Clive Cussler; Craig Dirgo

by The Sea Hunters II

  The questions without hard answers still persist.

  Could the Californian have responded in time and saved the poor souls of Titanic? Or was she too distant to reach the stricken liner before she sank? The controversy rages. There are revisionists who believe the lights seen by Titanic’s officers during the sinking came from a sailing ship, called Samson, that was engaged in illegal seal-fishing. Mistaking the flares for a government patrol boat out of Halifax, the crew of Samson fled the scene out of fear of being arrested. They didn’t find out about their part in the tragedy until almost a month later.

  What became of Carpathia and Californian, the two ships forever linked together in one of the sea’s great disasters? Were they scrapped at the end of their shipping careers? Or do they lie in solitude beneath the sea?

  In a strange historical coincidence, they were both torpedoed by German U-boats in World War I. One lies in the Mediterranean, the other in the Atlantic, but exactly where?

  To find keys to their final resting places, I went directly to the most knowledgeable source, Ed Kamuda of the Titanic Historical Society in Indian Orchard, Massachusetts. Ed sent me not only charts showing the approximate positions of the wrecks but also reports of the sinkings.

  The S.S. Californian was torpedoed on November 11, 1915, off Cape Matapan in the Mediterranean Sea, thirty miles from the coast of Greece. She slipped under the sea at 7:45 in the morning while on a voyage from Saloniki to Marseilles. She had been sailing as a troopship, but fortunately she was empty when she was struck by a single torpedo. Most of the crew escaped, and a French patrol boat took her under tow. But later in the afternoon, the persistent captain of the U-boat threw another torpedo at her, and she sank in thirteen thousand feet of water.

  I scratched Californian off my wish list. The reported position of the sinking given by the ship’s officers, the patrol boat, and the U-boat captain was not a good match. The site was quite vague. This is understandable, though. It’s hard to take a sun sighting with a sextant—these were the days before LORAN and GPS—while a disaster is going on around you. You can’t operate on luck alone, however, and searching the seafloor for a shipwreck lying over two and a half miles deep within a two-hundred-mile search grid, and operating strictly on guesswork, is certain folly.

  So I left the Californian, along with her legacy of what-might-have-been, alone in the depths.

  The Carpathia was a different story. Here we stood a fighting chance of finding her. That’s all I ever ask. If the odds are a hundred or fifty to one, forget it. But I’m a sucker for a ten-toone bet. Perhaps that’s why the red carpet is always out for Cussler in Las Vegas and at Indian casinos. I simply give my money to the croupier and dealer, then walk away. Why waste time suffering the agony of losing? It’s much simpler doing it my way.

  I learned that Carpathia had been torpedoed by U-55 on the morning of July 17, 1918, while sailing as part of a convoy carrying 225 military passengers and crew. The U-boat pumped two torpedoes into her, instantly killing five men in the engine room. Amazingly, Carpathia remained afloat. Captain William Prothero gave the order to abandon ship and lower the lifeboats. Impatient to finish the job, the U-boat’s commander sent a third torpedo into the battered liner. Ten minutes later, she went down. Interestingly, Lusitania sank in eighteen minutes after a single torpedo strike and lies just forty miles west of Carpathia.

  Again we were confronted with conflicting position reports of the Carpathia’s sinking. The H.M.S. Snowdrop, the ship that rescued the 225 survivors, gave one position while the officer from Carpathia gave another one 4 miles away. The U-boat’s commander put the sinking 6 miles north of the others. Admiralty charts showed a wreck in the general vicinity, about 4 miles from Carpathia’s last visual sighting, but it failed to coincide with the other sightings. The search grid now worked out to a lengthy area 12 miles by 12 miles, or a box covering 144 square miles.

  The dilemma never ends. This wasn’t going to be as easy as I thought.

  About this time, Keith Jessup contacted me. He is the legendary British diver who found and directed the salvage operations of the H.M.S. Edinburgh, the British cruiser sunk in the Baltic Sea during World War II with millions in Russian gold aboard. More than ninety percent of the gold was brought up by divers living in a decompression tank eight hundred feet deep.

