland, the naval archaeologist who was in charge of the investigation, graciously allowed me to go up now and touch the sub. After fifteen years and a share of my children’s inheritance spent on the long search, I felt as if an electric shock were running through me as I laid my hands on the propeller. Close up, the vessel looked longer and narrower than I had imagined, far more streamlined and aerodynamically designed to reduce water resistance than anyone had suspected. Hunley was truly a marvel of Civil War engineering and technology.

A photographer asked Ralph, Wes, Harry, and me to stand in front of the sub as it hung suspended in its sling, before it was lowered into the preservation tank. After we posed for a few minutes, the entire building suddenly erupted in cheers and applause. Totally unexpected, it was truly an emotional and cherished moment, a fulfillment of a dream. We all fought back the tears, proud that this moment existed because of us. The years of effort and expense had been worth it.

But, as with a triumphant army after a great victory, the moment soon passed. That was then. Now is now. It was time to plan the next expedition in hopes of finding another historically significant shipwreck.

Perhaps it’ll be the Pioneer II—or American Diver, as she was sometimes called. It was the predecessor to Hunley and was built by the same group of men in Mobile, Alabama. While being towed from the harbor in an attempt to sink one of the blockading Union fleet, she was hit by a squall, and she began to take on water through an improperly sealed hatch until she slipped under the waves. Fortunately, none of her crew accompanied her into the deep. Scientists and archaeologists are anxious to see the technology that was used as a foundation to modify and refine the Hunley into an undersea vessel considered state-of-the-art in 1863.

We’ve just received a permit from the state of Alabama to conduct a search and excavation. Yes, we’re positive this is another wreck that is buried deep in the sand and silt, and so is probably unrecoverable. But if we never make the attempt, we will never succeed.

Much water has passed the bows since Craig Dirgo and I wrote the first Sea Hunters. Since then NUMA has found the wrecks of Carpathia, the ship that rescued Titanic’s survivors and was torpedoed by a German U-boat six years later; the General Slocum, an excursion steamboat that burned and sank in the East River of New York, with a loss of more than one thousand people, mostly women and children; and the Mary Celeste, the famous ghost ship that was found floating off the Azores in 1876 with no one on board, the first great mystery of the seas.

The following narratives chronicle the most recent searches by NUMA crews who dragged sensing equipment through eight-foot seas, found themselves inundated by tidal waves, dove in water so dirty they couldn’t see the fingernails on the hands in front of them, and excavated tons of mud and sand under the worst conditions imaginable, all in an effort to identify a long-lost shipwreck. The people who are portrayed here, both past and present, were and are real. The historical events depicted are also factual but have been slightly dramatized to make the ships, and all who voyaged in them, more immediate to today’s reader.

There is no monetary profit to this ship-hunting madness. I do what I do purely out of a love for our country’s maritime history and to preserve it for future generations. It’s rich and worth cherishing.

Each day is future history. So don’t step lightly. The trick is to leave tracks that can be followed.