The Sea Hunters Part 5

In the Galveston Directory of 1856, we found the following information under the heading of "wharves."

Bean's Wharf-In rear of block 689 and opposite the "Shipper's Press,"

built the present year, by A. H. Bean and Nelson Clements, of New York, and controlled by T. H. McMahon & Gilbert; has a front of 300 feet.

Any optimism that we were on the trail of the lost steamship was shot down by local historians, who believed that Zavala sank outside the outer end of the pier in the channel and was dredged out of existence many years ago. I couldn't bring myself to write her off. I didn't read it that way. My reasoning was based on the a.s.sumption that Bean would never have built his wharf where the Zavala's wreck could hinder ships loading and unloading their cargo. It seemed only logical that the wreck was either under or alongside the old wharf pilings, certainly not outside in the channel.

Fortunately, I found the evolution of changes along the channel was fairly easy to trace. Bean's Wharf was well doc.u.mented in old waterfront surveys from 1856 to 1871. It began at the foot of 29th Street and extended 130 yards over the water in an L shape, the outer docking area extending west until it was adjacent to 30th Street.

After I examined a map of the waterfront from 1927, it became obvious that years of landfill now buried the old wharfs that once traveled over a broad marsh from sh.o.r.e. By overlaying the old maps in chronological order a search grid was defined.

While the search team was a.s.sembling at Galveston, my good friend and business partner Bob Esbenson, who became a character in my books and was described as a big pixie with limpid blue eyes, and I drove to the site and checked it out. My prime worry was that a structure of some kind sat over the wreck. Warehouses, grain elevators, and huge concrete dock facilities run continuously for two miles along the channel. Incredibly, the site where Bean's Wharf once stood was free of construction.

Our search grid was open because in 1971 a nearby grain elevator exploded, killing nearly thirty people. A warehouse over Bean's Wharf had been destroyed and the debris removed down to the dirt. It was now a parking lot for the rebuilt grain elevator's workers.

I climbed to the top of the grain elevator and visually lined up the streets shown on the old maps. Most of the former thoroughfares that once crisscrossed the old dock area were now little more than weedovergrown alleys. Far below, Bob Esbenson stood in the parking lot and moved about according to my shouted directions. Finally, when I was satisfied he was standing approximately where I thought Zavala's remains were buried, he marked the spot.

The next step was a mag survey with the Schonstedt gradiometer.

One very large target was recorded several feet under the dirt.

Then I hired a well digger to core through the landfill. It was cold and rainy and miserable, but everyone stuck it out through the afternoon and long into the night. Each core was pulled out of the ground and studied for its contents.

On one of the first attempts the drill bit struck something hard and refused to penetrate. I hoped that we had struck Zavala's boilers, but without a core there was no way of knowing for certain. We moved out and cored in three-foot grids, bringing up samples of wood, which could have been a ship or pieces from old pilings of Bean's Wharf.

Small lumps of coal also appeared that indicated a bunker from a steamship- Other bits of debris surfaced that were too vague to identify Positively with a ship.

Then, on the thirty-sixth attempt, we broke open the core and found seventeen inches of solid wood capped on the bottom by a copper plate.

We had drilled through the keel of a ship and exited through the copper sheathing that was attached to the hull to prevent damage from worms and incrustation. But had we truly found the bones of Zavala?

With Barto Arnold's permission, Esbenson rented a backhoe and we began to dig. At twelve feet the scoop unearthed the twin boilers of a steamship. Additional excavation uncovered a side of the hull. The Zavala had been found.

Photographs were taken and a troop of boy scouts were lowered in the scoop inside the excavation so they could stand on the boilers, the first to do so in almost 150 years. Barto Arnold declared it a historic site, and the grave was recovered.

Later, when Bob Esbenson was being interviewed by a reporter from the Galveston newspaper, he was asked how I determined where the Zavala lay.

