Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea

The History and Discovery of the World's Richest Shipwreck

Gary Kinder

• Publisher: Grove Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781555847968
• Topic: Tecnología e ingeniería
• Subtopic: Transporte marítimo

" Titanic meets Tom Clancy technology" in this national-bestselling account of the SS Central America 's wreckage and discovery ( People ). September 1875. With nearly six hundred passengers returning from the California Gold Rush, the side-wheel steamer SS Central America encountered a violent storm and sank two hundred miles off the Carolina coast. More than four hundred lives and twenty-one tons of gold were lost. It was a tragedy lost in legend for more than a century—until a brilliant young engineer named Tommy Thompson set out to find the wreck. Driven by scientific curiosity and resentful of the term "treasure hunt, " Thompson searched the deep-ocean floor using historical accounts, cutting-edge sonar technology, and an underwater robot of his own design. Navigating greedy investors, impatient crewmembers, and a competing salvage team, Thompson finally located the wreck in 1989 and sailed into Norfolk with her recovered treasure: gold coins, bars, nuggets, and dust, plus steamer trunks filled with period clothes, newspapers, books, and journals. A great American adventure story, Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea is also a fascinating account of the science, technology, and engineering that opened Earth's final frontier, providing "white-knuckle reading, as exciting as anything...in The Perfect Storm " ( Los Angeles Times Book Review ). "A complex, bittersweet history of two centuries of American entrepreneurship, linked by the mad quest for gold." — Entertainment Weekly "A ripping true tale of danger and discovery at sea." — The Washington Post "What a yarn!...If you sign on for the cruise, go in knowing that you're going to miss meals and a lot of sleep." — Newsweek

THE DEEP BLUE SEA

200 MILES OFF THE CAROLINA COAST

JUNE 1986

THE STEEL BOW of the Pine River shot upward eight feet, then slammed down, shuddering all the way to the fantail. Then the bow leaped up and slammed down again. A forty-knot wind whipped the sea white beneath lightning tearing at the night sky. When the stern dropped, water exploded over the fantail and rolled a hundred feet up the flat deck to crash against the control room, where the sonar techs sat trying to figure out what was wrong with the SeaMARC. They could look out a small window cut into the steel and see the wall of water headed up the deck.

“At times,” said sonar technician John Lettow, “it seemed as if there was ten foot of ocean and you were under it.”

The Pine River was a flat-bottomed mudboat from the Louisiana oil patch built to ferry drilling mud and supplies out to the oil rigs in the gulf. Tommy had found her in a shipyard in Orange, Texas, while scouting with a former navy commander named Don Craft. In his late fifties, Craft had retired after thirty years in the navy with an Unlimited Master’s ticket: He could skipper any vessel in any ocean. In late 1984, Tommy had called Craft because the commander now consulted for offshore operations and he knew which vessel and what equipment Tommy needed to run a SeaMARC search in deep water two hundred miles off the coast.

At first, Craft was leery. But Tommy sent him a check for his fee, and the check cleared, so Craft met Tommy in Houston. For four days they drove, talked, ate seafood, and stopped at every bayou shipyard from Orange to Jennings to Lafayette, from Cameron to Patterson to Houma, showcase spots along the gulf where the offshore support industry displayed its rustbucket mudboats for charter. Tommy and Craft ventured out on scaffold piers in search of one that could be sucked from the muck, sandblasted, overhauled, and refitted for a deep-water survey of the Atlantic Ocean.

For the first day and a half, Craft wondered if Tommy would ever stop talking. “He asked me every goddamned thing you can think of, on every subject you can think of,” said Craft, “vessels, ROVs, operational techniques, equipment, shipping companies, methods used in the gulf, how seafarers used to do things and what problems they had. We covered it all during that four days.”

In Orange, Texas, they found the Pine River, which Tommy liked because it had a helo-deck. Under the helo-deck was good control space, a small shop, and some storage, which appealed to Craft. At 165 feet, it was smaller than what Craft had envisioned, but he was satisfied.

Craft then had ripped out a lot of old equipment from a previous charter, got the vessel cleaned up for transit, measured the fuel on board, and topped it off at sixty thousand gallons. When he left Orange, he had the Pine River on charter, beginning the 14th of May and running through the end of July. Eight days later he arrived in Jacksonville, ready to place the tow point and the winch, weld a modified log boom to the deck for launching and recovering the twelve-hundred-pound SeaMARC, fire up the galley, fill the ship with groceries, and await Mike Williamson and the sonar techs for mobilization.

