Clive Cussler; Craig Dirgo

by The Sea Hunters II

  Obviously, we couldn’t say with certainty this was Manassas. The fact that this was the only massive target in the approximate area where she was recorded to have sunk was all we had going for us. I marked the site on my chart, noting the landmarks on the other side of the levee, and called it a day.

  The next morning, we headed across the river and began our search of the water just off Fort St. Philip for the Confederate ironclad Louisiana. She was a monstrous ship, one of the largest the South built. She was 264 feet long with a beam of 62 feet. Her construction had not been completed before the battle, and she was towed down from New Orleans and moored to the bank slightly above Fort St. Philip as a floating battery. If her engines had been functional, the battle might have taken a different turn. But she could contribute little in keeping the Union fleet from running the gauntlet and taking the city of New Orleans.

  After the battle, the Confederates set her on fire. Her mooring lines burned, and she began to drift downriver a short distance before being ripped apart by a massive blast when she was opposite the fort. We found a gigantic anomaly in the first hour of the search: no great feat, since I had studied a sketch of the exploding ironclad, showing a mushroom cloud of smoke erupting from the top of her casemate, done by Alfred Waud, the famous Civil War artist for Harper’s Weekly. The sketch put her directly off Fort St. Philip. She lies quite deep under the present shoreline in front of Fort St. Philip in a swampy area off the river. Her massive bulk contributed to the buildup of silt at the bend where she originally went down. Chris Goodwin, an archaeologist with an office in New Orleans, conducted an extensive survey over the site and, I believe, actually cored down to her wreck.

  The third day, we searched the river for two other boats that went down in the battle: the Confederate gunboat Governor Moore and the Union gunboat Varuna—fittingly sunk by the Governor Moore. Moore has the distinction of having fired through her own bow after ramming Varuna, because her forward gun would have hurled its shot over the Union boat if she’d fired through her own port. Both ships went ashore within a hundred yards of each other.

  We struck a large target to the south on the east bank around where Varuna ran aground to keep her from sinking, then continued upriver and found Governor Moore. She was easy to identify, because part of her, including the top of her boilers, was protruding from the water along the bank. The local boys often dive off of her boiler.

  Walt and I had accomplished all we could. After bidding John farewell, we reluctantly departed our ritzy accommodations and headed for Baton Rouge, where we discovered the final resting place of the Confederate ironclad Arkansas.

  I HOPE I’M forgiven for not spotting our targets with transits, as a true professional archaeologist would. By simply marking the wreck sites on charts with nearby landmarks, however, we’ve made it possible for anyone who follows our trail to have little trouble relocating the targets.

  Total cost of the expedition?

  $3,678.40.

  Now, how can you beat that?

  The story of Manassas, however, does not end here.

  I TURNED OVER my records to the chief archaeologist for the Army Corps of Engineers, who contracted with Texas A&M University to do a magnetometer study of the site. I returned the following year with my wife, Barbara, and pinpointed the spot where Walt and I had found a huge magnetic anomaly. The investigation was led by Ervan Garrison and James Baker of the university.

  The survey was conducted with a magnetometer, sidescan sonar, and subbottom profiler. The project determined that, indeed, a very strong anomaly existed over a large shoal that had formed over the site. The magnetometer readings of 8,000-plus gammas and the hard subbottom reflections indicated that an object the same size as Manassas was buried beneath the shoal where contemporary reports put the ironclad. They also found a large mass of steel dredge pipe directly opposite the site and eighteen feet deep in the river. I was surprised at this, since Walt and I recorded no ferrous activity away from the bank.

  Everything was fine and dandy, until Garrison and Baker turned over their report to the Corps’s chief archaeologist. He blew a fuse, then caused an uproar, when he claimed the report was totally inconclusive and proved nothing. His refusal to accept the report was almost vehement in its condemnation.

  The good people at A&M were dumbfounded. These were the nation’s leading experts in remote sensing. I read over the report and found it one of the most concise and detailed I’ve ever read. I was as mystified as Garrison and Baker.

