Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea (25 page)

When Bob saw Tommy’s copy of the article, he figured the librarian must have had nothing else to do. It was nearly impossible to read, a scratched white-on-black microfilm copy of an obscure notice in the Shipping Register of the
Savannah Daily Morning News
, but they could
read the coordinate, “lat. 3140, long. 7620,” which meant that the
Saxony
had spoke the
Ellen
no more than fifteen miles from where the
Ellen
captain reported he had been tacking through the wreckage earlier that day.

“We now had a third coordinate from the day after the disaster that was in the same area of the ocean,” said Bob. “It gave the
Ellen
coordinate credence. And the existence of those two coordinates within a ballpark of each other was enough to convince us we’ve got something scientific to play with now—it’s not just hearsay.” But he still couldn’t explain why those two coordinates were sixty miles from the
El Dorado
’s.

T
OMMY NOW HAD
acquired dozens of survivors’ accounts and other documents, and he could see there were probably hundreds more. He had even created a matrix, breaking the sinking into time segments, so he could understand the chronology of events. But studying technology was requiring more and more of his time and he also had to pursue financing, so he gave Bob all of the articles and letters he had collected and the matrix he had started putting together, and asked Bob to take over as historian. “He was into all kinds of subjects in different areas and a real trivia freak,” said Tommy, “which is perfect for a project like this.” By the fall of 1983, Bob’s geology consulting practice had dwindled, anyhow. The oil industry was pulling in, drying up, and rumors persisted that the market was about to collapse. Bob put it euphemistically, “I had more time on my hands.”

The sinking of the
Central America
was one of the biggest news events of nineteenth-century America. It was the worst disaster in American shipping, and several pundits of the day attributed the Panic of 1857 largely to the loss of the gold shipment aboard the steamer. Passengers and crew on the
Central America
hailed from all thirty-one states in the young union and many foreign countries. The telegraph only recently had sprouted up and down the East Coast, so that news of the arrival of the first survivors in Savannah shot straight up the wires all the way to Boston and over to New Orleans. Reporters waited dockside to get the first stories from survivors arriving in ports along the East Coast, and for the first time reporters relied heavily on the accounts of women. For weeks, dozens of newspapers ran vivid front-page accounts in the survivors’ own words,
the articles sometimes filling the page and several more pages inside. As survivors returned to their hometowns, and as official bodies inquired into the sinking, the story lived for months in over two hundred newspapers.

Two or three days a week, several hours a day, Bob sat on the main floor of the William Oxley Thompson Library at Ohio State, amid the bare concrete columns and the file cabinets filled with rolls of microfilm, his head in a reader, his blue eyes scanning the white on black film of articles from the front pages of old newspapers:
Frank Leslie’s Illustrated
, the
New York News
, the
New York Times
, the
New York Journal of Commerce
. When he saw something pertinent, he made a copy and took it home, where he studied it and pulled information to place on the matrix.

He found a dictionary of marine terms from the 1920s, which he referred to constantly, for the ship’s logs and the seamen’s accounts were filled with an argot that sometimes read like a foreign language: top gallant and jib-boom, spanker and bitt, fresh breeze, mizzen, hawser, and drag. Bob needed to interpret to understand the damage done to the vessel, and how the wind might push the ship, and what the storm had ripped from the deck.

Besides reading scores of lengthy accounts, he researched early American hurricanes, and the Great Storm of 1857. He studied the Blake Ridge. He read the work of Matthew Fontaine Maury, the father of oceanography and coincidentally Captain Herndon’s brother-in-law. He included in his inquiry the California Gold Rush, the country of Panama, the rise of the Panama route, the political climate of mid-nineteenth-century America, and the Panic of 1857.

Before long, Bob could recite from memory long passages of the survivors’ accounts. Inside his head began to live the voyage of the
Central America
as she steamed north from Havana bearing six hundred souls bound for New York: the storm winds rising on the second night, the waves swelling, the engine room leaking, the water deepening, the engines failing, the men passing buckets, the women taking courage, the
Marine
hoving to, the crewmen rowing the women and children in high seas, Captain Herndon refusing to leave his ship, the steamer succumbing to the storm, many men going to the bottom, and many more set adrift on the flotsam of the wreck on a dark night in a black sea. He thought about the Eastons and Virginia Birch and George Ashby and
Second Officer Frazer and Captain Badger and Captain Burt and Judge Monson. He tried to picture them and know them as he would a friend. He tried to crawl inside the head of Captain Herndon.

