Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea (46 page)

One piece of Tommy’s concept shared by many engineers trying to work in the deep ocean was keep it simple. But Tommy pushed for simplicity where others either hadn’t thought to look or had looked and tried but given up. His first move was to operate everything down below with one thin co-axial cable. Because the cable was the piece of equipment most likely to be damaged from twisting, snapping, or rubbing constantly over the shivs, it had to be cheap and easily replaced. Co-ax had been around for twenty years. “We’d take the component that was exposed the most,” said Tommy, “and make it the lowest-tech. Then we would put the complicated things on each end.”

But one small co-ax cable couldn’t transfer power downside and still have room for the signals needed to run everything else. That’s why no one else did it. All those signals chasing up and down at the same time on that tiny copper wire banged into each other and the cable overheated and the electronics fritzed at both ends. “Years ago many people attempted to do this,” said Don Craft, “and they discarded it because they couldn’t make it work.”

For hours on the phone that winter, Tommy ran what he called “thought experiments” with John Moore and other engineers, looking for ways to make it all work on a single cable. “The thought experiment is the conceptual structure for the problem you need to solve,” explained Tommy. “‘If I change this variable, this’ll happen; if I change that variable, that’ll happen.’” A big company would build a prototype and test it in a laboratory, but Tommy had neither the time nor the money, so he built prototypes in his head and tested them by banging his head against someone else’s. “The whole notion,” said Tommy, “is that it simplifies the problem.”

Tommy wanted to try putting the power down below on the vehicle, so they wouldn’t have to send it down from topside. That had been done before, but the battery packs put out too little power. Tommy wondered out loud if they could somehow stretch that power. They ran more thought experiments. Moore found engineers who had designed a unit to control the flow of signals through a cable. He explained how many signals he needed to send to the bottom, and the engineers said, “We’ve never done that many signals before, but let’s try it and see what happens.” They talked about ways to send signals at different frequencies
and how to fire off packets of these signals fractions of a second apart, one packet behind another.

After weeks of brainstorming with Tommy and consulting with the engineers, Moore thought he could get enough power to the vehicle and still shoot enough signals down that single co-ax to operate everything Tommy wanted. Then Tommy phoned Hackman and asked him to call around to his suppliers to find out how soon and for how much he could get a one-inch co-axial cable about twelve thousand feet long.

Hackman started calling and on his second call, a manufacturer said: “I’ve got some co-ax already sitting here that’s three-quarters of an inch, thirteen thousand feet of it.” Somebody had ordered the cable and then couldn’t pay, so it had been sitting around for two or three years and the man wanted to get rid of it. “I’ll sell it for a dollar a foot,” he told Hackman. That was an 80 percent discount. Hackman called Tommy and told him what he had found; Tommy called Moore and asked him if he could do everything they had talked about on a three-quarter-inch cable; Moore said he probably could; Tommy got back to Hackman, Hackman bought the cable for thirteen thousand dollars, and they designed the vehicle with that cable.

T
OMMY AND
H
ACKMAN
were so busy during the week that through the winter and into spring they often would get together on Sunday mornings at a nature interpretation center called Blacklick Woods Metropolitan Park. There were no telephones at the park, and no one knew how to find them. In the middle of jogging trails and nature hikes sat a small observation room with displays that explained the wildlife living in the surrounding woods and with large smoked-glass windows that looked out over the pond, the ducks, the deer, dove, and squirrels. Often, especially on cold days with patches of snow among the barren trees, the observation room lay deserted, and they would spread Hackman’s drawings out on the floor and talk. If a few people wandered in, some of the smaller children might stop to look at their drawings of elbows and robotic arms, but mostly the visitors ignored the two men on the floor talking about torque and flex and tensile strength.

Tommy had given Hackman only two guidelines for design: One, he had to be able to put whatever Hackman designed on any boat available
for hire, no dedicated motherships; two, he wanted off-the-shelf components, simple things like the cable itself, nothing specially made that would be difficult to replace.

