Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea (63 page)

Even if you extended the reach, you still had to see out there, or the new reach did you no good, because you can’t work on what you can’t see. Humans can’t tighten the little screw at the hinge in a pair of glasses if they hold the glasses and the tiny screwdriver out as far as their arms will reach and point the screw away. But Tommy wanted a vehicle that could. He wanted to pop the eyeballs out with the arm, zoom in with the cameras, and backlight it so the scene was crisp, and he wanted to zoom and backlight from several angles.

In thought experiments with Tommy, Hackman conceived a simple solution: Inside a plastic-lined aluminum sleeve, he put a hollow aluminum shaft that slid like a long drawer. Cheap, light, low tech. All of the stresses and flexes worked for Hackman on paper, and when they built it, it weighed three hundred pounds and extended the reach of the manipulator and the light booms by five feet.

“That’s what Harvey brought to it,” said Hackman. “He had a concept of what he wanted to do and how he wanted to do it, and then I’d design something, and he would just look at it. ‘Will it do the job I want it to do and will it fit in the place I want it to fit?’ And if it wouldn’t, he’d say, ‘Let’s keep working on it,’ and so I’d go back.”

T
O RAISE FRESH
capital, a partner had set up a meeting between Tommy and the investment banking house of Drexel Burnham in New York. But when Tommy flew to New York with Ashby and the other partners to meet with the Drexel management, he felt uncomfortable with them. “They really weren’t our kind of people,” he said.

“Money is money, as far as I was concerned,” said Ashby, “but Tommy thought that working with them would destroy the entire project, the confidentiality. They wanted to get into his organization and talk to his people and talk to his researchers, and Tommy would never have permitted that.”

Another partner offered to finance the building of the new vehicle and lease it back to Tommy. He also would arrange for a million dollar credit line. In one stroke, Tommy could have surmounted most of his financial problems, but then the partner would have owned the vehicle. Tommy had to find a way to deal with the current crisis without creating future problems. After three months of considering options, he finally decided he would have to raise money “the old-fashioned way,” which meant sitting down face to face, one on one, with old partners and new investors and explaining the recent accomplishments of the project. Ashby and the lawyers advised framing it as a new offering, Recovery Phase II, and including enough units in the subscription to raise $7.5 million. The only problem was that every unit in the partnership was gone, 100 percent sold, so they would have to dilute all of the current units to make room for the new ones. And on this the partners differed.

“Some partners thought that we had accomplished a great deal,” said Ashby, “and that the dilution should be very low; and others thought, Yes, we’ve accomplished a great deal, but these new shares should get a lot.”

Earlier, Ashby had broached the idea of a 25 percent dilution with some of the partners, but everyone he talked to had bristled. He pulled back to 15 percent, and some of the partners agreed they had to do it; others didn’t like the idea but said they wouldn’t fight it. Most had been diluted in other ventures, so they knew why it happened, and in the end, if not harmony, at least there was agreement. After they finished the arithmetic, Recovery Phase II opened with 150 smaller-percentage units that sold for fifty thousand dollars a unit.

When Ashby talked to partners now, he emphasized the court injunction and how the vehicle had performed on the bottom of the deep ocean. “Wayne was a bulldog,” said Dauterman. But as the fall of 1987 turned to the winter of 1988, money only dribbled in, and Tommy had to spend much of his time trying to predict when it would come; then based on that and a carefully conceived priority list, he cautiously ordered the next critical piece of equipment or line of expertise.

While Tommy allocated the funds sparingly, he pushed his engineers on the vehicle without their knowing that money was a problem. He confined his talks with them to concepts and specs and the problems of dealing with suppliers. Partners called him on his cellular phone at the warehouse wanting to know why he was not further along and why he had to improve what they had last year, anyhow.

Tommy never revealed to one group the problems of another. The partners may have had nightmares about their investment and the need for a second round of financing and a higher ante, but they didn’t go to bed worried about the seemingly insurmountable technical problems ahead of Hackman, Moore, Scotty, and the engineers. Hackman, Moore, Scotty, and the engineers went to bed with those nightmares, but they didn’t go to bed worried that the next time they called a supplier in Goleta, California, they would hear that Columbus-America was sixty days in arrears. Tommy went to bed, when he slept, with everyone’s nightmares.