"Clive stood on top of the grain elevator and yelled down for me to move here, move there, until I was standing next to a 1967 yellow Mercury."

"Is that where you found the Zavala ? " inquired the reporter.

"No, Clive missed it."

The reporter looked up from his notepad. "Are you saying he put you in the wrong place?"

Esbenson nodded sardonically. "Yeah, he had me standing a good ten feet off the center of the wreck."

The reporter stared at Esbenson, not certain if he had been conned, and ended the interview.

I wish I could Miss them all by only ten feet.

During the following year, I commissioned Fred Toumier to build a pair of matching 1/8th-inch-to-the-foot models of the Zavala. Fred is a marvelous craftsman and the gentleman who built the dozen or more models of our shipwreck discoveries that I display in my office. One I kept, the other I donated to the State of Texas one memorable afternoon in the governor's office at the state capitol in Austin.

Craig Dirgo, good friend and long-time NUMA a.s.sociate, arranged for the model to fly in the pilot's c.o.c.kpit on our flight from Denver to Austin. I might add that the model was in a rather large gla.s.s case.

Very carefully transporting it to the state capitol building in a cab and carrying it through the lobby and up an elevator, then around the rotunda to the governor's office left us flowing in perspiration.

We were a few minutes late and a corps of newsmen were questioning the governor on some new legislative proceedings, really fascinating stuff.

As they left, I tried to get them interested in the Zavala and the Texas Navy. They scratched themselves and yawned when I told them that here was a symbol of a ship that represented and fought for the Republic of Texas, the only historical shipwreck at that time still accessible.

They all looked at me as if I were trying to sell mineral water to a drunk. The news people simply have no grasp of history.

I was finally ushered into Governor Bill Clement's office, along with Wayne Gronquist and Barto Arnold, the very astute chief of the Texas Historical Commission. After Wayne made the introductions and presented the model, the governor looked at me and asked, "Did you build it?"

Politicians are not my favorite people. I always take great pride in marking No on my IRS return where it asks if I would donate a dollar to my favorite party. I recall voting in an election when I couldn't stand any of the candidates. So I wrote in John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd, and Ma Barker for the nation's highest offices.

After I spent hundreds of hours researching the Texas Navy, standing all night in the rain coring for the Zavala in a muddy parking lot, and spending thousands of dollars for the actual project, the governor thought I was only some schmoe who built the model?

Maybe I didn't build it, but I paid Fred several thousand dollars so NUMA could present it to the people of Texas. Reduced to tears, I stood there in my sweat-stained Brooks Brothers suit, spumed by the news media, wondering why I get less respect than Rodney Dangerfield.

The governor didn't quite receive the answer he expected. I turned to Gronquist and Arnold and muttered, "That's it, I'm out of here."

And I walked out.

Poor Wayne Gronquist and Barto Arnold were embarra.s.sed. The governor just shrugged and smiled and said, "I guess he's in a hurry to build another model."

Regretfully, the day may never come when Texas naval heroes such as Moore, Hurd, and Hawkins are as familiar as Travis, Bowie, and Fannin.

But because it is so accessible, I fervently hope that the Zavala will someday be fully surveyed and preserved for public display as she lies.

Perhaps what is left of her hull and machinery can point the way to a replica that can be built as she once was when she was the pride of the Texas fleet.

Now we turned our attention to the Invincible, which had run aground in the Gulf outside of Galveston in 1837 and was broken up by pounding surf. She proved to be the most elusive of the three, and we haven't identified her remains yet.

Her Flag Still Flies!

March 8, 1862 She moved like a monster from the depths of a forgotten Mesozoic sea.

The bulk of her hull was concealed beneath the dark water, while her ma.s.sive hump, with its iron-gray scales, rose into a morning haze, repugnant and repulsive. Her metamorphosis from a burned and sunken hulk into the world's most advanced murder machine had taken only ten months. When completed, no vessel in history looked as ominous and menacing. No warship in the world was thought to have the capability of sinking her. She was considered invincible.

