Clive Cussler; Craig Dirgo (25 page)

The NUMA team in Maine during the search for
L’Oiseau Blanc.
Left to right: Clive Cussler, Connie Young, Craig Dirgo, Ralph Wilbanks, Dirk Cussler
(Cline Cussler)

The U.S. Navy dirigible
Akron
flying into the storm that destroyed her
(Artist: Richard DeRosset)

The only known view of
PT-109,
as it was loaded on board the S.S.
Joseph Stanton
bound for the South Pacific, August 20, 1942
(Naval Historical Foundation)

The
PT-109
search crew in the Solomons. Left to right: Dirk Cussler, Danny Kennedy, Biuku Gasa (one of the men who rescued John F. Kennedy and his crew), Craig Dirgo
(Dirk Cussler
)

Ralph Wilbanks, Jayne Hitchcock, and Sean McLean searching for Morey’s boat (
Jayne Hitchcock)

The NUMA team that discovered the C.S.S.
Hunley,
during the submarine’s raising and removal to the Warren Lasch Preservation Center. Left to right: Harry Pecorelli III, Wes Hall, Clive Cussler, Ralph Wilbanks
(Carole Bortholomeaux)

“Kill me,” he said to the brothers quietly.

Boz looked at his brother and nodded. They were trained not to question orders from their captain. Volkert took one stiff wooden paddle, his brother another. Then, with what little strength they had left, they complied.

Two hours passed before enough strength returned to put Briggs over the side.

They died within minutes of each other the following morning.

DECEMBER 4, 1872, was a sunny day. Captain Moorhouse was at the wheel of
Dei Gratia.
The British brigantine had passed far north of the Azores out of sight of the islands and was now tacking southeast by south oh a course to drop down into the Gibraltar Straits. Moorhouse had just taken his position, recording it as 38 degrees 20 minutes north by 17 degrees 15 minutes west, when he spotted another ship approaching six miles distant off the port bow. The time was 1:52 P.M.

“Hand me the spyglass,” Moorhouse said to Second Officer Wright.

Wright reached into a drawer and handed Moorhouse the telescoping spyglass.

With a flick of the wrist, Moorhouse opened the telescope and stared at the vessel. The main sails were furled, and no one was visible on deck. Strange, but not overly so.

“She seems to be laden, but just plodding along,” Moorhouse noted.

“Our course will converge with her shortly,” Wright noted. “Should I signal her and find out the sea conditions?”

“All right,” Moorhouse said easily.

But the first and all subsequent signals went unanswered.

A few hundred yards ahead, the ghost ship continued west at a speed of one and a half to two knots. Moorhouse had yet to see anyone come on deck, and he was beginning to worry that the entire crew of the vessel had taken ill.

He stared at the vessel through the spyglass, then made a decision.

“Down with the mainsails,” he shouted to Seamen Anderson and Johnson.

Dei Gratia
slowed until she was barely bobbing on the water.

“What should we do?” Deveau, who had now come on deck, asked.

“Ready the boat,” Moorhouse ordered. “I want you and Wright to board. Take Johnson with you to man the boat.”

“Ahoy,” he shouted over a megaphone to
Mary Celeste.

There was no answer.

Once in the shore boat with Johnson at the oars, the trio of men watched the hull of the ship as they rowed closer. Not a single sailor was on deck; not a single sound could be heard save the slap of water against the hull. The men felt an eerie gloom, a sense of foreboding. They read the name on the stem as they approached:
Mary Celeste.

“Stay here,” Deveau said to Johnson, as the shore boat came alongside. “Mr. Wright and I will investigate.”

Tossing a hooked ladder over the gunwale, Deveau and Wright climbed aboard.

“Ahoy,” Deveau shouted once he was on the main deck.

No answer.

He and Wright walked forward. The main and lazeret hatches were lying on deck, the forward one upside down—a bad sign. Sailors are superstitious, and an upside-down hatch spelled trouble. The main staysail lay across the forward hatch across the chimney for the galley cookstove. No sailor in his right mind would allow that. The jib and the fore topmast staysail were set on a starboard tack, while the foresail and upper foretopsail had been blown away. The lower foretopsail was hanging by threads at four comers. No shore boat was visible on deck.