COLUMBUS, OHIO

W
INTER AND
S
PRING
, 1988

I
N
C
OLUMBUS WINTER
begins to relinquish its grip in March, but only reluctantly. The battle with spring takes place under gray skies, and tree branches with pinhead green sprouts rattle in the wind, and something falls from the sky that is not quite snow, not quite rain, not even sleet, but frozen droplets that tinkle when they hit, almost like the tumbling of thin seashells. On one of those days, Bob Evans sat in his office on the second floor of the Victorian on Neil Avenue, reviewing the sonar records Mike Williamson and his crew had shot in the summer of 1986.

In the ongoing round tables, Tommy, Bob, and Barry had concluded that although there was a 90 percent probability that Galaxy was the
Central America
, they also had to plan for it not being the
Central America
. Everything at the site had been so encouraging and yet
it was frustrating; they had found the ship, they had found the period dishes and the cup and the jugs, they had found the coal; but because the E-vehicle was so limited, they could not get under the coal to see what was there.

“It seems like we have the
Central America
,” said Bob, “but in science you’re never sure about anything; you’re 97 percent sure, or 99 percent sure. We were all putting a real happy face on, and at the same time, there’s this doubt in our own minds about what we’ve got, or at least a willingness to accept an alternate hypothesis.”

Part of Bob’s responsibility during each off-season was to systematically examine all of the new data gathered at sea and reevaluate the data from previous years. Tommy was particularly interested in synthesizing a new understanding of deep-water, historic ships; with the updated information, they planned for the next season. That winter Tommy told Bob to reanalyze the sonar records for the entire fourteen hundred square miles searched in 1986 and catalog everything. Bob had two things to help him: the experience of having ground-truthed Sidewheel and Galaxy, and new-generation software that would enable him not only to turn the sonar data into bright, contrasting colors, but also to scan, zoom, mask, and otherwise enhance the information.

Bob had begun reviewing the records from day one of the search, and as he went through each file, he marked the anomalies. “I was recreating the voyage, starting with the first record, so I was reliving what they had gone through. I was saying, ‘Okay, there’s an anomaly here; here’s another anomaly,’ I think I called them small, medium, and large, just checked everything; I wanted to have a whole record of that.”

Each time Bob entered a new file number, thin blue lines zipped from left to right and right to left across his monitor, marching upward until seven hundred of them filled the screen. “It’s the way it comes up originally at sea,” said Bob, “so you can watch it just as if the SeaMARC was moving along underneath you.” When the blue lines finished painting, Bob had on the screen two miles of ocean floor three miles wide.

The light blue lines indicated a flat bottom of sediment, but among the blue, Bob sometimes saw flecks of green or various shades of red or
black, tiny anomalies no bigger than a pixel on the screen, or one to two meters on the ocean floor. When he had noted every anomaly, he entered another file number and again the blue lines began to zip back and forth across the screen.

Williamson and the sonar techs had dismissed most of the anomalies in the original sonar search as too small, too hard, or too round and shapeless to be the remains of a 278-foot, wooden-hulled, sidewheel steamer. For Bob’s review of the records, Tommy told him to note everything: big ships, little ships, geology, shipping containers, submarines, sailboats, every anomaly right down to the suspected oil drums. Two anomalies along the western edge of their search area had been dismissed as geology, but being a geologist, Bob thought, “They’ll be interesting to look at.”

For three days Bob had done nothing but review sonar records. So far, he had analyzed over a hundred. The first forty-nine records were short and unreliable because the weather had been stormy and the equipment not working properly. At file 0120, Williamson had switched the SeaMARC to the one-thousand-meter swath for the high-resolution passes on the promising targets. Bob had studied those images many times before on the master optical disk, Williamson’s hit parade. “But I looked at them again,” said Bob, “because there’s some interesting ships.”

