Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea (17 page)

“I needed to get a real live feeling what the flow was like,” said Tommy. “We would study that stuff in school, but very few people have been able to feel it with their whole body.”

Tommy experimented with the hydroflow at different speeds and at different distances from the bottom. He noticed that the divers had to rely on someone topside to run the hydroflow, that they couldn’t signal when to rev it up or shut it down, so he designed a throttle they could control themselves from the bottom. He was a good diver, too; he could free dive to forty feet, but in the summer he was on the
Arbutus
, he brought up not one artifact. He preferred to build things and to experiment and to get his hands around the concepts he had discussed during all of those sessions with Dean Glower.

Some of his ideas were unusual, but unlike the ideas of many of the people Fisher consulted with, Tommy’s were grounded in physics and engineering. On the
Arbutus
, Clyne saw him constantly reading technical manuals and journals and then talking to Fisher about more “crossover technology,” something they might be able to adapt to the search. “He used to talk to Mel a lot about his different ideas,” said Clyne, “and Mel eventually got all of that— side scan, magnetometers, subbottom profilers.”

On rough days, the
Arbutus
acted as a break, keeping the wind and the waves away from the divers. One day not long after Tommy had
joined the crew, the weather was worse than anyone had seen it in some time. Tommy was on tanks at the bottom, and at the end of his dive, he surfaced on the weather side of the ship. Ten- to fifteen-foot waves swelled and crashed against the bulwark, and Ford yelled to Tommy to dive under the boat and come up on the lee. But Tommy had already taken off his mask, and he had his tanks in his hand and his regulator under his arm, like he was going to pass it all up to them on deck. He was treading water in his swim trunks, holding on to his gear, and then suddenly he disappeared. When he went down, they saw that he had taken off his fins and was carrying those, too.

“He just tried to swim under the boat,” remembered Ford, “fighting everything, and we’re going, ‘What is this guy doing?’”

The
Arbutus
was nearly thirty feet across the beam, and the current underneath ran strong to the weather side. The ship had been out there so long that coral encrusted the bottom, a calcified forest of tiny razors. The hull now rose and fell sharply, so a diver couldn’t dive five feet down and head under or a twelve-foot wave would lift the hull, suck the diver up with it, then roll on and drop the hull onto the diver, ripping into his skull and shredding the skin on his back.

The divers on deck waited on the weather side, watching where Tommy had gone down and expecting him to surface again, pushed back by the current. But Tommy did not come back up. A minute passed. Two minutes passed.

The divers started drifting across the deck to the lee side, but they did not see him there either. As they were getting ready to jump in and look for him, Tommy surfaced on the lee side, frog kicking with all of his gear in his hand.

“What the hell’re you doing?” yelled Ford.

When Tommy got up close out of the wind, he said, “I just wanted to see if I could do it without my fins.”

“He didn’t even get scratched up,” said Clyne, “and that would be minimal compared to what could’ve happened. If that boat had come down on his head and shoulders just one time, he would’ve been somewhere between here and Cuba, shark meat.”

Ford came to think of Tommy as the absentminded professor on Fisher’s crew. He told wild stories about amphibious cars and staying
awake for eight days, and Ford didn’t know what to believe, but when the diesel pump on the hydroflow stopped and Tommy fixed it, Ford began to think that maybe Tommy’s wild stories weren’t so wild. Ford, who was a decent mechanic himself, got lost in the old diesel floats and switches and had no concept of the pump’s operation. He also had no schematic to consult. Tommy got his hands inside the pump and started pulling things out, and then he put some things back in and took some more out, and then he said, “Let’s try this,” and then he said, “Maybe it’s this,” and then he said, “I think it’s this,” and by the end of the day he had the pump running again. Impressed Ford to no end. He said to Tommy, “You’re okay in my book.”

Tommy solved, or almost solved, two more problems on the
Arbutus
.

