Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea (19 page)

The
James Bay
finally arrived in Dominica on February 1, 1980. To survey Roseau Harbor quickly, Tommy and Doering experimented with a one-man, made-from-a-kit submarine about ten feet long with a clear bubble top. On one of the early dives an electrical fire filled the sub with acrid smoke while Tommy was inside trying to remove a nut with a crescent wrench, and he almost couldn’t get out. On an unmanned test dive, the sub filled with water, and they spent the whole night coaxing it back to the surface. Meanwhile, the divers blasted holes six to eight feet deep in the black sand and recovered glass bottles, brass spikes and ships’ fittings, silver spoons and olive jars and anchors, musket balls and clay pipes, an array of artifacts from a variety of ships flying the flags of different countries in different periods of history. They found debris from the sixteenth century, the seventeenth century, the
eighteenth century, and the nineteenth century. They sucked up the black sand with an airlift and recovered copper and silver coins, British farthings and shillings, coins from France, Canada, Jamaica, the United States, and an old French colony—a lot of artifacts but nothing of value. As he had with Fisher, Tommy watched and took notes and asked a lot of questions.

One morning, Tommy awoke to a lot of yelling and discovered that a diver named Bob had fallen out of his bunk, numb on one side, suffering from nitrogen narcosis, or the bends. For several days he had been diving in deep water and had cheated on his meter. Bob’s dive partner was Rich Banko. Banko described Tommy and Bob as “mortal enemies,” at each other all the time, arguing constantly. “Bob would go out of his way to tell anybody that Harvey was an asshole and a dipshit,” said Banko. Banko himself thought Tommy was “the most arrogant sonofabitch I’ve ever met, an eccentric inventor always trying to make a better metal detector.” He had once threatened to beat Tommy’s brains in, because Tommy had left him and two other guys at a deserted boatyard on a ninety-two-degree Sunday afternoon with no food, no water, and no shade and gone off in the Seaborne station wagon on one of his compulsive pursuits. But Banko figured he might have to stand in line, at least behind Bob, the diver who now had the bends.

Seaborne had a decompression chamber on the
James Bay
, but no one had ever used it. In his constant study of technology on the horizon, Tommy had learned that the foremost authority on the bends was a navy dive-medicine research team in Panama City, Florida. “The first thing Harvey did,” said Banko, “was to call the navy to get instructions on how to run this decompression chamber exactly the right way. He ran the whole show.”

Tommy called Panama City on the radio and talked to the navy experts about having Bob “blown down” to 165 feet. Within an hour, Tommy had the chamber properly adjusted, and they carried Bob inside, where he remained for almost two days, while Tommy gradually reduced the pressure to bring him slowly back up. Bob came out in better shape but still suffering from headaches, dizziness, fatigue, and the continuing paralysis of his right arm and leg. Tommy pushed the navy experts for additional ideas, and they reluctantly told him of a new
theory that administering pure oxygen to the victim might arrest the progressive nerve damage. But the idea was so new not even the research team could cite results, and no one wanted to take responsibility for the method.

Some of the divers on the
James Bay
disagreed with the idea anyhow. They had been trained to treat the bends according to strict navy dive tables, and they refused to cooperate. Tommy ignored their protests; he told Doering to round up all of the oxygen on the boat and then head to the island to see if he could find more. Doering pulled the
James Bay
in front of a small island medical school, where Banko found a nurse who came aboard with enough oxygen for four or five hours of treatment. Then Banko persuaded the owner of a welding shop to part with all of his oxygen.

Tommy still had too little oxygen to fill the chamber, so he created a portable system for Bob to breathe on. The danger was that breathing pure oxygen could cause Bob to black out, so Tommy watched him through the porthole and talked to him on the intercom, trying to coax as much of the oxygen into Bob’s system as he could without knocking him out. The treatment went back and forth for twenty-four hours.

