The Sea Hunters Part 8

He asked the Secretary of the Confederate Navy to be relieved.

Command was eventually given to his loyal officer Charles Morris.

With a new and inexperienced crew, Morris sailed out of Brest in February of 1864 and launched Florida on her second voyage. The pickings were slim because most of the ships of American registry were kept in their home ports by the high insurance premiums caused by Florida and Alabama, which was now also raiding the seas. After seizing thirteen ships, Lieutenant Morris sailed into the port of Bahia, Brazil, to take on supplies and coal.

Unfortunately for Morris and Florida, a Union warship was also at anchor in port, the U.S.S. Wachusctt, captained by Commander Napoleon Collins.

"We would have to run into that devil in a neutral port," Collins said to the United States consul at Bahia, Thomas F. Wilson, who had rowed out to the Yankee warship.

"Can't you blow her out of the water when she sails from port?"

asked Wilson.

Commander Collins studied Florida through a pair of binoculars.

"Her speed is superior to mine. If she sneaks out on a moonless night, she'll be impossible to chase down."

"A d.a.m.ned crime, if you ask me," Wilson growled. "We fail to destroy her, and G.o.d only knows how many innocent merchant ships she and her crew of pirates will burn and plunder."

Collins did not reply. He seemed lost in his thoughts.

"You've got to take action before she escapes."

"What do you suppose Brazil would do to us if we attacked Florida here and now?" Collins asked.

"They'd probably threaten to blow you out of the water," answered Wilson. "But I doubt they would actually try it. Beyond that, I'd be recalled to Washington and censured, and you'd be court-martialed for creating an international incident."

Collins lowered his binoculars and smiled shrewdly. "A pity.

She'd be easy enough to take. Most of her officers and crew have gone ash.o.r.e.

I hear Commander Morris and his officers are attending the opera."

"We have been presented with a golden opportunity, commander.

Regardless of personal consequences, our duty is clear."

Collins turned to his first officer. "Mr. Rigsby."

"sir?"

"Please find our chief engineer and order him to get up steam."

Rigsby stared at his captain, respect glowing in his eyes.

"You're going after Florida? Sir?"

"I intend to ram and sink her on the spot."

A shifty grin crossed Wilson's face. "I'll be more than happy to defend your claim that it was an unfortunate accident."

Collins nodded toward the helm. "Just so they know who to hang, I'll steer us in myself with you at my side."

"I'd consider it an honor," Consul Wilson said without hesitation.

Before dawn the following morning, Wachuseu quietly raised her anchors and steamed toward Florida, moored slightly more than a half mile away behind a Brazilian warship placed between the two enemy warships to discourage just such a situation. With Collins himself at the helm, Wachusett slipped around the Brazilian ship and headed on a collision course toward the unsuspecting Florida. A seaman standing deck watch sighted the Yankee ship looming from the predawn darkness, and gave the alarm. The cry came too late. Before the crew could spring from their hammocks and load the guns, Wachusett struck Florida on her starboard quarter, smashing her railings and bulwarks while shattering her mizzenmast and main yard.

In the darkness, Collins had misjudged. Instead of ramming his bow through Florida's hull amidships and sending her to the bottom of Bahia harbor, he merely grazed her, causing minimal damage. As his marines sprayed the raider's deck with small-arms musketry, two of his broadside guns were fired in the heat of the action without his express orders. Taking advantage of the mistake, he shouted for Florida's crew to surrender or be blown to pieces.

Lieutenant Thomas Porter, commander of the Confederate raider while Morris was on sh.o.r.e, had no choice but to concede defeat. His guns were unloaded, less than half the crew were on board, and Wachusett's marines were shooting down anyone who moved. He conferred with the few officers who hadn't gone ash.o.r.e, and all agreed that any defense could only result in a waste of lives. Reluctandy, Porter lowered the Confederate flag for the final time.

Collins ordered a hawser attached to the helpless Florida, and within minutes she was being towed out of the harbor. Alerted by the sound of gunfire, the Brazilian warship came to investigate. When its captain discovered the foul plan in gross violation of his nation's neutrality laws, he ordered his gun crews to fire at Wachusett.

