Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea (57 page)

Burlingham told Ryan that the bond had been filed and that the order was in effect. He added, “I would suggest you call your lawyer.” Then he turned to Tommy and said off the air, “I better not be lying.” The captain of the
Liberty Star
radioed Burlingham that he would stay clear of the work area for the night.

The restraining order was good for ten days. Robol now filed a motion to show cause why the
Liberty Star
and her personnel should not be held in contempt of court for having interfered with Columbus-America’s ongoing recovery. He also asked for an injunction against the
Liberty Star
, and because the captain had described the entitiy on board his ship as “the trustees of Columbia University,” Robol served each trustee. “That stirred things up a bit,” said Tommy. “They were all subpoenaed to court.” The hearing was set for July 15.

T
HE DAY AFTER
they got the restraining order, Craft launched the vehicle again. For the first time, the thrusters operated so they could land, and Moore had the manipulator tuned well enough to reach out stiffly and pluck artifacts from the debris fields. Although crude compared to the capability Tommy had planned to take to sea that summer, this simple dive introduced a new era in deep-ocean technology. At nine thousand feet, they shot video and dozens of stereo stills, and Moore retrieved fragments of wood, several more lumps of coal, and a sampling of mud. Four times, he tried to pick up timbers or objects made of iron, but they were so soggy or rusted through, they collapsed.

The ship had deteriorated dramatically. Timbers protruded upward from the wreckage, and a little of the decking was still visible; they could see patches of the hull and maybe a piece of the bow. But mostly the site was covered with coal. In some areas, only where the coal seemed mounded could they identify what appeared to be the core of the site.

While the techs explored the debris, Tommy and Barry prepared for their trip in to Norfolk. Tommy had to testify in court, and the
Navigator
could not leave the site. The only “captain” Hodgdon could find to come out and pick them up was a teenage boy willing to make the four-hundred-mile round trip in his father’s fishing boat with two of his buddies, a crew Hodgdon described as “hippie-type kids smoking pot.” When they brought the boat alongside the
Navigator
on the evening of July 13, Tommy’s brother-in-law, Milt Butterworth, was on board. He and Tommy’s sister Sandee had moved from Chicago to Columbia, South Carolina, where Milt was now a professional photographer and videographer who taught film at the University of South Carolina. He had come out to help the techs document the site.
When he boarded the
Navigator
, Tommy and Barry climbed down to the small fishing boat, and it pulled away at 9:45 that night.

The boat smelled like dead fish. It was dirty, and Tommy suspected that lice hid in the beds. Worse than that, he had no telephone to talk to Robol or his suppliers or his crew back on the
Navigator
. He and Barry settled in below and tried to talk about the hearing, but they were too tired. Then they tried to sleep, but in the confused seas, the bow would rise and smack the next wave, sending shudders through the boat. The crew smoked a little weed, tied the wheel down to keep her close to on course, and crashed on the floor of the bridge. In the middle of the night, Tommy heard the wheel creaking against the tautness of the line, and the pounding of the hull did not stop for twenty-two hours.

The next evening, Hodgdon and Gross met Tommy and Barry at the docks and drove them to a small airfield south of Wilmington, where it was raining so hard water ran in the streets, and thunderstorms stretched far to the north. Gross had to stay with the Sea Bee in Wilmington to patrol the site and photograph intruders, so Hodgdon had found a young pilot with a little single-engine Cessna, and he rounded up a copilot to navigate and run the radio. Tommy and Barry tumbled into the two backseats, and the pilot taxied in the rain out to the runway and got them into the air just before the airport shut down for weather, and they flew to Norfolk that night in a rainstorm. Tommy had to be in court the next morning at nine o’clock, when he would be cross-examined by lawyers on the other side, and he had to talk to Robol and Kelly and Loveland before he took the stand.

