The Sea Hunters Part 3

"They will suffer miserably without their father. You cannot give up hope. Think of them waiting for you at home."

c.o.x did not answer. He seemed to have lost all desire to live.

Hillard did not realize it at the time, but his efforts at keeping c.o.x alive no doubt prolonged his own life as well. "d.a.m.n you, c.o.x," he snapped. "Do not let yourself die. Hang on for G.o.d and your family."

c.o.x appeared not to hear. He was beyond caring. The cotton bale slewed broadside in a trough before being struck by the next wave.

Millard somehow clutched the bale with hands numb of all feeling, fighting to hang on as the bale was pitched and tossed crazily.

His body limp with apathy and insensibility, c.o.x slipped off the bale and Hillard saw him no more.

Hillard's ordeal was very nearly an exact replay of the drama acted out on Captain Manchester's cotton bale.

Manchester's partner, McKenna, complained constantly about the bitter cold. Then as the icy water soaked his skin and the frigid air sucked the life from his body, he babbled about his wife and children, how he had kissed them the morning he left home.

"You'll be with them this time tomorrow," Manchester gamely a.s.sured him.

"No, I fully expect I'll die from the cold."

"Move about, man," Manchester implored, trying to encourage McKenna.

"Get your blood flowing. Wave your arms, kick your legs, anything to keep warm."

"What good will it do?" mumbled McKenna. "We're both going to perish."

"Speak for yourself!" Manchester suddenly snapped. "I'll be d.a.m.ned if I'll give up."

Like Benjamin c.o.x on another cotton bale less than a mile away, McKenna appeared not to hear and went silent.

Manchester had heard many tales from ocean mariners about shipwrecked sailors who lost the will to survive. Discipline, they swore, was the key to survival. Too many mariners who were forced to abandon their ships expired out of lethargy and hopelessness. He could see it happening before his eyes. McKenna did not appear to care whether he lived or died. Staying alive to keep his wife and children from having to survive without a husband and father seemed the farthest thing from his mind.

Manchester could do nothing but watch helplessly as McKenna gave in to fate. He died shortly after the Lexington sank. His body fell backward, his head hanging partially in the water. The first heavy wave that struck the bale washed him off. For almost half an hour, he floated alongside Manchester, the moonlight reflecting on his white face and hands, before he finally drifted out of sight.

The agonizingly cold night came and pa.s.sed, a night of torment that never seemed to end. With the coming of the sun, the sea turned smooth, and Captain Meeker of the Merchant, who had labored through to dawn, unloadin cargo to lighten his vessel, was finally able to work his sloop off the sandbar with the incoming tide and set sail into the Sound.

Perched on his cotton bale, ffillard sighted the Merchant at about noon and wildly waved his hand to attract the attention of those on board. Captain Meeker smartly turned his sloop toward Hillard and came alongside. The helping hands of the crew pulled the half-frozen survivor over the side, where every courtesy was paid to him. He was taken below, where damp clothes were replaced with warm blankets, and he was placed in front of a stove while being fed cups of coffee laced with whiskey.

Next to be rescued was Captain Manchester. Nearly insensible from the cold, his hands frozen, he managed to insert his handkerchief between his rigid, unfeeling fingers and wave it feebly in a light breeze.

Observed by Meeker's alert crew, he was soon thawing out beside Captain Hillard in the galley of the Merchant.

At two o'clock in the afternoon, fireman Smith, his hands and feet badly frostbitten, was barely conscious when he was spotted by Captain Meeker and picked off the paddle-wheel guard. All three men suffered from the effects of the exposure to extreme cold, but all recovered in time to testify at the coroner's inquest. Captain Meeker also retrieved two bodies from the water before heading back to Southport.

The most remarkable story of survival was that of Second Mate David Crowley. Luckily, his bale did not capsize or roll heavily with the sea, enabling him to burrow a nest into the center of the cotton.

With his clothing stuffed with cotton until he looked like a fat snowman, he kept from freezing to death. Unseen by Captain Meeker's crew, Crowley suffered all day Tuesday and through the night. Not until nine o'clock Wednesday night did his floating home-away-from-home drift against an ice pack along the Long Island sh.o.r.e.