Collins ignored the inconsequential protest and refused to return a broadside. With the sun creeping over the horizon, he made the open sea, pulling his captive along in his wake.

Consul Wilson remained on Wachusett until it reached the United States. Fortunately for him, the decision to keep him on board was a sound one. Enraged by the wanton violation of neutrality, a Brazilian mob ransacked and burned the U.S. Consulate in Bahia. Had he remained behind, Wilson would have no doubt been strung up under a convenient light post.

Wachusett towed the illegally captured Florida into Hampton Roads and moored her off Newport News. Not long afterward, the Confederate raider mysteriously sank while at anchor. Rumors circulated blaming an army transport that rammed her in the dead of night. The true story didn't come out until one summer's evening in 1872, when John Maffitt was invited to Admiral Porter's home in Washington for dinner.

While enjoying brandy and cigars on the old sea dog's veranda, Maffitt looked at Porter and asked, "Admiral, will you give me a true account of the sinking of the Florida?"

Quite relaxed, Porter smiled shrewdly. "Certainly. Time enough has pa.s.sed under the bridge."

"Then it was no accident?"

"No accident." Porter shook his head. "President Lincoln was quite upset about receiving a storm Of Protests from the nations of Europe over Collins's deceitful capture of the ship in Brazil. Lincoln insisted that we release Florida and return her to Bahia and the Confederates to avoid the reparation demanded by the Brazilian government. During the dispute, Secretary of State Henry Seward called me to his office."

Porter went on to relate the events leading to the demise of Florida.

"Seward paced the floor, his Machiavellian mind trying to find a way out that would appease the European community. 'To let loose this fearful scourge upon our commerce again would be terrible. It must be avoided." " 'What do you suggest, Mr. Secretary?" I asked.

" 'I wish she was at the bottom of the sea!" " 'Do you mean it, sir?" " Seward nodded grimly. 'I do, from my soul " 'Then it shall be done," I promised him. The next morning I sent an engineer under cover of night to the stolen steamer. My instructions were to open the sea c.o.c.ks before midnight and not to leave the engine room until the water was up to his chin. At sunrise that rebel craft must be a thing of the past, resting on the bottom of the river." Porter paused to exhale a cloud of smoke into the humid Virginia evening. "I thought it Poetic justice to scuttle her over the spot where Merrimack rammed and sank c.u.mberland.

Maffitt listened in silence, staring at the brandy in his gla.s.s as if seeing his once proud ship resting in the eternal gloom at the bottom of the James River, where she would no more plague United States merchant shipping. No more would she haunt the navy that could only stop her with devious subterfuge. She would be enshrined in history along with her sister ship, Alabama, as the high water mark of the Confederate Navy.

So ended the final chapter of the Florida. All that was left was her epilogue.

Where Did They Go?

April 1980 iie more manifestation of Cussler's law, "Every man knows the location of a shipwreck that isn't there."

Sadly, it seems, man does not live by reason alone. All too often we live by drippy intuition and foggy reasoning with no sound basis in fact. You have to be on your guard to keep the two from gaining the upper hand. I've never known a shipwreck that was found through divine revelation or down-home guesswork.

Because they were known to lie within less than a mile of each other, I decided to combine c.u.mberland and Florida into one expedition.

What I a.s.sumed would be a relatively simple search project, because the ships were reportedly in a fairly compact area, turned out to be a very complicated and difficult affair. Although Congress had exploded and burned to her waterline, she was immediately eliminated as a possible target because she was raised in September of 1865 and her hulk towed to the Norfolk Navy Yard, where she was sold and broken up.

Why Florida and c.u.mberland were elusive for so many years is a mystery. Both were known to have sunk between the James River channel and the sh.o.r.e along Newport News. Accounts of her epic battle and the final resting place of c.u.mberland varied widely. Like witnesses at an auto accident or murder, none give the same account. Though a number of investigators looked into the enigma and acc.u.mulated a stack of data from 1904 until 1980, no one individual or group had actively searched for the wreck sites.