  During our conversation, I asked Keith if he knew anybody with a boat that I might charter to search for Carpathia. He replied that his son Graham was in the shipwreck survey business and would be delighted to join in and oversee the search. Graham and I hit it off, and plans were under way to form an expedition, funded by me and directed by Graham through his company, Argosy International. I would have given my left arm to lead it myself, but I was buried in work, my wife Barbara was suffering serious health problems, and negotiations were under way to sell my books to Hollywood. As much as I would have enjoyed participating, there was simply too much hanging over my head to leave the homestead in search of an old shipwreck.

  Graham chartered a survey boat called Ocean Venture, skippered by an experienced seaman named Gary Goodyear. After loading the remote operating vehicle (ROV) on board to take underwater video and photos, the ship and crew cast off during the middle of April from Penzance, England, the town made famous by Gilbert and Sullivan.

  The weather was not kind, and it was a rough trip to the search area in the North Atlantic off southern Ireland. Once on-site, they began to run survey lines in a box between the positions given by Carpathia, Snowdrop, and U-55, using a forward-seeking sonar that sent out sweeping arcs ahead of the ship and a sidescan sonar that threw out signals to both sides of the boat to detect any objects rising from the seafloor. The sonar units were backed up with a magnetometer to detect magnetic anomalies.

  On the second day, the forward sonar turned up a target. They had a wreck with the approximate dimensions of Carpathia located almost seven miles from her last reported position. The sidescan sonar showed a sunken vessel that appeared to be lying upside down with scattered debris along her hull, a common situation with ships that invert on the way down.

  With great anticipation and excitement, the crew prepared to explore the wreck. At 550 feet, the depth was too great for divers, so the crew prepared to deploy the ROV and its cameras to examine the wrecks. There were high hopes that it was indeed Carpathia. The weather was choppy and the waves high for such an operation. With the forecast calling for storms, they rushed to shoot the video and head for harbor before the seas turned uglier.

  Captain Goodyear positioned Ocean Venture over the wreck site. To minimize the length of cable between the ship and the ROV and to reduce the effects of a strong current, they employed a tether management system. Along with the ROV, a cage is lowered near the wreck with a winch that reels out a shorter length of cable to prevent the vehicle from bouncing around and becoming entangled in the wreckage.

  Unfortunately, at this point, Graham jumped the gun and made the announcement over the radio that Carpathia had been found.

  Not so.

  The video cameras revealed a large wreck similar to Carpathia lying atop her crushed superstructure, rudder and propellers rising toward the surface like grotesque fingered hands. The first tip-off came from the propellers. They were four-bladed, and Carpathia’s were known to have been three-bladed. Her length was also a hundred feet short.

  This was not looking good.

  It proved impossible to make a positive identification. The only hope was to stumble onto something in the extensive debris field around the wreck. The ROV and its cameras were sent over to videotape the objects lying like trash along a freeway.

  Then came a gruesome find. The cameras revealed a human bone protruding from the silt, a visible reminder of those who had gone down with the ship. Although NUMA is not in the artifact-removal business, the team decided to bring up for identification a piece of the ship’s china that was found resting in the silt not far from the bone. Rigging a wire, the ROV operator maneuvere
d his joystick and managed to hook the wire into the handle of what was soon seen as a soup tureen. Once the tureen was on board and delicately cleaned, the script on the base could be read: H.A.L

  This was definitely not Carpathia. But what was this wreck, and how had it come to be here?

  With time now run out, Ocean Venture set a course for home, and I went back to the archives.

  Research identified the wreck as the Hamburg American Lines ship Isis, a cargo/passenger ship of 4,454 tons built in Hamburg, Germany, and launched in 1922. Newspaper accounts reported that she had gone down in a raging storm on November 8, 1936. Thirty-five died. Only the cabin boy that tied himself under the seat of a lifeboat survived. One can only imagine the horror in the ship’s final moments as a huge wave crushed her superstructure and rolled her upside down before sending her to the bottom.