TWENTY-TWO MEN LIVED on the ship. Six men from the Louisiana bayou kept it clean, running, and pointed in the right direction. A cook ran the galley. Don Craft oversaw the operation. Twenty-four hours a day, Williamson and his sonar crew of eleven manned the electronics in the control room. Bob had remained in Columbus with the handle “Info Bob,” a source for additional information. Barry documented the search on film and video, helped Tommy write letters to the partners, and was responsible for ship-to-shore communications to assure a steady flow of supplies, spare parts, and information. Tommy was Williamson’s client, and as the client he was supposed to watch and listen. But he had $1.4 million in his pocket from partners who counted on him, and he would no more leave Williamson alone to run the SeaMARC survey at sea than he would have left Larry Stone alone to produce the probability map.

That spring, Tommy had called Stone frequently to question the assumptions they had relied upon to create the map. He would ask Stone, “How critical is that assumption? Can we get better data on that? How would we go about improving it? If the hurricane that hit the Central America was actually 110 knots instead of 78, how would that affect the eventual position of the sinking?”

“He just was so detailed and careful about what he did,” said Stone. “He would keep revisiting parts of the analysis, trying to poke holes in it, seeing where the soft spots were, and ‘Let’s see if we can fix ’em before we go to sea.’”

Tommy wanted to explore the chopped-down mast, the dumped anchor, the drag sail, anything that might affect the ship’s drift. He wanted to tighten their assumptions about wind and current. He wanted Stone to investigate the accuracy of nineteenth-century sextants and chronometers. He told Stone to call experts. Just get them on the phone, he said, they’ll talk to you, and Stone was surprised at how well it worked. “It only takes about three or four phone calls to find an expert about any subject in this country,” said Stone, “and that was something he was always instructing me to do.”

A former Coast Guard officer told them that celestial readings taken with sextants and chronometers of the mid–nineteenth century would be off by no more than four nautical miles. Another expert at the University of Miami advised them on ocean currents. A meteorologist at the Naval Postgraduate School created a computer model to estimate how hurricane force winds might affect those currents. A professor at Florida Atlantic University calculated the leeway factor, how fast those same hurricane winds would blow a hull filled with water across the surface of the sea.

But Tommy wanted even better estimates of the parameters they were using; he wanted sensitivity studies to see how using different estimates might change the probability distributions. “He was like a bulldog,” said Stone. “He just kept worrying this problem. He kept looking it over and thinking about the assumptions and picking them apart and trying to deal with the problems and making me deal with them.”

The final assumption Tommy wanted to examine was that the captains’ coordinates for each of the three scenarios Stone had used were equally reliable. After he, Bob, and Stone had discussed this, they assigned the Ellen scenario a weight of 72 percent, the Central America scenario 23 percent, and the Marine scenario 5 percent. They weighted the Ellen coordinate heavier because Captain Johnsen had shot his celestial fix after the storm, and he had recorded it in the ship’s log; Herndon’s coordinate from the Central America was passed along orally in the middle of the storm, and they still weren’t certain of its origin; and the Marine coordinate from Captain Burt was dead-reckoned. With each scenario weighted, they finally combined the three into one probability map, and Stone was pleased with what he saw before him.

“Everything looked consistent. And it gave me a very warm feeling, and I think it gave Tommy additional confidence in these probability maps, because we seemed to be able to resolve most of the inconsistencies and somehow make these maps all come together and overlap. Now, they had uncertainties in them, but they overlapped very nicely.”

The probability map Stone presented to Tommy was neat and precise; specific little numbers in perfect little cells, each representing a two-mile square of ocean. At the end of each line forming the grid, top and side, Stone had included the latitude and longitude down to the nearest minute. Within most of the cells appeared a number from 0 to 73, indicating the probability out of a thousand that the ship would be located in that two-mile square. The highest cell had a 7.3 percent chance of containing the shipwreck site; the many cells marked zero had some probability, but less than one chance in a thousand.

Mike Williamson and a colleague had then taken Stone’s probability map, factored in topography, weather, and the velocity and direction of currents, and designed a search map, the most efficient way to run track lines back and forth through the highest-probability cells on Stone’s map. They laid out each track on a grid with finely tuned coordinates and direction of sail. But, as they were experiencing in these first few days of the search, the currents never ran true and the equipment never operated without flaw and the ocean never lay still.

