Pirate Hunters

by Robert Kurson

  Soon, he felt ready to challenge the Andrea Doria, by many accounts the most dangerous shipwreck in American waters. Sunk in 1956 after colliding with the MS Stockholm off Nantucket Island, the massive Italian passenger liner lay on her starboard side in 250 feet of water. The ship’s interior was deep, dark, and dangerous. Narcosis and the bends could result from the slightest mistake. Passageways and staircases were twisted and disorienting. Silt and particulate reduced visibility, sometimes to mere inches. The Doria had a reputation for giving divers whatever room they needed to kill themselves inside.

  Before long, Chatterton was venturing into areas on the Andrea Doria, and other great wrecks, no other diver had dared. To him, the risk was the point: If he went somewhere easy, he knew what he’d find there, and how could a person look forward to that? By 1991, some were calling Chatterton the greatest wreck diver they’d ever seen. Charter captain Bill Nagle paid him the ultimate compliment: “When you die, no one will ever find your body.”

  In the summer of 1991, Nagle got a tip from a fisherman about a possible shipwreck located sixty miles off the New Jersey coast. He called Chatterton and they made a plan to check it out. The trip would cost several hundred dollars in fuel alone, and the odds of finding anything important were almost nil, but to Chatterton and Nagle, a man had to look. Who were you if you didn’t go look?

  They recruited a dozen other divers, each of whom paid one hundred dollars to help defray costs, and made their way to the site. Scuba tanks strapped to his back, Chatterton descended 230 feet to the bottom by himself, where he discovered a mostly intact World War II German U-boat. Chatterton knew his ocean and he knew his history; there was not supposed to be a U-boat within a 100-mile radius of this location. Wreck divers dreamed of finding a virgin U-boat. To discover one in American waters was the holy grail. All that remained was for the divers to identify the wreck, and they would make history.

  When the team returned to the site, however, a diver died on the bottom, his body swept away by currents. Chatterton and the others risked their lives looking, but they couldn’t find the man. The tragedy hung heavy over the group.

  Nagle moved to replace the fallen diver with Richie Kohler, owner of a local glass business and a member of the Atlantic Wreck Divers, a notorious gang of tough guys who wore matching skull-and-crossbones jackets, and raised hell on shipwrecks across the Eastern Seaboard. Kohler and his crew were accomplished divers, but they were everything Chatterton despised. They seemed to care for nothing but artifacts, risking their lives to get a twentieth teacup when they’d already bagged nineteen. They mooned passing dinner cruises, used stuffed animals for skeet-shooting targets, leaped naked into the water. They returned to the same wrecks to do the same things over and over, and for that, Chatterton dismissed them out of hand.

  If anything, Kohler detested Chatterton even more. “Who is this uptight asshole talking about excellence and art?” Kohler would ask. He knew Chatterton was an exceptional diver, but believed him to be missing the point. Shipwreck charters were supposed to be about fun, camaraderie, brotherhood. Without that, the sport became labor, and weekends weren’t made for that. “Imagine the life this guy leads,” Kohler told his buddies. “Fuck him and the boat he came in on.”

  Over Chatterton’s protests, Nagle brought Kohler aboard the U-boat project. Working separately, Chatterton and Kohler pressed into the submarine, where they encountered hanging pipe and wire and conduit (any bit of which could have entangled and trapped them inside the wreck), dead ends and tangled passageways, and live explosives ready to detonate from a single wayward touch. Throughout the wreck, they found the remains of fifty-six German sailors, some of them still dressed, their shoes laid out on the floor, left right, left right. But no proof of the U-boat’s identity.

  The two men began working together, not just underwater but in government archives, at libraries, with historians and diplomats, and on the phone with old U-boat aces. Slowly, they began piecing together a history different from the official accounts. And they began to understand each other. As months turned into years, they did groundbreaking work, but came to realize that until they found conclusive proof inside the wreck itself, their theories about the submarine’s identity were just a best guess, and neither of them had come this far, risked his life, to say “probably.” For Chatterton and Kohler, it came down to this: A person could have theories about who he was; he could make predictions about what he might do in a given situation. But he’d never really know until he was tested. For Chatterton and Kohler, the U-boat was their test. The U-boat was their moment.

