Submerged

by Daniel Lenihan

  Corky Farley, the ranger who has been steering us the past few hours through survey lanes pre-plotted by our computer, grabs the fire extinguisher as I take the helm. Hands on the wheel, I watch Larry over my shoulder so we won’t lose sight of him bobbing on the waves. Still moving away at a slow, three-knot survey speed, we can’t turn back for him. We are towing a marine magnetometer, a cylinder-shaped device at the end of fifty feet of cable, which would wrap in our prop. Also, with the wind coming from behind us, flames would wash over the boat if we came about.

  The whoosh-whoosh of the fire extinguisher assures me Corky is tending the blaze. “Got it,” he yells. “Don’t take your eyes off him.” Corky’s feet pound over the fiberglass deck, and I feel him take the wheel as he slips by me into the driver’s seat. Then he tracks Larry as I race to the stern to haul in the cable towing the magnetometer. Within seconds, I toss the whole works on the deck, reacquire Larry’s position from Corky, and yell, “Hit it!” Adrenaline has cleared away any remnants of my stupor. The boat’s mega-horsepower engines come alive as if happy to be finally doing what patrol boat engines are supposed to do: speed.

  Good grief! Systematically, almost somnambulantly, searching for a historic shipwreck one minute; Keystone Kop fire drill the next. The fire resulted from gas spilling against the red-hot manifold of the generator. Poor form, filling a generator like that on a boat, but we finally had a complex array of high-tech hardware and software working. We weren’t about to shut the system down because the generator’s gas tank only holds a two-hour supply.

  As Corky leans the craft into a tight turn to port, I keep my arm extended directly at Larry’s bobbing head so Corky can use my extended limb as a compass rose and align the now-speeding boat with the direction I’m pointing. Within seconds we are bearing down on him. At the last minute, Corky cuts the engine and turns sharply to starboard, heeling the boat’s left side into the marine version of a hockey stop. He lets the wind carry Murphy the last few yards to our port stern.

  Larry is treading water, hat in place, sunglasses on, funnel still in hand; he hasn’t even kicked off his deck shoes.

  “Hi,” he says.

  “You all right?” Corky asks.

  “Think so.”

  We help him in over the swim platform at the stern and sit him down. Amazingly, he is only burnt a bit along his right arm and hand, still clutching the funnel. Corky takes it from him. “Won’t need that for a while.”

  “Why? Are we going in?”

  Exasperated, Corky unfolds one finger at a time. “Well, Murphy, you just turned yourself into a flambeau, the front of my boat looks like it took a direct hit from an incendiary round . . .”

  “Okay, okay,” I interject. “Let’s go in and regroup.”

  The treasure-hunting community in the Keys found it amusing that a bunch of Smokey Bears intended to find, in less than two weeks, a wreck in an area in which they had been successful only after years of searching. But that was our intent. The SCRU team had been officially in existence for less than a year when another in a series of gauntlets had been thrown down, this time by a federal district court in Miami. It was July 1980, a time when the eruption of Mount St. Helens was fresh in our memory, Reagan was running against Carter for president, and we started hearing about some scary new disease killing gay people in San Francisco.

  Even at the time, it was illegal to search for antiquities in National Parks without an antiquities permit. But how to enforce it? On land there were explicit regulations against using metal detectors, but there was no such corollary on the water. Even if a looter removed items from the bottom and wasn’t caught directly in the act, he could claim that the item came from outside the park in state waters where rules were much more lax. Treasure hunting was a time-honored tradition in the Keys with most locals willing to wink at transgressions.

  But I didn’t think the winking would apply to federal judges. When the park protested that a treasure permit could not be let on historic shipwrecks in a national park, the court said, in so many words, that the agency had to demonstrate its stewardship by finding the site. In the silly world of state politics and circuit courts, the NPS had been challenged Old West style to “slap leather.”