W
HEN
K
ELLY AND
Loveland had studied shipwreck cases back in Columbus, they noted the name of the lawyer who had argued each case, and repeatedly they saw the name of one man, David Paul Horan. Horan was a sole practitioner from Key West, a lawyer with an undergraduate degree in marine biology who loved only one thing more than practicing law, and that was diving. He loved diving so much that clients once offered to pay for a wind vane that would sit atop his office: When the wind blew, the words “Lawyer’s In” would rotate into view, and when there was no wind, it would read, “Lawyer’s Gone Diving.” Horan had successfully argued Mel Fisher’s case against the State of
Florida all the way to the United States Supreme Court, and in seven years of litigation, he had never lost a hearing, a trial, or an appeal. They hired him to ride shotgun in the courtroom next to Robol.

By the time Tommy and Barry got to Robol’s office, it was well after midnight. “Everybody was about ready to fall asleep when we started,” remembered Kelly. They told Tommy he would testify about what had happened at sea, that he would be the only witness from Columbus-America they would call. There was no time to coach him on demeanor, or rehearse, or warn him of traps the other side’s lawyers might try to set for him. What they wanted to review with what little time they had was the story of what had happened at sea. When Tommy finished, it was four-thirty in the morning.

The story helped the lawyers understand the confrontation that had transpired topside in the sun, but the photographs sobered their intensity. Through the photographs they entered a world where nothing had changed for millions of years, until this ship had crashed into the bottom, and when the crashing had ceased and each piece had fluttered to the ocean floor, nothing had moved for over a century. In that world there was no confrontation, no deadline, no court date; there was no time, no season; there was no light, only the purest blackness in which the wreck sat mouldering.

“The first time I saw it,” said Kelly, “it was like two o’clock in the morning. Tommy says, ‘Look at these slides,’ and he put them in the stereo viewer, and there it was, some ribs of the ship. It was eerie. You could see timbers along the side, and there was a deadeye right there. And they had pictures of funny-looking fish, too. One was this white—lord knows what it was, some sort of life form that probably nobody had ever seen before, totally white, you know, just swimming by.”

W
HEN THEY ARRIVED
at the courthouse a few hours later, they saw sitting in the corridor not the trustees of Columbia University, but Tommy’s real competitor: a renowned treasure hunter named Burt Webber, wearing his trademark safari jacket and a huge silver-and-gold diver’s watch. Webber, forty-five, had gained fame and some fortune in 1978, when he beat John Doering and Seaborne Ventures to the wreck site of the
Concepción
on Silver Shoals off the Dominican
Republic. Webber was the real client, the treasure hunter on board the
Liberty Star
who had organized the whole expedition with funding from a group called Boston Salvage Consultants. Three years earlier he had been involved in another project “connected” with the
Central America
, and, as he put it, he had been “tracking research diligently on it for years.”

Presiding over the hearing was Richard B. Kellam, senior judge of the Eastern District of Virginia, Norfolk Division. Kellam was seventy-eight. He had been a federal judge for twenty years, and he was sharp enough to keep ahead of a courtroom full of lawyers and cut them off when he thought they were wasting his time.

“Good morning, gentlemen,” said Judge Kellam from the bench. “Are y’all ready to proceed?” Not one minute had passed before the lawyers were debating whether Kellam had jurisdiction to listen to anything anyone said about a shipwreck two hundred miles offshore. Kellam decided that as long as Columbus-America could prove it had an artifact from the ship, then he had jurisdiction over the ship, at least long enough to hear the parties argue the issue itself. With that settled, he told Robol to call his first witness.

The lawyers had found Tommy a shiny gray suit, a white shirt, and a gray tie, but they couldn’t find shoes to fit him. No one in the group had the same size feet as Tommy. He took the stand wearing the gray suit, the white shirt, and the shoes he had worn in on the fish boat, an old pair of maroon Reeboks.

Robol liked the shoes; they added a certain down-home look, a scientist with more important things on his mind than how nicely he was dressed. After having Tommy describe his work at Battelle, his early interest in deep-water wooden-hulled ships, and the technology his group had developed, Robol presented the judge with several sets of stereo slides of the ship, which Tommy looked at through a hand-held viewer and narrated for the judge. The first showed a piece of hull and the deadeyes used to rig sails. The next was at the edge of what appeared to be the coherent site, illustrating various states of degradation. The third set was of barrel hoops, with the vehicle’s manipulator in the foreground.