Afraid he might fall through into the frigid water, Crowley crawled across the ice on his stomach until he reached land. Then he stumbled nearly a mile to a house and rapped on the door with the last of his strength. The residents, Matthias and Mary Hutchinson, thought they were looking at a bloated dead body, dressed only in bulging light pants and a shirt, and with a bared head. They were astounded when the warmth of the house and their vigorous ma.s.sage of his limbs brought Crowley back to life. He had suffered forty-eight hours of freezing cold on his floating cotton raft and had drifted over fifty miles.

Shortly after his miraculous survival, the owners of the cotton on board the Lexington presented Second Mate Crowley with the same bale that had carried him to land. He had it transported to his home in Providence, Rhode Island, where he kept it standing in his living room for many years. When the price of cotton skyrocketed during the Civil War, Crowley sold his bale for charity. From it sprang the famous Lexington brand of cotton cloth.

There were other intriguing sequels to the burning of the Lexington.

Lithography was becoming a popular profession in the 1800s.

People throughout the country bought lithographs from their general stores and hung them in their living and dining rooms. For the price of a few pennies, the public came into the habit of changing the colored lithographs on the wall every week, especially when the subject that was ill.u.s.trated struck their fancy.

Right after the burning of the Lexington, a young artist, struggling to launch a lithography studio, was contracted by the New York Sun to produce a lithograph of the disaster. Working night and day, he turned out his masterwork in just sixty hours, and splendiferously t.i.tled it: THE AWFUL CONFLAGRATION OF THE STEAMBOAT LEXINGTON IN LONG ISLAND.

SOUND, MONDAY EVE, 13TH JANUARY 1840 BY WHICH MELANCHOLY OCCURRENCE.

OVER 100 PERSONS PERISHED.

Appearing in the New York Sun's extra edition, the portrayal of the frightful catastrophe became a sensation and hung in almost every home in America. Considered a breakthrough in journalism, the use of graphics to ill.u.s.trate a hot news story quickly became a traditional style that is with us today in newspapers and magazines.

The young artist's reputation was made, and he went on to become world famous. If the tragedy of the ill-fated Lexington did nothing else, it gave the country the remarkable talents of Nathaniel Currier, who in seventeen years would join forces with another artist/lithographer, James Merritt Ives, to produce evocative color lithographs that became the ill.u.s.trated soul of early America.

The man that arrived late at the dock and who wisely decided not to make an attempt to jump onto the Lexington read of the disaster in the extra edition of a newspaper late the next morning. He could not believe his luck. If he hadn't been delayed because of an argument with his editor, Park Benjamin, over editorial changes in his poem The Wreck of the Hesperus, set for publication in the World newspaper, he certainly would have been one of the 150 frozen bodies floating in the Sound.

He folded the newspaper, set it aside, and asked the waiter for a sheet of the hotel's stationery and an envelope. After the dishes were cleared, he began writing his wife and father to inform them their husband and son, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, was still alive and well in the restaurant of a New York hotel.

Captain Joseph Comstock was appointed by the Transportation Company to proceed to the scene of the disaster and search for the bodies of pa.s.sengers and crew, and to recover any luggage and company property.

The steamboat Statesman, Captain George Peck commanding, was chartered for the recovery operation.

Comstock's first problem was to determine the approximate position of the Lexington when it caught fire and later sank. Witnesses to the flames on the water gave conflicting testimony. Some reported seeing the burning ship off Eatons Neck Point, others put it in the middle of the Sound off Crane Neck Point. The lighthouse keeper at Old Field Point claimed he saw the flames vanish about three o'clock in the morning about four miles to the north of the lighthouse and slightly west. The depth of water was judged to be twenty fathoms.

After two days of searching, only seven bodies were discovered, including the two pulled from the water by Captain Meeker of the Merchant. Numerous sections of wreckage washed up ash.o.r.e. The nameplate on the wheelhouse, two feet in length with the entire word Lexington, and a swamped lifeboat, were found and retrieved, along with several pieces of luggage.

The weather during the search was intensely cold, the temperature holding at four degrees below zero. The sudden acc.u.mulation of ice along the sh.o.r.e rendered further efforts hopeless. Captain Comstock called off the search and ordered the Statesman back to New York with its pitifully small cargo of dead. The recovery operation was especially bitter for Comstock. One of those lost, whose body was never recovered, was Jesse Comstock, clerk of the Lexington, the captain's brother.

