Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea (58 page)

“With regard to the vessel that you have now seen pictures of,” said Horan, “that you have seen videotapes of, within the present injuncted area, what are your plans vis-à-vis that vessel?”

“I could not tell you,” said O’Brien, “because I simply looked at a few photographs, which don’t necessarily mean anything to me. I don’t know if I’m interested in salvaging that. I’m not sure what it is. It hasn’t been identified. I’m not sure if that stuff came off it.”

“Are you willing to stay out of that present salvage area that is subject to the court’s temporary restraining order?”

“I do not believe that I need to make that commitment now.”

“I’m asking you the question,” repeated Horan. “You can say that you either are or are not.”

“We are not going to stay out,” O’Brien shot back. “Unless the court instructs us to stay out, we are not willing to stay out.”

“No further questions,” said Horan.

Columbus-America rested its case, and the defense called the captain of the
Liberty Star
, Ed Sottak. Sottak, with his deep tan, starched white uniform, unfiltered Camels, and gravelly voice, looked so much the epitome of a sea captain that Loveland wanted to take a picture of him.

On the stand, Sottak recounted the running of his early track lines and then the various encounters between the two ships, emphasizing that he had tried to maintain a course that would keep his ship one mile from the
Navigator
.

Horan listened to the captain’s testimony and figured, Forget the distance between the ships, that fish is two and a half miles behind you! You feint one way, cross over the other, the ships are still a mile apart; but that fish continues straight on ahead. “He knew where he wanted that fish to be,” said Horan. “He just wanted to find out what we were doing underneath us.”

Horan cross-examined the captain and got him to admit that even if he knew at all times the location of his ship, he never knew, especially when turning, the position of the sonar fish.

“We don’t know how close your sonar fish came to the plantiff’s salvage vehicle, do we?” said Horan.

“Exactly, I have no way of being that precise about it.”

“And you don’t know whether those transponders sticking up off the bottom over there were in fact endangered by that fish coming by with that thirteen-thousand-foot cable, do you?”

“No. I cannot give you a precise position of that cable under the water.”

Horan finished his cross-examination of the captain, and Judge Kellam adjourned the hearing at 5:00, instructing the lawyers to be back in court the following morning at 8:45 for closing arguments. After hearing the arguments, he intended to rule quickly.

W
HEN THE LAWYERS
and Tommy and Barry arrived in court for the second day of the hearing, John O’Brien appeared in the courtroom with his lawyers, but noticeably absent from the corridor outside were Burt Webber, Dr. Ryan, and Captain Sottak. Judge Kellam gave each side thirty minutes for closing argument, then retired to his chambers. When he returned, he issued his opinion from the bench.

Listening to the testimony and the closing arguments, Kellam had become convinced of what Robol had written in law school ten years earlier and what he had told Tommy he foresaw as a likely progression: that American law, as flexible and embracing as it was cast over two hundred years before, had to keep pace with progress in science and technology. And if technology could now take us to the bottom of the deep ocean, then the law had to go there, too. “Though the items are small,” said Kellam, “it would seem that all that is required is that it be identified as a part of a particular wreckage, and, thus, it has been done.” Kellam relied on one of Horan’s Mel Fisher cases to help him ground the intellectual leap in precedent: If he had jurisdiction over some of the artifacts, then he had jurisdiction over the whole ship, and it made no difference if that ship lay outside the territorial waters of the United States; the federal statute gave federal courts jurisdiction over all admiralty claims. “And if the court has jurisdiction of the wreckage and of the plaintiff,” continued Kellam, “I would think that it has jurisdiction to protect that wreckage, to see that it is not destroyed.”

As he spoke about the need to protect the site, he noted, “The area marked off is small in comparison to the amount of area of the Atlantic Ocean, some three miles by four miles, or twelve square miles. There isn’t any question, in the minds of anyone, that the plaintiffs have located some sunken ship. Whether it’s the SS
Central America
or not, I doubt if any of us know. They may have a good idea that it is, but the
injunction in this case certainly should not, and does not, run to the vessel SS
Central America
, until it is clearly established that the vessel in question is that vessel.”