  The wreck in question was reputed to be a treasure-filled Spanish galleon brimming with gold doubloons and silver pieces-of-eight. In fact, all wrecks in Florida were reputed to be treasure-laden Spanish galleons, even the ones in which people had to push aside boiler tubes and steam fittings to get to a good digging spot.

  The irony of it all was that most of the greed-driven damage was concentrated on maritime archeological sites that carried nothing but a treasure of knowledge: priceless information on the lifeways of seamen, insights into a maritime past that was quickly decimated by the frenzied bottom clawing of treasure-seekers.

  Most destructive were the commercial operations that had invested in propwash deflectors. Elbow-shaped metal tubes, lowered by winch over the stern deflected the full force of the vessels’ propwash downward. These powerful devices could blow huge holes in the bottom sands, destroying any context of the artifacts and much of the remaining structure of buried ships. Where necessary because of deep sand overburden, they could be carefully used by archeologists to make contact with the first layer of cultural remains. In the hands of treasure salvors they were used to blow the wreck and associated coral into a soup of encrusted wood, concreted metal fastenings, and hunks of live coral. The one thing that survived this punishment quite well was gold and silver. These deflectors were called “mailboxes” in the Keys and attributed to treasure hunter Mel Fisher. They had actually been in existence for other marine applications for decades.

  Early reports regarding the wreck we were looking for was that it was definitely wooden and fairly early; the rest was probably wishful thinking by the salvors. But that was immaterial to us; an ancient wreck in park waters is sacrosanct regardless of what treasures it might hold. Biscayne National Monument (now Biscayne National Park) almost entirely comprises submerged lands located south of Key Biscayne. They were/are owned by the people of the United States. We had been given three weeks by the court to find the remains of a two to three-hundred-year-old wooden vessel embedded in the coral and sand of Biscayne National Park within a nine-square-mile search area. What this decision had to do with the time-honored and, to all appearances, legal principle of not screwing over antiquity in national parks escaped us, but the court is the court. If we hoped to keep our tenuous hold on heritage sites in parks with submerged bottoms, we had to win this case.

  We and our associates at the NPS Archeological Center in Tallahassee agreed the only way to succeed at such a task was with state-of-the-art electronic positioning. A week flitted by before we could convince the suits in the regional office that we couldn’t do the job by towing a magnetometer and using sextants to position the boat. We were left with a grand total of eleven days of project time. Our operation using the electronics would cost a thousand dollars a day, not counting our normal salaries. The suits finally capitulated, and there we were, with the electronics we had insisted on and under a lot of pressure.

  The key to winning resource protection battles in the parks is largely a function of getting the local park staff on your side. When we pulled into the government dock at Biscayne, with Murphy’s burnt forearm soaking in our ice cooler, and told the chief ranger what had transpired, we were at a critical juncture. He could have curled into an ass-covering ball of green and gray and lectured everybody on boat safety. Instead, he listened carefully to his rangers offering to take us back out all night without pay, and said: “I don’t want anybody hurt. Paint that smudge off before morning and take these lunatics [us] back out if you really think you can do it without bloodshed.”

  The fact that the NPS has the oldest nonmilitary diving program in the country, consisting of 150 collateral duty divers spread throughout the park system, was one of the elements in the equation that made the rather remarkable accom
plishments of the SCRU team over the next two decades a reality. It should also help one understand the level of intensity that attended our operations in the parks and why Chief Ranger Tim Setnicka let me and a freshly bandaged, just-returned-from-the-emergency-room Larry Murphy and a still smoking generator back out on the waters of Biscayne that night, even though he knew we were turning his park into a war zone.

  The SCRU team could only succeed by working at a fanatical level of intensity and the NPS was perhaps the only civilian agency that had the collective personality to nurture such a group. Steeped in almost a century of “rangering” tradition, the folks in the parks understood SCRU and took it under wing. The unit was absurdly tiny for its mission but during the NRIS it had built a support network that was still growing in many of the 300-plus units of the national park system. Biscayne had just become one of them.

