Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea (42 page)

Craft liked the bigger anomaly the sonar techs had imaged on the first run, the one they designated geology. The morning after they shot it, he pulled Tommy out of his bunk and told him, “If I were you, I’d take a closer look at Geo.” Still in his pajamas, Tommy followed Craft into the control room to look at the strip chart, and he liked the target even more than Craft. To him it looked like a ship.

Tommy now had at least one high-res look at each of the important targets, and the techs wanted to get back to Sidewheel. “We didn’t want to be searching the entire Gulf Stream area,” said Lettow, “just to map the sea floor and find every shipwreck out there.” But to square off the searched area along the southern boundary, Tommy insisted they raise the swath to 5,000 meters, loop to the east and run a final east-west track. Then he had them run another track line along the western boundary, completing the line in seven long hours of the tech crew staring once again at the ocean bottom.

Finally, late the afternoon of June 28, they steamed again toward Sidewheel. They shot it a second time at high resolution, and on the third run they narrowed the swath width even more and imaged it at five hundred meters. Then they turned and shot it a fourth time, turned and shot it a fifth time, turned and shot it a sixth. The closer they got and the tighter they focused, the more the image resembled a photograph of the
Central America
. Williamson recorded in his log, “This target appears to have the characteristics of our objective.” If Tommy would just let him prove it was the
Central America
, Tommy would be happy, the techs would be happy, and he could pursue the job with Amoco. But Tommy still would not let Williamson drop the camera.

The camera sled had no subsea navigation, and the
Pine River
could not hold position in the Gulf Stream current. The only way they could image the site with a camera was to dangle the sled on the cable and drag it back and forth in short tracks, much as they ran the sonar sweeps, except they had to get the camera within twenty feet. The method required patience and too much luck. Tommy had no time for patience or luck. He agreed to finish a suite of high-resolution sonar images of
Sidewheel, but then he insisted they sweep the parts of the search map they had not covered.

T
O KEEP THE
tech crew as objective as possible in the beginning, Tommy had purposely told them little about the
Central America
. But over the days of evaluating targets with Tommy and Williamson, they slowly had gleaned a set of criteria that any target must possess to be a candidate: It needed to be about three hundred feet long, about fifty feet wide, have three masts, two sidewheels, and one boiler stack; it had to be made of wood, although 750 tons of degrading iron and about 200 tons of coal might also litter the site.

As they dropped the SeaMARC closer to Sidewheel, as they shot it from more and more angles, now seven times, eight times, nine times, its rounded features sharpened, and the techs saw emerge from the collective images a ship. They shot it perfectly abeam, they shot it at forty degrees to see up inside a large cavity, they shortened the wave length on the SeaMARC signal so they could resolve even finer detail.

“We were taking Polaroids,” said Watson, “and then lining them up and saying, ‘This is this with this color palette, and this is this with this color palette.’ We were so ripped! ‘Oh, you didn’t eat today?’ ‘No, I’ll eat tomorrow, let’s try this, and, okay, let’s try that.’ We looked at it a hundred different ways in a hundred different colors from a hundred different aspects. We needed like eight more sets of hands to try all the things we wanted to try.”

In the shadows of the images they saw a huge hump amidships that would be the housing for one of the paddle wheels, and they could see that the ship had two prominent masts. This bothered Williamson, because in the blueprints he had seen three masts on the
Central America
. Tommy explained that during the storm the second mate and two other men had chopped down the foremast to ease her listing to starboard.

Williamson had only one nagging problem with Sidewheel: No matter how they estimated, it seemed smaller than the
Central America
was when it entered the storm. They had to account for ways that the image of a shipwreck of a 280-foot ship could appear to be shorter, and the images themselves gave them a clue. They could see damage to the bow, as if the ship had struck the seafloor head-on at high speed. Then
the techs learned that some of the five hundred passengers and crew left behind had chopped up large portions of the ship to make rafts, and the techs surmised that upon impact with the seafloor, the weakened ship had accordioned.