  So they continued to return to the wreck, spending money they didn’t have on fuel and expenses, taking time from their families. Two more divers, a father and son, died while diving the U-boat. Time and again, Chatterton and Kohler might have moved the bones of the fallen sailors or reached inside the dead men’s clothes to search for a pocket watch or cigarette lighter engraved with the submarine’s identity—those items sometimes survived for decades in a cold underwater environment. But neither diver was willing to do that. Swimming among the human remains, Chatterton and Kohler began to see these dead sailors not just as enemies but as someone’s sons or brothers or fathers or husbands, young guys whose country was being destroyed by a madman and whose families never knew where they had died. Searching the bodies would have required disturbing the remains. So Chatterton and Kohler let the bodies rest. Their decision raised the risk that they, too, would die inside the wreck. But they were on the verge of doing something beautiful, and would have rather lost their lives than do it in an ugly way. They kept searching.

  Soon, only Chatterton, Kohler, and a few others remained on the project. Chatterton began pressing into the most dangerous corners of the wreck—places so cramped and strewn with hanging debris it was hard for the eels who lived inside to find a way out. But with every dive he seemed only to drift further from an answer.

  At home, marriages grew distant and strained. To save his family, Kohler quit the U-boat and hung up his dive gear. By 1995, Chatterton found himself at a crossroads unlike any he’d known. He had unleashed all of himself on the U-boat, all that he knew about diving and life. And he was failing.

  In a fury of protest, he discovered and identified several new wrecks, enough to make any other diver’s career, but he only sank further into despair. By 1996, his marriage to Kathy was over, he was nearly broke, and Nagle, whom he adored, had died a broken man. When people tried to console Chatterton, he told them, “I no longer know who I am.”

  But by 1997, Kohler had sorted out his family issues and returned to the project. Chatterton devised a final plan to identify the U-boat, one that incorporated all his principles for living—and that Kohler felt certain would be deadly. Slithering inside a room that looked impossible to exit, Chatterton freed a supply box that held a key piece of evidence, then found he’d run out of air. Holding his breath, he pushed the box through a narrow opening to Kohler, then removed his tank and made a desperate swim for his partner. A few moments later, the supply box gave up its secret and the U-boat had its name. The journey had cost six years, three lives, two marriages, and two life’s savings. But Chatterton had his answer.

  —

  IN THE SPRING OF 1998, a friend invited Chatterton to a party at a hotel in Manhattan, promising good food and the chance to meet a woman he knew. Chatterton hated formal wear and fix-ups, but he liked his friend and said he would go.

  That Saturday night, he pulled up to the hotel on his burnt orange Harley-Davidson Road King, and left his keys with the valet. Inside, he was introduced to Carla Madrigal, a forty-six-year-old operational systems manager for a major commercial airline based in Washington, D.C. She was pretty in the way Chatterton liked—naturally and without trying too hard—slender, with light freckles and high cheekbones, and wore a gold letter C that caught Chatterton’s eye.

  They talked for hours, hardly noticing the others. At the end of the evening, Chatterton asked to see Car
la again. She asked why Chatterton kept looking at her necklace. He told her about a shipwreck he’d found at a time in his life when he’d felt lost. The wreck was the SS Carolina; he knew it by finding brass letters on the fantail that spelled out the ship’s name, in a font he’d never seen before—the same font as the C on her necklace.

  —

  THAT SUMMER, CHATTERTON AGREED to join an elite team of American and British divers on an expedition to the HMHS Britannic, sister ship to the Titanic. Sunk off the Greek island of Kea, the wreck lay on her starboard side in four hundred feet of water, a depth at the very edge of what was possible for world-class divers. Even before it launched, the expedition was being hailed as one of the most ambitious in diving history. For his part, Chatterton would attempt to become the first diver ever to use a rebreather on Britannic.