  Nine square miles is a very big piece of underwater real estate to survey comprehensively in the time allotted, especially with the technology available in 1980. With less than a week to prepare for the work at Biscayne, Larry and I stopped off at an ocean engineering firm in Houston to learn how a Del Norte positioning system worked. To someone using a PC today it doesn’t sound daunting, but in those days it was like deciding to take a two-day course in astrophysics before blasting off for the moon. In later years Larry would swear that the computer that formed the base of the technology had a hole in the side for a crank-starter.

  “Crap, it went down again.”

  The patter of the rain on the tarp draped over our heads was slow but relentless. The tarp kept the rain off us and the computer, but it also blocked the breeze. Sweat poured off of Murphy’s brow as if he were still in the rain. His uniform was soaked through with perspiration, and mine wasn’t much better.

  “Damn!” This erupted from underneath a neighboring plastic cocoon where George Fischer was monitoring the output of a Geometrics 806 magnetometer.

  Crammed in the stern of the 25-foot white patrol boat (with a freshly painted bow) was roughly a hundred thousand dollars worth of electronics, including a magnetometer to find iron—a component of all shipwrecks—and an electronic positioning system that tells you where you are when you find it. The onboard computer stored the boat’s location within several meters of accuracy every second.

  It was the first time we had used such sophisticated technology, and it was horribly demanding and frustrating, yet crucial. If we were to find this site in such a large area in such a short time, it is critical to know exactly where we had, and had not, been while towing the magnetometer. Treasure hunters didn’t use precise positioning systems at the time, but a model for covering large blocks of submerged bottom-lands for shipwrecks scientifically had been demonstrated by the aforementioned Carl Clausen, working with a young marine archeologist in Texas named Barto Arnold.

  We learned early on that Larry has a much greater proclivity for dealing with computers and recalcitrant electronics. George, from the Tallahassee office, who had originally hired me years before, likewise had more patience in this area. I returned to the dive boat to supervise in-water examination of magnetic anomalies. On this day I had as one of my divers, Jack Morehead, the superintendent of Everglades National Park. It was July 4th, a national holiday, but he couldn’t stand all this happening several miles away at Biscayne without getting involved.

  Jack Morehead was the living epitome of the park ranger tenacity that suffuses the agency. Although his background was forged on the climbing walls of Yosemite and Canyon de Chelly and as a ski instructor for mountain troops, he had learned to dive as early as 1959. He conducted many working dives when he was superintendent of Isle Royale. At fifty years old, he had wavy white hair, a ready smile, and was in great physical shape. Jack had lobbied for the creation of SCRU and was here to make damn sure we succeeded, even if it meant taking his turn on the endless dives checking out anomalies. Each day he called for a progress report, checked in by phone, or, if he could spare the time, was waiting on the dock with his neat pile of dive gear and a little insulated cooler bag he carried each time he boarded our boat.

  A high-ranking Park Service official, Jack would never have needed to get his feet wet in the field. Two years earlier he had attended one of the intense training programs we ran for NPS divers at Amistad. His presence at the course, designed for down-and-dirty, find-the-body, fix-the-buoys field rangers helped generate support for our fledgling group.

  As we headed the dive boat for a set of marker buoys dropped by the mag boat, I heard the characteristic click and lowering of radio static that meant someone had keyed their transmitter. Larry’s voice crackled a recommendation to bypass the next several targets we were slated to “ground truth,” in favor of one close to where he had just made a pass. He had broken the pattern of survey lanes that they had been tirelessly following and were now running the mag back over the same area from a different direction. I knew he had a hunch.

  I radioed back, “Roger . . . switch to direct.” The allusion to “direct” meant we were now transmitting only line-of-sight and could not be monitored by any but nearby craft, and we seemed to be alone on the ocean that day. All the usual holiday mayhem common to water parks was probably occurring nearer to shore.

  I turned to Jack and said, “You don’t mind getting on the troll-line again, do you?”

