Adventures of a Sea Hunter (9 page)

Ever since the war between the United States and Mexico had broken out in the spring of 1846,
Somers
had stayed off Veracruz, enforcing the U.S. Navy’s blockade of the port. Now, winter had come, and with it, more tedium punctuated by occasional excitement.

“He’s heading in, sir!” cried the lookout on
Somers.
As
Somers
tacked to pick up the wind and surge towards the incoming ship, the men loaded the guns. Lieutenant Commander Raphael Semmes was sure the other ship was going to try to bypass
Somers
and run into harbor, and it was his job to stop it. Lieutenant Parker, standing on the bulwark, telescope trained on the horizon as they tracked the suspected blockade runner, turned to Semmes. “It looks a little squally to windward, sir.”

A black cloud was racing across the sea, heading directly for them. The squall would bring powerful gusts of wind as well as rain, and Semmes knew that his ship was in trouble.
Somers
was “flying light” with little ballast, and the tall masts were full of canvas, spread to the wind, to give her the speed she needed to intercept the other ship.
Somers
was built for speed, but running with a full rig was a risky business. “Shorten sail, Mr. Parker,” Semmes ordered.

An engraving depicting the wreck of the U.S. warship
Somers,
from
Gleason’s Pictorial Drawing Room Companion,
December 1847.

“All hands!” Parker bawled. “To the yards. Strike the mainsail and brail the spanker!” Men scrambled up the shrouds and spread out onto the yards, hands clutching at the billowing canvas of the mainsail as the helmsman eased off a bit to slack the sail. With jerks and lurches, as men grabbed handfuls of the thick canvas, the main sail climbed up the mast. After the men lashed the sail in place, they turned their attention to the spanker, its canvas spread out on the boom sling off the back of the mast. As they lowered the sail to half its full length, they tied off the loose canvas with the brails, rows of line sewn into the sail.

Then the squall hit. A blast of wind slammed into
Somers
, and the brig rolled. As a sailor screamed “She’s going over!” the man at the wheel called out: “She will not answer the helm, sir.” The decks canted sharply, throwing men and loose gear. In seconds, the brig lay on her side, water
pouring into open hatches. Clinging to the rigging, Seninies knew he had one chance to save his ship. “Cut away the masts!” he ordered. Balancing above the waves on the bulwark, the men grabbed knives and axes and started hacking at the thick, tarred lines that supported the masts. But it was too late. The masts and yards lay flat on the sea, and the brig was filling fast, settling deeper into the water.
Somers
was sinking. When the hull started to go under, Semmes yelled out, “Every man save himself who can!” As the men threw themselves into the sea,
Somers
sank. Just ten minutes after the squall hit, the most notorious ship in the U.S. Navy was gone, taking thirty-two men with her.

Somers’s
last captain, Raphael Semmes, was a son of the South. He survived the sinking and later, during the Civil War, to acclaim (or distress, depending on which side of the war you fought on), as Admiral Semmes of the Confederate States Navy, he helped to sweep the high seas free of Union merchant shipping, capturing and burning any ship flying the American flag in his raider
CSS
Alabama.

In 1986, the governor of Mexico’s Veracruz Province, Acosta Lagunes, asked art dealer, explorer and filmmaker George Belcher to search out historic shipwrecks for the Provincial Museum in Jalapa. Thoughts of Spanish galleons full of rich treasures for the museum’s galleries inspired the governor’s request, but instead of them, Belcher discovered the forgotten grave of
Somers
in 107 feet of water on June 2, just as a squall rolled over his survey boat and covered the scene with darkness and rain. Belcher knew the story of the infamous brig, and the significance of his find inspired him to seek protection for the wreck from both the Mexican and U.S. governments. But first, he had to firmly establish its identity, and so in May 1987, he returned to Veracruz with a small team that included shipwreck archeologist Mitch Marken and me.

Our dives proved conclusively that this was indeed
Somers
, setting off three years of negotiation between the United States and Mexico over who owned the wreck and what would happen to it. The Mexicans
agreed to protect the site, in response to news that local divers had been plundering the wreck, taking weapons, bottles and the ship’s chronometer, which I had last seen lying in the sand at the stern, exactly where it would have dropped from the deteriorating binnacle at the wheel. It has never been seen again, a reminder that significant finds, if not acted on immediately, end up being taken by looters and souvenir hunters. While I condemn the souvenir hunters, I also blame bureaucratic circumstances when governments stand by, either for lack of funding or lack of interest, and leave sites like
Somers
unprotected and unexcavated.

Eventually, the two nations agreed to share the costs, such as they were, of documenting
Somers.
This was no mean feat for Mexico, as it had far less money than the United States. The Armada de Mexico provided a patrol boat,
Margarita Maza de Juarez
, its crew, their
SEAL
team (the Commandos Subacuaticos) and a team of underwater archeologists from the National Institute of Anthropology and History, headed by Dr. Pilar Luna Erreguereña. I led the U.S. team, loaned by the National Park Service’s Submerged Cultural Resources Unit, with archeologists and wreck mappers Jerry Livingston and Larry Nordby, and photographer John Brooks. George Belcher and his brother Joel, the discoverers of the wreck, came as our guests but paying their own way. In July 1990, we gathered in Veracruz. It had been three years since I had last dived
Somers
, and, like George, I was both excited and uneasy about what we would find.