  The Corps archaeologist then called in a local marine archaeologist to do another survey of the site. After investigating, he went on television to bemoan the agony of defeat by proclaiming that the magnetic anomaly was not Manassas but a pile of old pipe dumped there in the 1920s.

  This made absolutely no sense to anyone. Our target was practically under the levee, not eighteen feet deep and thirty-six feet out into the river. That was the pipe, but where had it come from? The Army Corps’s rejection of A&M’s mag study struck me as strange. The mystery wasn’t solved until much later.

  FIFTEEN YEARS PASSED before I returned to the Manassas site. Ralph Wilbanks, Wes Hall, Craig Dirgo, Dirk Cussler, and I had just finished an expedition to find the Republic of Texas Navy ship Invincible, without much luck. Working off Ralph’s boat, Diversity, we dredged a site off Galveston and identified it as a shipwreck, but nothing more specific, since we couldn’t find any artifacts. From Texas, we towed Ralph’s boat to the Mississippi River Delta.

  My thought was that since mag technology had improved and Ralph and Wes were far more professional than Walt and I, it was time to go back and check out the Manassas site again.

  We lowered Diversity down a boat ramp in Venice and leisurely studied the west bank of the Mississippi with Ralph’s state-of-the-art magnetometer. While Ralph steered, Wes ran the mag. Just as it had fifteen years earlier, the recorder’s needle showed a steady line that meant the cupboard was bare of wrecks.

  I watched the shoreline carefully, keeping a keen eye on the landmarks across the river and the top of a big oak tree that was not far from the site. I also noticed that many huge rocks had been laid against the shore by the Army Corps of Engineers.

  Before I could alert the team that we were entering the target zone, Wes let out a gasp as the magnetometer went into hysterics.

  “What’s your reading?” Ralph asked, turning.

  “Eleven thousand gammas,” Wes muttered. He’d rarely ever seen a reading that huge.

  “We’ve passed between the pipe and Manassas,” I explained. Ralph finished the run almost to Fort Jackson before turning around and making another survey along the bank. This time, by hugging the base of the levee, we got a lower reading, since the sensor was farther from the submerged pipe.

  “There’s something big running on an angle under the levee,” Wes announced, examining his mag records.

  We couldn’t get ashore, because the river was running too high and the shoal between the bank and the levee was underwater. Returning to Venice, we pulled Diversity out of the water and hauled it to the Manassas site. There we walked the mag up and down the levee. The signals were still there, but not as strong.

  After dinner, a few of us were sitting in the bar of the boat marina in Venice when an older fellow came up and offered to buy us a drink. He was of medium height, with a tanned face and a finely brushed mane of white hair. He said he had retired a few years before from the Army Corps of Engineers and lived just outside Venice.

  “You them fellas looking for that old Confederate ironclad?” he inquired.

  “We’re the ones,” I answered.

  “I remember some other fellas was looking for her a long time back.”

  “That was me, about fifteen years back.”

  “You sure got scammed by the Corps report, didn’t you?”

  I looked at him. “Scammed?”

  “Sure, after you found the Manassas, word came down from the chief archaeologist and his boss to drop a
load of old dredge pipe on top of it. Boy, was he shook up when that Texas bunch ignored the pipe and concentrated on the wreck under the levee.”

  “The pipe was dumped there after we found the wreck?” I asked, baffled.

  “That’s the way it went.”

  “But why?”

  “The Corps had planned a big project to reinforce the west levee. If the state archaeology commission had got wind of an old shipwreck under it, they’d have named it a historic site and stopped the Corps from throwing rock on top of it. That’s why the Texas survey was tossed out and another survey contracted that said there was no shipwreck, only a bunch of dredge pipe.”

  I felt like a man who’d come awake after a hernia operation. I never did understand why a first-class remote-sensing survey was rejected out of hand. I thought it ridiculous then. Now I can see why.

  The old guy and I talked long into the night. I shouldn’t say “old guy.” We must have been about the same age. I can’t recall a more satisfying evening.