  Using solenoids, sensors, and a chemical absorbent to manage exhaled gas, rebreathers allowed divers to go deeper and work more efficiently than ever before. The technology was cutting-edge but still hadn’t been perfected; several divers had died using the new apparatus. In experimenting with a rebreather during training for Britannic, Chatterton nearly lost his life more than a dozen times. On the wreck, he’d need it to function flawlessly.

  To many, his plan seemed suicidal. He intended to go to the boiler rooms to search for evidence as to why the ship sank so fast. If there was a scarier destination on the wreck, no one knew about it. According to deck plans, a diver would have to wriggle through a narrow fireman’s tunnel, a passage so tight a person could not turn around. In deepwater-wreck diving, the inability to turn around was often the last experience a person ever had.

  Chatterton wasted little time when he got to the wreck. Dropping down into a fracture in the Britannic’s bow, he found the fireman’s tunnel and corkscrewed inside. It was even more narrow and tight than he’d imagined, just inches of room to either side. He checked his depth gauge: 375 feet. Crazy deep.

  He moved slowly, past jagged pipe, tangled wires, fallen railing, and razor-sharp coral—the worst place he’d ever been on a wreck. A single misstep, one brush against an invisible obstacle or a slip into a hanging tangle, and he would be trapped. And it would be hours before they came looking for him, if anyone knew where to come looking at all.

  For several minutes, he finger-crawled forward, covering more than a hundred feet before he arrived at the boiler room. Chatterton checked the rebreather’s handset.

  The screen was blank.

  The computer controlling the rebreather had died. Now he had no idea what oxygen concentration he was breathing, what he needed to survive, or how to keep from dying. And he didn’t have a bailout tank—the tunnel was so narrow he’d left it at the anchor line. He began to say good-bye to himself.

  But was he supposed to just give up and scratch out a note to loved ones as he waited to drown? He’d seen others do that. He was not going to die that way. So he started adding oxygen manually. If he added too much, he could become toxic, convulse, lose his mouthpiece, and drown. If he added too little, he could pass out and drown. It would have to be a guess. He adjusted the mix, and waited to see if he’d live.

  He stayed conscious.

  Now he had to get out. Unable to turn around, be began to slither backward, inching out of the tunnel in the same painstaking way he’d come in. Every instinct demanded he rush, but he knew suddenness would tangle him in the hanging web of wreckage.

  He emerged several minutes later, wondering if each breath would be his last. He swam to the anchor line, grabbed his open circuit bailout tank, and began his three-hour decompression ascent to the surface.

  That night, Chatterton took a taxi to a small hardware store, where he purchased hacksaw blades and a soldering gun, and went to work repairing the rebreather back in his hotel room. Smoke billowed from under his door before Chatterton put out the small fire he’d started, but in a few hours he’d Frankensteined the rebreather back into operating form.

  He was back on the boat and into the wreck the next day. Chatterton made a total of six dives that trip. The rebreather failed on three of them. He never did figure out why Britannic sank so fast, but he’d gone places on the wreck thought to be impossible to reach. And though magazines published pictures from the expedition, no photographer could capture a feeling like that.

  —

  IN NOVEMBER 2000, PBS aired a two-hour special episode of its documentary series Nova devoted to the mystery U-boat. Chatterton and Kohler were its stars, and it became one of the highest-rated episodes in series history. One morning, not long after it aired, Chatterton felt an egg-sized lump on his neck while shaving. A surgeon did a needle biopsy, then called later that day and asked him to come back to the office. “I’m kinda busy, can we make it tomorrow?” Chatterton asked. He knew it was trouble when the doctor said no.

  At the office, the surgeon told Chatterton he had a squamous cell carcinoma—cancer. He explained the pathology and recommended immediate surgery.

  “You didn’t say if it was benign or malignant.”

  “Malignant. You’re going to need chemotherapy and radiation. You have a fifty-fifty chance of survival.”