Originally commissioned in the United States Navy as the steamscrew frigate Merrimack, she had been rebuilt by the Confederate engineers after their military forces captured the Norfolk Navy Yard from the Union Navy. Renamed C.S.S. Virginia, and captained by Franklin Buchanan, a crusty old navy man in his early sixties, who had been the first superintendent of the Naval Academy at Annapolis, the ironclad steamed toward its date with destiny.

The Union fleet of warships swung lazily on their anchors with the incoming tide that surged into the bay called Hampton Roads.

Except for a low haze that hung over the water, the day had dawned cloud-free and blue. Blockading the mouth of the James River off the town of Newport News, Virginia, were the Union twenty-four-gun sloop-of-war c.u.mberland and the frigate Congress, mounting fifty-four guns. Three miles around the Newport News point were three of the Union Navy's mightiest warships, the huge steam frigates Minnesota and Roanoke, each mounting forty-four heavy guns, and c.u.mberland's sister ship, St.

Lawrence. Five ships that could have defeated almost any fleet in the world.

c.u.mberland was once the pride of the U.S. Navy. Built at the Boston Navy Yard in 1842, she had served as the flagship for both the Mediterranean and African squadrons. She was a ship artists loved to paint.

With her raked masts and full set of white square sails set against a curtain of blue, her dark hull knifing silently through green seas, she was the last of her design. In two decades, fighting wooden ships would be replaced by drab vessels of iron and, eventually, steel.

Once mounting fifty-four guns, she had been modernized, razeed they called it then, by having her lower gun deck eliminated and her old weaponry replaced by fewer guns far more powerful. She mounted two ten-inch Dahlgren pivot guns fore and aft, twenty-two nine-inch new-model Dahlgrens on her broadside batteries, and one of the mightiest cannons built, a seventy-pound rifled gun. For a wooden fighting ship, she was as formidable as they came. But without engines she was an anachronism, an instrument of war beyond her time.

On board c.u.mberland, her crew were hanging out laundry and finishing their noonday meal in the galley. Sh.o.r.e boats rocked gently against the ma.s.sive black hull near the ladder leading to the open gun deck.

The crewmen with afternoon and evening sh.o.r.e leave pushed off for town, not knowing how lucky they were to be leaving the ship. The captain, Commander William Radford, had been ordered to preside over a court-martial near Fortress Monroe, and before the light of dawn had set off on his horse for the ten-mile ride.

Several sailors not yet picked for liberty were cl.u.s.tered on the aft deck. One of them was blowing a tune on his harmonica as a short, heavily bearded Irish gunner's mate danced a jig beside a thickly coiled hawser. The hishman was happy with the thought that he would soon be able to drink in a local saloon and perhaps find a girl.

The weekly laundry, strung from the rigging to dry, gently waved in the light spring breeze. A young seaman, still in his teens, sat on the deck and scribed a letter to his loved ones at home. Finished, he sealed the flap with a dab of wax and placed the envelope in the pocket of his jacket.

On sh.o.r.e, soldiers from an Indiana infantry regiment and a battery of artillery were watching a wrestling match between the champions of two companies. Because of the unseasonably warm temperatures, a group of the soldiers were wading in the river close to the rocky beach.

The few who knew how to swim paddled into the deeper water and taunted those who remained in the shallows.

Lying cahnly, like a proud elk in the sights of a hunter's gun, c.u.mberland was blissfully unaware of the menace steaming toward her from across the bay. Her crew could not imagine the h.e.l.l they were about to face, did not foresee how many would be maimed and killed in the next hour. Wood was about to collide with iron and the results would be catastrophic. Naval warfare was never the same again.

