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 C
onfederate 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.
Clive Cussler; Craig Dirgo Page 16
