The Sea Hunters II: More True Adventures with Famous Shipwrecks

I Cradle of Secession 1863–1865

Rear Admiral Samuel F. DuPont stared into the distance. The bow of his command, New Ironsides, a heavily armed frigate, was pointed in the direction of Charleston. To starboard lay Sullivan’s Island, to port Morris Island and Cummings Point.

Dead ahead was DuPont’s objective, Fort Sumter.

Fort Sumter, a massive brick-and-concrete fortress rising forty feet above the water, was located on a small island off Charleston. Sumter was one of the first Federal installations to be taken by the Confederates. It was also the most visible reminder to the citizens of the United States of the South’s defiance. The first shots of the War Between the States had been fired on Sumter.

DuPont swiveled his head and glanced at his assembled fleet.

From west to east they stretched across the water. Keokuk, Nahant, Nantucket, Catskill, his own New lronsides, then Patapsco, Montauk, Passaic, and Weehawken. The flotilla was an impressive armada tasked with a difficult mission.

The Union ships were clad in armor — a recent development for the antiquated Union navy — and the fleet was powered by steam, not sail. Still, for all their new technology, their task was as old as sea warfare itself: to bring a concentrated fire of heavy guns to bear, to project force on a distant target.

To achieve this goal, DuPont led the most powerful squadron ever assembled.

Commander A. C. Rhind stared through the forward porthole of his command, Keokuk. His ship was farthest to the west and last in the long line of warships. Keokuk was an experimental craft commissioned to the Union navy on February 24, 1863.

Her design was different from that of the seven other Passaic-class ironclads. Unlike the razor-edged styling of the monitors, Keokuk featured a rounded, whale-like upper deck. A pair of armored, half-conical towers perched on each end of the vessel, separated by a stubby smokestack. Amidships, alongside the slightly taller smokestack, was a davited wooden shore boat. On the stern deck was a wooden staff, where the Stars and Stripes fluttered in the breeze.

The ship looked like a cigar topped by thimbles.

Keokuk was 159 feet 6 inches in length, with a beam of 36 feet and a draft of 8 feet 6 inches. She was propelled by twin screws powered by steam, which gave her greater speed and maneuverability over the monitors. Her armament consisted of a pair of massive 11-inch Dahlgren guns. The guns were designed to pivot to fire through a trio of gun ports. Unlike the monitors, the towers did not rotate to give her a greater field of fire. Her armor was too light for the guns of Sumter, but Rhind did not know this yet. Keokuk carried a crew of ninety-two.

Ship engineer N. W. Wheeler approached Rhind. “All is in order,” he reported quietly.

“Follow them in,” Rhind said to the pilot.

“We’re almost in range,” Captain John Rodgers shouted. “We’ll be hearing from the rebels soon.”

Rodgers commanded Weehawken, the lead vessel in the line approaching Fort Sumter. While Rodgers was proud of his vessel and crew, he couldn’t help but feel anxious. At that moment, he saw a puff of smoke from Sumter, and a shot struck the water twenty feet ahead. The battle was starting.

Weehawken was some 200 feet in length, with a beam of 46 feet. The vessel featured twin gun turrets that packed a wallop. One gun was a standard 11-inch smoothbore; the second, a 42,000-pound, 15-inch Dahlgren, could hurl a 400-pound shell a mile. On her bow she pushed a torpedo raft to detonate the Confederate mines.

From inside the pentagonal-shaped Fort Sumter, the approaching line of warships looked like a corridor of floating death. The commanding officer of Fort Sumter, Major Stephen Elliott Jr., had faith in his ability to ward off the attack. Still, the sight was enough to give pause. Built on an artificial island three and three-eighths miles distant from Charleston, Sumter was a fortress. The fort’s base was constructed of chunks of stone from northern quarries. Her walls were solid brick, and concrete masonry stretched sixty feet high. At their thickest point, the walls were twelve feet in width; at the narrowest, a full eight. Guns were arranged on casemates on a pair of decks; the upper deck was open, and the lower deck guns were firing through reinforced ports.

On board Patapsco, the fourth Union ship in line, the view ahead was already becoming clouded with smoke. To an untrained eye, Patapsco and Weehawken looked similar, except for color. Weehawken was lead gray and Patapsco basic black, but Patapsco carried a surprise. She had the massive 15-inch Dahlgren, but her 11-inch smoothbore had been replaced by a 50-pound rifled Parrot gun that had the ability to lob a round over a mile with accuracy.

