The Sea Hunters Part 24

The Cromptons, along with their six children and nanny, were lost.

Turner was alone on the bridge, a solitary figure staring up at the decks of his ship that loomed above him. He hung there clutching a railing as the bow of Lusitania plunged down until it struck a granite outcropping three hundred feet below the surface. Twisting, as if rotated by some unseen hand, the great Cunard liner slowly slid under the water. Swept away by the surge created by underwater turbulence, Turner found a small wooden chair and used it for a float until he was plucked alive from the Sea by a fishing trawler.

Lusitania was gone. Her death throes lasted only eighteen minutes.

When the final count was tallied, 1,198 pa.s.sengers and crew, out of 1,958 who had sailed from New York, were lost. Following on the heels of the t.i.tanic, which took 1,500 with her in 1912, and the Empress of Ireland with 1,000 dead in 1914, Lusitania's loss was especially staggering. Looking back, it seems incredible that so many maritime disasters with such heavy numbers of dead all occurred in the short span of three years.

It would take another thirty years before the record was broken during World War II by Russian submarines that sank the German pa.s.senger liners Willhelm Gustloff, General Steuben, and Goya, which were carrying refugees fleeing from the avenging Red Army.

The combined death count from the three torpedoed liners came to 18,000.

His face clouded with disbelief that a single torpedo had caused one of the world's great ocean liners to completely disappear in just eighteen minutes, Schwieger downed his periscope and gave orders for First Officer Weisbach to set a course for Germany.

Awarded the Iron Cross for his work in the Irish Sea, Schwieger was to sink several other ships in the coming year, but then his luck slowly began to run out. The end for U-20 came the following year in October of 1916. Because of a faulty compa.s.s, U-20 ran aground on a shoal just off the Jutland Peninsula of Denmark during a heavy fog.

Schwieger quickly sent an appeal for help to the nearest German naval base. An entire fleet of torpedo boats and destroyers responded.

The Germans correctly a.s.sumed that, if the British Navy had intercepted the SOS, they would have sent every warship within a hundred miles to destroy the U-boat that sank Lusitania. If successful, the result would have been heralded as a great naval victory.

Tow lines were attached, and the effort to pull U-20 off the shoal began at the first high tide. But nothing went right for Schwieger and his boat this day. The sands of the shoal, no more than a hundred yards from the beach, gripped the submarine in a tenacious grip. Ropes and chains broke several times. With each wave U-20 sank deeper into the bottom. Schwieger decided the project was hopeless and ordered explosive charges placed in the bilges.

The crew evacuated their vessel, taking all papers and personal belongings. Except for blowing a few holes in the bottom of the hull, the following explosions had little effect on the U-20. Schwieger left her there with heavy heart, immune to the death and destruction they had caused together.

Given command of the U-88, a big new boat of the latest design, Schwieger took most of his old U-20 crew with him. He continued to hara.s.s British shipping for another year. Then on September 17, 1917, U-88 struck a British mine and sank with all hands. Walter Schwieger had challenged fate once too often.

U-20 sat abandoned and rusting in the sands of Jutland until 1925.

Then, for some unexplained reason, the Danish Admiralty decided to destroy the infamous submarine and ordered charges of dynamite to be set around the wreck. Using nearly a ton of explosives, they blew off the upper deck and conning tower. A hail of shattered metal was thrown over a wide area. One of the men who placed the charges fell asleep in the engine room and went unmissed until after the explosion.

Incredibly, he staggered out of the wreckage and swam onto the beach with only a few cuts and bruises.

During her brief life, U-20 sank over twenty ships and caused the deaths of nearly fifteen hundred men, women, and children. Her evil deeds are engraved on the tombstones of her victims. Forever linked with Lusitania, she was slowly covered over by sand, her final resting place eventually forgotten.

Germany's early undersea boats had sunk an incredible 4,838 ships during World War I, 2,009 more than their descendants in World War II.

In the latter war, n.a.z.i U-boats destroyed 4.5 million tons of shipping as against 11 million in 1914-18.

The horror of the next war will not be ships sunk by torpedoes fired from submarines, but rather entire cities and nations destroyed by missiles launched from silos in their hull.