The matrix became the Data Correlation Matrix, and it soon expanded to take up one entire wall, floor to ceiling, in the study of Bob’s house, each entry a specific reference to the storm, the condition of the ship, or a statement of location. When he found a critical piece of information, he walked over to the matrix and wrote it in pencil with a simple reference code next to it. NYT stood for the
New York Times
, PB was the
Philadelphia Bulletin
, CC the
Charleston Courier;
then came the date, page, and column numbers and the name of the witness. To disguise where the data had come from, he and Tommy later created a cryptic reference code, a series of nine letters and numbers, so they could trace the information back to its source, but no one else could.

“That way we would not be giving away our sources,” said Bob. “We were very, very jealous of our sources at this point, because we knew there were other people out there thinking about the
Central America
.”

I
N 1979
, T
OMMY
had received a phone call from a lawyer practicing in a small Columbus firm. Robbie Hoffman, a short, funny, friendly, fast-talking man not much older than Tommy, had a client interested in salvaging the
Andrea Doria
, the Italian luxury liner that had sunk in 1956 off the coast of Nantucket. Tommy had told Robbie that the
Andrea Doria
was a poor target because it had a steel hull and no records supported the wild claims of jewels and currency stashed on board. Robbie dropped the client, but he liked working with Tommy. “He’s brilliant,” said Robbie, “he just is. He exudes it. He knows what he’s talking about, and he’s extremely disciplined, and he has tons of energy. Tons of energy.”

Tommy and Robbie had talked then about deep-ocean recovery one day being a viable business. “When it happens and you’re doing it,” Robbie had said, “you call me, ’cause I want to be involved.”

By 1983, Robbie had left his firm and gone out on his own. Tommy was now convinced that one day was here, that the technology for finding a ship in the deep ocean and then salvaging that ship was possible and that he had a good target to pursue. His next step was to broaden
his contacts with suppliers and contractors and professionals who would provide him with pieces of the right technology, and to explore ways to finance the project. He called Robbie and reminded him of what he had said four years earlier about being involved.

Tommy and Robbie renewed their relationship over occasional beers late at night at Robbie’s house, Tommy talking to Robbie as he had to Bob about his theories on deep-water shipwrecks. They wondered out loud how with no money Tommy might secure professional services and promises of technology, and how to approach investors with an idea both costly and seemingly impossible. “I was a cheerleader,” said Robbie, “someone to be there and to spend time with him, to hear the talk about how to do it.”

Robbie compared Tommy to Don Quixote, always chasing windmills, and he saw himself as the “schlepper” walking behind the donkey. Before long, Tommy was at Robbie’s house two or three nights a week, every week, sometimes on Saturdays and Sundays, working on the project. He seemed not to notice the indiscretion of showing up nigh on to midnight, night after night, with a gap-tooth grin and a six-pack of beer at the home of a newly married friend. Robbie thought it was outrageous, but he accepted the behavior. “Harvey was so driven that it made it difficult at times to put up with him,” said Robbie, “but that’s the nature of the beast, the beast being the brilliant person. You have to be able to accept a lot about them.”

With Robbie’s new wife often asleep in the other bedroom, Tommy and Robbie worked on Robbie’s PC, drafting letters to research libraries, suppliers, contractors, and potential investors. Tommy would outline what he wanted to say, Robbie would put it into words, then Tommy would review it sentence by sentence to make sure the words not only carried the message, but also conveyed the right tone. Tone was important. Then Tommy would try to imagine every response the recipient could have to the language they had used, and he would look for ways to reword the letter either to avoid a negative response or enhance a positive one, to be a little more ambiguous or a little more clear, to pique interest but not reveal too much.