THEY HAD LEFT Jacksonville just after midnight on June 3, the Pine River bucking ever higher waves and rising wind. On the morning of June 4, they were in hilly water near the start of track line 1, two hundred miles at sea, ready to begin the search for the Central America. But two hours into the search, they had to abandon the track line and recover the SeaMARC: The navigation didn’t work, so they couldn’t tell where it was or how high it flew, and if they didn’t know where the SeaMARC was and how high it flew, they would have no idea where the shipwrecks were when the SeaMARC saw them, which was the reason for being out there. By that evening, they had the guts of the SeaMARC spread across tables in the control room. Outside, the weather continued to climb.

“It was a hurricane,” said Lettow, “and then it was downgraded as it moved offshore out of the Gulf Stream. But there were storm seas and lightning strikes virtually everywhere around us.” The eye of Tropical Storm Andrew blessed them late one night with fifteen minutes of calm water and clear skies, before the wind and the sea built again, buffeting the Pine River, her aft deck, according to the log, “frequently awash.”

The techs took advantage of the bad weather to test one system after another, but they couldn’t even agree on the problems.

One said, “There’s a missing logic gate; we got to put this gate in.”

Another thought, “The system worked before without the gate. It’s the whole logic process that’s screwed.”

A third wanted to throw the first overboard for distracting the second, who might have a solution.

“Hours are going by,” said technician Will Watson, “days are going by, and you’re just watching this.”

They stared at card after computer card and gradually eliminated a few more problems only to discover that on a previous sea trial another crew had rewired the system and shifted all of the cards. When they reconnected it and aligned everything according to the schematics, the tow fish still would not process signals from the topside controls. Finally, they discovered that the schematics themselves were incorrect.

Andrew passed and the wind slackened, but the seas remained confused and rough. On the afternoon of June 7, they reassembled the SeaMARC and launched again, but no sooner had the tow fish hit the water than they discovered more problems. They talked about “blown buffer chips” on the “tone burst generator” and grounding problems in a “24-pin Burton,” an almost incomprehensible argot, but the gist was clear: One problem after another after another after another, each time something different. They recovered the tow fish and again tore it apart.

Tommy was always there, watching the techs, trying to work with them, seeing hours and then days spin by on the clock. “Mike was trying to let the techs work on it,” said Tommy, “and I’d talk to the techs and try to help them think through the logic and diagnostics, and so I would be included in the circle. Mike’s telling me, ‘They’ll get it, they’ll get it,’ but when I’m working with the techs they’re saying, ‘We don’t know this part of the circuit. If we go in there, we could damage it and not ever get it fixed.’”

One night as Tommy looked at the SeaMARC electronics spread across the control room and listened to the techs trying to figure out the problems and felt the pitch and roll of the ship in storm seas and looked back over an entire week of great frustration with nothing accomplished since they had set sail, he said just loud enough for Will Watson to hear, “I was afraid of this.”

Tommy was dealing with men who knew more about electronics and sonar than he did, but they had never used electronics or sonar to find a wooden-hulled shipwreck in the deep ocean. No one had. And they hadn’t spent most of their lives studying ways to solve problems. “Typically,” said Tommy, “they just took one path at solving a problem, and then they’d get to the end of that and go, ‘Okay, that didn’t work, now what do we do?’ and they’d go down another path.”

Tommy would ask the techs, “How long before you think you have it apart and figure out if that’s the problem?” Someone would give him an estimate, and Tommy would say, “What if you can’t fix it?”

They’d say, “Oh, then we’ll do this.”

And Tommy would ask, “Can’t we be doing that right now? We’ve got eight hours here and not everybody can be working on the fish. Can we be making phone calls? Can we be getting information? Can we be ordering integrated circuits? What integrated circuits do you think? Are there five chips that are suspect? Why don’t we order those now?”

If the techs working on the problem were wrong after eight hours, at least the others would be far along a parallel path. And if they were right, they could always cancel the parts they had ordered or send them back. If a supplier charged them a few bucks, so what? Tommy was spending twenty thousand dollars a day on the best sonar experts in the world, and until their sonar worked they were surveying nothing.