I began working with researchers Bob Fleming and Dr. Chester Bradley, who was an authority on the sinking of c.u.mberland, Florida, and Congress. Salvage accounts, eyewitness reports, correspondence, and newspaper articals were a.s.sembled and studied.

Research revealed that after the war George B. West, the son of a farmer whose waterfront property was close to where the vessels sank, used to fish in and around the wrecks while they were being salvaged.

West described how salvage divers attempted to find in the paymaster's stateroom of c.u.mberland an iron chest that reportedly contained $40,000 in gold coin. I frankly never bought the story of the treasure.

Never have I heard of a soldier, sailor, or airman, from the Revolutionary War to Desert Storm, being paid in gold. Impossible to believe our benevolent government paid their fighting men in anything other than paper money or silver coin. Incredibly, the safe was found and raised ten years after the war, in 1875, by Clements Brown, but newspaper reports state that only $25 or $30 was discovered inside.

I've always found it interesting that two weeks after a ship sinks, any ship, be it a tugboat or an ocean liner, there is a rumor that it was carrying $10,000 in cash somewhere in its bowels. Twenty years later the rumor mill has increased it to $100,000 in silver. At one hundred years, the figure has grown to $1 million in gold. After two hundred years, salvors and treasure hunters will swear the ship was carrying ten tons of gold and sackfuls of precious jewels, all valued at no less than $500 million. Such is the mesmerizing lure of treasure. ' The facts are that, despite the occasional big strikes like Atocha and Central America, more money has been thrown into the sea searching for riches than has ever been recovered.

George West located the site where he had observed the divers working on Florida as "off Pier 1 and Pier 2" near the Newport News beach front. He then described c.u.mberland as being sunk off Pier 6 about the middle of the channel."

I then calculated possible sites by overlaying a transparency from an old 1870 chart on top of the most modern chart. By comparing the landmarks from West's accounts I could see that Pier 6 now corresponded with the Virginia Port Authority's Pier C, while the Home Brothers Shipyard pier now stood over what had once been Piers 1 and 2.

John Sands, curator at the Newport News Mariners' Museum, was most helpful in providing us with copies of watercolors and sketches by contemporary artists showing c.u.mberland's masts protruding from the river between two piers, approximately three hundred yards from sh.o.r.e.

Now, we had our ballpark.

I decided it was time to reap the fruits of our labor. I broke open a jar of Laura Scudder's peanut b.u.t.ter. While making my favorite sandwich of peanut b.u.t.ter with mayonnaise and dill pickles, I phoned Bill Shea and Walt Schob and set up a date for all of us to meet in Virginia for a four-day cursory inspection to collect initial data for a later, more in-depth search.

The next step was to apply to the Virginia Marine Resources Commission for a permit to investigate underwater historic property.

John Broadwater, head of the Underwater Archaeology Section, was most helpful and even provided a team of state archaeologists to come along and dive. Support was provided by members of a British Advanced Underwater Team, a bunch of really fun and jovial guys.

On the day that everyone a.s.sembled for the project, the officials of the Commonwealth of Virginia (the tide State isn't good enough for them) were somewhat less than impressed with our methodology, a term archaeologists are fond of using; it has an academic ring to it, like provenance and empirical data.

There are work boats and there are work boats. But our NUMA crew operated off a hundred-foot luxury yacht that was built in the 1920s and whose decks had been walked by two Presidents, Coolidge and Hoover.

She was called Sakonit, and abounded with teak decks and mahogany interior paneling. Her skipper, Danny Wilson, had spent long hours and a fair sum of money restoring her to her original state. He and his family lived on board.

One could sit on the s.p.a.cious open rear deck under a colorful awning and imagine ghostly men in tuxedos and women in flapper dresses, stockings rolled down below knees red with rouge, drinking bootleg booze and dancing to a Dixieland jazz band, playing "The Varsity Drag."

