Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea

SHIP OF GOLD
IN THE DEEP BLUE SEA

ALSO BY GARY KINDER:

Victim
:
The Other Side of Murder

Light Years
:
An Investigation into the
Extraterrestrial Experiences
of Eduard Meier

S
HIP OF
G
OLD
IN THE
D
EEP
B
LUE
S
EA

GARY KINDER

Copyright © 1998 Gary Kinder

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the Robert Manlove family for permission to quote from the journals of Oliver Perry Manlove.

Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kinder, Gary.

Ship of Gold in the deep blue sea / Gary Kinder.

p.    cm.

eBook ISBN-13: 978-1-5558-4796-8

1. Central America (Ship) 2. Shipwrecks—North Atlantic Ocean. 3. Survival after airplane accidents, shipwrecks, etc. I. Title.
G530.C4K55    1998
910′.91631—dc21                           97-49812

Design by Laura Hammond Hough and Julie Duquet

Grove Press
841 Broadway
New York, NY 10003

For
Kristin and Lindsay
from whom but a smile is worth more to me
than all of the gold on the
Central America

Wreck of the Steamship
Central America
: J. Childs, Philadelphia, circa 1857. Reproduced by permission of the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts. Photograph by Mark Sexton.

Rigging, hull, and deck plans of the SS
Central America
: Cedric Ridgely-Nevitt, 1944. Reproduced by permission of the Peabody Essex Museum/
The American Neptune
.

CONTENTS

Prologue

Ship of Gold

Tommy

The Deep Blue Sea

Epilogue

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I
N THE TEN
years since I began researching this book, many things have happened. My father used to say he was going to die before I finished. When he said this, my brother, Randy, and I would laugh, certain he would outlive us all. As I worked to complete what I thought were the final rewrites, my father did die, in January 1995. Three months later, my mother suffered a series of strokes and was committed to a nursing home. Two years later, as I was finally bringing the project to a close, Randy died suddenly, all teachings of the bitter lesson that while we are tending relentlessly to one part of our lives, the other parts do not stand still. So much remained unsaid and undone. For their sakes, and for the sake of others close to me, I wish I could have comprehended quicker and written faster, but I couldn’t. During this difficult time of my life, friends filled the void, and I am indebted to them. Three deserve
a special thanks for always being there and always caring: Scott Easter, Gary Williams, and my cousin Steve Chamberlain. Thanks, too, to others like Mike and J. J., who came through.

Morgan Entrekin is my editor and publisher and friend. We’ve been together almost twenty years. He’s brilliant on the page, honest, and he cares about the people who write for him. Long before Tommy Thompson found the gold, Morgan encouraged me to stay with the story. Then over the next several years, he spent countless hours in Seattle hotel rooms, helping me to see and shape it. It’s a trite thing to say, but nevertheless true: Without his commitment to the project and his belief in me, I would never have completed
Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea
.

At Columbus-America, certain people were especially helpful: Bob Evans and Barry Schatz, Rick Robol and Bill Kelly, Judy Conrad, Paula Steele, Don Hackman, and the rest of the tech crew, who are the characters inhabiting the story but who deserve to be thanked publicly anyway: Alan Scott, John Moore, Ted Brockett, John Doering, Milt Butterworth, Tod Steele, Bryan Anderson, Don Craft, Mike Milosh, and Bill Burlingham.

I want to thank Tommy Thompson for enduring the discomfort he must have felt to have a writer shadowing the project he wanted so carefully guarded. He allowed me to speak with anyone inside the organization and made available to me the group’s historical files and letters to the partnership. He allowed me on the ship at sea to observe. He asked for one thing: Because of the sensitive and highly proprietary nature of the information surrounding the discovery of the
Central America
, and given the highly competitive field of underwater recovery, he wanted to review the manuscript for anything proprietary that might reveal too much of his unique technology. I did not want to do this; I also did not want to be responsible for unwittingly revealing anything that could diminish what he and his group had worked so hard to accomplish. The changes he requested often amounted to substituting a single word to give him the protection he needed. Sometimes he offered suggestions for improving the manuscript by revealing more of his technology. In explaining why certain seemingly minor procedures could not appear in the book, he also helped me to understand the enormous complexity and difficulty of working in the deep ocean. I have
come as close as possible to portraying his unusual techniques and procedures without providing a manual for others to duplicate what he has done.

Though it was years ago, I have not forgotten the many hundreds of hours Helene Canavan spent transcribing tapes of my interviews. For the last four years, my assistant, Laura Duncan, has put up with my frequent disappearances, physically and mentally, and managed to keep the office running. Thank you, Laura, and congratulations on the baby. Thanks, too, to my other assistant, Deron Lord, who came in two years ago to take more of the load off, while I traveled to teach my writing seminar to lawyers and finished the manuscript.

Ten years is a long time to expect others to wait and understand. My daughters have hardly known me when I was not working on “the book.” My greatest joy in having finished is that now even more of my hours will be filled with hearing their thoughts and ideas, their passions and dreams, watching them grow. Alison was there the whole time, waiting with dreams of her own. She deserves to have them fulfilled. She’s the one I want most of all to understand. In both senses. I hope she now does; I think I’m now beginning to.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

A
LL OF THE
characters in this story are real. I have changed no names, created no scenes from imagination, made up no dialogue. To protect proprietary information, I have minimally altered some material concerning technology and procedures.