The afternoon of the 8th, they redeployed the SeaMARC and began towing again along track line 1. The weather that had moderated slightly since the eye of Andrew passed over two days earlier began building back up, the seas to six feet and the wind to twenty knots. Trying again to tow along those neat little track lines on the search map, the Pine River fought strong currents and heavy seas, sometimes crabbing almost sideways. Once, a blast of lightning cracked down to the water so close to the ship it blew out a piece of cable that carried the signal from the submerged SeaMARC to the ship topside.

Tommy asked Lettow, “What do you think?”

Lettow said, “I think we should have gone back to the beach and drank beer three days ago instead of mucking around in this.”

ON THE FIRST track line, they would follow a course through probability cells equaling just over 25 percent of the distribution: one chance in four they would image the Central America in that first thirty-mile run. They would then turn around and run the next track line back, overlapping half of the first track and imaging a mile-and-a-half strip of new bottom, turn around, and head back again on track line 3. At the end of that line, they would have covered nearly 50 percent of the probability.

But hours into their second try at line 1, the wind blew the bow of the Pine River off course. Trying to force the bow back, the captain cranked the rudder over farther, until it was almost sideways, pushing water. This slowed the ship and the tow fish headed for the seafloor. Seeing that the fish was dropping, the winch operator in the control room wound in slack so the SeaMARC wouldn’t hit bottom, and that extra weight pulling back on the ship slowed it even more, which made it more difficult to keep the bow on track, so the captain tried more rudder.

The fish was all over, up and down, its speed constantly changing, in and out of the track, leaving holidays in that first run through the highest-probability cells. Tommy was back and forth between the control room and the bridge, trying to get the two crews to realize they needed to communicate with each other. “That created a little bit of friction,” said Tommy, “but we had to figure out a way to make the ship work.”

Tommy worried that the Central America was in one of those high-probability cells in that first track line where the SeaMARC was not working; or that everyone was so tired and nauseated from the work and the weather no one would know where they were when the SeaMARC did image a big target; that the Central America with those gigantic paddle wheels and all that gold stuffed in her belly would glide right on by, and no one would notice.

“I’d sometimes go in there in the middle of the night,” he said, “and everybody’d be asleep on the EPC recorders.”

When clients called Mike Williamson, they wanted him to find something on the bottom of the ocean. They told him where they thought it was, then turned Williamson loose to find it. That was their role as clients. In Tommy’s mind, his role as client was “to help direct when I thought they weren’t thinking clearly about the problem,” and he pushed Williamson to rethink everything. If Tommy was up in the middle of the night and Williamson was napping in his bunk, Tommy got him up. When Williamson’s crew started scratching their heads over what was wrong with the SeaMARC, Tommy got on the satellite phone at ten dollars a minute and called the guy who created the SeaMARC.

Don Craft had skippered several operations where Williamson was the sonar expert. He knew that when Williamson and his crew came on board, the sonar responsibilities would be handled as efficiently and professionally as possible. “Mike Williamson,” said Craft, “is a world-class sonar operator.” And Williamson had handpicked his crew after years of working with the best. “We brought to the party,” he said, “what we thought was the best team in the world.”

But Tommy was thinking, I have a hundred partners who have bet a lot of money that I know how to find and recover a shipwreck at depths no one has ever worked in before. My first test is to image the shipwreck on the SeaMARC IA. I had forty days at sea to get that image. Eleven of those days are now gone, lost to weather, towing foul-ups, navigation problems, and other malfunctions in the SeaMARC, and all we have is one track line from a lurching tow fish constantly being dragged off course.

Ted Brockett, who had designed the sled for the tow fish, understood Tommy’s concern, but he sympathized with Williamson. “Harvey was always underfoot,” said Brockett. “If something wasn’t working right, he’d get in there with a calculator and a pencil and he’d be designing, calculating the stresses. He was down to the nuts and bolts on everything, so I spent a fair amount of time soothing egos and trying to keep these two guys calmed down. Nobody was throwing punches, but the discussions got fairly heated, and on a small boat when you can’t get away from each other, those things tend to build.”

OFFSHORE NO ONE functions at 100 percent. Williamson figured you could take anyone who performs well on the beach and put them in a small ship at sea and their productivity would drop by 90 percent. Ships the size of the Pine River pitched and rolled. They were powered by diesel engines, which were noisy and belched fumes that filled the head when the head already felt light from the rocking of the ship. Anyone who said they never got seasick w...