Thinking the search for the Civil War ships might be a change of scene, Wilson chartered the Sakonit to NUMA for half his normal charge for five days. He offered me a stateroom and invited me to enjoy sleeping on the famous old yacht. The problem was I couldn't sleep.

The Sakonit didn't have air conditioning, and Virginia in July is not cool, nor is it dry.

I lay there staring at the reflection Of rippling water through a porthole while lying in an ocean of sweat, insanely envious of Bill Shea, Walt Schob, and my son, Dirk, no fools they, who were living comfortably in a nearby Holiday Inn, under a constant seventy-two-degree temperature while enjoying a c.o.c.ktail lounge within spitting distance that served ice-cold beer.

My tongue wagged like a blind dog's tail in a meat market at the thought of joining them, but the Wilsons were such nice and hospitable people I braved it out.

John Broadwater, his staff of underwater investigators, and the British dive team were not sure we had the proper approach for archaeological survey. For some unfathomable reason they thought our survey effectiveness was severely limited. They found our equipment lacking.

Not intending a full-scale exercise, all we brought along was our trusty Schonstedt gradiometer, our own expert archaeologist, Dan KoskiKarell, two cases of Coors beer, and four bottles of Bombay gin.

I'm a strong believer in "getting there is half the fun."

On reflection I can see that our philosophies clashed. Broadwater and his crew were dead serious and expected a full-scale effort, but I was there strictly to investigate site conditions, study landmarks, and make a little whoopie on the side. A more extensive search project would come later.

Settling down to business, we began running our lanes fifty feet apart and perpendicular (I love that word) to sh.o.r.e. When anomalies of consequence were detected, buoys were dropped and divers went down, swimming one-hundred-foot circular search patterns around the centers of the targets.

Because all targets were at depths in excess of seventy feet, bottom time was limited to a maximum of forty minutes, and repet.i.tive dives did not exceed twenty-five minutes. And because English dive tables restricted bottom time to thirty minutes with no repet.i.tive dives, the British team could probe the sites only once a day.

Swimming under the James River cannot be compared to sport diving in the Caribbean. There have been attempts to clean the water since we were there in '81 and '82, but in those days we had to contend with a dark, murky void containing every pollutant known to man: sewage, ketone, chemicals, and an E. coli count that would make an environmentalist cry. If that wasn't enough, there were the river's current and the tidal surge from Chesapeake Bay sweeping back and forth over the dive sites to contend with. Ship traffic was also heavy, and the moving hulls and thrashing propeller blades of tankers, freighters, tugs, and barges, which travel up and down the river, presented a constant source of peril to divers.

Walt Schob, who dove around the world and worked on the recovery of the Mary Rose, King Henry VIII's flagship that lay forgotten for four centuries until foundand recovered, said conditions on the bottom of the James River were the worst he had ever encountered.

Our one benefit was the warm water temperature. Beyond that the only thing you looked forward to after diving through seventy feet of gloom to the ooze on the bottom was the joy of reaching the surface and sunlight again. Visibility was nil. Divers who wore gla.s.ses needed the services of an optometrist to grind prescription lenses in their face masks. Even with 20/20 eyesight, it's tough to focus on a vague object less than six inches away.

Leaving the lion's share of the diving to the young guys, I spent my time keeping a sharp eye on the water for pa.s.sing ships and any signs of problems under water. My other job was to field questions by dignitaries and news people. I was @lways amused when a visitor came on board the Sakonit to observe the operation and spotted an artificial leg lying on the deck. Their expressions were priceless. It belonged to d.i.c.k Swete, one of the Virginia Research Center archaeologists, who had lost a leg in Vietnam. Before they could ask, I told them the divers had found it while probing the river bottom. I don't believe d.i.c.k ever knew about the story I created and handed out to the gullible about the one-legged sailor who was urinating on the casemate of the Virginia when it rammed the c.u.mberland.

One reporter asked me, "Do you have a doctor on board?"

"Not in the strict sense," I answered. "I handle all medical emergencies myself."

"Did you go to medical school?"

"No, but I subscribe to the Reader's Digest.