“You don’t want to build a whole brand-new rake,” Tommy gave as an example. “You can use a garden rake.” On a government project, the engineers would have a rake welded in the machine shop out of stainless steel, instead of going to a hardware store. “The government would spend twenty thousand dollars on it,” said Tommy. “We don’t mind being practical.”

Tommy knew the
Central America
had been built with thick oak beams and heavy pine planking, and he gave Hackman blueprints of the ship’s architecture for dimensions. But whether the ship would be virtually intact and standing tall, or collapsed, decayed, and eaten through, Tommy couldn’t be sure. Some of the sonagrams, especially the suite taken of Sidewheel, showed long shadows, indicating that masts and hull stood almost proud. Other anomalies cast short shadows, suggesting that they stood no more than a few feet above the sand.

Some biologists told Tommy he might find “bugs,” or shipworms, on the bottom. Others said that the site was so deep, the water so cold, and the pressure so great, that no shipworms could live down there; the ship, 40 feet high, 50 feet wide, 280 feet long, should be virtually intact. So they would need eyes to see into the saloon where the women had huddled with the children, to venture down the gangway where the men had lined up to bail, to peek into the purser’s office where the passengers had kept their gold. Hackman’s original designs were of tiny ROVs, flying eyeballs, like Ballard’s Jason Jr., that could swim inside and tele-explore.

Once they had explored and documented the site, Hackman figured they would have to pick things up and slowly eat their way into the center of the ship. They would have to cut carefully through decks, and since the
Central America
went down with at least two hundred tons of coal in her hold, they would have to move coal. Hackman sometimes had an idea for a chain saw or a gripper or a digger, but he would tell Tommy, “You can’t do something like this on any vehicle we have today.” Tommy would say, “That’s all right, let’s keep looking at it.” Hackman had learned to try it Tommy’s way and to keep trying it
Tommy’s way, even if it didn’t work at first. “He’s asked for an awful lot of crazy things,” said Hackman, “but an awful lot of those crazy things have helped a lot.”

T
OWARD THE END
of February 1987, the March issue of
Life
magazine appeared on newsstands in Columbus. On the cover were two hands, the wrists wrapped in gold chains, the palms and fingers uplifted and covered with gold and silver coins and chunks of emerald as large as a thumbnail. The hands belonged to Mel Fisher, and the treasure came from the
Atocha
. The cover read, “The Search for Lost Treasures: Eight Great Mysteries of the Americas.” Inside was a one-and-a-half-page spread of Fisher in a bathing suit, reclining in a hammock, a tropical drink in his hand, a smile on his face, gold chains around his tan neck, the hammock stretched over a pile of huge silver ingots, more gold chains, gold finger bars, and other gold artifacts. The caption read, “This Lucky Man Found His, But Others Lie Unclaimed.”

The article, by Linda Gomez, then told of the
San Jose
, with its billion dollar treasure lying in turbulent waters off the coast of Columbia since 1708. Gomez also wrote of the Lost Dutchman Mine in Arizona, the Money Pit on Oak Island off Nova Scotia, the funerary cache in the pre-Incan city of Chan Chan in Peru, and the treasure troves on Cocos Island, off Costa Rica. Number two on the list of eight was titled “The Gold Rush’s Saddest Claim,” and in one short paragraph Gomez told the story of the sinking of the
Central America
. In a large inset was a photograph of a Charleston man named Lee Spence, a bearded fellow with a round, pleasant face. The article said that Spence had located several Civil War ships on the bottom, and that for the past fifteen years he had been researching the story of the
Central America
.

“He believes he has discovered where the
Central America
lies,” wrote Gomez, “and hopes to beat competitors to the prize within two years. ‘All the pieces of the puzzle are there,’” she quoted Spence. “‘It’s a rush to the finish now.’”