Under full steam, black smoke trailing from her single stack, the Virginia steamed down the Elizabeth River and headed into the waters of Hampton Roads. Sluggish as an overloaded barge, ugly as a tin bathtub turned upside down, she had suddenly become the pride of the Confederacy. The local civilians and soldiers, who had watched her being built and expressed great skepticism as to her potential, now crowded both sides of the river and gave her a rousing send-off. A crewman raised the Confederate flag of 1862 with its two horizontal red stripes separated by a white stripe, with thirteen stars in a blue field. Their cheers were accompanied by gun salutes from Confederate batteries guarding the mouth of the river.

The armament of the converted Merrimack consisted of a deadly a.s.sortment of old worn cannon that were hastily converted into more Powerful rifled guns, numbering ten in all. There was no maiden voyage; there were no trials to train the crew or test the machinery.

Old Buck Buchanan was an impatient man. With a makeshift vessel, knocked together with unskilled labor and a crew who had never set foot on board a naval vessel before, much less fought on one, Buchanan Ordered the Virginia into battle while a gang of workmen still labored to finish her.

Unable to gather an experienced naval crew, Buchanan recruited 320 volunteers from infantry and artillery troops stationed at Richmond.

So desperate was Buchanan for good men he accepted the services of Colonel J. T. Wood of the Confederate Army to come on board as an acting naval lieutenant.

As the ship moved ponderously toward the enemy, Buchanan a.s.sembled his crew and gave them a fiery pep talk. He ended his speech with the words "You shall not complain that I do not take you close enough [to the enemy]. Now go to your guns."

Lieutenant George Monis, c.u.mberland's executive officer and acting captain during Radford's absence, stood next to Lieutenant Thomas 0.

Selfridge, Jr and pointed to a column of smoke far in the distance.

"What do you make of it, Tom?"

Selfridge stared through a pair of binoculars. "That layer of haze over the water gives it the appearance of a mirage. I can't tell whether it's underway or motionless."

Morris laid a telescope on a railing to steady it and peered into the distance. "Looks to me like it's moving this way."

The two Union officers watched in silence for the next few minutes until the column of smoke loomed from the haze and revealed itself as spewing from a tall stack that protruded from the middle of a huge slope-sided vessel that plowed unswervingly across the water directly at c.u.mberland and Congress. Everyone in the Union Navy had known that their former ship had been raised and rebuilt and covered with a shield of iron. They had expected her to put in an appearance, but not so soon.

"It's the Merrimack, " said Morris quietly. "She's coming out."

Selfridge stared through his binoculars at their approaching nemesis.

"She's making for us and Congress.

"We're going to have a fight this day."." "Shall I pa.s.s the word to the other officers?"

Morris nodded solemnly. "And give the order for the drummers to beat to quarters."

The crew's wash was hurriedly pulled down, the sails spread for drying were furled, and the sh.o.r.e boats were rowed into the shallows away from the ship. Sand was spread over the gun deck to absorb the blood that was sure to flow. c.u.mberland's guns were run out, loaded, and primed. A strange quiet fell over the ship as every man's eyes followed the progress of the iron beast moving inexorably toward them, estimating its speed and counting its gunports.

What they could not see beneath the water was the ten-thousandpound cast-iron ram that was mounted to Virginia's bow like the beak on a gigantic gargoyle.

"We'll ignore the steam frigates for now," said Buchanan to his second in command, Lieutenant Catesby Jones, "and concentrate on c.u.mberland and Congress.

Jones, about forty years old, stared at old Buck. "Isn't your brother on one of those ships?"

Buchanan nodded gravely, "McKean is paymaster on Congress.

"Which ship do you wish to attack first?" Jones asked.

"c.u.mberland She has a seventy-pound rifled gun. I want to see what she can do against our armor."

Apprehension reflected in Jones's eyes. "A pity we didn't have a seventy-pounder of our own to test during construction."

Buchanan forced a tight smile. "We'll soon know how she stands up, won't we?"