In the middle of these promising targets were the high-resolution images shot along the western border of the probability map. “I was fascinated with what I was doing now,” said Bob, “because this was the geology marked in the log book, and I was looking at these strange, long, linear features.” He spent nearly a half hour studying 0126, then he went to 0127 and let it paint its way up the screen.

File 0127 was the target in the southwest corner of the probability map that the sonar techs had had trouble finding again on the high-resolution run. They had made three passes trying to relocate the target. On the first pass, the watch leader had written in the log, “No joy.” On the second pass, the navigator had written, “Contact 200 meters port—geology?” and the watch leader had written, “Large geological feature.” On the third pass, the watch leader had concluded, “Target believed to be a geological anomaly with no cultural value.”

When Bob finished reading the comments from the watch leader and the navigator, he glanced up at the screen, and the thin blue lines running quietly back and forth had been interrupted by a large image only partially painted but already filling with green and red and black. “I saw this, quote, ‘geological’ anomaly coming on,” said Bob, “and it got about a fourth of the way up, and I started getting weak in the knees.” The target was long and thin at the core, “Like a central area of mass,” thought Bob, “but surrounded by a galaxy of debris.” He checked the log again to make sure it was shot on the one-thousand-meter swath. He measured it quickly. The core seemed significantly longer than Galaxy. He turned off the screen. “I thought about it for a minute … and I turned it back on … and I looked at it again … you know? … I’m like … you know? … I just … I thought … you know? THIS IS A SHIP! THIS IS NOT GEOLOGY! IT’S NOT ONLY A SHIP, BUT IT’S MUCH BIGGER AND THE RIGHT CONFIGURATION!”

What had distinguished Galaxy from the other shipwreck images were the fields of debris obscuring the contours of the ship. Every other image had looked like a ship, pointy and thin, but Bob now knew that the image of a wooden-hulled ship full of coal after a century on the bottom should appear rounded and amorphous. “The sonar team are the top sonar experts in the world,” said Bob, “but this was the first phenomenon they had seen that looked like this, so I can understand why they called it geology. But I’ve spent all summer ground-truthing something else called Galaxy that looks like geology, too, only I know it’s a ship. And this new target looked an awful lot like Galaxy. If this was the
Central America
, we had spent 115 days at sea on the wrong ship.”

Bob rocked in a confused emotional sea, waves of frustration and waves of elation washing over him at once. They all had worked so hard that summer and had found nothing; yet he was staring at dramatic information that fit their new understanding of sonar images of large, deep-water, wooden ships. “I’m suddenly thinking that right here in our very own data might be the answer to our problem.”

D
ESPITE A CHILLY
wind rattling the bare branches of the trees, Bob left the office and started down the sidewalk, head bent, passing one old
Victorian after another. “I was questioning my scientific method. This anomaly had an area roughly mid-ship that was standing some thirty feet proud off the bottom. This corresponded, of course, with engine works. It had two rather bulbous, hard-looking objects sitting athwartships on either side. These, of course, could have been paddle wheels. I’m thinking about all this stuff, and I’m going, ‘This is it!’ I was drawing conclusions well beyond what I was allowed to conclude, so I was trying to slow myself down. I can’t just unequivocally say, ‘This is the
Central America
!’ That’s ludicrous. However, I was very quickly swept into the idea that no longer was Galaxy the only bet we had.”

When Bob returned, Tommy was in his dining room office deep into a conversation on the phone. Bob went up to the third floor and found Barry also on the phone. He returned to his computer on the second floor. The screen was blank. Bob turned it on, and the anomaly appeared again on the left side, a cloud of color at the core against a neutral ocean bottom. “Maybe it is geology,” thought Bob.

On the upper right of the screen sat another anomaly he surmised was geology, a ridge, thirty to forty meters wide and miles long. He studied the two, using everything he knew as a geologist and everything he had learned about comparing shipwrecks on the bottom to their sonagrams. He went back and forth, first one, then the other, then the first again, finding correlations and differences and seeing much more in the new anomaly of what he now thought he should be seeing. “It was obvious to me,” said Bob, “that that strong ‘geological’ anomaly was significantly different from the other geology.”