“Let’s go below,” Deveau said.

Climbing down the ladder, Deveau reached the lower deck. He began to open the cabin doors but found not a single soul. He and Wright searched through the cabins. In the captain’s cabin, Deveau noted that the chronometer, sextant, ship’s register, and navigation book were missing. In the mate’s cabin, Wright found the logbook and log slate. In the galley, where both men converged, there was no prepared food nor was there any food or drink on the crew’s table.

“I’ll check the stores,” Wright said.

“I’m going to check the hold,” Deveau said.

Wright found a six-month supply of food and water; Deveau a strong odor of alcohol and almost four feet of water in the hold. He began to pump the hold dry, and that was where Wright found him a few moments later.

“No one aboard,” Deveau said, “but no major problems, save this water.”

“I don’t know if you noticed it earlier when we were on deck,” Wright said, “but the binnacle was knocked loose and the compass destroyed.”

“That is most odd,” Deveau agreed. “Let’s pump out the hold, then report back to Mr. Moorhouse.”

After lowering the remaining sails and tossing out the sea anchor, they did.

“Sir,” Deveau reported, “she’s a ghost ship.”

He and Wright had just explained what they had found, and now Moorhouse was puffing on his pipe and thinking. Less than a hundred yards away,
Mary Celeste,
the ship without a crew, sat awaiting a decision.

“My first duty is to my ship and cargo,” Moorhouse said slowly.

“I understand,” Deveau said, “and the choice is yours. However, if you give me two seamen and some food, I think we can make Gibraltar and claim salvage rights.”

“Do you have your own navigation tools?”

Deveau had been a commanding captain in the past.

“Yes, sir,” Deveau said. “If you could spare a barometer, watch, another compass, and some food, I think we can make port.”

Sparing three men from
Dei Gratia
would leave Moorhouse seriously shorthanded.

“Let’s try it,” Moorhouse said at last, “but if we run into trouble we cast
Mary Celeste
adrift, transfer your men back, and report the loss upon reaching port.”

“Thank you, sir,” Deveau said.

“Take Lund and Anderson,” Moorhouse said. “We’ll wait here until you have the ship seaworthy.”

At 8:26 that evening, the hold was pumped and the spare sails set in place. They set off for the six-hundred-mile journey to Gibraltar just as the moon rose over the horizon. A fool’s moon lit the ghostly journey.

The weather stayed fair until the Straits of Gibraltar. Then, for the first time since taking command of
Mary Celeste,
Deveau lost sight of
Dei Gratia
in the rough seas. On Friday the thirteenth, nine days since the ghost ship had first been spotted, Deveau entered the port of Gibraltar.
Dei Gratia
was already there.

“HERE’S YOUR CHANGE,” the telegraph clerk said to Captain Moorhouse.

On Saturday the fourteenth of December, the disaster clerk at the New York offices of Atlantic Mutual Insurance Company received the following cablegram from Gibraltar:

FOUND FOURTH AND BROUGHT HERE “MARY CELESTE.
” ABANDONED SEAWORTHY. ADMIRALTY IMPOST
. NOTIFY ALL PARTIES TELEGRAPH OFFER OF
SALVAGE. MOORHOUSE.

The cable was the first notice in the United States that something had gone terribly wrong on
Mary Celeste.

Of its crew and passengers, nothing would ever be found. The
Mary Celeste
itself would be put back into service, but a little over twelve years later, on January 3, 1885, the ship would be wrecked on the Reefs of the Rochelais near Miragoane, Haiti.

And while the ship was gone, the legend continued to grow.

II

Paradise Gone
2001

THE TALE OF THE
MARY CELESTE
MAKES THE HAIR RISE on the nape of the neck. She is enshrined as the most famous ghost ship in the history of the sea. There are other accounts of ships being found abandoned, their crews having vanished, but none has the fascination and the intrigue that fire the imagination like
Mary Celeste.
She still wears the crown of haunted ships.