Slowly, like an old man turning his head, the turret on Patapsco rotated. And then the Parrot sang.

Major Elliott was standing on the upper gun deck of Fort Sumter when he heard the high-pitched whine of a rifled round. It slammed into the base of the fort, showering brick dust high into the air. Elliott felt a sting on his cheeks like the bites of many tiny ants. Wiping the lens of his spyglass clean, he ordered the fire returned.

It was 2:41 P.M., some ten minutes after the first shot had been fired from Fort Sumter, and aboard New Ironsides, DuPont was seeing his carefully crafted plans unraveling. The line of Union warships was straying out of formation. As he peered through the smoke ahead, it looked as if Weehawken was slowing.

New Ironsides was eight hundred yards from Fort Sumter and was inside the curtain of fire from both Fort Moultrie to the north and Sumter dead ahead. A volley of Confederate shot rang out. DuPont was flung to the deck, as New Ironsides took the fourth of the ninety-three hits she would suffer in the next three hours.

Rising from the deck, DuPont trained his spyglass on Weehawken.

Captain Rodgers had felt what he thought was a sea mine exploding beneath his hull. The line of sea mines, known as torpedoes, brought more fear to the crews of the Union gunboats than did the guns of Sumter and Moultrie. The forts and their guns could be seen; the torpedoes were hidden assassins lying in wait for the unwary.

“Full astern,” Rodgers shouted through the speaking tube to the engine room.

Passaic, second in line, slowed. The Union formation began to deteriorate.

On Sullivan’s Island, Confederate gunners at Battery Bee and Battery Beauregard added to the fire coming from the parapets of Fort Moultrie. Across the water, the Sumter gunners were hurling several shells a minute in a relentlessly orchestrated symphony of loading and firing. A curtain of smoke blew from the gun decks and was carried by the breezes past the Union fleet. A rain of lead fell from the sky.

“Sir,” the pilot of New Ironsides said to DuPont, “we are having control problems.”

DuPont knew his command was unwieldy. The vessel had been designed and built in a frenzy by a Union navy anxious to meet the threat from Confederate ironclads. Unlike the monitors, she had been designed on the old tried-and-true hull of sail and steamships, and her hybrid design of steam, sails, and armor had never truly worked efficiently.

“We’ve been struck forty times,” DuPont noted. “I don’t doubt there are problems.”

“I fear we might run down one of the monitors,” the pilot noted.

DuPont turned to the signalman. “Make the signal to disregard motions of commander-in-chief.” The man scampered away. Next DuPont turned to the pilot.

“Take us out,” he said quietly. “I’ll be damned if I’ll sink one of my own.”

From last in line to first. As the formation broke apart, Keokuk bravely steamed to the front of the line. For her brave actions, she would pay a stern price.

“Sir,” Keokuk’s signalman reported, “New lronsides asks we disregard her movement.”

Commander Rhind nodded absently. He had more important things to contend with. In the last thirty minutes, Keokuk had taken eighty-seven hits. The ironclad was holed in nineteen places above and below the waterline. Her gun towers and smokestack were riddled with holes through which one could see the fading daylight, and his aft gun had been disabled before it could ever fire a round.

The forward gun had gotten off five shots — then it, too, was disabled. Rhind was in command of a vessel that was now completely defenseless. Then the engines stopped.

Weehawken had been struck nearly fifty times by the Confederate guns. One cannonball had jammed the turret, making the gun unusable. The pilot backed away, then turned to starboard to retreat. The ship’s engineers ran to the turret. After great effort, they managed to get it to rotate. Weehawken withdrew from the battle with the dangerous torpedo raft, which was left to drift ashore.

Patapsco was taking a drubbing. The guns of Fort Moultrie were pounding her starboard side. The pilot was doing his best to position his ironclad so the guns could not find their range, but he could barely see through the smoke, and Union ships were everywhere. With the line of attack in deterioration and fully half the Union ironclads in retreat, only the chaos of an action gone wrong was visible out of the viewing port.

Smoke rolled across the water. Plumes of water shot into the air like just-spouted fountains, as missed shots plunged into the water. The few Union ironclads still engaged were trying to return fire to the forts, but that merely added to the noise and confusion. Along with the scream of shells flying seaward and back to the forts was the din of steam engines, boilers, and chains. There was no quiet on an ironclad. The metal hulls reverberated with the smallest sound and echoed like the tolling gates of hell. When the hull or deck armor was struck by Confederate shot, the sound for the crew was akin to having their head inside a church bell being rung.

