Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea (61 page)

Burlingham waited until four o’clock that afternoon, just as the
Cameron Seahorse
was coming out of her turn, to broadcast a sécurité call requesting that all vessels in the area give him a berth of over eight thousand feet.

Ten minutes later, he called the
Cameron Seahorse
and asked that the charterer and a representative of Steadfast Oceaneering be present in the wheelhouse. “As it appears again that you are going to enter the injuncted area,” he announced, “I’m going to read you a copy of the order granting preliminary injunction.”

Suddenly, a different voice from the
Cameron Seahorse
broke in. “
Nicor Navigator, Cameron Seahorse
. This is the charterer, Wally Kreisle, K-r-e-i-s-l-e. Be advised that this vessel and the crew aboard are working under my direction. Also be advised that we are going to search the area that we are entering now and the area that you are describing.”

“Roger, understand,” said Burlingham. “I am now going to read to you the order granting preliminary injunction.” He read the first paragraph. “How copy?” he asked Kreisle.

“Copy that just fine,” said Kreisle, “but I don’t understand any one part of it. I don’t know what else to tell you, bud.”

“Roger,” said Burlingham. He read the next paragraph from Judge Kellam’s order. “How copy?” he asked again.

“Copy just fine, don’t understand any part of it,” said Kreisle. “I’ve explained to you what this vessel intends to do and what I’ve paid for this vessel to do, and I expect that to be carried out to its fullest.”

Burlingham signed off. Fifteen minutes later, he got back on the radio with the captain. “Look,” he said, “I’m not recording this call. This is between you and me. You are going to be in deep shit if you come into our injuncted area.”

He had the
Navigator
idling on the southwest corner, her bow pointed to the northeast, waiting for the
Cameron Seahorse
. The cable was still in the water, and this time Burlingham agreed to fly the colors and shapes of a vessel restricted in its ability to maneuver. He could stand fast or move left or right, and the other captain had to steer clear.

The
Cameron Seahorse
came in from the west about midway up the box on a bearing almost due east, her bow rising and falling in heavy seas. As she began to close, Burlingham sat motionless, and the other captain did not deviate. Tommy and Bob were in the wheelhouse with Burlingham, when Robol called. Bob went aft to the COM shack to take the call. Except for pitching in near ten-foot seas and a twenty-five-knot wind, the
Navigator
sat motionless in the water. Bob could look out beyond the heaving stern and see the bow of the
Cameron Seahorse
aimed at the
Navigator
. “He’s come around,” Bob told Robol, “and he’s about ready to run right through the injuncted area again.”

“I understand,” said Robol.

“I don’t know if you do understand,” said Bob, “but I certainly hope you understand. This guy is running right up our ass!”

“I understand,” Robol said again. He told Bob that even though it was the Saturday of Labor Day weekend, he had a hearing set for that afternoon and the judge was aware of Kreisle’s actions.

“Good,” said Bob, “’cause right now, I’m looking out the back window here, and I can practically read the name on his boat.” Bob hurried back to the bridge.

The
Cameron Seahorse
continued to close, and Burlingham decided it was time to make his move. “Okay,” he said, “which way do you want me to take him?”

Because of currents and the layout of the wreck site, Bob said, “I’d rather you take him to the north.”

“No problem,” said Burlingham.

Burlingham angled to port, forcing the other captain to deviate from his intended track. The other captain radioed Burlingham, “C’mon, can’t you do anything else?” Burlingham said, “No, sir,” and continued sidling to port, and the other captain had to veer away.

About six o’clock that evening, Burlingham pushed the
Cameron Seahorse
out the north end of the box. The tow fish, they estimated, followed two hours later.