I gleaned the historical narrative from diaries of passengers aboard the
Central America
and hundreds of contemporary articles and interviews with the survivors of the sinking in 1857. I read several books on the California Gold Rush; particularly helpful were
The Forty-Niners
by William Johnson from Time-Life Books and a doctoral thesis by John Kemble titled
The Panama Route
. I also read Richard Henry Dana’s classic,
Two Years before the Mast
. I referred to drawings of the
Central America
, a painting of the ship, and woodcuts from scenes along the Panama Route and at the wharves in San Francisco and Aspinwall. For
nautical references, I used
The Oxford Companion to Ships and the Sea
and Bowditch’s
American Practical Navigator
.

To reconstruct the search for the
Central America
, I had the Columbus-America Discovery Group’s 1986 sonar logs, the ship captain’s logs for 1987 and 1988, the pilot’s flight log for 1987, other at-sea logs for 1986 and 1987, tape recordings of hostile encounters with rival ships at sea, the navigator’s timed artifact recovery log for 1988, personal diaries and occasional letters written by crew members, partnership letters from the Columbus-America Discovery Group, trial transcripts, photographs of ocean floor sites and from aboard the various work vessels, hours of video on the bottom and topside, several visits to the offices and warehouse in Columbus, Ohio, and to the staging site in Wilmington, North Carolina, and extensive interviews with over a hundred people, including the ship and tech crews, partners, lawyers, CPAs, engineers, scientists, and families and friends of the main characters. I read half a dozen books about the evolution of submarines and submersibles and man’s attempts to penetrate the deep ocean. In August 1989 and again in September 1990, I traveled on small fishing boats out to the
Arctic Discoverer
to live on board the ship and observe procedures on deck and in the control room while the Columbus-America Discovery Group explored the site of the
Central America
. In some instances, besides the recollections of those involved, I also had audio and videotapes of the actual events from which to construct scenes and dialogue.

PROLOGUE

THE CALIFORNIA GOLD RUSH

A
S WAS HIS
habit each morning, James Marshall rose early to walk the gravel bar along his millrace to see if the water was yet deep enough and swift enough to turn the wheel for the sawmill he had built for John Sutter. At the headwater, Marshall closed the sluice gate, then ambled to the lower end and stood at the edge of the race. Ice fringed the shallow pockets against the bank; the deeper pools lay still and crystalline. As Marshall scanned the rocky bottom, in one of the pools, about six inches beneath the surface, he spied a yellow lump sitting on a flat rock. He rolled back his sleeve, reached into the still water, and retrieved the lump. It was about the size and shape of his thumbnail, gold and shiny, but without sparkle. Except for its color, it looked like an old piece of chewed spruce gum.

Marshall stood by the race, turning the lump in his fingers, his breath steaming in white clouds. The lump was small but dense, a curious find among the rounded gray stones of the river. He thought it looked like gold, but he wasn’t sure. He tried a simple test: He laid the lump on a smooth rock, picked up another rock, and hit the lump. It did not break, but when he held it up, he saw that it had changed shape. Marshall dropped the lump into his pocket, finished scanning the race, and returned to camp.

That day, one of the crew at the mill recorded in his journal that “James Martial the Boss of the Mill” had found “some kind of mettle in the tail race that looks like goald.” To test it, they set the lump on an anvil and beat it with a hammer. Iron pyrite, or fool’s gold, would have shattered; Marshall’s piece only flattened. Then the cook tossed it into a kettle of lye and boiled it for a day, but the lump emerged with the same shiny, golden cast.

Marshall and his crew had dug the millrace along the south fork of the American River in the far northern reaches of a desolate and obscure territory named by the Spanish “California.” The morning Marshall found the lump, January 24, 1848, all of California belonged to Mexico, but Mexico and the United States had been at war, and the two countries were in the final phases of negotiating a treaty under which Mexico would cede “Upper” California to the United States.

Upper California stretched from a point just south of the port at San Diego north to the Oregon Territory. The backbone of the region was a mountain range called the Sierra Nevada. Across the foothills and plains of the Sierra Nevada’s western slope lived a diverse, but sparse population cohabiting a space too vast for frequent encounters and too abundant to cause friction: scattered Mexican farmers, a small contingent of U.S. soldiers, a few navy warships, indigenous tribes, the remnants of sporadic Catholic missions, lonely cattle ranchers, trappers still supplying hide ships from back east, and a splintered band of Mormons. The Mormons, 238 of them, had arrived by ship a year and a half earlier and settled at Yerba Buena, an outpost of about 40 inhabitants along the western fringe of an immense bay coming in off the Pacific. When the Mormons renamed the settlement in 1847, Yerba Buena had become “San Francisco.”

Perhaps the most prosperous inhabitant of the region was a jovial, twice bankrupted, German-born Swiss, a self-proclaimed “captain,” John Augustus Sutter. Sutter had arrived by way of Hawaii and persuaded the Mexican governor of California to deed him fifty thousand fertile acres at the confluence of the American and Sacramento rivers, about a hundred miles northeast of the colony at San Francisco. He named his domain New Helvetia, but others in those parts called it Sutter’s Fort. In the fall of 1847, with plans to extend his holdings and needing lumber to do it, Sutter had sent a carpenter named James Marshall fifty miles up the American River to build a sawmill.