Along with constant noise was constant heat. Even though the temperature outside was mild, in battle all ports were closed and battened down. With no breeze coming inside, the air became superheated.

Then the smells. Gunpowder, fuses, metal, and grease. Paint and cotton batting. Food from the galley, odors from the head compartment, unwashed sailors. Fear. It was a cacophony of sights and sounds, a sensory overload for the captain and crew.

Disabled and battered, the pilot steered Patapsco from the line.

On the deck of New Ironsides, Rear Admiral DuPont could see that it was hopeless. The battle was three hours old, and the Union fleet had not managed to accomplish much. Keokuk was battered and barely moving.

Weehawken and Patapsco had been hit many times.

The Union monitors Nahant, Nantucket, Montauk, Passaic, and Catskill had all taken numerous blows. DuPont’s flotilla was in disarray and deteriorating minute by minute.

DuPont gave the order to withdraw.

The Union fleet retreated the way they arrived, south down the ship channel past Morris Island. But it was a different picture from when they had steamed north to engage the rebels. The monitors showed spots where the paint had been jarred loose, and their armor was dented like a tin can hit by a golf club. Uneven streams of smoke trailed from their stacks as engineers struggled to keep the battered boilers operating. Two of the seven monitors were leaking. For now, the flow of the water into the hulls was being dissipated overboard by the pumps. Still, the weight of the water before it was discharged was causing both to list slightly. The armada came crawling back past Morris Island resembling a boxer after a losing match. Later, it would be learned that the fleet had suffered a total of 493 hits.

The powerful Union force had been beaten like a borrowed mule. Keokuk had gone from last in line to first and back to last again.

Commander Rhind climbed through the hatch into one of the towers. He could use only one arm — the other was peppered with wooden shards that went inches into his flesh.

Keokuk’s experimental armor had proved a failure. Designed with alternating horizontal rows of wood interspersed with metal strips, the mishmash failed to provide adequate protection. The truth was that the design of the armor was as practical as making a bulletproof vest without sides. When a cannonball struck the iron straps on the hull, it was repelled. But what of the wood hull inches away? That usually exploded in a hail of splinters and wood chips. Rhind’s arm was proof of that.

Staring fore and aft, Rhind assessed Keokuk’s damage.

The forward tower was pounded to pulp — it looked as if a giant had beaten it with a sledgehammer. The crew inside the forward tower were all wounded. The aft tower, where Rhind was standing, was not much better. The gun had been disabled after only five shots, but the crew had fared better. Only a little more than half had been wounded.

Between the two towers stood the remains of Keokuk’s smokestack.

The stack was riddled with so many holes, it looked like a tin shed hit by a shotgun blast. Smoke rose along the outline of the pipe until reaching a hole. Then it puffed out of the holes in rings, like those from the lips of an accomplished smoker.

While Rhind watched, Keokuk rolled over a wave. Just then, part of the ornamental top of the stack broke loose. It struck the deck before being washed overboard.

Rhind’s ship was coming apart.

Nineteen shells had penetrated Keokuk’s armor. Several of those were below the waterline. Rhind knew that the engineering crew was hard at work just keeping the vessel afloat. Thirty-two of his crew were wounded, but thankfully no one had died.

Rhind opened the hatch and climbed back to the main deck. Keokuk was out of range of the Confederate guns; his crew was now concentrating on keeping afloat.

Thirty-two wounded, but no dead. Soon there would be a death, but it would be the death of Keokuk As the sun set in the west, the cigar-shaped craft limped toward her anchorage off Morris Island. Commander Rhind had no illusions about the battle. He and the rest of the Union fleet had been savagely pummeled, and his ship had suffered the worst. Climbing down into the hold, he shouted to Engineer Wheeler, who was near the bow supervising the plugging of a leak.

“How bad is it?” Rhind asked.

Wheeler was covered in grease and sopping wet. Wiping his hands on a grimy rag, he walked closer. “It’s not good, Commander,” Wheeler said. “I count nineteen holes in the hull, and more than half are below waterline. The pumps are keeping up, but just barely. The engines keep cutting out, and the forward turret is useless. To make matters worse, half my engine-room crew is wounded, so we are having trouble keeping up with all of the problems that are cropping up.”

“I’ll send down some of the gun crew and deckhands to help,” Rhind offered.

At that instant, Keokuk rolled over a wave and the hull flexed. A bolt that held the planking to the ribs shot across the hold like a minié ball and stuck in the far wall.

“We need to anchor,” Wheeler shouted, as he ran to inspect the damage.