When the divers had finished working an area in the quicksands, the only way they could move the floating hulk was to wait for the wind and the tide to align, then pick up all of the anchors and drift for several minutes before resetting them. The work was hard, and the divers hated it, but by resetting anchors they could move the
Arbutus
a few hundred feet every week or two. Then Tommy figured out a way to rerig the hydraulic system so they could lay the big irrigation-pipe hydroflow down on the water horizontally, making it a propeller instead of a digging tool. The first time they turned on the hydroflow in the new position, it propelled the
Arbutus
across the quicksands to the outer reef, three or four miles away, the 187-foot hulk of steel doing about four knots and leaving a little wake behind it.

But the
Arbutus
’s papers classified the ship as a stationary platform, the same as a derrick or a barge, and they were traveling for miles around the wreck site, “digging holes all over the place,” remembered Clyne. Local fishermen used the
Arbutus
to locate their lobster traps, and all of a sudden that sight reference seemed to have moved, and they couldn’t find their traps. They complained to the Coast Guard, and the Coast Guard came out and wanted to see the engine room, which was one huge, open, empty slime pit. When they asked Clyne how he moved the
Arbutus
, he said, “Anchor over anchor.” They looked at the engine room again and left.

Perhaps the worst problem faced by the crew on the
Arbutus
was not the sun or the weather or the currents or the sharks or trying to move the
Arbutus
, but the seagulls. “It was seagull heaven,” said Clyne, “guano
city.” Birds flying up from Havana to the Marquesas would settle onto the
Arbutus
for an extended stopover before continuing their journey. Hundreds if not thousands of seagulls constantly lined up on the rails and on the beams, occupied every perch a bird could find on the ship, frittering up and down the rail, looking at everything sideways, squawking constantly in kaffeeklatsch crescendos, and dumping on the deck.

“Our deck in the morning would look like Detroit at Christmas time,” said Clyne. “White. Just white.”

After a rain, the deck was slick and dangerous, and it smelled as bad as the theodolite tower. They had tried putting up scarecrows, but the birds landed on the scarecrows and dumped all over them, too. The crew swung ropes and brooms at them, and lunged at them, but only a few would move and they came back, squawking louder, almost like they were laughing.

Then Tommy had an idea: Let’s electrify the rails; we can run a 220 line, send it up to the main rail and shoot a current all the way around to the other rails and control it all from the wheelhouse. At first the crew laughed, but the more they thought about it, the more they said, “Why not?” and “I wonder if it could be done.” And pretty soon it sounded downright logical. Zap ’em. Just enough to tickle the bottoms of their feet and make them fly away.

Tommy wired the ship and they got everybody safely up in the wheelhouse where they had the battery. With all of the lines connected, Tommy looped one around the negative terminal, and then he touched the other line to the positive terminal. Suddenly, hundreds of birds shot into the air squawking and flapping away from the ship.

“You could hear them scream as they took off,” remembered Clyne. “It was great. It worked! We couldn’t believe it! Everybody was patting everybody else on the back, you know.”

For almost a year they had been living with bird droppings thick all over everything, even their gear. From the time they arose in the morning until they finally retired at night, they had had to breathe the stuff and feel it squish through their toes. Now, they’d finally found a way to get rid of the problem.

Tommy disconnected the battery to make the ship safe for the crew, and the divers went back to looking for treasure. A short while later,
the birds started coming back, and after a bunch had collected along the rails, the crew ran back into the wheelhouse, and Tommy hit the juice again, and again the birds shot into the air and flew away. All except one.

What happened next got the crew to wondering about a seagull’s IQ, because what happened next not even some of the crew would have figured out.

Tommy hit the juice again and the current shot along the rail, and they thought that one seagull would fly away, but she didn’t. She lifted one leg. They disconnected the battery, and she put her leg down. They zapped her again, and she lifted the other leg. Without both of her legs down to complete the circuit, the electricity just ran on through. Another bird landed, then another bird, and another bird, and Tommy touched that positive terminal with the wire again, and half a dozen seagulls lifted one leg. As soon as the electricity stopped, they set the leg down.