J
UST AFTER MIDNIGHT
on June 30, they attempted to run a second high-res shot of a good target near Sidewheel, but weather forced them to abort the line not a half hour into the run. They swung around and realigned, and on the third run they imaged the target only seventy-five meters to port. Williamson studied the strip chart and the computer returns, and before they had even ended the line, he recorded in his log, “S/wheel still best bet.”

They returned to Sidewheel and ran another line, and Williamson continued to study that target. He recorded in his log, “Search team recommends deployment of transponders for camera runs.” He was even preparing for the camera work, when Tommy interceded, and thirty minutes later they had raised the swath width of the SeaMARC back to the full five thousand meters and were proceeding toward a track line along the eastern edge of the search map, “against recommendations of MEW,” wrote Williamson. Tommy wanted to look into every probability cell that contained a number higher than 0; to the west were several with numbers from 2 through 8, and more to the east had numbers from 1 to 7, a few chances out of a thousand that the
Central America
lay beneath that two-mile square of ocean.

Brockett remembered Williamson being furious. “Look,” Williamson told Tommy, “this is what I do for a living. I know what I’m doing, I’m an expert. We are wasting our time out here. We need to get some detailed information on these targets so that you will be able to do a good job next year!” And Brockett remembered Tommy insisting, “No, we need to go out here and look in these low-probability areas and complete the search.”

About ten hours into that next eastern track line, they imaged another target large enough and bright enough for Williamson to add to the hit parade, and it was labeled “Galaxy.”

But Tommy still wanted to run the final eastern track, even though the total of all of the chances out of a thousand that the
Central America
lay along that track was 3. Tommy wanted to run that line and even extend it by nineteen kilometers. “Extending that line would go through a bunch of cells with zero probability or infinitesimal probability,” remembered Williamson. “There was quite a heated discussion about that. Harvey just said, ‘You will extend this line!’”

For ten hours, they towed the SeaMARC along that far eastern track line, while a following sea and a strong northeast current constantly tried to push the
Pine River
off course. Williamson wrote in the log, “Hope we have not wasted the good weather/sea conditions needed for camera/video runs on S/wheel, which we believe to be our target (the
C.A
.).” Then the wind began to kick up, too, and before they had reached the end of the line, they had to abort the run. “Again,” wrote Williamson, “it is the recommendation of the survey team that we return to contact ‘Sidewheel’, deploy LBS transponders, calibrate the acoustic grid, and proceed with video and camera verification of the target as a 280′ paddle-wheel steamer we have been contracted to locate.”

But now Tommy wanted a high-resolution look at Galaxy, the anomaly they had imaged the day before. Williamson had already studied the broad-swath image of Galaxy and determined it was not a mid-nineteenth-century sidewheel steamer. He recorded in the log, “Harvey Thompson insists that we next run a verification pass at 1km on target ‘Galaxy,’ which appears to be a steel-hulled vessel with associated debris (bulk cargo).”

On the first attempt, they hit the target in less than four minutes and ended the run in ten, but the image painted only on the strip charts, not on the computer. They tightened the swath to five hundred meters, turned and swept the target a second time, then turned and swept it again for the third and final time. Now Tommy had at least one and often two or three high-resolution images of every major target they had located. He calculated they had now covered enough of the map that with only three or four days remaining, the time would be more wisely spent either running closer looks at the promising targets or trying to drop a camera on Sidewheel. He directed them to quit and sail for Sidewheel to begin laying the navigation grid for the camera runs.

“We ultimately prevailed,” said Lettow, “and we put the video camera down on that shipwreck.”

* * *

A
T ABOUT SIX
hundred feet, the deep ocean squeezes out the last particle of natural light, and below that everything moves in blackness. The SeaMARC flew through that blackness, shooting sound waves at the deep-ocean floor, and the system recorded the behavior of those sound waves as they encountered hard objects. Then it converted that behavior to information the eye could see: squiggles on the chart recorders and pixels in a color mosaic on the computer display. Even when they dropped the SeaMARC closer to a target and tightened the swath, they still could see only converted sound waves, not the object that bounced them back. That’s what was so frustrating about sonar: You couldn’t see the thing itself.