An hour later, four miles from Fort Sumter and two miles off Morris Island, Rhind ordered the anchor dropped. The engineers mounted a brave defense, but Keokuk’s short life was over. Throughout the night, the weather was calm with fair seas. And for a time it seemed that Wheeler and his crew might save the battered vessel.

Fate, however, had another plan. The winds kicked up at 5 A.M. It was nothing that a healthy ship would even notice, but Keokuk was far from healthy. As the vessel flexed, the cotton batting that Wheeler’s crew had stuffed between the planking became saturated, then worked loose. Keokuk began sinking farther into the water.

Rhind reacted by ordering parts of the damaged towers and smokestack cut loose, but the action did little to stop the inevitable. It was a battle that could not be won.

The sun broke on April 8, and with it came stronger winds.

“Signal for assistance,” Rhind said. “We need tugs to evacuate the wounded.”

Wheeler climbed the ladder to the main deck. From shoes to belt line, he was soaked. He had gone twenty-four hours without sleep, and his face was etched with exhaustion.

“Sir,” he said, saluting Rhind, “the water’s rising faster than we can handle.”

Rhind pointed to a trio of approaching tugs.

“Help is here, just keep her afloat until we off-load the wounded,” he said.

“It will be an honor, sir,” Wheeler said, as he made his way back to the ladder, “but I estimate we have twenty minutes and little more.”

It was 7:20 A.M. when Rhind and Wheeler stepped from the deck of Keokuk. As soon as the tug cast off, the ironclad began her death spasms. First she shifted bow-down, as water borne by the wind entered through her hawse pipe. Then the ironclad shuddered as the immense weight of the water settled in the lower hold and sprang the already battered planking. The second the water filled the hold, Keokuk burped a cloud of coal dust like the last gasp of a diseased smoker.

Then she settled to the seafloor in fifteen feet of water.

Her battered smokestack was partially visible. Keokuk had lived but six weeks.

Philo T. Hackett spit tobacco juice at a nearby anthill and watched the tiny insects struggle to free themselves from the sticky mess. At fourteen, he was too young to be chewing, but he was also too young to be hiding on Morris Island under a makeshift covering of brush and limbs. Hackett had been hiding since yesterday evening. First, he had watched the battle, then he had observed the Union ironclad struggle to stay afloat before dying.

Hackett’s father was stationed on Fort Sumter, and his mother was home, worried sick about her missing son. Crawling from his hiding place, Hackett made his way to his rowboat hidden on the lee side of the island.

Then he quietly rowed across the water to report to General Beauregard.

“I WANT THOSE guns,” Beauregard said.

Adolphus La Coste nodded.

La Coste was a civil engineer. However, in a war where all were called, he was not one to shirk responsibility. He stared at the aging lightship at the dock in Charleston.

“I think we can do it, sir,” La Coste said, “but it is not without peril. We will be operating right under the nose of the Yankees.”

“How long will it take, Adolphus?” Beauregard asked.

“With the right help, a couple of weeks,” La Coste answered.

“Whatever you need,” Beauregard said, walking away. “I want those guns.”

Outfitting the lightship with tackle and hoist required a week. True to his word, Beauregard had given La Coste all he needed. The tackle was new, the ropes unused. A half-dozen divers sat on the deck amid a pile of freshly oiled saws, pry bars, and levers. Now it was time to do the impossible.

A driving rain was making visibility nonexistent.

Diver Angus Smith climbed up a Jacob’s ladder onto the deck of the lightship. His leather gloves were in tatters and his hands cut from his labors. Smith barely felt the pain, because the cold from being immersed in the chilled water had permeated his very being. For seven nights now, Smith and the other divers had rowed out on small boats to labor a fathom below the water. To avoid being seen, they used no lights. To avoid being heard, they were careful not to bang tools against the metal. Before first light, the divers retreated; each evening they came anew. Four days into the operation, they reported to La Coste that the guns were free from their mounts and that openings in the turrets had been hewn. Tonight was the first time the modified lightship had visited the site.

“We’re doing this all by feel, sir,” Smith said. “It’s as black as night down there, but I think we have everything attached as ordered.”

La Coste nodded, then stepped into the pilothouse near a single burning candle and stared at his pocket watch. It was nearly 4 A.M. Attaching the lines had taken longer than expected. Soon it would be light, and the minute the Yankees saw the lightship on station above Keokuk, they were sure to come. He stepped back out of the pilothouse.

“Are all your divers out of the water, Smith?” La Coste asked.