I was drawn into her web at least twenty years ago when I asked Bob Fleming, NUMA’s researcher in Washington, D.C., to probe the archives for her ultimate end. Had she sunk during a storm while on a voyage, or had she simply outlived her usefulness and ended up a derelict in the mudflats of some port’s backwater, along with so many of her sister ships? Only a few records, and fewer yet of more than a hundred books written since her tragedy, held the answer.

Mary Celeste
was sailed for another twelve years and two months after being abandoned in the Azores in 1872. During this time, she went through a number of different owners. She set sail on her final passage from New York to Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in December of 1884, under the command of Captain Gilman Parker of Wmthrop, Massachusetts. On January 3, 1885, she was sailing on a southeasterly course through a narrow channel between the Haitian southern peninsula and Gonâve Island. The sky was empty of clouds, and the seas no higher than a man’s knee.

Rising ominously in the middle of the channel was Rochelais Reef, a small rocky mountain rising from the seafloor, its peak capped with thick coral. The reef was plainly marked on the chart and sharply visible to the helmsman. He set a new course around the reef and was beginning to turn the spokes of the wheel when Captain Parker gripped him roughly by the arm.

“Belay that! Stay on course.”

“But, sir, we’ll run onto the reef for sure,” protested the helmsman.

“Damn you!” Parker snapped. “Do as you’re ordered.”

Knowing the ship was headed for certain disaster, the helmsman, out of fear of punishment, steered for the reef dead ahead. At high tide, the menacing Rochelais Reef barely rose above the surface of the water, as the once-beautiful ship came closer to what would be her grave. The helmsman gave the captain one last desperate look, but Parker remained resolute and nodded straight ahead where the waves were rolling over the reef.

Mary Celeste
struck dead center of Rochelais Reef. Her keel and hull planking cut a gouge through the coral, but the sharp spines cut through her copper-sheathed bottom and ripped into her bowels, sending tons of water inside her lower decks. Her bow drove up onto the reef as her stern settled beneath the water. In her death throes,
Mary Celeste
groaned horribly, as her hull and timbers were crushed by her momentum into the unyielding coral. At last, the agonized sounds died across the water and the ship became silent.

Calmly, Captain Parker sent his crew into the boats and ordered them to row to the nearby port of Miragoane, Haiti, not more than twelve miles to the south. Unfortunately for Captain Parker,
Mary Celeste
did not immediately sink. It would not be long before an inspection of the wrecked hulk and its cargo revealed that it carried little more than fish and rubber shoes, which were not the expensive cargo listed in the manifest. The vessel, as it turned out, was exorbitantly insured to the tune of $25,000, far above the value of the ship and its cargo. Today, we call it an insurance scam. Back then, it was referred to as barratry, and was an offense punishable under U.S. law and carried the death penalty.

It seemed that Parker’s bad luck had no end. Kingman Putnam, a New York surveyor, happened to be in Haiti at the time and was hired by the insurance underwriters to conduct an examination. His examination of the waterlogged cargo was instrumental in Parker’s arrest when he returned to New York. Parker was tried in court, but the jury hung, and another trial was immediately ordered by the court. True to form, Parker died before a new trial could be held.

Mary Celeste
soon disappeared into the coral that grew over her timbers and buried her decks. Despite her previous notoriety, she died neglected and forgotten, her drama played out on a barren reef in Haiti, perhaps in revenge by the ghosts of her vanished crew.

ARMED WITH ENOUGH research data to give it a good shot, I began making plans to charter a boat and sail to Rochelais Reef. I contacted Mr. Mark Sheldon, who had purchased my favorite old search boat,
Arvor III.
This was the vessel I had sailed on when searching for the
Bonhomme Richard
in 1980. I chartered her again in 1984, when my team and I encountered all sorts of wild adventures in the North Sea, finding sixteen shipwrecks while losing a war of words with the French navy in Cherbourg, France, who refused to allow us to search for the Confederate raider
Alabama.

I had planned to meet the boat in Kingston, Jamaica, and then run across the Jamaica Channel and around Cape Dame Marie to Rochelais Reef, about a two-day trip. Unfortunately, Sheldon became ill and was not available for charter until the following year.