The thoughts of Billy Budd as he waits in the ship’s brig for his execution come to mind as I perch on the edge of the patrol boat, preparing to drop “fathoms down, fathoms down” to where “oozy weeds” do twist, not around a dead boy, but amidst the bones
of Somers
, the ship that inspired Herman Melville’s haunting tale:

But me they’ll lash in hammock, drop me deep.
Fathoms down, fathoms down, how I’ll dream fast asleep.
I feel it stealing now. Sentry, are you there?

Just ease these darbies at the wrist,
And roll me over fair,
I am sleepy, and the oozy weeds about me twist.

I turn to George Belcher and nod. Together, we roll off backward, splashing into the warm blue water. Other splashes follow us, and soon a cluster of divers is hanging on the anchor line. A final check of the gear, then we let the air out of our buoyancy vests and drop into the murky depths. Sixty feet down, I’m in a cloudy haze of grayish-green water, my dive partner a blurry form. Ninety feet, and the blur clears as I switch on my dive light. The bottom is approaching, so I give the buoyancy vest a quick hit of air. My descent slows and stops, and I’m hovering over a large iron anchor, nearly no feet below the surface. In front of me, the curving form of a ship’s bow rises up out of the silt, sweeping sharply back like the edge of a knife blade.

Sleeping in her grave, the clipper brig
Somers
, perhaps the most notorious ship in the history of the United States Navy, lies before me at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. Canted on her side, the wooden hull largely consumed by marine organisms,
Somers
is now truly a ghost ship, her form outlined by the copper sheathing that once protected her hull from the voracious appetite of marine creatures. Impervious to the attack of the teredo worms that eat wooden ships’ hulls, the copper has leached its metallic salts into a thin layer of wood so that this fragile remnant of
Somers
still holds her form perfectly more than 140 years after she went down. A slow and steady decay, this, and as a result, everything lies on the seabed exactly as it once did on the decks and in the holds: iron cannon, anchor chain, the ship’s stove and other gear, even the iron fittings and blocks from the masts. Everything inside
Somers
, after she sank, lay trapped in the hull as it deteriorated and collapsed over the decades, and presumably much of it should still be here, buried in layers of rotten wood, sand, silt and thick masses of corroded iron. Indications of what was once inside the ship, and of lives interrupted and lost, include a small white plate, an oval serving platter from the officers’ wardroom and a small black glass bottle.

I drift past the iron davits for the port quarter boat. Lying flat on the sand, they are a reminder of the only boat to get away from the sinking
Somers.
It ferried several men to the safety of the nearby island of Isla Verde. Many others never made it, trapped below by the rushing water or drowned in the open sea as their heavy boots and uniforms pulled them under. I also recall, as I float for a moment over this spot, that this is where young Philip Spencer lay manacled to the deck on that long-ago night of November 26, 1842, in the first of a chain of events that cost three lives and ruined others. Spencer, Cromwell and Small were all chained at the stern, Small next to the aftermost 32-pounder carronade on the port side. That gun lies here now, and I swim up to take a look at it.

As I continue my tour of the wreck, I see that three of the four carronades on the starboard side lie buried muzzle down in the sand, showing that
Somers
sank sideways, never righting as she dropped into the depths, and landed on the starboard side. I stop and carefully run a small iron probe up inside the barrel of one of the guns. The probe stops 24 inches into the 4-foot bore of the carronade. I turn to another gun and try it. It, too, is blocked. I smile and turn to Pilar Luna, who is shining a light on the gun to help me guide the probe. These guns are loaded, as we expected. After all,
Somers
was ready for action, in the middle of a chase, when the squall hit.

A long metal tube, topped by what looks like an open trough, is the brig’s pump, once used to remove water from the hold, but useless on that fateful morning. Lying on the bottom, it is now being mapped by Larry Nordby and Jerry Livingston. Their tape measure indicates it is just over u feet long—a perfect match for the depth of the hold. A metal flange, almost halfway up the iron tube, would not be noticed by most people, but Larry instantly recognizes that it means the area below decks was divided into a berth deck, where the men lived, and a lower hold. This flange marks the location of that divide, a feature not recorded in the few surviving plans of the brig. It is also an indicator of just how small and crowded this vessel was, particularly on that winter voyage in 1842, with 120 men and boys packed on these decks and in

Captain Santos Gomez Leyva of the Armada de Mexico and Dr. Pilar Luna Erregueren a watch as Larry Nordby works on the map of the wreck of Somers aboard the patrol vessel
Margarita Maza de Juarez, 1990.
James P. Delgado