When Tommy looked at the fourth set, he said, “This is in the bow area of the shipwreck, and of course in all these pictures you can see the
proliferation of the anthracite coal, coal obviously being the most prominent component of this particular shipwreck site.”

Next, Tommy narrated videotape of John Moore’s recovery. “This is one of our manipulators,” he began, “that is attached to one of our modularized sections, that is attached to our modular vehicle, that is picking up a lump of coal, that has been refrigerated in seawater, that is here on the desk.”

On the television screen, the mechanical arm slowly picked a lump of coal from the pile and with jerky movements brought it up in front of the camera. Even in the poor quality of the footage, everyone could see something growing out of the top of the coal, a delicate, spongelike life form no more than an inch and a half high.

“God knows what the hell it was,” Horan said later. “It looked like a tulip champagne glass: pure white, gelatinous—weird stuff. But that little white tulip just cooked their goose.”

“The importance of this particular lump of coal,” continued Tommy, “is that it has a sessile organism on it, which as you can see survives at these depths. We have refrigerated it, and it seems to be surviving so far.”

On the desk in front of Tommy sat a large, wide-mouth bottle filled with cold seawater. In the bottle was a chunk of coal, and attached to the coal was the same wispy white life form, floating upward like a tiny hourglass.

“Where did the coal come from?” asked Robol.

“This coal came from the shipwreck site that we saw the video of, which is the same shipwreck site that this court hearing is about.”

On cross-examination by the lawyer representing Boston Salvage, Tommy admitted that the
Central America
was his primary interest, that the
Central America
had a lot of gold on board, that he had disturbed the site but only minimally in the debris field, that the first thing he had recovered was on July 6, 1987. The lawyer wanted to know if he had recovered the items on that day just so he could file in court.

“I think it’s fair to say,” admitted Tommy, “that the fact that other people were in the area certainly sped up the process.”

Next, the lawyer asked about the site, and Tommy described the size of the coherent core and the plumes of debris extending outward two hundred meters. He noted that he had not determined the ship’s
identity; that he had the present capability to recover artifacts from the ship, whatever it was; and that the confrontation had not been life threatening. That was the end of Tommy’s testimony.

When Judge Kellam told Robol to call his next witness, Dave Horan shocked the other side by calling as a hostile witness a man named John F. O’Brien, the president of Boston Salvage. O’Brien and several of his current partners had also been involved in Harry John’s search for the
Central America
in 1984. Loveland later described him as “a business promoter kind of guy, so he was a perfect contrast with Tommy.”

With O’Brien on the stand, Horan wondered out loud why the
Liberty Star
had left the dock one month after the
Nicor Navigator
and gone straight for the center of the original ten-mile-radius circle Columbus-America had filed on for Sidewheel. But O’Brien said he knew nothing of Columbus-America’s claim; he said he had never even heard of Columbus-America until he got a telex from the
Liberty Star
describing an encounter with a group calling itself by that name.

“Have you located any wrecks?” asked Horan.

“We have sonar data that details certain anomalies,” said O’Brien. “We are not sure what they are yet, because we have not camera ID’d them yet.”

“Unless enjoined by this court,” asked Horan, “do you intend to conduct activities within the present injuncted area?”

O’Brien’s lawyer objected, but Horan told Judge Kellam there would be no reason to issue an injunction if Boston Salvage agreed not to enter the box. Kellam overruled the objection.

Horan repeated his question. “Sir,” snapped O’Brien, “our overall plan calls for a trapezoidal shape out in the ocean that is within that whole seven-hundred-square-mile area, and that box is scheduled to be surveyed. We have gone off that track on three occasions now. We are off that track because the court told us to. If the court tells us we don’t have to, we are going to get back on our track, because that’s what we contracted to have done.”