  Chatterton went numb. He was just forty-nine years old. But as he got his coat to leave he thought, “I can live with fifty-fifty. I can come out on the right side of that.”

  He started chemo shortly after the surgery, riding his Harley in the snow to the treatments, then going to his underwater construction job the same day despite being too weak to swim. Carla joined him at chemo. She teased him about the attention the gay pharmacist lavished on him. “I don’t think anyone else shows up here in black leather,” she joked, but inside she was trembling.

  After chemo, Chatterton began radiation, five times a week for two months. By the end he could not lift his diving helmet. But doctors were cautiously optimistic. Fingers crossed, Chatterton would make it.

  A few weeks later, he was supervising a big job in Battery Park City in downtown Manhattan. This work site was different from the usual water locations. It was underneath the World Financial Center, across West Street from the World Trade Center.

  Chatterton was in his company’s trailer on September 11, 2001, when he heard a roar and then an explosion. He opened the door and looked up, where he saw an orange-and-black fireball shooting out of the side of the North Tower of the World Trade Center. He ran back into the trailer as debris began raining down on the corrugated tin roof. When those sounds finally stopped, he went back outside and into a world of mayhem and screams. He helped four Japanese tourists who were covered in blood. Dead bodies were everywhere.

  Chatterton ran fifty yards to the communications shack and got on the radio—he had ten divers in the water and needed to get them out. He ordered the men to drop everything and return to the dive station. Then he ran back outside.

  After all his divers got out of the water, one of them pointed to the South Tower.

  “Here comes another one!”

  Chatterton saw the second plane hit, and human shapes falling from the tower. By now, the fire department had taken over Chatterton’s trailer and made it their command post. A short time later, the South Tower fell onto the trailer, killing five of New York City’s top firefighters inside. Nearby, a man flailed in the river. Chatterton and his divers ran and pulled the man out.

  For the next several hours, Chatterton helped people onto the ferryboats until there were no more boats coming in. He boarded the last one to leave that day, and looked back over a broken New York. In New Jersey, he found a ride to his condo and called Carla, who was in Argentina on business. She started crying and told him she had watched it all on television. She had feared the worst but never got the sense that he’d died, only that he’d been helping people. And she told him she loved him.

  —

  CHATTERTON RETURNED TO WORK a few weeks later, but his heart wasn’t in it. The commute was bad, the memories bitter, and he was spending more time in management than in the water. He ma
rried Carla in January 2002. Then he hatched a plan.

  He would become a history professor. He’d taken a few college courses after Vietnam, and had come to love the subject after diving so many historic shipwrecks. He enrolled at Kean University in New Jersey and quit his job as a commercial diver. It had been a twenty-year run, but for Chatterton the challenge was gone.

  He got straight As his first semester, and was ready to start a second, when he received a call from cable television’s History Channel. They were developing a show about shipwrecks and were looking for hosts. Days later, he and Kohler—once the archest of enemies—found themselves auditioning as a team.

  Producers liked them and ordered eight episodes. The show would be called Deep Sea Detectives, and the premise was simple: Each week, the two divers would investigate a shipwreck-related mystery, doing research on land and diving the wreck underwater. Chatterton’s powerful baritone would be perfect for the narration.

  The show began airing in 2003 and was a hit from the start. Chatterton filmed between classes, but the schedule was tough on Kohler’s family and business, so Kohler quit after eight episodes. He was replaced by thirty-five-year-old Michael Norwood, a handsome and accomplished British diver who had on-screen chemistry with Chatterton.

  Chatterton and Norwood became fast friends. In December 2003, the show went to Palau, an island nation in the west Pacific, to investigate the USS Perry, a World War II warship sunk in 270 feet of water. The hosts would be joined by cameraman Danny Crowell, an experienced diver and a veteran of the U-boat adventure.

  At the wreck site, Crowell moved down the anchor line, followed by Norwood and Chatterton. Near the bottom, Norwood motioned with his hand across his throat—the out-of-air signal—which seemed strange to Chatterton; they’d been in the water for just a few minutes.