Smith did a quick count of the men on deck. Four were sleeping, still in their diving gear; one other had disrobed and stood in his long johns, peeing over the railing on the lee side.

“They’re all accounted for, sir,” Smith said laconically.

“Power to the turnstile,” La Coste ordered.

Four Confederate sailors began walking in a circle. Their hands were gripping the oak arms of the turnstile. Slowly the thick lines were tightened until the 15,700-pound weight of the first gun was being supported only by cable and rope and chain.

The cannon rose slowly through the water. Inch by inch by inch.

La Coste stared at the wooden derrick on the bow. The wood creaked in protest as the joints rubbed, but it held fast. “Grease the fair ends,” he whispered to a sailor, who slathered animal fat on the lines. Then he staggered as the deck of the lightship settled from the immense weight being transferred. Almost imperceptibly, the cannon rose.

Wiping water from his beard, La Coste peered into the depths of Keokuk’s grave.

And then he saw it. The merest edge of the outer tube of the cannon.

“Harder, boys,” he said a little too loudly.

The cannon was almost at the top edge of the tower — a few more inches and it would be free. Then it stopped.

“Mr. La Coste,” a deckhand whispered, “the tackle’s together. We can’t go farther.”

Inches from salvation and miles from success. And the sky was becoming lighter.

“Damn,” La Coste said. Soon they would be visible. Once they were spotted, this operation would be finished for good. “We need to move all the weight we can to the stern. That should raise the bow enough to give us the small space we need.”

A little more — but not enough. The dangling gun muzzle clung stubbornly to the wreck. La Coste stared east — it was growing lighter. A few more minutes and he would need to abort the mission to escape detection. A span thinner than a slice of bread.

Then the sea came to the rescue.

Perhaps there was a storm a hundred miles offshore. Maybe somewhere the earth had trembled. Whatever the case, a large wave came from nowhere. It rolled across the placid surface of the water like a bedsheet being straightened.

Into the trough in advance of the wave, the lightship dropped. Then, all at once, the hull of the ship rose, and the gun came free and hung on the cable.

“Can you steer with the gun weight off your bow?” La Coste asked the captain.

“I can sure as hell try,” the captain said.

Three nights later, they came back and raised the second gun. It was not until much later that the Union found out that Keokuk had been salvaged.

A few months after the debacle off Fort Sumter, Captain Rodgers was sleeping in his cabin on Weehawken. He had been reassigned farther south, and the ironclad was riding at anchor in the Wassaw Sound off Georgia. Nehant, a second Union monitor, lay a league away. It was hot, four degrees over eighty, and the air was still. Wispy Spanish moss hung from the trees nearby, and the croak of thousands of frogs filled the air. The Union ships were waiting to intercept the newest Confederate ram.

The pilot of the Confederate ironclad Atlanta was groping his way down the Savannah River. The channel was narrow, and to escape detection he had ordered no lights lit. Atlanta was unwieldy, underpowered, and deeply drafted, all the things that made a ship hard to handle. Converted from the fast blockade runner Fingal, Atlanta had been armored and a cast-iron ram mounted to her bow. Her firepower consisted of four Brooke-rifled guns and a lethal spar-torpedo stretching ahead of the ram. Slowly, she went downriver.

Atop Atlanta’s casement, ordinary seaman Jesse Merrill was standing watch. Even in the darkness, he could see the difference in the river astern. Atlanta was dragging her keel and churning up the river mud. The ship was dragging bottom.

Peering forward, Merrill strained to see through the mist on the river. He thought he caught the outline of another ship, but just as he trained his eyes on the spot, Atlanta ran aground and he was pitched forward.

“Back her up,” he heard the pilot whisper.

Spinning her prop in the mud, the big ironclad struggled to break free.

After a few minutes of rocking the ship back and forth, she was freed.

Two hundred yards away, Weehawken was closest to the Confederate ram. Her lookout was struggling to stay awake and losing the battle. Time after time as he peered through the port upriver, his head nodded as sleep overtook him.

It was warm, and there was little fresh air. His head bobbed up and down.

Atlanta backed up and started downriver again. Jesse Merrill continued to peer into the distance. There it was again. Low to the water and dark in color, he might have missed it except for the rounded sweep of the gun turret.

Climbing down from the nest, he alerted the captain.

“Take it slow,” the captain ordered. “The lookout sees a Yankee ironclad.”

Seconds later, the pilot ran Atlanta hard aground again.