I'd Rather Be in Hawaii June 1984 There are worse places than the North Sea, but I can't think of any when you're on a sixty-four-foot boat being pounded by fifteen-foot waves. This was my third voyage into those wicked waters, and being a tad mentally deficient, I looked forward to the trip. My first two expeditions were failed attempts to find John Paul Jones's ship, Bonhomme Richard.

Now my objectives were even more ambitious. The six-week expedition was divided into two phases. The first three weeks were to be spent searching for H.M.S. Pathfinder, U-20, U-21, and several of the battle cruisers that sank during the great sea battle between the British and German fleets off Jutland, Denmark. The second phase of three weeks was dedicated to finding the World War II troop transport Leopoldville and the famed Confederate raider Alabama, which went down after a furious battle with Union frigate Kearsarge, off Cherbourg.

Altogether, we a.s.sembled a target list of nearly thirty lost ships.

Whoever coined the phrase "biting off more than you can chew" must have had me in mind. Actually, it was more a case of trying to hit ten birds with one stone. In for a penny, in for a pound. Go for broke, think big, or go whole hog. If original sayings were worth a dime and cliches a dollar, I'd go for the big money every time.

My wisest contribution was allowing two weeks out of the six I'd scheduled to be lost due to rotten weather, problems with the boat, or our detection instruments. You can't second-guess the unknown, but you can allow yourself some leeway. When planning your project, always, always figure in nonproductive time. You'll be very disappointed if you don't.

Nearly two years of research went into the effort. Correspondence was heavy between me, Bob Fleming, and British and German naval archives. A ma.s.s of material was acc.u.mulated from English, Scottish, German, Dutch, and Danish fishemien, who knew the sea the way they knew the decks of their trawlers. A pile of nautical charts were a.s.sembled, studied, and marked. For the Alabama, we examined French records of the famous battle. I sat for half an hour in front of Renoir's painting "The Sinking of the Alabama" that hangs in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Letters, diaries, and contemporary news reports were also examined.

The first setback we encountered was the conflicting position reports on World War I shipwrecks. Their last known positions as recorded by the British Admiralty and Imperial German Navy did not match the positions marked on the fishermen's charts. Nor were the fishermen's data very accurate, as we were about to find.

Take for example the wreck of Invincible, a British battle cruiser that was. .h.i.t by a lucky shot and blown up, taking all but six of her thousandman crew with her. In the general area where she was thought to have gone down, there were eight different position markings for an unknown ship within a three-mile radius.

How, I wondered in awe, could they misplace a 562-foot-by-78-foot, 17,250-ton battle cruiser? But they did. We stumbled on her wreck a good mile or more from the nearest estimated position. It is a fact, however, that fishermen are quite reluctant to give away locations of good fishing grounds or the snags and hangers that catch their nets.

They figure if they know the exact position where fish congregate or the spot they lost a $5,000 set of nets, they're better off not enlightening their compet.i.tors. So when pumping a fisherman on a wreck site, you have to be very polite and diplomatic while wondering if you're being sold stock in a company that manufactures rumble seats and buggy whips.

My plane was late coming into London and I missed my connecting flight to Scotland, so I sat around Heathrow and read British tabloids for the latest dirt before my flight to Aberdeen was called. Arriving three hours late, I ran into a distraught Bill Shea wandering the arrival gates like a lost soul. Bill was afraid I had been abducted by alien Scotsmen and began to think perhaps he was doomed to spend eternity in the Aberdeen airport.

We hailed a cab and drove to the dock, where we found the boat I had chartered, the same one I had used to search for the Bonhomme Richard five years previously. Solid, tough Arvor III was built in Buckle, Scotland, sometime in the 1960s. Her first owner, a wealthy Frenchman, wanted a yacht that could cruise the roughest seas in the worst weather nature could throw at her. So he decided on a stouthulled Buckle Boat used by fishermen making a hard living in the North Sea. Not many pleasure yachts are designed around a fishing trawler. Arvor was probably the only one of her kind.

Powered by two big diesels, she cruised at a complacent eight knots.

Her main saloon and staterooms were paneled in deep red mahogany and quite large. Besides a commode, the head in the main stateroom provided a bidet. The first time I tried it, I turned the handle too far and reversed my a.n.a.l ca.n.a.l while striking my head on the deck above.