As he neared the end of his opinion, Kellam said he could understand how long cables affected by currents and unpredictable in their travel might interfere with the salvor’s subsea operation if dragged back and forth in the vicinity. “I just think that what damage the defendant might suffer, by not being able to drag the fish through this small area of water, is nothing compared with the risk that might result to those undertaking the salvage operation.”

Once Columbus-America recovered items of value, Judge Kellam would decide who owned them. In the meantime, the judge enjoined “anyone in the world that knows of it” from interfering with Columbus-America’s salvage operation at the wreck site. By 10:10, the hearing had concluded, and Judge Kellam had excused the lawyers.

As Judge Kellam spoke from the bench, the
Liberty Star
was already over halfway between Norfolk and the wreck site. She had left Norfolk in the evening of the previous day, just after court had adjourned.

“They sent the captain of the
Liberty Star
back out there with the ship while the judge is in court comparing final arguments!” said Loveland. “They figured, ‘We’ll get out there while these guys are still in court.’”

Burt Webber, Boston Salvage, and Dr. Ryan and his sonar techs still wanted a peek inside that little box, just an hour or two for their fish to fly over whatever had the Columbus-America group so excited. Loveland and Kelly surmised that their strategy had been to hustle out to the site before the court granted the injunction, add a couple of hours for the news to reach the
Liberty Star
and for Burt Webber and his crew to verify with the lawyers that, yes, there really was an injunction, and in that time sweep the box with their sonar and produce an image of the site for themselves.

But Tommy had already considered this scenario, and that’s why he had spent twenty-two hours on a tossing fish boat and three more in the air in an electrical storm to get to Norfolk without taking his ship off site. When the
Liberty Star
cleared the radar horizon that afternoon, the
Navigator
sat there like a hen on a golden egg, and even the court now warned not to ruffle her feathers.

About five o’clock, Bob Evans called Robol to tell him the bridge had sighted the
Liberty Star
heading toward the box. This time she had nothing in the water and was moving at better than twelve knots. They watched her come within seven miles of the northern edge, just close enough for visual verification, then stop, turn, and slowly head away. They lost radar contact with the
Liberty Star
at fourteen miles, but they had not seen the last intruder.

ON THE GALAXY SITE

A
UGUST
1987

A
FTER
J
UDGE
K
ELLAM
rendered his decision, the Columbus-America Discovery Group issued a statement in the form of a news article. It was headlined “SHIPWRECK DISCOVERY OPENS NEW ERA OF DEEP OCEAN EXPLORATION,” and the article began, “A shipwreck with many characteristics of the
Central America
, a sidewheel steamship that sank in 1857 with a load of California gold and the loss of 428 lives, has been found off the Atlantic Coast.” With the find released, Tommy and Barry flew to Washington, D.C., for an interview with the
Washington Post
, and then on to New York, where they met with reporters from the
Christian Science Monitor
and
U.S. News and World Report
. When they returned to Wilmington a week later, they holed up in a motel, where the phone calls cost less than the
ten dollars a minute on the SAT phone at sea. “We were hammering the phones,” said Tommy, “calling as many people as we could about different things, engineers, partners, scientists, to make as many connections as we could.”

A
NYONE ON THE
ship would gladly have traded places with Tommy or Barry for a motel room that didn’t move. Most of them had been at sea for nearly eight weeks with no break, working odd hours, often getting no sleep. They had to cling to their plates in the galley, or their food ended up on the floor. They had to shower and shampoo—remove the cap, pour the shampoo, and screw the cap back on, all with one hand— while their feet danced a cha-cha in the shower stall. To go to the bathroom they had to brace themselves just to sit down; then they couldn’t flush without first filling a bucket in the sink and tossing that into the toilet. “Sometimes it’d take more than one bucket,” said Tod, “and when you’re in heavy seas and it’s splashing out, it can get really nasty.”

After two months of this, everyone had had to swallow a crawful of irritation. They were on there with people they wouldn’t necessarily have chosen to have as their friends. “But you absolutely have to get along with them,” said John Moore, “you have to put up with their irritating habits.” Yet Moore would sit down next to Doering at the breakfast table, and Doering would say, “G’morning, John,” and Moore wouldn’t even acknowledge Doering was there. “He wouldn’t even grunt,” said Doering.

