Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea (37 page)

He had been in the water over sixty hours, when on Tuesday morning he saw something floating in the distance that looked like a small boat. His body flat against the plank, he scooted himself to the end and began swimming his hands in the water. By now the winds were no more than light breezes and the sea almost calm. Still, he paddled for more than three hours, gradually closing the distance, three miles, two miles, a mile, until he recognized the object. It was one of the lifeboats from the
Central America
, gently floating and apparently empty. Tice paddled up to the side and held on to the gunwale for a long while before he could muster enough energy to lift himself off the plank and into the boat. Water sat halfway up its ribs, but in the water he found three oars, a rusty pan, a corroded pail, three old coats, and an oilcloth jacket. Tice bailed the water, tied one of the coats to an oar, then hoisted the signal at the bow. In the boat he could sleep without fear of being swept away, but still he had no food and no water.

He continued to watch the horizon for bigger ships, but he saw only small parts of the wreck floating in the ocean. Once he spied a wicker flask rising up and over a swell. Hoping the flask contained liquid, he used one oar to scull toward it and discovered that the cork was loose and the flask contained but a few spoonfuls of more salt water. That night he slept an unquiet sleep, and all the next day he saw nothing but his little boat, the sky and the sea, and the hot sun shining down upon all of it.

Midmorning on Thursday, Tice spotted another piece of the wreck, this one larger than most of the pieces he had seen drifting. Again, he took an oar and tried to scull off the stern of the lifeboat in that direction; as he got closer, he could just make out a raft carrying two or three men. He continued sculling toward the raft.

Grant had seen the boat about three miles off. It now approached so slowly that neither he nor Dawson could tell if anyone was inside. Grant stripped to his underwear, Dawson helped him tie a life preserver around his waist, and Grant lowered himself into the water to begin paddling
toward the boat, which now was about a mile away. Tice saw someone leave the raft, so he pulled the oar back and forth off the stern, steering toward the swimmer, and within an hour the two met. Tice helped Grant into the boat, then the two rowed to the raft to pull Dawson off. As he struggled with Dawson, Tice noticed that one dead body remained entangled in the ropes.

During the first minutes together, the three men briefly mumbled of their experiences since the steamer sank. Then Dawson used what little strength he had to peel off his clothes so they could dry. Tice advised them both to wet a handkerchief and keep it wet and tie it around their head. After that they again fell silent, weak and dehydrated, no energy to speak except an occasional muttering, a wondering out loud at the chance they would be rescued. Even if they had had the strength to row, they would not have done so, for they did not know where to head. They could see nothing but sea and sky, they had little idea how far they were from shore, and other than following the path of the sun, they had no sense of direction. So they drifted, day and night, scalded by the hot sun as they scanned the empty horizon, sleeping fitfully at night, and borne onward by the wind and the sea.

Two more days passed, one week now since the steamer had gone down. Still no food, no water, no sail. Boils and blisters had bubbled up from their skin and some of those had popped, leaving large raw sores on their backs and arms. They had lost their sense of hunger, but their lips had dried and hardened and cracked, and their tongues were parched and beginning to swell from want of water. Then late Sunday morning, to the northeast, they saw the sail of a schooner, and she appeared to be on a southerly course. They took to the oars and tried pulling for the schooner, watching the wind puff her sails, but when they got within two miles of her, the distance between the ship and their small boat began to increase. The schooner held steady to her course, and in another two hours had sailed over the horizon.

That night, Dawson lay in the bottom of the boat wishing he could die. Then the next day, for the first time since the hurricane, they drifted into a rain shower. They opened their mouths and caught the drops and sucked the cool moisture from their clothes. They filled the small silver cup, and between the pail and the pan collected another quart; but they
had gone for so long without water that when the rain shower passed, it had provided little to ease their suffering.