Arvor III was ideally suited as a search and survey vessel. Solid and stable as a work platform, her living quarters were comfortable and efficient. If you walked by her on a dock, you probably wouldn't give her a second look. Not fancy, she looked quite ordinary. She was painted a no-nonsense black with white upperworks and was immaculate inside and out. I was blessed to get her, and I was doubly blessed with her remarkable crew.

In all my travels, I've found no finer people than the Scots.

Despite their reputation for thriftiness, they're generous in a host of ways. Try and buy a Scot a drink. His cash is in the bartender's hand before your fingers touch your wallet. If you're cold, they'll give you the coats off their backs. Courteous, considerate, no favor goes ignored.

They're a tough and hardy people. My dad used to tell a story about the Scots when he served in the German army in World War I. Yes, my father fought with the bad guys. I also have an uncle who shot down fourteen Allied planes. Anyway, Dad used to describe the French as mediocre fighters, the British as tenacious bulldogs, the Americans as real sc.r.a.ppers. "But my German comrades took anything they could all dish out. It was only when we heard the bagpipes from the 'ladies from h.e.l.l' that we oozed cold sweat and knew a lot of us wouldn't be going home for Christmas."

Arvor's skipper, Jimmy Flett, is a Scot any man would be proud to boast of having as a friend. Honest, with integrity nine miles long, you wouldn't give a second thought about trusting him with your life, your wife, and your bank account. Jimmy had been torpedoed twice during the war, one of the few who survived an oil-tanker explosion.

Later, when he captained a coastal pa.s.senger-cargo ship, he brought her through one of the worst storms on record in the North Sea.

A grateful government wanted to present him with a medal. But Jimmy refused to receive it unless his chief engineer was given one as well.

Because, as Jimmy put it, "if he hadn't kept the engines running under impossible conditions, everyone on the ship would have drowned."

The bureaucrats refused to give a medal to Jimmy's chief engineer, so he stuck to his guns. His only reward for saving so many lives is a photograph of the medal he never received.

Our first mate was John, who had been one of Jimmy's crew the night they fought the terrible storm. Quiet, most helpful, John was a presence seen but seldom heard. Colin Robb, our cook from Oben on the rugged northeast coast of Scotland, never was at a loss for words.

The only problem was none of us Americans could fathom his brogue.

Bill Shea and I thought that after a couple of weeks we'd become accustomed to his enunciation and understand what he was saying. I'm sorry to report that when the expedition closed down six weeks later, we were still failing Scot's Brogue Translation Course I-A. However, we did become especially adept at listening to Colin tell a joke.

Unable to comprehend a single phrase, Shea and I would wait patiently until Colin paused. Then, a.s.suming the punch line was given, we'd laugh.

Amazingly, we pulled it off the entire voyage without Colin's catching on. At least we think we fooled him. Maybe we didn't. Colin never confessed.

The British trucking system being what it is, we were delayed by four days while waiting for our equipment to arrive. The side scan sonar, magnetometer, and underwater camera had been air-freighted from the States three weeks earlier and were sitting in a London warehouse.

With little to do while living on the boat beside the Aberdeen dock, Shea and I wandered the town.

Going to the local movie theater was particularly interesting.

After paying for our tickets, we were sent upstairs to the balcony.

Neither of us had ever seen a balcony-only theater before.

Leaning over the railing in the front row, we could see that the downstairs seating section hadn't been used in thirty years. The aisles and seats were buried under decades of dust. No fancy snack bar with hot b.u.t.tered popcorn and jumbo Pepsis here. What we got were two girls standing on opposite sides of the balcony shining flaswights on trays of goodies strapped around their necks. I asked one of the concession girls why the main floor was deserted.

She looked up at me from the glow of her flashlight. "Why, sir, it's not safe down there."

Not safe from what? I didn't have the guts to ask why my body was more secure from harm in the balcony.

Strolling back to the boat, Bill and I came upon a crowd in front of a small building. We walked up to a bobby controlling the crowd and inquired as to the fuss. "The building you see is Aberdeen's maritime museum," he explained proudly. "The Queen Mother will arrive any minute to officially open it."

Since Bill and I figured this was as close as we were going to get to an invitation to Buckingham Palace, we stood on the curb while everybody waved little British flags and shouted, "Hooray for the Queen Mum. Hooray for the Queen Mum." A delightful old lady in her eighties at the time, she waved graciously and disappeared into the museum.