After two days, every one of the seagulls had returned, and it seemed as if many had brought friends and relatives, for the entire bow was lined with seagulls and the deck was white again. Now when Tommy threw the switch, hundreds of seagulls would lift one leg in unison, and by touching the wire to the terminal back and forth in a rhythmic way, he could make the birds dance. It reminded Clyne of
A Chorus Line
.

“That was the type of ingenuity that Harvey would come up with,” said Clyne. “He would think of things that none of us would think could be useful, and he tried to make ’em work. Some did. And some didn’t.”

T
HAT SUMMER, AFTER
thousands of hours with their face masks down in the sand, the divers on the
Arbutus
had found nothing much more valuable than a barrel hoop. Yet they all wanted to be on the bottom, because as one put it, “If you’re not down
there
, you’re not going to find
it
.” But more and more Tommy stayed topside trying to solve bigger problems and observing how others searched for treasure. He was more interested in why they couldn’t find the
Atocha
than he was in seeing treasure, and as he watched, he got to thinking.

For two hundred years, fleets of treasure galleons stuffed with silver and gold and emeralds had plied the Caribbean Sea, crisscrossed it every
which way, from Key West down to Cartagena, from the Yucatán over to the Windward Islands, and every so often, one of those unpredictable West Indian cyclones would come spinning across the Caribbean and slam half the fleet onto shallow reefs, which ripped open the hulls and spewed that treasure all over the ocean floor.

Where were these ships and why were they so hard to find? Already, shipwrecks had become one of the seven-to-fourteen, and Tommy was asking more questions. Just how “blue-sky” are these projects? With all of those shipwrecks out there and all of that research available and the technology on line, it shouldn’t be a matter of searching until you stumbled across something. Tommy had liked Mel Fisher from the day he met the man, but Fisher would blast holes into the seafloor, and within days or even hours sand would again fill the holes, and Fisher would have no record of where he had just searched.

“Amazing the way that place worked,” said Tommy. “Absolutely incredible. I got to see a lot of the problems.”

They had dragged a magnetometer all over the quicksands where they had found the cannons, and every time they’d get a hit, remembered Tommy, someone would shout, “Yeah, that’s it! That’s just where I thought it was gonna be, right in this area of the map I was thinking about! That’s gotta be it—send the divers down!” Then they would mark the spot by throwing over a bleach bottle tied to a cinder block, except that often by the time they got that into the water, the boat would be a hundred yards beyond the hit. A diver then had to go down and see if what had set off the magnetometer was part of the
Atocha
. It was always something else, but they would say the same thing the next time, and they would keep thinking that way again and again and again. As soon as the weather turned rough, the bleach bottle buoys would drift.

“This had been going on for years,” said Tommy, “and they had no method for knowing where they’d searched. They argued about, ‘Well, we searched that last year,’ you know, and somebody else would say, ‘No, no, that was over there. We didn’t search that.’ It was incredible. After years of that they had no good records of what had happened. And Mel’s operation was better than most.”

Tommy figured that someone needed to study hurricanes and how they came across the Caribbean, and what they would do over the centuries
to a ship already wrecked, how they would break it up and where the pieces might have moved. Everyone looking for the
Atocha
knew that two hurricanes had hit the ship, one only three weeks after the other; but there must be a way to narrow the dynamics of those two hurricanes, a way to quantify all of the possibilities.

And another thing Tommy pondered: How did Fisher know the
Atocha
had not been salvaged shortly after it sank 350 years ago? The water wasn’t that deep: Dozens of people had free dived to see the
Atocha
’s cannons. If the wreck’s in twelve feet of water or even forty feet, the technology was there centuries ago to salvage it. What were the odds?

As Tommy watched Fisher’s operation and listened to stories about other treasure hunters, he began to see a pattern: They operated from day to day, with no long-term plan; they all were underfunded; no one kept accurate records; the turnover rate of workers was high; they raised money primarily through the media; investors were unhappy and filing lawsuits; the state claimed all treasure belonged to it; the storms scattered a ship’s remains sometimes for miles across the shallow sea; they had no way of telling whether an artifact came from their target ship or from some other ship that had landed on top of it in another storm; they could never be sure that no one else had already salvaged the ship they were after.