The coroner's inquest threw blame in every direction. The jury censured the steamboat's owners for maintaining a dangerous ship and denounced them for transporting inflammable cargo on a steamboat carrying pa.s.sengers. They criticized the state steamboat inspectors for ignonng gross safety violations, and the dockworkers for loading combustible cargo next to a heat source. They accused Captain Child and his dead crew of the Lexington of dereliction of duty, while strangely exonerating Captain Manchester, Second Mate Crowley, and fireman Smith from all blame.

The verdict was that the Lexington was a firetrap. The casing around the smokestack ignited a fire that was communicated to the cotton bales stacked around it. No one was indicted, convicted, paid a fine, or lost a license.

All that remained were hearts overwhelmed with grief. The burning of the Lexington left ninety grieving widows and nearly three hundred fatherless and motherless children. For all but five of the dead, there would be no tomb.

POSTSCRIPT.

An item from a weekly paper, the Long Islander, Huntington, New York.

September 30, 1842. THE LEXINGTON. The wreck of this ill-fated vessel has been raised to the surface of the water, but, one of the chains breaking, she again sank in 130 feet of water. The attempt is again in progress. The eight hundred dollars recovered from her were not in bills, as before stated, but in a lump of silver, weighing thirty pounds, the box having been emptied on the deck to be used as a bucket for throwing water on the flames.

Enter NUMA April 1983 I can't remember what initially sparked my interest in the Lexington.

I believe it might have been an afterthought while searching the sand and surf of the Fire Island National Seash.o.r.e in New York for the remains of the first steamboat to cross the Atlantic, the Savannah.

She struck the beach during a fog in 1821, several years after her epic crossing. Although she was under steam for only eighty hours, her famous voyage stands unchallenged in the history books.

This type of search is usually the most frustrating because almost all ships that run aground on sandy sh.o.r.es or on the banks of rivers are covered in time and completely buried under a shroud of silt. You can easily observe this phenomenon while standing at the edge of a surf line. As the dying waves pa.s.s beyond you, your feet sink into the sand and are soon covered. The same thing happens to a ship, even a battleship, if given enough time. Another problem is that landmarks go through great change, and the sightings of contemporary witnesses seldom apply.

On a boat belonging to a pair of Long Island residents, Bill Shea and I conducted a remote sensing survey with his proton magnetometer as close as we dared to the breakers on the Atlantic Ocean side of the island in hopes of detecting the magnetic signature of any iron left on board the Savannah. Although we had planned a mile-long search grid that ran parallel to the beach, we could not distinguish landmarks over the high sand dunes that run along the spine of Fire Island. Since the boat did not carry navigation equipment, this was imperative if we were to set our boundaries for running our search lanes in the water and on the beach.

I volunteered to swim to sh.o.r.e, climb the sud dunes, and take visual sightings in order to plot our search grid. Fifteen minutes later, I located the landmarks that I had plotted from a topographic chart that corresponded with the approximate site of the Savannah's burial place.

After marking the eastern boundary of the grid with a piece of driftwood that could be seen from the boat, I began pacing off a mile toward the west boundary.

Taking my terrible memory into consideration-when my wife sends me to the store for a loaf of bread, I always come home with a jar of pickles-I kept track of my progress by shifting ten pebbles one by one from one hand to another. The beach appeared totally deserted, so I merrily counted out the numbers aloud in a Mitch Miller sing-along fashion.

About halfway toward my western boundary, I noticed a figure approaching from the opposite direction. Drawing closer, I could see that it was an elderly man wearing a big-brimmed floppy hat on his head. I was so wrapped up in not losing my count I paid no more attention to him until after we had pa.s.sed. Then a tiny brain cell told me that something wasn't quite right. So I turned around.

The old gentleman had stopped about ten paces away and was staring at me as if I were some nut case who had escaped his padded cell.

Amus.e.m.e.nt was etched on his suntanned face. He, no doubt, couldn't imagine why someone would walk down a deserted beach while staring at the sand and singing numbers to himself.

He couldn't have been more amused than me when I realized that beneath the floppy hat the old guy was completely nude.