Virtually every piece of mail Gomez received regarding the story was about Spence and the
Central America
. Fifteen readers wrote for Spence’s phone number or address. They wanted to invest. A week after the article appeared, Spence flew to New York, where Jane Pauley interviewed
him on the “Today Show” about his plans to recover the gold shipment from the fabled sidewheel steamer.

Tommy’s partners, many with $50,000 to $100,000 in the project, got nervous. “We didn’t think anyone else knew about the ship!” said Jim Turner. The article prompted Tommy to write a letter to the partners on March 7. He had monitored Spence’s efforts for months, and Spence was still trying to raise money. “We will continue to monitor Spence,” he wrote, “as well as several other groups that have not yet gone public but have the potential to become serious competitors.”

No one wanted to believe that another group could interfere with what they were doing, but in his failure-mode thinking, Tommy had to wonder and to plan for the possibility. From the beginning, he had warned they might have competition. He had put the caveat in his original offerings for the partnership and ever since had reminded the partners of the importance of keeping quiet. Much earlier, he had raised his own antenna, listening for hints in the deep-ocean community that someone else might be launching a major expedition to find the
Central America
. And to ensure that he would be there first, he had even conceived the Emergency Plan, a fall-back strategy he could activate immediately to get out to the site quickly if he had to.

After Tommy had heard the first rumor of competition back in January, he had considered going to the Emergency Plan, but that was a difficult decision. The E-Plan was an all-out sprint to get to sea the moment the weather window opened around June 1. It meant cutting out so many links in the time chain that they would have to alter the vehicle’s design drastically, make it far simpler, far less capable, and leave no opportunity to test it. Then they would have to step up production schedules on everything else and be at sea longer than planned, so the whole thing would cost the partnership another million dollars. That was a lot of money, and Tommy didn’t know if the partnership would be willing to add that to the financial burden they already shouldered. Although the partnership consisted of over a hundred silent partners, about twenty were close to Tommy, kept in touch, and watched his progress. They were businessmen, mostly self-made millionaires, who understood that problems arise, and that any business venture worthwhile had risk. They were toughened to the ideas of competition and secrecy, and Tommy could talk
to them. When the
Life
article appeared, he scheduled a meeting with this group.

They held the meeting at Buck Patton’s office, and Patton later described the discussion as “very emotional.” Tommy had the E-Plan ready to activate if he needed it, but he didn’t know if the partnership was ready for it. He estimated there was a 5 percent probability that someone else could mobilize a search expedition, find the site, and claim it before August, when he planned to be out there. That was the dilemma he presented to the partners at the meeting: Do we spend a million dollars to accelerate the project, eat up our cushion, and have to go back to the partners for more money, just because there is one chance in twenty that competition will beat us to the
Central America
, image it, confuse our legal claim, and undermine our financing, which could create myriad headaches for us?

Jim Turner wasn’t sure if Tommy was asking permission to overstep his budget, or if he was trying to gauge the backlash if he did.

“Tommy always did a wonderful job of laying out positions,” said Turner, “without letting anyone know where he stood. I think he was asking, ‘Should I go ahead?’ My response was, ‘Why are you asking the question? Let’s go do it!’” All along, Turner had figured Tommy would have to come back for more money, anyhow.

“But it’s a pride issue with him,” said Turner. “He not only wants to bring this thing up, he wants to bring it up in budget.”

A year earlier, serious competition would have ended the project. But now they probably had an image of the ship, and as Tommy had told them from the beginning, the search was the biggest risk. The biggest risk now was that somebody else would also image the ship on sonar and file an admiralty claim, leaving the partnership with a handful of pretty sonagrams. When Tommy distilled the problem to a million dollars versus a 5 percent probability, Patton said, “Tom, the point is, if that probability comes true, we’ve got 100 percent of nothing.”

“But a million dollars,” said Tommy, “is a million dollars.”

“In a project this size,” said Patton, “that’s just an insurance policy to make sure we’re clean with the board of health. If we don’t spend that million dollars, eight years of your life and this great big dream, and a lot of investors’ dreams at this point, are just going to go down the tubes.”