First light poked through the view port and stabbed the lookout in the eye like a saber. Shaking his head, he wiped the slobber from his mustache, then scanned the water. Like a ghostly apparition some two hundred yards distant, Atlanta came into view. The lookout stared for a second, then sounded the alarm.

He continued ringing the bell for a full three minutes.

At the sound of the bell, Captain Rodgers leapt from his bed and ran to the pilothouse, still in his nightclothes. His second in command, Lieutenant Pyle, was already at his station.

“She hasn’t moved, sir.”

Rodgers scanned the water with his spyglass. “The crew is scurrying on deck,” Rodgers said. “If I had to guess, I’d say she’s run aground.”

“I took the liberty of signaling Nehant, the lieutenant said, “and ordered a full head of steam from the engine room.”

“Head straight at her,” Rodgers ordered.

“Guns at ready,” Lieutenant Pyle said.

“Commence firing” Rodgers said.

It was impossible to miss. The first shot from Weehawken’s fifteen-inch gun scored a hit. It tore apart Atlanta’s casement like a fireman’s ax through a flimsy front door. And the rebel ironclad was powerless to reply. The grounding had keeled her over. Even with her guns depressed as far as they would go, when she tried to return fire, her shells sailed over the treetops along the riverbank. Weehawken’s second volley bashed in ten square feet of Atlanta’s armor and blew the gun crew off their feet.

Number three tore off the top of the pilothouse. That was all it took.

The captain hauled down the flag and surrendered.

Later, Atlanta was taken to the Philadelphia Naval Yard, where she was refitted and returned to service as a Union navy vessel. Rodgers was hailed as a hero and promoted to commodore. As captain of the first monitor to defeat an ironclad in individual combat, he returned to Charleston to continue the fight against Fort Sumter.

Eight months after capturing Atlanta, Weehawken was a seasoned veteran. Her crew was honed by combat and their on-board routine entrenched. Day after day, she lobbed shells toward Sumter. So it was nothing unusual when she anchored off Morris Island to refill her magazine.

Harold McKenzie was an ordinary seaman. And ordinary seamen followed orders. Even so, McKenzie could not help but mention his apprehensions to his friend Pat Wicks.

“The weight is not being distributed correctly,” he whispered, as the two men carried a wooden crate filled with shells. “We’re putting too much forward.”

But Wicks had other matters on his mind.

“We’re taking on a full load. The officers must be planning another run at the forts.”

Wicks had been wounded by shrapnel in the first attack on Sumter, and ever since he had been more than a little gun-shy. By contrast, McKenzie had just transferred to Weehawken. He was still itching to see combat.

“Good,” McKenzie said. “It’s high time we taught the rebels a lesson.”

But that was not to be, for McKenzie’s worst fears would soon be realized.

That evening, as the sailors slept in their berths, a stiff wind came from land. The misplaced load of fresh munitions was making Weehawken ride low in the bow, and it took only a matter of moments for serious trouble to arise. As the first series of waves washed over the bow, the water flooded into an unsecured hatch. As the bow dropped a few inches lower, water raced into the anchor chain hawse pipe. As the water filled the lower hold, the bow quickly settled lower. Now the bilge pumps in the stem were of no use, and the ones forward could not handle the volume of water.

A simple mistake, but it doomed Weehawken to an early grave.

Wicks was in the top bunk, and he felt it first. A sharp jolt as the bow slipped down made his head strike the deck above, jarring him awake.

“Mac,” Wicks shouted, “wake up.”

McKenzie struggled to free himself from his berth, but Wicks’s warning would come a moment too late for either man. Weehawken was already going through her death throes. As the flow of water increased, her trim was upset. The water flowed into the lower hold, then quickly to one side. Like a toy ship in a bathtub, Weehawken rolled onto her starboard beam. Within seconds, the sea flooded in through the open turret ports and deck hatches and made contact with the boilers with a burst of steam.

Then Weehawken slipped beneath the waves, taking thirty-one souls to their graves.

It was January 15, 1865, and the long and bloody war was drawing to a close. On board the monitor Patapsco, Commander Stephen Quackenbush looked forward to going home. His vessel had seen nearly constant action since the first assault on Fort Sumter, and he and his crew were weary from war. While similar in design to the rest of the monitor class, Patapsco had heavier armament that kept her constantly utilized. With the only big Parrot gun in the fleet, Patapsco could lie out of reach of the forts’ guns and fire without fear of damage. Because of this fact, Patapsco had fired more shells at the rebel defenders than any other vessel.