One of the practices I've come to rely on when looking for a particular shipwreck is to research other ships that went down in the same general area. Should my primary target prove too elusive or impossible to find within my time schedule, or luckily, I stumble on it early in the game, I can use the extra days to hunt for a second or third wreck. There is nothing wrong with being extra ambitious when you're given the opportunity of achieving an additional success by catching two or more fish on the same hook.

Unable to find a solid magnetic signature of the Savannah, I decided to give her a rain check, and I moved the crew across Long Island into the Sound for an attempt at discovering the steamboat Lexington, lost for nearly 150 years.

Bob Fleming, a nationally respected Washington, D.C researcher and shipwreck scholar', who works with me on a regular basis, put me onto the track of the ill-starred steamboat. Fleming sent me the story behind the tragedy. Cursed with a vivid imagination, I could almost hear the cries of the Lexington's victims begging for someone to find their tomb.

Margaret Dubitsky, a Long Island schoolteacher, who worked long and hard in compiling a remarkable research package from New York state and local archives, found references to the steamboat's being raised.

One vague report claimed it was brought to the surface and towed away, suggesting,it no longer lay on the bottom of the Sound.

This piece of information nearly sank the project before it began.

It was known that occasional sea hunts through the decades had failed to find a trace of the steamboat. Could this explain why she was never located by either sport divers or fishermen? Everyone, it seemed, claimed that because she couldn't be found she must no longer exist.

I hated to give up on her. Much of my life people have told me I was wasting my time or engaging in an exercise in futility when I tackled a seemingly hopeless project. What is interesting is that they were right only 40 percent of the time.

Shoving all pessimistic thoughts aside, I felt strongly that it was conceivable the Lexington might still rest in the murky depths, forgotten and untouched for almost a century and a half. If so, the charred wreckage of what had once been the finest steamboat on Long Island Sound had now become a historically rich and archaeologically significant vessel.

Raising a two-hundred-foot vessel from 130 feet of water is a feat rarely if ever attempted today. Difficulties with weather, unpredictable seas, the heavy lifting equipment involved, and the expense can be enormous. Having the technology in 1842 to accomplish such an undertaking seems incredible. Hard-hat diving was in its infancy. Decompression tables were unknown. Did divers sling chains under the hull to lift her out of the water, or were cables dragged under the wreck by two vessels steaming side by side? And then there had to be a barge and a crane with the capacity to lift a 488-ton vessel to the surface.

Even by twenty-first-century standards this takes a derrick almost the size of the one used by the Glomar Explorer to raise the Russian submarine. And yet it was accomplished, as eventually proven by NUMA in July of 1983.

Finding no insurance-company records of a raising, no credible, detailed accounts in contemporary newspapers of a charred hull brought into port, I forged ahead and formed an expedition to search for the wreckage I felt certain was still on the seabed. I was told by any number of divers that I was laboring in vain and pouring time and money into a sinkhole. To me, this was akin to telling MacArthur he couldn't invade the Philippines.

Working with Zeff Loria of Port Jefferson, Long Island, who agreed to act as project director, I began a.n.a.lyzing the historical material gathered by researchers Fleming and Dubitsky. The enigma? Where exactly was the Lexington when she finally sank? Ship captains sailing in landlocked waters did not navigate by lat.i.tude and longitude coordinates. Nor did they estimate their positions by the stars or dead reckoning. They used visual sightings. Log books from ships sailing the Sound simply contained entries stating that "Oak Neck Point was abeam at 9:35 P.m." Few other details on position were given.

The Lexington left few clues.

Of all the sightings from witnesses on sh.o.r.e, I placed my faith in the Old Field lighthouse keeper, who reported seeing the flames die about four miles north of the Point and slightly to the west. Figuring that he was a good judge of distance across water, I laid out an initial grid of four square miles in his approximate area, and the search was on.

The first attempt was spent primarily in studying the area, bottom conditions, run of the tide, and underwater visibility. Captain Tony Bresnah, with his boat, the Day Off, anch.o.r.ed us over a sunken barge and we made a test dive into the Sound. One to two feet of visibility was not unexpected, but the current was much stronger than estimated.

We figured close to four knots, and all divers were holding on to the anchor chain while stretched horizontal like flags in a windstorm.

We also discovered that half our search grid pa.s.sed under the path of the Bridgeport-Port Jefferson ferry that ran between the mainland and Long Island during the summers. In continuous operation since 1874, it provided an excellent reason why fishermen didn't fish and divers didn't dive in the neighborhood.