“I sat in front of this green screen,” remembered Robbie, “Harvey standing there at my shoulder, the letters dancing across, eighty-five
proofreads per letter. He had incredible discipline. Working over there at Battelle, going home every night, and then coming over here at eleven o’clock, work till two in the morning, three in the morning. Get these things knocked out.”

With Bob Evans as his sounding board on the research and Robbie Hoffman as his business advisor, Tommy began to shape his ideas about deep-water shipwrecks into a project. Robbie likened it all to the principle of inertia: A body in motion tends to stay in motion. “It just continued to build, and as it built, it seemed to move faster.”

O
NE OF
T
OMMY
’
S
late-night letters went to the publishing branch of the Church of Scientology in Hollywood, California, another to a billionaire from South Africa, and another to the heir of the Miller Brewing fortune in Milwaukee, all contacts Tommy had established through friends and acquaintances, and all capable of providing him the millions he needed to search for the
Central America
. All three were interested. The first in-person pitch went to the Scientologists.

“Harv, in his inimitable, incredible style,” said Robbie, “somehow had convinced the Scientology people to send us airfare.”

Tommy could take off from Battelle no more than one day, so he planned for them to leave Columbus early in the morning, fly to Chicago, change planes and head to Los Angeles, meet with representatives of the L. Ron Hubbard publishing branch of the Church of Scientology, then fly back through Chicago and be home in Columbus not too long after midnight, so he could be at work at Battelle early the next morning.

“It’s something,” said Robbie, “that in my entire life I will never forget or forgive Harvey for. Ever.”

What flabbergasted Robbie as much as Tommy’s insistence that they make the trip in one day was that after Tommy had asked three guys wearing powder blue button-down shirts and striped ties to sign nondisclosure statements, after he had pitched the deal to them for three hours without a bite of lunch, after he had piqued their interest with his theories and his research on the
Central America
, after he had asked them to cover the search phase of the project for a million-six, he had the audacity in the foyer as they were saying good-bye to remind them they owed him cab fare back to the airport.

But that was Tommy’s way of testing their sincerity and their interest. “If they tell you they’re going to do something and it doesn’t happen that way,” said Tommy, “you have to think about that.”

Tommy handed the first cab receipt to the man who had set up the meeting; the man doubled the figure and handed Tommy sixty dollars in cash, but Tommy decided later not to pursue the relationship.

Next, they flew to New York by way of Newark to meet with the billionaire, who sat in the drawing room of his suite, surrounded by dark antiques, and never asked a question. “There weren’t any questions left to ask,” said Robbie. “Harv was absolutely complete and totally prepared at all times.” The billionaire thought the idea could work, but because of a lack of liquidity in some of his companies, he did not want to invest, and that was the end of the meeting.

When they left the hotel, Tommy told Robbie he didn’t have enough money to take a taxi to the Newark airport, that they would have to walk fifteen blocks to the Port Authority and catch a bus. “It’ll be a slice of life,” said Tommy. But the bus died in the Lincoln Tunnel, and the driver had to find a semi to push them through to daylight, where Tommy and Robbie got out, walked to the next exit, and found themselves in a neighborhood where no one spoke English and taxis wouldn’t stop. “I was so aggravated when we finally got to the airport,” said Robbie, “all I wanted to do was go home and never have anything to do with this project again.”

T
HE HEIR TO
the Miller Brewing fortune was Harry John, who lived with Capuchin monks in Milwaukee, where he ran the De Rance Foundation, a nonprofit corporation organized to devote funds to religious, charitable, and educational causes. It was the largest Catholic charity organization in the world, with resources exceeding $100 million. Mr. John, then in his sixties, had created the foundation thirty years earlier with inherited stock and made himself the trustee, chairman of the board, president and chief executive officer, treasurer, and chief financial officer of the foundation. Of late, as a federal judge would soon find, the eccentric Mr. John had been surreptitiously siphoning off large sums from the foundation to indulge his propensity for looking for shipwrecks. In pursuit of two wrecks that year, he had pulled out just under
three and a half million dollars, and he’d thrown in another two and a half million of his own money. Now he was after the
Central America
.