My other memorable experience in Aberdeen happened at the only phone booth on the docks. After standing in a British queue for an hour, I finally stepped inside and dialed the trucking company in London, ranting and raving over my tardy equipment. When I was informed that it was loaded on a truck whose final drop-off point was Aberdeen and was now somewhere in Wales, I became twenty degrees above steamed.

Adding to my wrath, a young fisherman, impatient to use the phone, began pounding on the door. Since I was only three minutes into my conversation, I ignored him. Then he pushed the door open and tried to pull me out. I was intent on yelling obscenities at the trucking company dispatcher and didn't Turn and notice that he was thirty years younger and built much broader than me, wore all black, and had an earring in his ear-these were the days before it became a fad. I was several inches taller, but if it came to a contest in brute strength, he could have likely picked up the booth with me inside and thrown it in the harbor.

Fortunately, a couple of factors worked in my favor. One, I was already madder than h.e.l.l at the trucking company and didn't care if he had muscles like tree trunks, and two, I was cold sober while the obnoxious fisherman was dead drunk.

More on impulse than common sense, I placed my outspread hand in his face and gave a mighty heave. He staggered backward across a narrow alley and struck a brick wall, cracking his head. He stood there, holding up the wall with a glazed look in his eyes, just staring at me.

I now recognized that this was a guy you don't tease when he's eating, so I finished my call and hastily departed.

Our equipment finally arrived, which made me happy. No more irate phone calls or nasty confrontations out of that dockside phone booth.

After everything was loaded aboard and tested, we sailed out of Aberdeen and headed due south toward St. Abb's Head, eighty miles away.

The day was breezy under a pewter sky of high clouds. On the way to the Pathfinder site, we took a short detour and spent four hours searching for the U-12, a German submarine rammed and sunk by H.M.S.

Ariel in 1915. A British sonar sweep failed to find her in 1977, but we obtained a good reading for a submarine about two miles from where the Adn-dralty charts put her. The image showed her sitting upright with a nice shadow outlining her conning tower.

Considering the find to be a good omen, we continued to the search grid I had outlined off St. Abb's Head. I gave the lat.i.tudes and longitudes to Jimmy, who converted them on his Loran navigation chart.

The sea became rough and poor Bill was barely able to function at the side scan recorder. He swallowed ten different brands of pills and plastered his entire body with Transdenn Scc)p patches to prevent seasickness. His nausea overcame the finest remedies on the market.

I've always thought he could make a fortune hiring himself out as a guinea pig to pharmaceutical companies. If they could come up with a medication to cure Bill's motion sickness, they could rule the world without bothering to spend zillions buying Washington.

We set the side scan for one-thousand-meter lanes and began mowing the lawn in the late afternoon, running north and south with the tide, which is the only way to go. The seabed read smooth and flat, interspersed with gravelly ripples. The bottom in this area was also very clean and free of trash and debris. The hours pa.s.sed. Colin fixed dinner in the galley. Bill, of course, wasn't hungry.

At 8:20 the next morning, Jimmy announced, "We just pa.s.sed over a rise on the bottom."

Because his fathometer scanned directly under the hull while the sonar sensor was dragged fifty yards astern, everyone gathered around the recorder, waiting for a peculiar object to appear. There is a hypnotic attraction in staring down on the reddish-brown smudges that slowly materialize on paper. Expectation and antic.i.p.ation never seem to fade.

I've seen men and women sit over a machine until their eyes turned red and swelled shut.

The image of a man-made object lying on a level bottom slowly revealed itself at the outer edge of the thousand-meter range. The object read vague, but it was there. We made another pa.s.s and switched the sonar to record a lane of only two hundred meters, obtaining a picture of a badly shattered ship, broken in three sections, lying at slightly different angles to each other. The stern section was the only part of the wreck that had distinguishing features.

We made five more pa.s.ses, and on the sixth we defined a small naval gun lying beside the wreck. Next we attempted to lower our underwater video camera over the side and get a picture, but the current was so strong and the seven-foot waves tossed us around so badly the video screen revealed little more than bluffed images of jagged wreckage. In retrospect, I realize we could have easily lost the camera if it had hung up on the wreck.

Identification according to archaeological standards was not positive in the sense that we didn't find a sign saying, THIS IS THE PATHFINDER.

