Clive Cussler; Craig Dirgo (18 page)

Harold McKenzie was an ordinary seaman. And ordinary seamen followed orders. Even so, McKenzie could not help but mention his apprehensions to his friend Pat Wicks.

“The weight is not being distributed correctly,” he whispered, as the two men carried a wooden crate filled with shells. “We’re putting too much forward.”

But Wicks had other matters on his mind.

“We’re taking on a full load. The officers must be planning another run at the forts.”

Wicks had been wounded by shrapnel in the first attack on Sumter, and ever since he had been more than a little gun-shy. By contrast, McKenzie had just transferred to
Weehawken.
He was still itching to see combat.

“Good,” McKenzie said. “It’s high time we taught the rebels a lesson.”

But that was not to be, for McKenzie’s worst fears would soon be realized.

That evening, as the sailors slept in their berths, a stiff wind came from land. The misplaced load of fresh munitions was making
Weehawken
ride low in the bow, and it took only a matter of moments for serious trouble to arise. As the first series of waves washed over the bow, the water flooded into an unsecured hatch. As the bow dropped a few inches lower, water raced into the anchor chain hawse pipe. As the water filled the lower hold, the bow quickly settled lower. Now the bilge pumps in the stem were of no use, and the ones forward could not handle the volume of water.

A simple mistake, but it doomed
Weehawken
to an early grave.

Wicks was in the top bunk, and he felt it first. A sharp jolt as the bow slipped down made his head strike the deck above, jarring him awake.

“Mac,” Wicks shouted, “wake up.”

McKenzie struggled to free himself from his berth, but Wicks’s warning would come a moment too late for either man.
Weehawken
was already going through her death throes. As the flow of water increased, her trim was upset. The water flowed into the lower hold, then quickly to one side. Like a toy ship in a bathtub,
Weehawken
rolled onto her starboard beam. Within seconds, the sea flooded in through the open turret ports and deck hatches and made contact with the boilers with a burst of steam.

Then
Weehawken
slipped beneath the waves, taking thirty-one souls to their graves.

IT WAS JANUARY 15, 1865, and the long and bloody war was drawing to a close. On board the monitor
Patapsco,
Commander Stephen Quackenbush looked forward to going home. His vessel had seen nearly constant action since the first assault on Fort Sumter, and he and his crew were weary from war. While similar in design to the rest of the monitor class,
Patapsco
had heavier armament that kept her constantly utilized. With the only big Parrot gun in the fleet,
Patapsco
could lie out of reach of the forts’ guns and fire without fear of damage. Because of this fact,
Patapsco
had fired more shells at the rebel defenders than any other vessel.

With her record of accomplishments well recognized, it was little surprise that in early 1865
Patapsco
was assigned the dangerous task of picket duty. Picket duty was no picnic; it was a dangerous combination of nightly scouting sorties and minesweeping in the outer harbor. Captain and crew hated it soundly.

“We have a strong flood tide,” executive officer Ensign William Sampson said to Quackenbush, as the two men stood on the top of the turret, staring through the moonless night.

“We’ll escort the launches and minesweeping boats inside the channel before we drift back out and provide fire support,” Quackenbush said quietly.

“Shall I go below and give the order to the helmsman and chief engineer for slow speed?” Sampson asked.

“Do that. I’ll remain here and keep watch.”

It was a choice that would save Quackenbush’s life.

Patapsco
steamed closer to the Confederate forts. Behind came the small, steam-powered launches equipped with grapnels and drags. Slowly, they passed the monitor and began the tedious task of sweeping for mines.

Sampson reappeared topside. “I’ve ordered the guns run out, sir.”

Quackenbush nodded. His command was now ready to provide fire support.

The night passed with agonizing slowness as the Union ironclad drifted in and out of the channel. It is said the third time is a charm, but this did not ring true with
Patapsco
and her crew. As the tidal current carried the ship out of the harbor entrance for the third time after midnight, the hull struck a floating mine set only a day before.

The device was a wooden barrel torpedo carrying a hundred pounds of gunpowder.

Igniting when jarred, the torpedo ripped a huge hole on the port side aft of the bow. The explosion lifted
Patapsco’s
bow up in the air. Quackenbush and Sampson were thrown to the deck as a giant column of water rose into the air before slamming down on the gun turret.

“Man the boats!” Quackenbush shouted.

But it was too late.
Patapsco
dove beneath the waves in less than a minute and a half, down forty feet to the seabed. Sixty-two of the officers and crew went with her. Only the tip of the smokestack remained above water at low tide.

Quackenbush and Sampson barely escaped being sucked under by the doomed monitor and were rescued by a launch.

It was a fortunate rescue for the U.S. Navy.

William Sampson later became superintendent of the Naval Academy and was named commander of the Atlantic squadron during the Spanish-American War. When the Spanish fleet attempted to escape Santiago, Cuba, Sampson’s fleet, utilizing his battle plans and temporarily under the command of Winfield Scott Schley, destroyed it.

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.