Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea (24 page)

By 1983, Williamson had started an ocean technology company and sold it and started a new one, and he still wanted that million-dollar sonar. “I was going to get a million bucks,” said Williamson, “and we’d get one built and go off and do all sorts of things.” About this time, Tommy called him and encouraged him to go ahead with the project, even to the point of helping him find financing.

To Williamson, Tommy Thompson was a treasure hunter, and Williamson ran with a different crowd, what a friend called the “black community,” the intelligence people. “Williamson actually has a lot of clout,” said the friend. “He’s a pretty big genius in that community.” And Williamson did not work with treasure hunters.

“They’re generally a flash in the pan,” he said, “a lot of talk and no dollars, and we considered Harvey the same way. We were interested in the project but certainly not willing to jump in and share his enthusiasm without seeing a little long green.”

But Tommy pursued Williamson the same way he had serenaded other suppliers who consulted for the government and large corporations: He kept in touch, and he asked intelligent questions. And he knew that Williamson wanted to get a new SeaMARC, the IA, built just as much as he, Tommy, wanted to use it to find deep-water shipwrecks.

By the fall of 1983, Tommy had talked with Williamson frequently by phone and had met with him three times in Seattle to talk about deep-water side-scan sonar. Williamson explained his ideas on how to turn the current SeaMARC technology into a more efficient side scan, and Tommy knew the ideas were sound. It was the new-generation technology he had been looking for, and suddenly he could see all of the pieces. “I started to realize that the technology wasn’t going to be in the year 2000, that with a lot of effort and the right group we could make it happen. I finally decided that the time was now.”

T
OMMY NOW ALLOCATED
more and more of his free hours each month to studying ships that had sunk in deep water, like the
Titanic
, the
Republic
, the
Andrea Doria
, the
San José
. For each ship he wanted to know: Was there enough historical documentation to determine that the ship carried a cargo of substantial value when it sank, and that it sank in a
roughly definable location? If the answer to these questions was yes, he then studied the ocean environment at that location. Environment was critical. If the ocean floor was deep sediment, the ship would be buried, and the sediment would fill in the site faster than he could dig it out; if the currents ran swift, he would not be able to study the site carefully and later position an ROV with cameras. By subjecting potential sites to such scrutiny, he could determine which ship had the greatest probability of being recovered.

One of the ships he researched was a sidewheel steamer called the SS
Central America
. For years in treasure hunting lore, the story had persisted that the
Central America
lay off Cape Hatteras a hundred feet deep. Treasure hunters with no more than scuba tanks and huka rigs found it a convenient legend to keep alive, because if that legend died so did their source of funding. They had raised millions, showing investors a World War II navy map on which was charted all of the debris near the cape, and it had arbitrarily labeled one of the sites “the
Central America
.” One group had found wreckage in ninety feet of water, stanchions, a spokesman claimed, that could be traced to mid-nineteenth-century steamships. Not far away, a different outfit had found another site, and the UPI reported that artifacts found at that site “are being tested by a Florida company to determine if they are from a steamship that sank in 1857 with a cargo of gold.” In the spring of 1983, a magazine piece claimed that although a few treasure hunters speculated that the
Central America
had sunk on the eastern edge of the Gulf Stream in about 105 fathoms or 900 feet of water, the bigger school of thought pegged the sinking at the western edge and hence down no more than 20 fathoms or 120 feet. “The latter argument may be valid,” concluded the article. “A treasure-hunting concern recently announced that they found the
Central America
in 10 fathoms of water near Cape Hatteras.”

But Tommy had read many of the newspaper articles written in 1857, then plotted the information from one officer’s account, and estimated that the ship had lost power and foundered at a coordinate roughly one hundred miles east and north of Cape Romain on the Carolina coast.

One evening after work, he stopped by Bob’s house on the way home. If the
Central America
lay one hundred miles from Cape Romain,
it would be in the middle of a geographical feature called the Blake Ridge. Tommy wanted to know what the bottom was like out there, because a soft bottom of rapidly accumulating sediment would complicate his search. Bob didn’t know the answer, but he told Tommy he would find out what he could at the geology library on campus.

What Bob read about the Blake Ridge so excited him he called Tommy at work, and the two of them met at Bob’s house that night. “Harvey, this is not a problem at all,” he said. On the Blake Ridge, currents moved by at one-tenth of a knot, and for miles the bottom was hard flat sediment. Bob told Tommy, “I mean the sedimentation collects out there no more than one centimeter every thousand years!”

O
UTSIDE
B
ATTELLE
, T
OMMY
was now amassing voluminous notes on underwater technology, beginning to formulate relationships with suppliers, and corresponding with historical archives at several libraries on the East Coast. For years he had collected information on deep-water, historic shipwrecks, and the list had grown to forty. He and Bob met more frequently, together refining what they called the Historic Shipwreck Selection Process and narrowing the targets to a project Tommy could present to investors. “We developed the language as we went along,” said Bob, “the selection criteria for projects in general, and then we analyzed the risks involved with each ship.”

They divided risk into intrinsic and extrinsic. Intrinsic risks were those inherent to the site: probability of previous recovery, accuracy of historical documentation, and the environment around the site. All deep-water shipwrecks scored high in the first category; most of them scored high in the second category; few of them did well in the third. Shipwrecks with a high total score then advanced to form a universe of “Feasibly Recoverable Shipwrecks with Low Intrinsic Risk.”

Next, they assessed the extrinsic risks, those that had to do with recovery: Favorable Operational Factors, Positive Site Security, Legal Rights Obtainable. Is the technology available to access that site, can we guarantee site security in that area of the world, and do we have legal protection?