Not only was it Saturday night of Labor Day weekend, it was also Judge Kellam’s fortieth wedding anniversary. Phoning the judge’s home, Robol apologized profusely for the intrusion and explained that the judge’s injunction had been blatantly violated at least three times by a second group of interlopers and that a confrontation at sea was approaching crisis. That night Kellam granted an order to show cause, demanding that Kreisle and all other parties aboard the
Cameron Seahorse
appear in court Tuesday morning. Immediately, Robol faxed notice of the order to Kreisle’s ship and to Kreisle’s lawyer. When the
Cameron Seahorse
arrived in Norfolk, a federal marshal and a private investigator met Kreisle at the dock and confiscated all of his navigation and sonar records and turned them over to the court under seal. On Tuesday, Judge Kellam held Kreisle and everyone else on board the
Cameron Seahorse
in contempt of court.

* * *

A
T THE END
of the previous summer, Tommy had negotiated another option with Mike Williamson: If for any reason, Tommy needed to do more sonar work at the end of the ’87 season, he could exercise a first right of refusal on the SeaMARC in September.

Tommy now had three reasons to exercise the option: One, he wanted to protect the injuncted area from Kreisle, who was unpredictable and already had defied one court order. Two, since Galaxy was in the last track line they had run to the east, he wanted to know what both Kreisle and Burt Webber had been finding out beyond Galaxy; he worried that one of them might find a cultural deposit and claim it in court just to operate near the Galaxy site and pounce on Galaxy as soon as Columbus-America left. Three, he didn’t know how much of the
Central America
had broken up and scattered as it sank. “It was hard to interpret what we were seeing at Galaxy,” he said. “To the east could have been chunks of the ship.”

By now it was almost mid-September, and the weather window in the Atlantic was about to close. Burlingham moved the
Navigator
to a shipyard north of Charleston to beef up the winch, load twenty-one thousand feet of new co-ax cable, and pick up Williamson and his sonar team. From September 12th to the 26th, they searched another five hundred square miles of deep ocean to the east and south of Galaxy.

During the search, Tommy hardly showed his face outside the Elder van where he had his SAT phone and his bunk and where he took most of his meals. Over the entire summer, he had been able to study the wreck site at Galaxy for only two and a half weeks, and in many ways, he knew little about it. Although the vehicle surpassed anything tried in the deep ocean, it was still the emergency vehicle they had sailed with back in June. It was not designed for intricate or heavy salvage. “If we’d had a more advanced vehicle,” said Tommy, “and we hadn’t had all the interference from the competition, I think we would’ve found gold.” But they didn’t have a more advanced vehicle and the interference had continued nearly all summer, and they had found nothing of commercial value. Tommy was already planning for the ’88 season.

They had spent all summer at sea, from one side of the weather window to the other. And after learning with their own eyes that the sonagram of Sidewheel had deceived them; after discovering what a shipwreck with a debris field really looked like; after all of the fighting
and tension and maneuvering at sea; after all of the fighting and tension and maneuvering in federal court; after proving they could go down eight thousand feet to the ocean floor and work for long periods of time, which no one else in the world had ever done, and find coal in abundance and artifacts from women and children and ceramic dishes and jugs and bottles from the mid–nineteenth century; after four months at sea, they had found no gold, and the site had yielded nothing that confirmed or denied that all of the battles in court and all of the battles at sea had been fought over the
Central America
.

COLUMBUS, OHIO

F
ALL
, 1987

T
OMMY HAD NOT
wanted to go to sea in May. He had wanted to stay in Columbus, let Moore and Hackman and Scotty produce a vehicle that could do all of the wonderful things he envisioned, drop that vehicle in the water for the first time in August, test it at sea for weeks if necessary, then head for Sidewheel. If Sidewheel wasn’t the
Central America
, and he had projected it might not be, they would search the sonagrams again and head for the next most promising site. When they found the
Central America
, he wanted to study the ship, film it, photograph it, understand it, and bring back a significant amount of gold. He would finish the recovery the following summer. Instead, the rumor of competition had forced him to sea long before the vehicle was ready, and the reality of competition had kept him there, fending off interlopers
instead of concentrating on the science and the engineering and the technology. He had depleted his funding by having to rush production of the vehicle, having to fight the legal battles in court, having to pick at the site with a vehicle that could not document and recover the artifacts as they needed to.