But the dimensions measured on the side scan recording closely matched those of Pathfinder The discovery of a small naval cannon also adds to the evidence. And finally, there is no other shipwreck within ten square miles in any direction.

When we sent in a report of our findings to the Admiralty, they were more than pleased to update their charts with our wreck position, since it was the only one of proven accuracy. H.M.S. Pathfinder's twisted and rusting remains lie lonely and forlorn under a white-capped sea thirty miles off St. Abb's Head at 56 07 21 by 02 09 15 in 155 feet of water. There are strong currents in this area, and diving is hazardous.

Now it was on to the infamous terminator of Lusitania.

Bill prayed for deliverance and was answered. The waters turned to gla.s.s for the voyage across the North Sea to ThyborOn, a small fishing port on the Jutland Peninsula in Denmark. On the way over we searched for several of the warships sunk during the great Jutland naval battle in 1916. After only three pa.s.ses, we recorded the H.M.S.

Hawke, a British cruiser that was torpedoed by U-9. She was found very close to the position reported by fishermen and Admiralty charts.

One of the few times this circ.u.mstance occurred, Hawke's outline was quite distinguishable and her calculated dimensions were on the money.

Her hull is relatively in one piece, but her superstructure appears crumpled on one side of the wreck.

Moving on, we searched for the wrecks of H.M.S. Defence and H.M.S.

Warrior, two British heavy cruisers, and the German light cruiser Wieshaden. The first two were a wash. Nothing resembling shipwrecks were found within five miles of where they were supposed to be. A large anomaly was. .h.i.t over the approximate position of Wieshaden, but we couldn't get close enough for a more detailed view, due to fishing nets floating all around the area. The practice is called gill fishing. The Danish fishermen, in particular, found that fish tend to gather around shipwrecks and geological rises on the seabed. So they drop nets attached to floats around the protrusions, leave them for a few days, and then pull them in, hopefully filled with fish.

After Colin's belly-filling dinner, which always included boiled potatoes, Jimmy and I usually poured scotch while Bill played movies over the video monitor. One has to be the most boring movie ever made, a Kipling story t.i.tled Kim, with Peter O'Toole. Some old Indian Hindu beggar wanders around India for fifty years looking for a river.

Rivers are a dime a dozen in India. We could only believe that he was overly picky.

The British still have great affection for their lost empire in India.

Bill and I fell asleep, but the Scots thought it was marvelously entertaining. On the other hand, our favorite flick for the North Sea crossing was Stephen King's Creepshow. They thought it disgusting.

Different cultures, different taste in films.

We no sooner docked in ThyborOn than the sea turned nasty. Other than complain, there was little choice but to wait for calmer weather.

Bill and I walked into the town bank and converted a few traveler's checks to Danish kroner. mile we were standing at the counter, the whole bank felt as though it were rocking back and forth.

Too many days at sea does that to you. Your equilibrium takes a while to adjust to a floor that doesn't roll.

I often wondered why anyone would want to live in Thyboron. The town is pretty and clean and picturesque, the people are courteous and friendly, but the wind blows so hard eleven months out of the year that all trees within five miles of the coast grow horizontally. Though it was June and the sun shone bright, the wind chill factor reminded me of a Telluride, Colorado, ski slope in January.

While waiting for the sea to calm, Bill and I conferred with the local fishermen and drank beer with the town officials. Sitting on the beach and gawking at all the gorgeous blonde Scandinavian girls sunning in the sand, wearing only bikini bottoms and no bras, quickly became our favorite pastime. You'd have thought they were in Acapulco the way they lay there without a single goose b.u.mp, while we big chicken foreigners were bundled in heavy coats and sweaters.

One afternoon, I took a walk along the quay and was observing the fishermen unloading their catch after returning to port. Out of the corner of my eye, I happened to catch Bill on the opposite dock from me, panning the harbor with his video camera. The instant his lens was aimed in my direction I began jumping up and down and doing all sorts of crazy gyrations. I was too far away to be recognized, and he didn't notice me through his viewfinder.

Later, during dinner, he began running the tape on the monitor.

As the camera panned the opposite dock, I pointed to the wildly dancing figure and said, "What's that guy doing?"

Bill stared. "I didn't catch that before. He looks like he's in a spastic fit."