“Harvey ramrodded the program,” said Banko. “I give him credit for that. The nurse was there for medical advice, but as far as running the chamber and talking to the navy, Harvey handled the whole situation.” The following day, they flew Bob to Miami, where he received additional treatment. When he left the hospital a week later, the doctors put his recovery rate at 98 percent. “I don’t know if it would have killed him,” said Banko, “but certainly he would have been crippled if it wasn’t for the chamber and the way it was handled.”

Throughout the spring and into the early summer of 1980, the divers searched Roseau Harbor and then Portsmouth Harbor, but they found only more “scatter,” artifacts of little value. “We could have done better going up north and looking for the treasure fleet,” said Doering, “but by the time we had worked ourselves up there and had evidence of the fleet, we were broke, and we got run out of town, so to speak.”

Banko could tell the end was near. His bosses didn’t want to run the boat, they didn’t want to run the blasters, they were always skimping
on fuel. Tommy left the ship and returned to Ohio. Doering left Banko and three others with the smaller boat on Dominica and took the
James Bay
to Guyana to replace rotten planking in the hull. Doering told Banko he’d be back in three weeks, but the repairs ran almost forty thousand dollars, and nearly two months passed before he called Banko again to tell him they were stuck in Guyana because they couldn’t pay the bill. When they finally raised the money to get the
James Bay
out of dry dock and back to Dominica, there was nothing left to run the operation. Banko had a friend who had dived with another treasure hunter, and the friend had seen the same problems.

“This guy would have all these grandiose things going on,” said Banko, “and all of a sudden there’d be no money and he’s gone. It happened to all of them.”

T
OMMY SPENT LITTLE
time in Key West now. He continued working around the country on various projects—solar energy, an infinitely variable speed transmission, an amphibious bus—earning just enough to eat and pay for his phone bills. He still had the notes from his sessions with Dean Glower and a list of the problems he would need to solve before he could perform complex and delicate work over long periods of time at the bottom of the sea. For long hours, he sat in research libraries, revisiting what he and Glower had discussed, trying to isolate the problems and get them straight in his mind. “Everything he does,” said Glower, “you can see that he looks at it from all directions, and he sorts it all out so he can understand it.”

As Tommy had watched the treasure hunters searching for shipwrecks around shallow water reefs and wondered at their lack of methodology, the leap had been a short one to wondering about the technology needed to recover shipwrecks from the deep ocean. For if he had the capability to descend thousands of feet, sift delicately through the remains of an ancient ship, and bring back her treasure unmarred, he had the means to do almost anything on the bottom: fish, farm, mine, drill, recover, test, save, explore, collect, all of the things he and Glower had discussed. The same forces had to be overcome.

When Tommy learned that big mining companies had banded together to share the cost of developing ocean technology, deep-ocean
mining became one of the seven-to-fourteen. Deep-water submersibles already had imaged mineral rich manganese nodules scattered like baking potatoes across the ocean floor, but the mining companies needed better technology to collect the nodules cost effectively. He read whatever he could find on their work and spoke on the phone with several of the people involved.

Tommy kept looking at what others had tried and wondered what in their approach prevented them from doing more intricate work for longer periods of time. There seemed to be a barrier that no one could penetrate; Glower himself had labeled the barrier “impossible.” Ever since the
Thresher
tragedy, submersibles had come out of the military and out of industry that could go deeper and deeper, but they could perform only the same crude functions: observe, photograph, film, grab, and hold.

Wherever he was, Key West or Texas or Chicago, Tommy kept in touch with Glower, and they talked about things Tommy had seen or learned, or about questions he needed to ask. When Glower answered the phone and heard a voice say, “This is Tom,” he knew the conversation would be long and intriguing.

During this time of travel and research, Tommy wrote down two questions: “By the year 2000, what kind of technology will be available to find and recover historic wooden ships lost in the deep ocean?” And, “What prevents us from doing that at a reasonable cost right now?” As he talked with other scientists and engineers, he asked these questions repeatedly, until he had a clearer picture of the problems ahead. Once he had defined those, he could search for ways to solve them now.