With her record of accomplishments well recognized, it was little surprise that in early 1865 Patapsco was assigned the dangerous task of picket duty. Picket duty was no picnic; it was a dangerous combination of nightly scouting sorties and minesweeping in the outer harbor. Captain and crew hated it soundly.

“We have a strong flood tide,” executive officer Ensign William Sampson said to Quackenbush, as the two men stood on the top of the turret, staring through the moonless night.

“We’ll escort the launches and minesweeping boats inside the channel before we drift back out and provide fire support,” Quackenbush said quietly.

“Shall I go below and give the order to the helmsman and chief engineer for slow speed?” Sampson asked.

“Do that. I’ll remain here and keep watch.”

It was a choice that would save Quackenbush’s life.

Patapsco steamed closer to the Confederate forts. Behind came the small, steam-powered launches equipped with grapnels and drags. Slowly, they passed the monitor and began the tedious task of sweeping for mines.

Sampson reappeared topside. “I’ve ordered the guns run out, sir.”

Quackenbush nodded. His command was now ready to provide fire support.

The night passed with agonizing slowness as the Union ironclad drifted in and out of the channel. It is said the third time is a charm, but this did not ring true with Patapsco and her crew. As the tidal current carried the ship out of the harbor entrance for the third time after midnight, the hull struck a floating mine set only a day before.

The device was a wooden barrel torpedo carrying a hundred pounds of gunpowder.

Igniting when jarred, the torpedo ripped a huge hole on the port side aft of the bow. The explosion lifted Patapsco’s bow up in the air. Quackenbush and Sampson were thrown to the deck as a giant column of water rose into the air before slamming down on the gun turret.

“Man the boats!” Quackenbush shouted.

But it was too late. Patapsco dove beneath the waves in less than a minute and a half, down forty feet to the seabed. Sixty-two of the officers and crew went with her. Only the tip of the smokestack remained above water at low tide.

Quackenbush and Sampson barely escaped being sucked under by the doomed monitor and were rescued by a launch.

It was a fortunate rescue for the U.S. Navy.

William Sampson later became superintendent of the Naval Academy and was named commander of the Atlantic squadron during the Spanish-American War. When the Spanish fleet attempted to escape Santiago, Cuba, Sampson’s fleet, utilizing his battle plans and temporarily under the command of Winfield Scott Schley, destroyed it.

Honed by their combat experience in the Civil War, Sampson, Schley, and Dewey all died as heroes with the rank of admiral.

II Three for the Price of One 1981, 2001

When possible, I always try to piggyback expeditions. It makes perfect sense on an obtuse level. If NUMA is searching for a certain ship, it becomes cost- and time-efficient to look for other wrecks in the same general area.

Charleston is a case in point. During the 1981 expedition to find the Confederate submarine Hunley, we used two boats, one to mow the search grid line with a magnetometer and the other to carry a gradiometer and divers to investigate any interesting targets.

You might want to scan over this paragraph, since I think it’s a good time to differentiate between a magnetometer and a gradiometer. The Schonstedt gradiometer, which we have used over the years with great success, reads the difference in magnetic intensity of a ferrous object between two sensors placed twenty inches apart and can be towed at speeds up to twenty-five knots. By comparison, a magnetometer reads differences in the earth’s magnetic field, which, because of various atmospheric conditions, may often cause bogus readings. It must be towed at relatively slow speeds.

While the survey boat went about its business hunting the sub, the dive boat drifted around with nothing to do, waiting for a call that rarely came. Having learned that time is money, I sent the dive boat prowling after other shipwrecks that sank during the siege of Charleston in the Civil War.

The waters in and around Charleston Harbor are a veritable salvage yard of old shipwrecks. From the late 1600s until the eve of the twentieth century, hundreds of ships of every size and rig have gone to the bottom within sight of the city. Nearly forty New England whalers were scuttled in a vain attempt to barricade the channels to keep the Confederate blockade runners from entering and leaving. Twenty or more greyhounds of the sea were sunk by Union navy gunfire attempting to run the blockade.

Union ships went on the bottom too: Housatonic was torpedoed by Hunley. Weehawken sank accidentally in a squall. Patapsco was sunk by a mine. And Keokuk sank after being struck nearly a hundred times by Confederate cannon shells. They all lay in the silt in a common burial ground.