  THERE ARE CURRENTLY plans afoot by John Hunley and a group of interested Louisiana citizens to dig an exploratory hole on the site and see if the Manassas is truly there. If so, its removal and restoration would stand alongside that of the Confederate submarine Hunley. Not only is she the first armored ship built in America, but she is the first one actually to see combat. The battle between Monitor and Merrimack did not take place for another five months.

  Over the years, the chief archaeologist and I had exchanged Christmas cards. On the back of the last card I sent, I wrote, “You dog.” Then I proceeded briefly to relate the story I’d heard from the retired Corps worker.

  I never heard from him again.

  PART FOUR

  U.S.S. Mississippi

  I

  A Magnificent End 1863

  ON THE HEIGHTS OF PORT HUDSON OVERLOOKING THE Mississippi River, the Confederate batteries had managed to withstand the daylong bombardment by the Federal fleet, and now the night of March 14, 1863, was curiously quiet. Twenty miles above the state capital at Baton Rouge, Louisiana, the small riverboat landing was perched on a steep eighty-foot-high bluff at a point where the river made a sharp turn to the west. A narrow beach ran along the precipice, overgrown with willows and cottonwoods that provided cover for a two-gun battery.

  Major General Franklin Gardner stared through the blackness of night at the stars reflected on the fast-flowing river. A native New Yorker, he had seen service in the Mexican War and fought Indians on the frontier. He had offered his services to the Confederacy because of his love for his wife, the daughter of Louisiana governor Alexandre Mouton, and his affection for his friends and neighbors that had come after many years of living in Baton Rouge.

  Port Hudson had great strategic value. The Confederates had fortified the bluffs and thrown up earthworks on the land side because it gave them control of the Red River, as well as the Mississippi. As long as they held the Red River, supplies and troops could be brought into the Confederacy from Mexico through Texas. Gardner’s orders were to hold at all cost against the assault by Union General Nathaniel Banks and his troops. He would hold out for forty-eight days before surrendering during the first week of July.

  In his early forties, Gardner was of medium height and slender, with sparse reddish hair. He peered into the darkness through a pair of binoculars for a few moments before lowering them. “I have a feeling Farragut will come before dawn.”

  Lieutenant Wilfred Pratt of Company K, in command of the nearby gun, its muzzle pointed down to fire in the middle of the river, nodded in agreement. “I wouldn’t put it past them sneaky Yanks to make a try in the wee hours while it’s still dark.”

  “It should be an interesting battle,” murmured Gardner, satisfied that his eighteen guns were well concealed in their emplacements and ready for action.

  He and his seven-thousand-man force would soon be surrounded and besieged by a Union army, the same as their comrades at Vicksburg 110 miles upstream. Both positions were of vital importance to the Confederacy. As long as they controlled their positions above the Mississippi, it was too hazardous and costly in ships and men for the Union gunboats and transports to risk passage.

  Gardner lifted his glasses again. “What time do you have?”

  Lieutenant Pratt pulled a watch from a breast pocket by a gold chain, lit a match, and peered at the dial. “I have three minutes to eleven o’clock, sir.”

  The words were barely uttered when two red rockets soared into the night sky, breaking the stillness of the air as they burst above the river. Captain Whitfield Youngblood of Gardner’s signal corps had ordered the rockets launched upon seeing the red light on the masthead of Farragut’s flagship Hartford, as the vessel passed his station. The Confederates were neither deceived nor surprised. Their eighteen big guns roared and flashed in a deafening crescendo of thunderclaps that never seemed to end.

  Gardner and Pratt watched mesmerized as the Union fleet steadily moved up the river, their black hulls blending in with the dark river. The bedlam mushroomed as the combined 112 guns of the Union fleet, those of the ironclad Essex, and the mortar boats tied along the east bank blasted back in reply. The great thirteen-inch mortar shells with their burning fuses rose and fell like meteors within the Confederate fortifications. The sky became a giant fireworks display. The ground shuttered and vibrated as if rolled by an earthquake. The fiery spurts from the gun muzzles blazed and then blinked dark as their crews rammed new charges and shot down their smoking barrels.