  It might be said that some wreck is better than no wreck at all. But that’s no compensation when we had our hearts set on finding Carpathia.

  Return to Go and wish for luckier dice.

  For the next try, Graham was joined by John Davis and his film crew from ECO-NOVA, along with master diver Mike Fletcher. Setting out from Penzance for the second attempt, Ocean Venture stopped in the fishing town of Baltimore, Ireland, where Graham and John talked to the local fishermen. Ocean fishermen are a great source for locating shipwrecks. They take great pains to carefully mark hangers or snags on their charts—any objects protruding from the bottom that cause them to tear or lose their expensive nets and trawl gear.

  They were kind enough to provide a list of eighteen spots where they had hooked their nets. One of them might be Carpathia. One trawler belonged to a Spanish fisherman who had programmed snags in and around the Carpathia search area. The boat’s new owner was helpful in supplying the GPS coordinates that revealed the exact locations. There was one snag he thought had a high potential, and he suggested we search it first.

  But it was not to be. The famous old liner was still not ready to be found. Fate in the form of nasty weather set in, and a near disaster dropped on our doorstop.

  When we reached the first prime target, the Ocean Venture’s ROV was dropped into the deep and moved around a wreck that proved to be a large trawler that had sunk in a storm in 1996. If nothing else, our position was right on the money. The fix couldn’t have been more accurate. Then came a break in the umbilical cable, and cold salt water began causing electrical shorts in the delicate wiring. There would be no more underwater images this trip. The cable could not be repaired, only replaced, and there was no spare on board. With disappointment written in everyone’s eyes, the ship turned for port.

  There are times I’d like to strangle the guy who wrote, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.” Not that I haven’t taken his advice on occasion. It’s just that I have this feeling that he never succeeded in anything he ever attempted.

  We decided that next time, provided my hand wasn’t tired of writing checks to pay for the madness, it would be pointless to continue search grids because of the vagaries of the sea and weather.

  Given the accuracy of the fishermen’s positions, it seemed more expedient and less time-consuming to simply check out each individual hanger. Running search lanes was like looking for the proverbial needle in the haystack, one straw at a time. But now the stormy season was coming on. We would have to hang tough before making another effort.

  Graham Jessup fitted out a new ship and headed for the Titanic site to bring up artifacts, but luckily, John Davis of ECO-NOVA, who had involved me in the Sea Hunters documentaries, offered to joint-venture the third Carpathia expedition. John would direct operations, as well as bring along a film crew to videotape the seafloor using a newer and larger ROV—with better capabilities—than the one used previously.

  In December, during a lull in the weather and restocked with food, water, and fuel, Ocean Venture, with reliable Gary Goodyear at the helm, set out once again. During the voyage to the search area, the remaining seventeen snag positions provided by the fishermen were plotted into the ship’s computer. The plan was to start at the north end and zigzag down south, hitting the marked snags as they went

  The first target was a mystery we still haven’t solved. The sonar readings showed what is most definitely a destroyer, with the aft hundred feet totally missing—almost as if a giant hand had sliced it off with a knife. The stem could not be found on either forward or sidescan sonar. The best guess is that the ship was torpedoed but did not sink right away. The stem pulled free and sank, but the rest of the ship floated long enough to be towed until it sank, too. There were no records of a warship going down in this area. Hopefully, someday we’ll be able to identify her.

  The following days passed without a solid strike on which we could hang our hat. Operating twenty-four hours a day, the ship and crew began to show signs of frustration and fatigue. Still, anxiety ran high as Ocean Venture neared the seventeenth and last target in the extreme end of the southern search area.

  Then, at last, the gods smiled, and the sonar reading began revealing what looked like a large ship on the bottom. Everyone in the wheelhouse stood in silent anticipation as the target began to increase in size, until Goodyear pointed and said, “There’s your ship.”

  Optimism was high, but failure is always standing behind those who look for sunken ships. Despite the advances in equipment technology and computer projections, shipwreck-searching is not an exact science. The lesson of Isis, and at least two other wrecks that NUMA misidentified over twenty years, came back to haunt everyone. Several more passes were made over the remains of the ship far below. The dimensions checked out. So far, so good. Now it was the turn of the robotic vehicle and its cameras to probe the carcass.