For the second attempt, Zeff Loria a.s.sembled a first-rate crew.

The Mikado III, captained by Mike Amell, an experienced divemaster, was chartered. The dive team was led by Doug Rutledge and Sandy Zicaro.

Equipment included a Schonstedt gradiometer to detect the presence of iron, a Klein & a.s.sociates side scan sonar to record objects protruding from the sea bottom, and a Loran navigation unit, since made obsolete by newer Global Positioning Systems, utilizing satellites.

For once the tedium of running search lanes did not cause uncontrolled yawning. Tom Cunu-rungs, Klein's sonar technician, announced not one but three solid targets the first hour into the search. Subsequent runs over the targets suggested one large vessel broken into three sections. In one sonar recording the engine's walking beam and a large section of the guard from a paddle wheel could be detected.

Captain Mike Amell then expertly moored the Mikado III directly over the wreck so the divers could descend on the anchor line. The bottom depth registered 140 feet on the boat's echo sounder and the diver's depth gauges. This time we waited for slack tide. The view inside a tunnel offered better visibility than what Rutledge and Zicaro found on the bottom, and they had to examine the wreck with powerful underwater lights.

Using a safety line, we made narrow sweeps of the central section of the wreckage. With the divers restricted to only ten minutes of bottom time, major exploration was severely limited. The divers brought up a few bolts and pieces of charred wood. They reported seeing one of the paddle wheels and more charred timbers and described the hull construction as looking like an egg crate, verifying the Lexington's unusual box frame.

It is a pity you cannot stand on the sandy bottom, step back, and view the wreckage in its entirety. The length of the burned and broken hull, the great paddle wheels, the walking beams of the engines are more imagined than seen. The dismal green, murky water allows you only a few closeup glimpses of how the ship must have once appeared.

You feel as if you're groping through a haunted house in the dead of night, glimpsing its ghosts from the corner of one eye.

Because of the many long hours of research, I felt as though I had walked the decks of the Lexington, watched the smoke pour into the sky from her smokestack, seen her pa.s.sengers and crew. To the other divers, she was simply a pile of debris on the bottom. I saw her in my mind as she once was, a greyhound of the waters. And yet I was not sorry to leave her.

After we a.s.sembled the artifacts and cataloged them, I sent a piece of a timber to Robert Baldwin, a leading expert in wood science, who identified it as yellow pine, one of the woods used in the construction of the steamship.

Rutledge and Zicaro also described strands of a weird green wire that looped around the wreck. Believing that the wreck was raised before breaking into three pieces, I did a bit of detective work by contacting Mr. Oliver Tannet, an executive with a wire cable company.

As luck would have it, Mr. Tannet collected antique wire and was an authority on early cable. He stated that by 1840 engineers had not achieved the technology to extrude flexible wire cable. In order to make it curl, the iron strands were woven around a core of copper.

After a century and a half of attack by salt water, the iron in the cables used to hoist the Lexington off the bottom had eroded away, leaving the green-patinaed copper core behind.

The lighthouse keeper was close to the mark. Instead of four miles north and slightly west, the wreck of the Lexington was found three and a half miles north and slightly west.

The artifacts recovered by NUMA (sorry, no silver) were donated to the Vanderbilt Museum in Centerport, Long Island, for display to the public. Talk of raising the steamship soon faded, as do most recovery projects when the costs are added up and no one comes forth to underwrite the funding.

Since NUMA's discovery, many divers have investigated the Lexington.

Her resting place is now well known to the local dive boat captains.

Perhaps someday an extensive archaeological recovery may be realized on her remains.

The greyhounds of the Sound have long steamed over the horizon.

The Lexington is a time capsule of an era when the United States was just beginning to flex its muscles and cross the threshold of the industrial revolution. A time when we were turning more of our energies from manifest destiny to technology. A pity we'll never see their smoke or hear their whistles again.

A final word of caution. Diving the Lexington can be very dangerous.

The tides are treacherous and can run as high as four knots.

Ambient light is almost nonexistent and disorientation is a sure bet unless the diver makes good use of a guideline attached to the anchor chain. I highly recommend that you dive only during slack tide to avoid a nasty current.