On July 4, they retrieved the SeaMARC and left it on deck. For the next two days, they set up a subsea navigation grid, repaired the cable, and worked on the video system. They launched the SeaMARC again to run it over Sidewheel another six times, until they thought they could find it with a camera. Then they deployed the camera sled early on the morning of July 7. By 5:00
A.M
., the camera trailed in the bottom darkness nearly nine thousand feet below.

They had clamped the lights, a video camera, and a still camera to a hydrodynamic sled, but the cameras were stationary, aimed straight down, with no thrusters to position the sled and no pan and tilt to control the cameras. All they could do was hope that their navigation readouts were accurate, that they could relocate the site and drag the camera sled across the center of it, and that the remains of a ship suddenly would glide into view.

Williamson called the searches “Brownian motion,” a phrase borrowed from physicists to describe the random movement of ricocheting gas particles. Tommy referred to them as “spaghetti searches.”

They directed the captain of the
Pine River
to proceed at a specified heading, while they sat in the control room and watched the television monitor. They had shut down the sonar recorders and the rest of the SeaMARC equipment—no gains to adjust, no nav to record, no measurements to take, just a film log to keep, a television monitor to watch, and one guy, the pilot, ready to raise or lower the camera sled dragging behind the
Pine River
.

To see any detail, the camera had to be within twenty feet of the object—ten feet was better—and if the camera was farther away than thirty feet, they could see nothing at all. As the pilot watched the monitor, he paid out on the winch when the boat heaved up and hauled in on the winch when the boat heaved down, trying to keep the sled flying at a steady altitude. If he let the camera rise higher than thirty feet off the floor, they saw nothing on the monitor but backscatter—“Just like looking at a fuzzy white TV,” said Lettow. To get the camera back in range so they could see the bottom, he had to pay out on the winch just a tap without going too far and crashing the sled into the floor. Lettow likened it to playing an intense video game.

On the first pass, they towed the camera sled and watched the monitor for two hours and saw nothing but snow. On camera run two they saw the bottom briefly, and they got some footage of the crisscrossing trails of sea cucumbers, but at the end of the run, they discovered that the VCR was not operating properly, and they had lost whatever tape they had on runs one and two. They tried a third camera run, and again they glimpsed the bottom only for moments. They seemed to have good horizontal control, but it was difficult for the pilots to keep the sled in that narrow thirty-foot window without risking the equipment. Already, one of the pilots had crashed the sled into the floor, bending the frame. With the sea beginning to build again, they tried a fourth camera run, and when they still saw nothing, they turned to reposition the ship and decided to change their approach. This time they would drift across the target with the camera almost directly beneath the ship.

They recovered the camera sled, hooked it to a chunk of pig iron, and lowered the whole rig over the side. Since the
Pine River
could not remain still above the target, they tried to align her with the wind and the currents so she would drift slowly across the spot. “Just kind of wander about in the area,” said Williamson. “Very frustrating because obviously you’re just looking at whatever providence brings into your field of view.”

Within an hour, Lettow piloted the camera over anchor chain, huge iron links in the sand trailing off into the darkness. Then a ghostly image of what appeared to be timbers crossed the monitor. They realigned the ship for another drift, and two hours later they again saw a piece of something.
And again an hour after that. Then they saw what they thought was debris and a few minutes later something that looked like a wood beam. But in all of these passes they could never tell what they were seeing or where they were on the site.

Each time they thought they saw the ship, the pilot began firing the still camera to shoot as many frames as he could, but every time he fired, the video monitor would go blank or suddenly fuzz with static. When they recovered the camera sled to load fresh film and tape and replace the batteries, they discovered that out of the four hundred still frames they had shot, only one hundred had been exposed, and most of those were either underexposed or double and triple exposed because the frames had not advanced.