John Davis of ECO-NOVA Productions then stepped in and offered to set up an expedition to conduct the search. Since John and his team are from Nova Scotia and
Mary Celeste
was built in Nova Scotia, they had a strong incentive to find the wreck. They were also enthusiastic about making a Sea Hunters documentary about the ship.

In April of 2001, John set up the logistics, chartered a boat, and sent me round-trip airline tickets to Haiti. I arrived in Fort Lauderdale in the evening and was mildly surprised to see no one there to meet me. I hailed a shuttle van and headed for the Sheraton Hotel, then walked alone into the lobby, to the surprise of Davis. He had sent a friend to meet me, who had somehow missed picking me out of the deplaning crowd.

With a face like mine, I wondered how I could be lost in the crowd. I began to wonder if this was the start of an ordeal. I was sure my guardian angel had gone on vacation and an evil demon taken his place, especially when I found I’d forgotten my passport. How’s that for dementia?

John didn’t give it a thought. “You’ll be all right,” he said cheerfully. “The Haitians won’t care.”

Images of being thrown into a Haitian jail streamed through my mind. I called my wife, Barbara, and asked her to send the passport through the airline’s courier service. Just to play it safe, she faxed the pertinent pages to the hotel, at least so I had some kind of identification for Haitian immigration if for some reason the passport did not arrive.

Naturally, the airplane with my passport was late, which wasn’t too disastrous. I still had almost an hour before our scheduled departure. Exotic Lynx Airlines, our air carrier to Haiti, had other plans. Unexpectedly, the clerk at the counter announced that because all passengers were present, the plane would be taking off an hour early. I do believe Lynx belongs in the
Guinness Book of World Records.
When I bemoaned my lack of passport, the clerk laughed it off and said, “They won’t care.”

Where had I heard
that
before?

Somehow I didn’t relish the idea of entering into a third world country that had revolutionaries stalking the hills, without proper credentials. Left with no choice, I arranged with Craig Dirgo, who was living in Fort Lauderdale at the time, to pick up my passport when it finally arrived.

The flight was on a nineteen-passenger DeHavilland prop plane. It was uneventful except for a huge black man who resembled Mike Tyson seated in back of me. He was terrified of flying and clutched the back of my seat every time we hit turbulence. As I looked down on the islands surrounded by turquoise waters, I had dreams of arriving at a sun-drenched tropical paradise with local natives playing marimbas and steel drums while passing around piña coladas. The bubble was burst as the plane touched down at a weed-infested airstrip and I was jolted back to reality. There was no terminal, only a bunch of dilapidated shacks strung around a dusty parking lot filled with battered old French and Japanese autos.

We disembarked and headed for the immigration shack. Thankfully, my perceptive eye noted that my suitcase and John’s bag had been stowed in the nose section of the plane when we left Fort Lauderdale. I turned and saw that the Haitian baggage handler, after removing the passengers’ luggage from the rear of the plane, was pushing his load, minus our bags, on a cart across the field. With John following, I returned to the airplane, unlatched the locks on the nose section, lifted it up, and removed our bags. No one interfered. If we hadn’t snagged our luggage from the plane’s nose, they’d have been on their way back to Fort Lauderdale in another twenty minutes.

I smiled my best smile, and the immigration official graciously stamped my fax copy passport and waved me through.

“See,” said Davis, “didn’t I tell you? A piece of cake.”

“Now the trick is to get out,” I muttered, wondering what I was getting myself into.

Davis had arranged for us to stay at the Cormier Plage Hotel, a tropical paradise in a cove farther up the coast not far from the border with the Dominican Republic. The resort is owned by Jean Claude and Kathy Dicquemare, who had lived in Haiti over twenty-five years. The plan was for Davis and me to stay overnight until the boat containing the rest of the team arrived from Fort Lauderdale by sea. After clearing customs, we were met by Jean Claude’s nephew, whose name unfortunately escapes me. We came out into a mob scene stomping up a cloud of dust. There were hundreds of Haitians milling about the airport—doing what, I have no idea.

We were stormed by little boys demanding a dollar. Considering the poverty of the nation, these kids don’t mess around. In most countries I’ve visited, the little beggar boys and girls usually ask for coins.