None of the three could move his limbs. They all sat with their heads on their knees, drifting, and waiting silently to die. But behind the rain shower, one of them spied a brig a few miles distant standing before a light breeze. At the risk she would turn out an apparition conjured only by their exhaustion, or real enough yet sail away, they again felt hope, and the ship gradually drew closer. Then they saw her topsails unfurl and her bowsprit swing directly at them.

Grant and Dawson sat side by side and wrapped their cracked hands around two oars and with nothing but hope to power their efforts, they tried to row toward the brig. But Dawson gave up. Then he tried again to row, and again he quit. Finally, he began rowing again, and soon thereafter, the captain of the brig hailed them across the water and in minutes they were alongside. She was the brig
Mary
out of Greenock, Scotland, recently departed from Cárdenas, Cuba, bound for Cork, loaded with molasses and sugar. Dawson’s white shirt had caught the eye of one sailor.

The sailors slowly hoisted the three men on board, being careful not to strike their emaciated bodies against the timbers. Then they carried the three men across the deck to the cabin, where the captain refreshed them first with a glass of warm claret sweetened with sugar. When they had swallowed the sweet wine, they begged for water, which the captain wisely refused. After they had rested a while, he gave them small portions of thin gruel, which they followed with another fit of begging, which the captain again refused. As days went by, he fed them a little more and allowed them to have sips of water. Slowly he nursed them back with small amounts of water and gruel, and slowly they gained strength.

After the three men had been aboard the
Mary
for a week, the captain encountered the bark
Laura
, bound for New York, and transferred them for safe passage to their original destination. When Grant, Dawson, and Tice arrived in the city on October 5, a relentless press hounded them for interviews and described the condition of their bodies to a readership agape at the details.
Frank Leslie’s Illustrated
said their suffering was “unparalleled in the history of shipwrecks.” Even after two weeks of care and
convalescence, their cheeks still were sunken, their limbs emaciated and covered with large sea boils. Flesh still peeled from their hands. One periodical described Grant: “His large, manly face was white and almost fleshless, showing the bony outlines with ghastly distinctness, and his black, scarred lips looked as though in his agony he had frequently bitten them through. But the most shocking traces of suffering were in his eyes. Naturally large, they were now preternaturally distended and wore a fixed, straining, sleepless expression as though still looking from the raft along the dreary horizon for a friendly sail.”

“I do not like to speak about our sufferings,” Grant told the reporter in a voice hoarse and hollow. “They were all but death.”

A reporter for the
New York Times
wrote that the three men were “almost suffocated” by the crowd and could not answer even half of the questions put to them. “The colored man, Dawson,” observed the reporter, “evidently impatient of the distinguished attention shown him, soon found an opening through the crowd, and limped away.”

The
Mary
had rescued the three men at four o’clock Monday afternoon, eight days and twenty hours since they had been cast adrift as the
Central America
went to the bottom. The captain of the
Mary
logged the coordinate at the time of their rescue, 36° 40′ latitude, 76° 00′ longitude, which meant that since the sinking, Grant, Dawson, and Tice had drifted to the northeast almost five hundred miles.

When he was able to walk again, George Dawson, either in New York, or having traveled to Swansea, Massachusetts, kept his promise to a dying man: He presented the silver cup to James Birch’s wife and to Birch’s young son, Frank. Birch’s wife added another inscription: “Saved from the Steamer Central America, Lost September 12, 1857.” The cup is now on display at the Hearst Mining Building, University of California, Berkeley.

B
OB HAD DISCOVERED
this extraordinary story early in his research, and despite his curiosity at how the men could have mustered the will to survive, he saw immediately the mathematical value of the tale. Already he had consulted an authority on the Gulf Stream at the University of Miami. Presenting the story hypothetically and using different coordinates, he reconstructed an equivalent scenario and posed this question
to the expert: If something adrift at this point on the ocean ended up at this point, would it be in the Gulf Stream? “And the answer,” Bob said later, “was definitely it would be.”