I'm constantly amazed at how the ladies and gentlemen of the news media can't take a joke.

Of the two targets that seemed the most promising, one turned out to be an old coal barge constructed from iron. The other target, however, revealed a lumberyard full of won-neaten planking the archaeologists cla.s.sified as coming from a nineteenth-century shipwreck.

Could it possibly be Florida's remains?

iv Back with a Vengeance July 1982 after giving it my earnest consideration over two martinis one evening, I decided to make another attempt on Florida and c.u.mberland.

Somehow it seemed the only sane thing to do.

Since we were reasonably certain where Florida rested, and had a grid site no larger than a football field for c.u.mberland, I felt that, in keeping with my image as a good fellow, salt of the earth, and the backbone of America, it was time for a professional survey conducted by a team of hard-core professional archaeologists.

Fortune smiled. I didn't have to call Kelly Girls or run a cla.s.sified ad under Help Wanted. Four of the archaeologists from the Commonwealth of Virginia, who dove with NUMA in 1981-James Knickerbacker, Sam Margolin, d.i.c.k Swete, and Mike Warner-had resigned and launched their own organization, called Underwater Archaeological Joint Ventures (U.A.J.V). I couldn't have found a better team if I'd offered a reward. Between them, they had ama.s.sed over eight hundred hours of bottom time in the James River, and despite G.o.d-awful conditions had achieved a proven record of success in both search and survey and expedition.

The first hurdle was obtaining a permit from Virginia and the Army Corps of Engineers to excavate the wreck sites.

Having a nonchalant flair for trivial details, I found the procedures and ensuing hurdles thrown out by the bureaucracy, the restrictions, the consideration of everything from the threat to sh.e.l.l-fishing activities and cultural resources to the requirements for daily logs, dive logs, excavation and artifact registers, monthly reports, methodology (that word again), and a hundred other stipulations rather exasperating. What you could and could not do reminded me of watching a nree Stooges film festival without being allowed to eat hot b.u.t.tered popcorn and Milk Duds.

Because of some genetic short circuit, I have not become a slave to the acquisition of historical artifacts, and so the permit was finally issued, thanks in large part to the patience of the U.A.J.V gang, who plodded unflinchingly through a mountain of paperwork.

Before the actual survey began, U.A.J.V interviewed local watermen, sport divers, clam and crab fishermen, charter-boat captains, anyone who might shed light on variations in the riverbed. They struck gold when veteran clammer Wilbur Riley offered his services and showed our team the site where, during an effort to retrieve his tongs, which had caught and hung on a submerged object, he had pulled up artifacts from the Civil War era.

Divers went down and discovered heavy concentrations of scattered wreckage of a large wooden ship, whose huge hull timbers rose out of the muck like ghosts frozen in the past. Almost immediately they observed the shaft of a large anchor, decking planks, and ordnance accessories used by the men who manned the cannon. Over a period of several days, a number of interesting artifacts were recovered from the ship that tenaciously fought a battle she could not win. One was an irregular frame that a sailor had fashioned around the broken edges of a mirror. Perhaps the most dramatic find was c.u.mberland's large bronze bell, standing 6 inches high and 19 inches wide. When you stare at it, you can imagine it rung by an unseen hand, sending her crew to their guns at the approach of the Virginia.

The one object any maritime museum would give its curator's left leg to put on display is the ram of MerrinwckIVirginia which still lies buried inside the hull of c.u.mberland. This is the most prized artifact of all, but its recovery calls for a very expensive and extensive project far beyond NUMA's means.

An enigma that plagued the search team was the constant loss of their site-marker buoys. On the progress report there is constant mention of "New buoys set." "Buoys missing...... Buoys relocated."

"Buoys missing." The buoy anchor lines appeared to be torn from the bottom.

Surely pa.s.sing ships and fishermen did not sweep across our dive sites every night of the week. We could not help wondering if someone didn't like us. But with no suspects, and certainly none with motives, we wrote off the phenomenon to ghosts from the wrecks who love to play pranks on the living.