Once they had eliminated all ships but those with low intrinsic and low extrinsic risks, each ship had to pass a final test: Was there anything on board worth recovering?

The
Titanic
was a hunk of steel seven hundred feet long that would burn a hole through a sonar chart; even if it rested in mountainous territory, they could probably find it, and the abundant historical documentation would help them narrow the search area. But the
Titanic
presented two insurmountable risks: Her steel hull would be impossible to penetrate even with the technology Tommy saw on the horizon. And if they could get inside, she carried nothing worth recovering; some loose jewelry perhaps, rings and bracelets and necklaces scattered in various small cubicles, but no treasure centrally stored, nothing they could use to make the payoff attractive to investors.

“In terms of financial risk,” said Bob, “the
Titanic
was not a good project.”

Other deep-water ships presented similar problems. Myths had arisen around some of them that tons of gold lay stored in secure compartments. But no historical data supported the myths. In 1909, the British White Star luxury liner
Republic
had gone down fifty miles off Nantucket, and for decades, rumors had circulated that it had taken millions in gold coins with it. But no official records existed. “Sure, there were a lot of rich people on board,” said Bob, “but how much was in the purser’s safe? Nobody knows.”

The
Andrea Doria
, an Italian liner hailed by her owners as the “Grande Dame of the Sea,” collided with another ship in dense fog in 1956 and also went down just off Nantucket. She was a glistening seven-hundred-foot floating museum of murals, rare wood panels, and ceramics designed by Italian artists, and her passengers also were wealthy, but once again myth about the treasure on board sprouted from rumor with no documentation.

Tommy and Bob were convinced that the
San José
had carried more than a billion dollars in treasure to the bottom when British warships landed a cannonball in her munitions cache and sank her in 1708. But the
San José
was off the coast of Colombia in murky, turbulent waters.

After many deep-water shipwrecks were run through the selection process, the sidewheel steamer SS
Central America
rose to the top in every category. It had sunk in an era of accurate record keeping and reliable navigation instruments. Dozens of witnesses had testified to the sinking, and five ship captains had given coordinates that placed the ship in
an area where sediment collected no faster than a centimeter every thousand years. The extrinsic risks looked as favorable: She had a wooden hull, which would be easier to get into, and massive iron works in her steam engines and boilers that would provide a good target for sonar, even if much of the iron had corroded and disappeared. And it was off the coast of the United States, so they wouldn’t have to negotiate with a foreign government and they could more easily provide site security.

One other thing appealed to Tommy and Bob: the ship was American and its treasure symbolized one of the most defining periods in American history, that narrow window running from the California Gold Rush through the Civil War. If they could find it, they would open a time capsule representing an entire nation during a crucial period in its formation.

“The
Central America
,” said Bob, “scored much, much higher than any other project when subjected to this selection process.”

And her gold shipment was documented: With gold valued at $20 an ounce in 1857, the publicly reported commercial shipment totaled between $1.210 and $1.6 million. Although many of the
Central America
’s records, including her cargo manifest, had been destroyed in the Great San Francisco Fire of 1906, some accounts estimated that the gold carried by the passengers at least equaled the commercial shipment. And the Department of the Army recently had confirmed a story approaching myth that had circulated for years: that the
Central America
carried an official secret shipment of gold destined to shore up the faltering northern industrial economy. The letter, dated April 2, 1971, acknowledged that the information about the shipment had been declassified, and it verified that secreted in her hold the
Central America
had also carried six hundred fifty-pound bar boxes, or another thirty thousand pounds of gold.

I
N HIS HISTORICAL
research, Tommy had uncovered two coordinates that helped pinpoint the sinking. One came from the
Ellen
, a bark that had sailed into the wreckage the following day. The other had come from the
El Dorado
, the schooner that had rounded the stern within a cracker’s throw of the
Central America
only ninety minutes before she sank. The only problem was that the
El Dorado
coordinate approximated
the site of the sinking, and the
Ellen
coordinate marked the area to which the wreckage had drifted over the next twelve hours, but the two positions were nearly sixty miles apart, and the wreckage could not have drifted that far in that time, even in the Gulf Stream. The search area would be too big, unless Tommy could find another coordinate to confirm either the coordinate of the
El Dorado
or the coordinate of the
Ellen
.

In collecting newspaper accounts from every major port along the East Coast, Tommy had discovered that on the day after the sinking, the
Ellen
had spoke another ship, the
Saxony
, bound for Savannah.

“Just on gut instinct I thought, God, somebody, some reporter, somewhere must have found out where the
Saxony
was and got those coordinates.”

Tommy called Savannah’s Regional Library and found a librarian willing to do the research. He sent his request in a letter, enclosed a five-dollar check to pay for copies, and explained that she should search the Savannah papers on the 18th and 19th of September 1857. The librarian found an article that covered the arrival of the
Saxony
, but the piece was short and contained no coordinates. Tommy knew from his research that if the
Saxony
had sailed into Savannah and the captain had not given coordinates to the ship reporter, it would be the only ship that had sailed into a port on the East Coast after the hurricane without reporting a coordinate. Tommy called the librarian again and suggested that perhaps more than one article on the
Saxony
’s arrival appeared in the paper, or that maybe the one she had found continued on another page inside.

A few days later, Tommy received a letter dated October 18, 1983:

Dear Mr. Thompson:

Your perseverance has been rewarded. When I was checking September 19, 1857 for the “Shipping Record” column, I looked at the entry I had cited to you earlier. Contrary to my previous findings, the abstract of that article was just that. Enclosed is the entire entry. …”