  We were moving over clear water less than thirty feet deep so we could visually cover the area best by dragging divers from lines suspended from the stern. They held a Danforth anchor, which could be tilted in such a way that water rushing over its surface depressed or raised the diver like a poor-man’s dive sled. They usually used their snorkels but wore scuba in case they needed to descend for a longer time. The “trolling” reference was to the timeworn gallows humor that this technique was reminiscent of trolling for sharks, with the diver as bait.

  Jack, though recently returned from an hour on the towline, had no complaints about getting back in. He and our assigned boat operator were soon in the water while I joggled the throttles to diver-towing speed—around one-and-a-half to two knots. The radio crackled back to life, and I heard Larry’s voice.

  “Head toward red buoy after lining up from due east, bear eleven o’clock after passing buoy, pattern back from thirty yards north.”

  “Roger.”

  I watched Jack slide over the surface, methodically turning his head left to right as we approached the red marker. It looked like a lobster buoy the park had confiscated from an illegal trap.

  Suddenly, Jack was gone. A ranger sitting in the stern monitoring the person being trolled, noted it as soon as I did. “What the . . . ?” It was okay to depress the line, but against our protocol to leave the line without giving a signal to the monitor, who, in turn, would tell the boat operator to put the engines in neutral. Running boat props anywhere near a diver has to be done with extreme caution.

  Within ten seconds Jack was back at the surface sputtering. He switched from snorkel to his regulator mouthpiece, yelled something incomprehensible, and darted down again. A minute later he was on the surface and with our engines now cut we could hear him plainly.

  “Dan, there are cannons all over the bottom, artifacts, ballast, ship structure . . . get the hell in here!”

  I radioed the survey boat that we were deploying an anchor and that they should “raft off ” alongside. They should come in from the north and stay clear of divers in the water to our south. Our helmsman had already joined Jack on the bottom.

  The exhaustion from the past ten days wrapped around me like a damp blanket. Emotionally as well as physically depleted, I sat alone on the gunnel, bouncing in the gentle swells, and watched the survey boat approach. Soon everyone from both boats was in the water except Larry and me.

  “You knew, eh?”

  “No way to know, but I damn well felt it. Long, continuous anomaly, multiple spikes. It smelled right.”

  Within minutes we had our tanks on and were splashing over the side. There was
still the chance it was a different wreck from the one the salvors had found.

  Our “dive suits” in these climes were not especially trendy. We found the most practical apparel was a pair of blue jeans and an old neoprene wet suit top, loose fitting, with the forearm zippers ripped out. This provided plenty of protection against coral, jagged metal, and stinging hydroids on the bottom and sun on the surface. If one was going to dive all day, it also precluded ever having to change one’s garb.

  As I pushed away from the boat and broke the surface, I noticed sea fans and turtle grass bending steadily in a moderate bottom current running in a different direction than the lay of the boat from its anchor. The next thing I took in were the irregular shapes on the bottom; man had indeed intruded into this world at some time in the past. Lastly, I noted my growing sense of calm and well-being; away from the frantic surface activity and blaring radios, for the first time in days I could melt back into the world in which I feel the most at home.

  I came down near what appeared to be a large coral head, but as I drew nearer it was obviously something man-made, encrusted with coral. My mind starting putting the shapes into some semblance of order and searching for an explanation. Under the encrustation was a hodgepodge of . . . junior bowling balls? Not likely. A shot locker? Yes. Apparently, there was once a stowage area for cannon balls. The wood had long ago decomposed, but the iron shot concreted in a manner that kept the shape of the old container.

  Wooden vessels from the sixteenth or twentieth centuries—or any time in between—seem to share certain similarities in the way they break up. They tend to disarticulate along the turn of the bilge, that curved area where the ship’s sides seem as if they are taking a sharp curve toward the keel. The end product of that process is that they all get flattened out into about five or more pieces representing sides, bottom, stern, and bow. The light superstructure is often broken off and separated by ocean dynamics from the rest.