  Soon the smoke was so thick that gunners on both sides could only sight their guns on the enemy’s flashes. Confederate sharpshooters in rifle pits added to the maelstrom clatter as they fired at ships, hoping to bring down the crewmen.

  “IT WON’T BE easy swinging around the bend,” said Farragut’s pilot on board Hartford. George Alder stared down into the black water surging past the frigate’s hull. Then he glanced woefully at the gunboat Albatross that was lashed along the frigate’s port side. “Not with two ships tied side by side against a four-knot current.”

  “The current is the least of my concern,” came the staunch reply. “Just keep us in the center of the river.”

  Admiral David Glasgow Farragut, a tough Scot with a perennial smile, stood imperturbable. He was as unstirred as a rock assaulted by heavy surf—an image he’d displayed in the battle for New Orleans, as well as one for which he would become famous later, at the battle of Mobile Bay, when he’d ignore the Confederate minefield after losing one of his monitors and shout, “Damn the torpedoes! Full steam ahead!”

  The opposite of General Gardner, Farragut came from the South. Though he’d been born in Tennessee, was raised in Louisiana, and lived in Virginia, he was devoted to the United States. After moving his family north, he’d joined the Union and was named flag officer in command of the West Gulf’s blockading squadron.

  After his great victory at New Orleans, he was determined to run this fleet upriver to Vicksburg to try to aid General Grant in his siege of the city. Farragut turned and surveyed the ships lined up behind Hartford. The frigate Richmond, with the gunboat Genesee alongside, was directly astern. Then came the frigate Monongahela, tied to the gunboat Kineo. And finally the “old spinning wheel,” as the frigate Mississippi was affectionately called because of her antiquated paddle wheels.

  Bullets whizzed through the riggings as the rebel riflemen aimed high through the smoke, causing few casualties among Hartford’s crew. The forty-two-gun sloop of war pushed through the smoke and was almost clear of the worst of the fire when the current caught her and swept her bow toward the Port Hudson batteries.

  “The damned current!” shouted Alder. “I can’t hold her.”

  A signal was quickly shouted across the bulwarks to the captain of Albatross to reverse his engines while Hartford’s engineer poured on the coal full steam ahead. Slowly, the two ships swung on a ninety-degree angle upriver and steamed out of range of the deadly guns.

  Farragut was wise en
ough to know that Hartford and Albatross were lucky. The Confederates had not depressed their guns low enough to do damage to the Union ships, but they were not about to make the same mistake as the next ships in line came within range.

  “I’m afraid the rest of the fleet is in for the worst of it,” he said apprehensively, as he saw a fire erupt from an old house on the west bank. The Confederates had obviously ignited it to light up the river and reveal the Union fleet.

  Farragut was especially concerned about the last ship in line. Mississippi was the oldest steamer in naval service. A hardened battle veteran, she had proved her worth in the run past the forts below New Orleans. By the time it was her turn to run the gauntlet, the Confederate gunners would have had time to zero in on her with deadly accuracy. She was about to find herself in the most exposed position of the entire fleet.

  THROUGHOUT THE NEARLY 250 years of its existence, the U.S. Navy has been blessed with any number of ships that contributed proud and illustrious service. Some benefit from household names like Bonhomme Richard, Monitor, Arizona, and Enterprise. But many others, with careers no less distinguished, are neglected and forgotten by all but a few naval historians. One such ship was the U.S.S. Mississippi.

  The second to be built of the Navy’s oceangoing armed steamships, Mississippi was commissioned on December 22, 1841, shortly before her sister ship, Missouri. Commodore Matthew C. Perry personally supervised her construction, and she was named after the mighty river that flowed through the heart of the country.

  Mississippi was a side-wheel steamer 229 feet in length with a beam of 40 feet and a depth of 19 feet. Her original gun battery consisted of two 10-inch and eight 8-inch guns. She had a respectable top speed of 8 knots, and she carried a crew of 280.

  Unlike her virtual twin, Missouri, which sailed for only two years before accidentally catching on fire and exploding off of Gibraltar in 1843, Mississippi enjoyed a long and glorious existence before she, too, burned and exploded.