  While Goodyear’s first mate jockeyed Ocean Venture’s thrusters, fighting the current and waves to keep the ship stabilized above the wreck, the ROV was lowered over the stern. As the deck crane swung it over, the winch slowly played out the umbilical cord, sending the little unmanned craft into a sea turned gray from the dark, menacing clouds above. Inside the wheelhouse, Goodyear sat in front of a video monitor with a remote-control unit perched in his lap, moving the joysticks and switches that maneuvered the underwater vehicle’s motors and cameras.

  Now every eye was locked on the monitor, waiting for the ROV to drop through the gloomy void to the bottom. After what seemed a millennium, we could see the drab, sunless silt spread across the sea bottom.

  “I think we’re about fifty feet north of her,” said Davis.

  “Turning south,” acknowledged Goodyear.

  Plankton and sediment swirled like chaff in a windstorm, kicked up by a strong current. Visibility on the seafloor was poor, no more than six or seven feet. It was like looking through a lace curtain on a window as it swayed in the breeze.

  Then a huge, dark shape began to loom in the murk before materializing into the hull of the ship. Unlike Isis, which had turned turtle on its descent, this wreck was sitting upright. She looked for all the world like a haunted castle or, better yet, the ominous house that belonged to Norman Bates and his mother in Psycho. Her black paint no longer showed, and her steel hull and remaining bulkheads had long been covered with marine incrustations and silt.

  “Come around to the stem so we can count the prop blades,” said Davis.

  “Heading toward the stern,” replied Goodyear, as he manipulated the ROV controls.

  Large openings in the hull appeared, their steel borders disjointed and jagged, with debris spilling out from them.

  “Could be where the torpedoes struck,” observed Fletcher.

  Soon, a massive rudder and bronze propellers came into view.

  “She’s got three blades,” Davis noted excitedly.

  “The number of spindles holding the rudder look right,” added Goodyear.

  “She’s got to be Carpathia,” Fletcher said, in growing excitement.

  “What’s that lying in the sand off to the side of the hull?” Davis said, p
ointing.

  Everyone stared intently at the monitor’s screen and the object half-buried in the silt.

  “By God, a ship’s bell,” muttered Goodyear. “It’s Carpathia’s bell!”

  He zoomed in with the ROV’s cameras, but the raised letters identifying the ship were too encrusted to read. The ravages of time and sea life had laid a blanket over them. Unable to make a positive identification from the bell or the bow proved irritating to the men in the wheelhouse.

  The ROV rose from the bottom and moved along the dead hull, past rows of portholes, some still with glass in them, past the hatches through which Tetanic’s survivors had entered that cold dawn six years before Carpathia went down. The Ocean Venture’s crew could almost envision the slightly more than seven hundred people—pitifully few men, heartbroken wives, fatherless children—who had either climbed the ladders or been hoisted aboard Carpathia’s decks.

  Dozens of trawl nets were entangled in the wreckage, making Goodyear’s job very tricky indeed. The upper superstructure and funnel were gone, collapsed into a great tangle of shattered wreckage. A huge conger eel came out of a jumbled mess to stare at the intruder to its domain. The ROV sailed over the forecastle, focusing on the deck winches, finding the fallen forward mast.

  Suddenly, the cable became snagged, wedged in the twisted metal on the main deck.

  It seemed as though, after eighty years in black solitude, Carpathia didn’t want to be left alone again. With a sensitive touch, Goodyear feathered the joysticks on the remote, retracing the ROV’s path until the umbilical cord finally pulled free. With a sigh of relief, he brought up the ROV and the first images of Carpathia since 1918.

  With nothing more to be accomplished, the weary but exhilarated crew reluctantly stowed the ROV and the sonar and magnetometer gear and set a course back to Penzance, England. The disappointment over the Isis hung heavily on their minds. The big question was whether they had truly discovered Carpathia, or some other ship of the same design.