Although the course and width of the Gulf Stream alters from time to time, this information greatly narrowed the site of the sinking, and Tommy guarded it closely; he had not revealed it even to Larry Stone. But when Stone’s probability maps failed to overlap, Tommy told Stone to reestimate everything, assuming a three-knot current always headed northeast. He wanted to see if that made a difference. “And it did,” said Stone. “Once we put that in, then the maps started to overlap rather nicely. So that was encouraging. That means that the information we were using from these three independent sources was now consistent.”

THE DEEP BLUE SEA

200 MILES OFF THE CAROLINA COAST

J
UNE
1986

T
HE STEEL BOW
of the
Pine River
shot upward eight feet, then slammed down, shuddering all the way to the fantail. Then the bow leaped up and slammed down again. A forty-knot wind whipped the sea white beneath lightning tearing at the night sky. When the stern dropped, water exploded over the fantail and rolled a hundred feet up the flat deck to crash against the control room, where the sonar techs sat trying to figure out what was wrong with the SeaMARC. They could look out a small window cut into the steel and see the wall of water headed up the deck.

“At times,” said sonar technician John Lettow, “it seemed as if there was ten foot of ocean and you were under it.”

The
Pine River
was a flat-bottomed mudboat from the Louisiana oil patch built to ferry drilling mud and supplies out to the oil rigs in the gulf. Tommy had found her in a shipyard in Orange, Texas, while scouting with a former navy commander named Don Craft. In his late fifties, Craft had retired after thirty years in the navy with an Unlimited Master’s ticket: He could skipper any vessel in any ocean. In late 1984, Tommy had called Craft because the commander now consulted for offshore operations and he knew which vessel and what equipment Tommy needed to run a SeaMARC search in deep water two hundred miles off the coast.

At first, Craft was leery. But Tommy sent him a check for his fee, and the check cleared, so Craft met Tommy in Houston. For four days they drove, talked, ate seafood, and stopped at every bayou shipyard from Orange to Jennings to Lafayette, from Cameron to Patterson to Houma, showcase spots along the gulf where the offshore support industry displayed its rustbucket mudboats for charter. Tommy and Craft ventured out on scaffold piers in search of one that could be sucked from the muck, sandblasted, overhauled, and refitted for a deep-water survey of the Atlantic Ocean.

For the first day and a half, Craft wondered if Tommy would ever stop talking. “He asked me every goddamned thing you can think of, on every subject you can think of,” said Craft, “vessels, ROVs, operational techniques, equipment, shipping companies, methods used in the gulf, how seafarers used to do things and what problems they had. We covered it all during that four days.”

In Orange, Texas, they found the
Pine River
, which Tommy liked because it had a helo-deck. Under the helo-deck was good control space, a small shop, and some storage, which appealed to Craft. At 165 feet, it was smaller than what Craft had envisioned, but he was satisfied.

Craft then had ripped out a lot of old equipment from a previous charter, got the vessel cleaned up for transit, measured the fuel on board, and topped it off at sixty thousand gallons. When he left Orange, he had the
Pine River
on charter, beginning the 14th of May and running through the end of July. Eight days later he arrived in Jacksonville, ready to place the tow point and the winch, weld a modified log boom to the deck for launching and recovering the twelve-hundred-pound SeaMARC, fire up
the galley, fill the ship with groceries, and await Mike Williamson and the sonar techs for mobilization.

T
WENTY-TWO MEN LIVED
on the ship. Six men from the Louisiana bayou kept it clean, running, and pointed in the right direction. A cook ran the galley. Don Craft oversaw the operation. Twenty-four hours a day, Williamson and his sonar crew of eleven manned the electronics in the control room. Bob had remained in Columbus with the handle “Info Bob,” a source for additional information. Barry documented the search on film and video, helped Tommy write letters to the partners, and was responsible for ship-to-shore communications to assure a steady flow of supplies, spare parts, and information. Tommy was Williamson’s client, and as the client he was supposed to watch and listen. But he had $1.4 million in his pocket from partners who counted on him, and he would no more leave Williamson alone to run the SeaMARC survey at sea than he would have left Larry Stone alone to produce the probability map.