After throwing our bags in the back of a little Honda SUV, we drove through the port city of Cape Haitian. I’ve seen squalor before, but nothing I’ve ever seen compared to this. The worst slums in the hills above Rio de Janeiro looked like Beverly Hills compared to this place. The streets were in total disrepair, with battered old cars, some moving, some parked and stripped, cluttering the landscape. Buildings were crumbling like they were rotting from within. Any place else, they would have been condemned years before. Mobs of people wandered the streets and sidewalks, as if searching for something that didn’t exist. We passed a huge ten-acre dump, where hordes of people were shoveling garbage and trash into plastic bags and carting it home in wheelbarrows. It was not a pretty sight.

We finally left the self-destructing town and traveled over the mountain on a road that had not been graded in ten years—no, make that twenty. We passed shanties with scrawny chickens pecking barren ground, long lines of people at a single water faucet, waiting to fill their plastic jugs, staring at us as if we’d just flown down from the moon. At seeing their thin bodies, I began to feel self-conscious about being twenty pounds overweight.

The potholes looked like the size of meteor craters, and the ruts were as deep as the trenches in World War I. Yet the landscape was scenic and quite beautiful. The few areas on the mountain where the trees had not been cut down were quite picturesque. I have found it easy to imagine Haiti as a beautiful nation in the years that have passed.

We finally dropped down into a delightful cove with hundreds of palm trees. Village shacks lined one side of the road, and the children were playing happily while their mothers washed clothes in a stream flowing down from the mountains. Jean Claude’s nephew turned the truck through the gate of the resort and we met Jean Claude and Kathy, a quiet lady who obviously ran the show behind the scenes. Jean Claude is a genuine character—someone that everyone should have as a friend. Though we were both pushing seventy, he was twice as active as I was. He dove at least once every day, and often two or three times. He kept a record that revealed he had already slipped beneath the waves 165 times. The term
half manlhalf fish
applied to Jean Claude.

The hotel was very charming, with neatly cut lawns, a long sandy beach, and white buildings with a restaurant and a bar under a beautifully crafted thatched roof of palm fronds. The only drawback is that the coral comes up to within a few feet of the beach, and though it makes for great snorkeling, you’d scrape your chest off if you tried to swim in it. The food was gourmet quality. Seven different lobster dishes cooked in different ways and tinged in exotic sauces were only a small part of the menu. Then on to the bar for after-dinner drinks and hours of telling tales of shipwrecks and the people who search for them.

The boat showed up the next day. Owned by Allan Gardner of Highland Beach, Florida,
Ella Warley II
is a fifty-four-foot steel-hulled vessel specially designed by Allan for underwater research. She carries the latest dive and detection gear with state-of-the-art electronics. Allan is a very successful businessman who owns a large computer technology company. When not directing his corporate empire, he spends his time searching for shipwrecks in the Caribbean. My kind of guy.

Allan is a truly nice guy with the patience of Job who smiles constantly and, after a few shots of scotch, laughs continuously. Joining him on the voyage from Fort Lauderdale was the team from ECO-NOVA, including Mike Fletcher, master diver, and underwater photographers Robert Guertin and Lawrence Taylor—all friendly and good-hearted guys with enough esprit de corps to turn a grueling expedition into a proud moment of achievement and success.

John and I boarded a boat from a dock in a lagoon used by Carnival Cruise Lines ships to send their passengers to a tropical cove to enjoy a day of sun and surf. Like Allan, Jean Claude generously gave his time to come along, because he knew Haiti and could converse with the natives in Creole—a handy arrangement, as it turned out.

The voyage to Rochelais Reef began early the next morning. The seas were very rough, but I fortified myself with a bottle of Porfido tequila I had brought along for just such an occasion. Though a fairly stable boat,
Ella Warley II
rolled with the punches. With her flat bottom, she makes the perfect dive platform for underwater survey, but she’s not exactly what you’d call a luxury yacht. She was built for a purpose without the niceties of plush furnishings, a deep keel, or stabilizers. Plus she suffered from heads that always clogged when you flushed them.