Doering himself was still grumbling about Tommy’s leaving Bob Evans in charge of the tech crew. Bob was one of the youngest men in the control room, the only one besides Milt who hadn’t spent hundreds of days at sea, yet he was coordinating every dive, trying to carry out Tommy’s instructions for exploring the site, but he might rather have been back in Columbus with his new girlfriend, sorting out their relationship and playing jazz piano at night around the Short North.

On deck, Craft still fumed out loud over his frustration with Tommy. In the control room, Doering fumed over Bob Evans and his “goddamn mud samples,” and Moore’s verbal fits kept everyone tense. Even Scotty, probably the least judgmental and the calmest person any of them had ever met, ventured that he admired John Moore, “but he’s impossible to work with.”

To calm everybody down, about every ten days Craft unlocked the beer and a little hard stuff and had a deck party; not much by beach standards, but compared to the monotony and irritation of life on that 240-by-50-foot island, any celebration seemed like Mardi Gras. Craft started the beer chilling in the afternoon, then barbecued hot dogs and hamburgers that evening, and everybody gathered on the back deck in the still warm air of the Gulf Stream. Blue-black waves rolled by from as far out as they could see in all directions, the crew with a light buzz, bullshitting and grabassing, eating chips and dip, and listening as Bob Evans cranked up his keyboard and played jazz. He called it “music to dive by,” and one of the mates sometimes joined in with a banjo, and Bryan picked some rhythm and blues on his grandfather’s old Gibson. And they floated around in the Gulf Stream making as much noise as they could and no one cared.

“It sounds childish when you describe it,” admitted Craft, “but after you’ve had three or four weeks with nothing going on, it’s a welcome break.”

Sometimes the parties lasted till long after midnight, the tension dissipating with the day’s heat, the stars out and philosophy hanging thick on the deck. The crew liked the schedule with Tommy gone. Craft had them getting up at the same time every day and starting work at the same time and quitting at the same time. And pontificating at night under the stars was an opportunity for them all to beat up on Tommy for pushing them too hard, too far, when he was there. “He assumes that everybody is like he is,” said Moore, “that they never get tired and that it doesn’t matter whether it’s night or day. He has trouble realizing that the other people here don’t have the same kind of motivation that he does.”

A
T
T
OMMY
’
S DIRECTION
, the tech crew was to film and photograph the ship. They were not to land, not to move in close, not to explore among the timbers and the silt and the piles of coal. Tommy did not want the site disturbed; all he wanted were thousands of photographs and thousands of feet of video.

From the day Tommy and Barry departed for Norfolk on July 13 until they returned three and a half weeks later, the tech crew launched the vehicle fourteen times, but only five of the dives lasted until the
batteries ran low late in the afternoon. Sometimes they couldn’t launch because the seas rose to seven or eight feet and the wind to twenty knots and lightning cracked bright and jagged all around them. Sometimes they had deployed the vehicle, but a squall line appeared suddenly along the horizon and blew in so fast they were forced to recover early.

Other times, the breeze settled at under five knots and the seas rose no more than two feet but the winch was down or they had electrical problems or the telemetry system failed to process the signals traveling up and down the cable. A major frustration became the vehicle’s three thrusters, the eight-inch-diameter, two-and-a-half-foot-long impellers used to propel the vehicle around the site. At eighty-five hundred feet, the pressure would drive a pencil eraser through a hole no wider than two human hairs, .004 of an inch. The thrusters cost five thousand dollars apiece and were the best available, but the rubber seals couldn’t hold back the salt water, which seeped through and shorted out the motors. On several dives, the techs surveyed the site for no more than thirty minutes before one of the thrusters stopped spinning. Then they had to rush the vehicle to the surface, tear open the thruster motor, and dry it out with a heat gun or a hair dryer, or throw it into the galley oven before it corroded. They ordered new seals, they machined their own seals, they redesigned the old seals, but nothing worked. The thrusters flooded nearly every other dive, and if one or two thrusters were out, they couldn’t survey the site the way they needed to, and the site was massive.