“Tommy was tired,” said Buck Patton, “and the project was seriously short of money.”

That season had cost Tommy most of the $3.6 million allocated to the entire Recovery Phase. He had saved some of the funds from the Search Phase the year before, and when he combined that with what remained in the war chest from ’87, the partnership had an emergency fund of almost a million dollars. But $4.5 million was gone, and in some of the partners’ eyes Tommy had recovered nothing but a bunch of dishes and one infamous lump of coal. Some said, “That may be the most expensive piece of coal in history.” “Will it burn?” asked others.

“A lot of coal jokes,” remembered Patton.

Tommy knew that some of the partners, those close to the project, the ones who helped him with advice, realized the significance of what they had achieved that summer. Two milestones: First, they had done things with technology on the bottom of the deep ocean that no one had ever done before; second, a judge had accepted their novel interpretation of jurisdiction and granted them the exclusive right to work at their site; and when other intruders challenged that right, the judge had enforced his injunction with a contempt order. But no matter how extraordinary the accomplishments, the partnership also wanted to see gold, and there was none.

“You would think that after our performance and after what we won and how we persevered and how well our team worked and how we beat these guys,” mused Tommy, “you would think it would just be the most heroic situation you could ever imagine, and yet that doesn’t necessarily translate to an investor. The way the typical partner looks at it is, ‘Wow, I didn’t realize we were gonna have all this legal trouble. It’s starting to look more risky.’ So we got back that fall, totally exhausted, spent physically and mentally, and now the hard part starts. Now we’re in an uphill battle to raise money to build the full-up vehicle.”

The most important thing Tommy could do was communicate with his partners, but he would have to word his letters carefully. At sea, Tommy had had little time to communicate with anyone. He had sent each partner a couple of brief missives that he worried had confused them even more, because he couldn’t tell them everything that was happening. “And it’s hard for them to identify with you,” said Tommy, “if you haven’t been able to tell them the strategies that went into everything.” He wanted to convey the struggle they had experienced at sea, so the partners could relive some of the adventure; he wanted them to understand the difficulty. But he had to be careful not to make the problems seem insurmountable; and without making promises, he had to tell them what he planned to do the following season.

For insight into the mind-set of the partners, Tommy talked frequently with Wayne Ashby and a few other partners with whom he had developed a rapport. When he wrote a letter, Tommy showed it first to Ashby and asked for his comments. “We worked together on a lot of them,” said Ashby. “He’d call and ask me if he was explaining it the right way, should it be expanded, does it need to be mentioned at all.”

Two ticklish issues needed explaining: How a world-class sonar team had, with great confidence, selected the wrong site; and why he needed more money to build the full-up vehicle to penetrate all of that coal and prove that Galaxy was indeed the
Central America
. Tommy wasn’t surprised at the error on Sidewheel, because no one had ever done this before and he understood the difficulties. Anyone in the deep-ocean community would understand. But would the partners? If he tried too hard to explain why it was so difficult to do anything on the bottom of the deep ocean, the partners might think, Well, if the experts don’t know, who does? And if the experts don’t know, should I put more money into it?

In October, they mailed a ten-page letter to the partners, reviewing the setbacks caused by Tommy being forced to implement the E-Plan and the major achievements despite those setbacks. Based on the encouraging sonagrams of their original target, Sidewheel, they had expected to find a relatively intact steamship with sidewheels and hatchways. Instead,
wrote Tommy, they found “a scene of great corrosion and abundant life eating away at the shipwreck, attacking the wooden hull walls until they slowly collapsed.” Moving on to what they then realized was a far more promising target at Galaxy, they had recovered several artifacts from the debris field, but with the limited capacity of the E-vehicle, they could not dig through the coal.