Fifteen minutes later, Congress was the first to fire, unleashing an entire broadside, which bounced off the casemate of Vrlrginia, as one Union sailor described it, "like hail off a tin roof." Then c.u.mberland's batteries opened up in unison with the artillery on sh.o.r.e. Observers wondered at the smoke that erupted when a sh.e.l.l struck the Confederate armored casemate, ricocheted into the sky, and fell on the opposite side of the river. What they saw was the frying and sizzling of the animal fat Buchanan had ordered smeared on the sides of the ironclad's casemate to deflect Union sh.e.l.ls. What he didn't count on was the sickening stench that was carried through the gunports and upper vents, washing over the crew like an evil wind.

The only damage sustained in the opening stage of the battle came from a sh.e.l.l of c.u.mberland that shattered vrlrginia's anchor chain and drove it back through a gunport, killing one man and wounding several others.

The ironclad had the advantage. Because the Union warship was riding at anchor with the incoming tide and Virginia was approaching bow on, c.u.mberland's gunners could not bring their broadside guns to bear.

Reserving her fire until within easy range, Virginia's forward seven-inch rifled gun was run out through the casemate and blasted away. The shot pounded through c.u.mberland's side, bursting on the gun deck in a cloud of wooden splinters that killed and wounded a dozen marines. A fast reload and the gun's second round burst amid the crew of the forward ten-inch pivot gun, killing them all except the powder boy and horribly wounding gun captain John Kirker, who had both arms taken off at the shoulders.

As he was being carried below to the berth deck, where the ship's surgeon was already operating on the wounded marines, Kirker shouted, his arterial blood spurting from his shoulders, "Give 'em fits, boys, give 'em fits!"

Lieutenant Morris stood in the rigging, directing the battle, watching the destruction of his ship with helpless frustration as the Virginia plowed relentlessly ever closer to c.u.mberland. Then, unexpectedly, the ironclad swung around in a wide clumsy Turn and pointed her bow at c.u.mberland's starboard side. Only at that moment did Morris realize the iron beast meant to ram him.

"Steer straight for her and don't Turn as much as one degree,"

Buchanan shouted above the gunfire to his pilot. "Strike her square abeam her forward mast."

"Wherever you say, sir," the pilot acknowledged.

A thick cloud of dusty black smoke poured from Virginia's big stack as she closed the distance at a ninety-degree angle toward the doomed Union ship. Moving at her maximum speed of 5-1/2 knots, like a giant fist punching through water, she broke past an outer layer of logs, erected around the hull of c.u.mberland as protection against just such an event. Her irresistible ma.s.s split the logs like toothpicks, and she crossed the remaining few yards to her target in seconds.

After the war, when Buchanan reminisced about the battle, he recalled that the most inspired order he ever gave in his long naval career came when he shouted down to the engine room half a minute before the impact. "Reverse engines!"

The big propellers stopped, reversed and bit in the rive,r, as the ma.s.sive ram, thrust by nearly a thousand tons of ma.s.s, crushed through c.u.mberland's hull deep below the waterline just aft of the forward mast and below the berth deck, driving in timbers and opening a hole that some said later, "a horse and carriage could have driven through."

At the same time, the deadly bow guns of Virginia belched fire and shot directly through the side of the mortally wounded frigate, killing ten men belowdecks. The masts of c.u.mberland swayed back and forth like pendulums as water gushed inside the stricken ship. For nearly a minute the two ships were tightly locked together, the Virginia unable to break free from the frigate's grasp. c.u.mberland's bow began to sink lower into the water. For a moment it looked as though the wooden frigate were going to drag the ironclad to the bottom with her. If Buchanan had not ordered his engines reversed before the collision, the Virginia would have surely embedded her bow more deeply in a death grip and gone down.

Fortunately for Buchanan and his crew, the immense ram was ripped from its mountings while held fast inside c.u.mberland, and the ironclad broke free. Then Virginia pivoted until the ships were side by side.