By 1980, Tommy had read scores of esoteric treatises on the problems of working in the deep ocean, and from pay phones and friends’ houses he had talked to scientists and engineers all over the country. On paper, he had sketched vague concepts that departed from different points and proceeded in different directions. He didn’t have all of the answers, but finally he understood the questions, and that was the key: No one had been able to penetrate the “impossible” barrier, because they were still asking the same wrong questions.

ABOARD THE
CENTRAL AMERICA

N
EAR
D
ARK
, S
ATURDAY
, S
EPTEMBER
12, 1857

C
APTAIN
H
ERNDON TALKED
in private with Thomas Badger, and the two men agreed again that the ship must go down. Herndon repeated that he would not leave his ship while there was a soul on board. As before, the two captains kept their conversation to themselves and urged all hands again to renew their efforts. Captain Herndon told one passenger that he had “strong hopes” the steamer would survive till daylight, when the storm would lie down and the brig
Marine
and the swift schooner that so recently had rounded their stern would come to rescue them all. “They will stay by us,” he said, “they promised me they would.” He could still see their lights in the distance, in the direction blown by the wind.

Herndon retired to his quarters and emerged in full dress uniform, the oil silk covering removed from the gold band on his cap. On the
wheelhouse, he took his stand, gripping the iron railing with his left hand and striking a pose that seemed inhumanly serene, as though he had reached deep and found a strange peace.

Just after the schooner began blowing to leeward at dusk, Herndon had told his second officer Frazer to fire a distress rocket, and to fire another rocket every half hour. He also ordered Frazer to remain with him until he went from the ship; they would be the last to leave. Just as Frazer lit the first rocket, they saw off the starboard bow the lifeboat of the bos’n, John Black.

Many of the men continued bailing, but the lines had dwindled now that the women and children had all been carried safely to the
Marine
. The men could hear the water still rising in the hold. As darkness approached, they could feel the ship slipping away beneath them, and they abandoned the bailing lines to search for life preservers and pieces of the ship to keep them afloat.

Herndon ordered the men to cut off portions of the upper deck housing and stack them on deck, so they would be scattered about on the surface if the ship sank and men struggled to stay alive in the sea. One man tore the door off the wheelhouse, others ripped planks from the hurricane deck to lash together for a raft. They pulled doors off cabins and pried away the thick boards of the steerage berths and carried it all to the upper deck.

Weak from lack of food and sleep, exhausted from their labors, and discouraged by the losing hand fate was dealing, some of the men made no effort to secure a life preserver or a board, instead returning to their cabins or crawling into someone else’s to await fate’s final card.

One forty-niner was returning home penniless to a wife who had gone insane since he had left her eight years earlier. As the sky grew darker and the ship settled deeper into the sea, the man’s bunkmate stood in steerage pleading with him to try to save himself. “When the critical moment arrived,” said the bunkmate, “he refused to make any effort to escape.”

In the same part of the ship with the poet Oliver Manlove were two brothers named Horn who had gone to California in 1850. Working together and working hard they had unearthed six thousand dollars’ worth of gold, which they had kept in a large carpet sack that one or the other had guarded throughout the trip.

“I found Anson Horn weeping,” wrote Manlove. “He said that his time had come, that he should never see his home again, which he had longed to see, praying and hoping for it. I tried to encourage him but he fully believed that his fate was sealed, that all of our fates were sealed, and that there was no use in fighting against it.”

The thought that had intruded many times into the fear and exhaustion of the past two days came sharply into focus during those latter moments, for now they had to decide whether to take the gold or leave it behind. Most of the passengers were returning miners who had accumulated at least a few thousand dollars in gold, which they carried with them in treasure belts, carpetbags, and purses. But gold was dense. A red house brick weighed about four pounds; a gold brick of the same size weighed nearly fifty. Even in smaller amounts, gold could sink a weak swimmer or quickly exhaust a strong one. Yet some of the men had suffered great hardship since the summer of 1849 to accumulate the contents of that treasure belt or that carpetbag.