At first it appeared as if finding them would be a kindergarten hide-and-seek operation. We had a chart drawn by a Union navy officer in 1864 that showed the approximate position of ten blockade runners and the Union ironclads that had been lost. It seemed a simple matter to transpose them onto a modem chart. The only catch, as I discovered quite by chance, was that the longitude meridians sometime prior to 1890 ran four hundred yards farther west than later projections. I caught this when I noticed that the fifty-second meridian appeared much closer to Fort Sumter on an 1870 chart than on a 1980 chart. The revelation seemed to be confirmed by the fact that every wreck we found was a quarter of a mile west of where it should have been, which goes to show that you can never do enough homework.

Walt Schob acted as our advance man, arriving in town with his wife, Lee, to charter a boat and arrange quarters for a crew whose eventual size could have fielded three hockey teams. The house he rented was a large two-story affair on Sullivan’s Island with a long boardwalk that stretched over the dunes to the beach and ended in a comfortable little gazebo. Walt hired a lady named Doris to cook for the guys. Doris turned out excellent meals, but for a reason she would never explain, she refused to fix me grits for breakfast. She also had a strange habit of making only baloney sandwiches for our afternoon picnics at sea. No cheese, tuna, or peanut butter. Not until much later did I find out that it was at Walt’s insistence. He laid out the afternoon one-course menu because he liked baloney sandwiches. I still become drowned in nostalgia whenever I see baloney in a delicatessen showcase.

Sadly, during Hurricane Hugo, the house was completely swept away and destroyed. The same is true of the motel we all stayed in during the 1980 expedition. All that was left were the concrete slabs where the cottages once sat.

A brief detour here: No historical saga of the Civil War ships lost in Charleston can be written without a mention of Benjamin Mallifert, a former Union officer of engineers, who became the most renowned salvage specialist of his time. One of his descendants sent me a photo of him in the uniform of a Union army major. The ladies would have considered him an attractive man; his eyes burned with a humorous twinkle, and he sported a neatly trimmed thick beard. He was energetic, and no slouch when it came to stripping a shipwreck of anything that was valuable, including scrap metal.

Mallifert ruled over an operation that salvaged more than fifty Civil War shipwrecks in the years after the war. In Charleston alone, he raised millions of pounds of iron, brass, and copper from the sunken warships, Union and Confederate alike.

His diving operations are recorded in his diaries that rest in the Charleston Fireproof Building archives, and they make interesting reading. He must have been a congenial man with a droll wit. One of his entries reads, “My divers reported bringing up five hundred pounds of iron today, more or less… probably less.”

His description of each wreck, and his accounting of the metal removed, was valuable in determining how much wreckage remained after he moved on.

Ten years ago, I ran across him again. Not in Charleston, but on the James River of Virginia. My NUMA team and I were searching for Virginia II, Richmond, and Fredericksburg, three Confederate ironclads that made up the James River fleet. When General Grant took Petersburg near the end of the war, the commander of the fleet, Admiral Raphael Semmes, former captain of the famed Confederate raider Alabama, ordered the fleet blown up and scuttled.

There was a crude drawing of the ships exploding below Drewry’s Bluff on the river below Richmond. We found nothing on the sidescan sonar. The magnetometer registered large targets, but they seemed indistinct and scattered. Since they were all buried in the river’s mud, Doc Harold Edgerton, renowned inventor of the sidescan sonar and strobe light, came along with his subbottom profiler — or penetrator, as he called it.

Doc tried hard but had no luck. His penetrator could not see through the gas pockets under the mud formed over the decades by decomposing leaves from trees along the banks. We were about to throw in the towel when I decided to take a day off from the search to comb through the Army Corps of Engineers archives in Portsmouth, Virginia. I was determined to study every drawer and cabinet in the place if it took me all week.

At two o’clock in the afternoon, I pulled open a drawer labeled Survey of the Pamunkey River, 1931. One by one, I went through a stack of old photographs, survey drawings, and sheets of statistics. Then, out of the blue, I ran across a sheet of thick transparent paper 28 inches by 18 inches, with a scale of 3/4 of an inch equaling 50 feet, and pulled it from the drawer. At first glance, it appeared to be a drawing of the banks along a section of the James River. It clearly didn’t belong in the Pamunkey River drawer. How it got there, and for how long it had been there, was anybody’s guess.

I stood spellbound as I examined the artwork that was uniquely tinted from the back of the transparent paper. The wording at the top in front read, “Disposition of wrecks below Drewry’s Bluff, 1881.”

The illustrator signed his name Benjamin Mallifert.

I felt as though I’d stepped into the Twilight Zone. This had to be more than mere luck. It could only come under the heading of fate. Researchers spend half their lives stalking the mother lode. I found it after only four hours of looking in what should have been the wrong place.

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 artifacts 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.