Clive Cussler; Craig Dirgo Page 5

  Diversity left the port in the month of February. Each anomaly that was detected during the aerial surveys was located from the water surface as directed by the navigation computer software operating in conjunction with the differential global positioning system. Once the target was confirmed by the magnetometer, it was marked with a buoy. Next, the divers went over the side and examined the bottom. If the target was buried, the diver used a handheld proton to pinpoint the exact spot. Then a thin metal probe or water-jet probe was used to find out how deep the target was buried. Once the dimensions and depth were established, the induction dredge was lowered and the sand blown away, as a crater was dug over the target. Once an artifact or a wreck was revealed, a study was made to date it. A boiler meant a nineteenth- or twentieth-century wreck. Same with the remains of paddle wheels from an old steamship. Capstans, bronze propellers, deck winches, various pieces of ship’s machinery, and anchors along with their chains were uncovered. Fascinating discoveries, but no blue ribbon or trophy.

  A shipwreck was soon discovered and marked as Target 4. It was routinely marked with a buoy, and the divers deployed to investigate the site. Two artifacts were found exposed and recovered for investigation. They appeared to be badly encrusted firearms, a flintlock pistol, and a flintlock musket.

  Hopes were high that L‘Aimable had been found, as Ralph sent the artifacts to the conservation laboratory at Texas A&M for preservation and identification. Sadly, our hopes were dashed when an X ray evaluation revealed them to be from the late eighteenth to early nineteenth century. While of historical importance, they were not from L’Aimable.

  Thus ended phase one.

  I have been in contact with the Texas Antiquities Commission and Texas A&M University about the possibility of archaeology students excavating the artifacts on the wreck as a school project. Though I have offered to fund the effort, as of this writing I’ve yet to hear anything.

  In September of the same year, Ralph set out again and launched phase two, lasting most of the fall and into the winter. Bad weather caused countless delays. I can’t imagine the jolly times they must have had in Port O’Connor while waiting days and weeks for the weather to clear. I heard that one of their pastimes was going down to the nearest bait shack and counting worms.

  I flew into San Antonio and had a pleasant two-hundred-mile drive to Port O‘Connor for the next phase of the search. I met Ralph at the motel and had dinner at Josie’s, where the meals are real belly-busters.

  We set out the next day with a relatively calm sea and clear skies. I have always felt as though I was coming home when I stepped aboard Diversity. She is as rugged as they come, as well as stable and fast, her 250-horsepower Yamaha shoving her through the waves. Diversity and I have a love-hate relationship. I never fail to bang my shins on her many flanges, sharp edges, and pointed knobs, causing me to bleed all over Ralph’s clean deck. Ralph always has a cooler of beer and soda pop, along with strange munchies from food manufacturers no one has ever heard of, such as Magnolia’s Spicy Pickled Okra and Carl’s Crunchy Pig Parts.

  Wes Hall was working on another survey on the East Coast, so Mel Bell and Steve Howard, two very efficient and affable guys, filled in as dive crew for the second phase. Several targets were marked and probed before the dredge was unleashed, and we dug through the silt to see what turned up. Still no L’Aimable.

  One evening during the operation, the leading citizens of Port O’Connor threw a barbecue party in our honor. A fun time was had by all, and I found it interesting to hear about the hefty amount of funding that was to be raised to aid in the recovery and preservation of any artifacts that would be put on display at a facility in town. I keep looking, but I haven’t found a check yet. Help did come, however, in the form of contacts for additional equipment, which proved invaluable.

  Target 2 appeared that it might be L’Aimable. She had the right magnetometer readings and after being probed was found to lie twelve feet under the sand, definitely an old wreck and a likely prospect. She could not be revealed just yet, since the dredge aboard Diversity was not up to the job of blowing a twelve-foot-deep crater. I had to return home because of writing commitments. Ralph received the generous assistance of Steve Hoyt and Bill Pierson of the Texas Historical Commission (THC), who brought their boat, Anomaly, a state marine survey boat with reverse prop-wash thrusters that could blow a larger hole through the sand. Not much progress could be made, due to poor weather conditions, and it was decided to cease operations until the weather improved.

  Phase three began in June of 1999, as the sea turned fairly smooth. A veritable fleet set out for Target 2. Besides Ralph and his Diversity team, there was the Texas Historical Commission crew and its survey boat Anomaly, and a new arrival, the sixty-five-foot Chip XI, owned by the Ocean Corporation of Houston, a school for commercial divers. This boat was more than well equipped to reach through the silt to investigate the target. Jerry Ford, chief dive instructor for OC, brought along a team of dedicated students who volunteered to work the project on their own time.

  Over the next several days, Target 2 was partially exposed. She was indeed a very old shipwreck. A cannonball was recovered, and then the divers exposed a cannon. I was immediately phoned and asked to provide the necessary financial support to conserve it. I was more than willing to comply, and the THC agreed to permit the recovery. But, while this was going on, the weather turned bad again, and the recovery was postponed for three weeks to await clearer seas. Unfortunately, as usually happens, the crater containing the cannon filled in with sand.

  When the climate became congenial once again, Diversity and Anomaly returned to the scene of the wreck, then blew another huge hole until the cannon was exposed for the second time since it had sunk into the seafloor. Then it was raised from its twelve-foot-deep hole with lift bags and laid on the surface of the bottom.

  The next day, Chief Kevin Walker graciously offered the Coast Guard’s assistance, and he arrived at the site on a fifty-five-foot buoy tender. The crane used to lift buoys was activated, and the cannon was raised into the sun for the first time in more than two hundred years and lowered onto the deck. From the site, it was then carried to the Coast Guard base in Port O’Connor and immersed in shallow water for temporary preservation until it could be transported, along with the cannonball, to Texas A&M University for conservation.

  James Jobling of the conservation lab eventually identified what turned out to be a British navy twenty-four-pounder carronade and dated it from the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century. Several months later, Jobling called and said that he and A&M had never received the check for $3,000, the cost of preserving the cannon. I checked with Wayne Gronquist, who assured me that the elite of Port O‘Connor would take care of it. Another three months and Jobling had yet to be paid, so I sent him a check. My next call was to Steve Hoyt at the Texas Historical Commission. Even though the state had jurisdiction regarding the final placement of the cannon, I politely asked that it go anywhere but Port O’Connor, since all had run and hid when it came time to pay the bill. The last I heard, it was still in the conservation lab.

  MISSED AGAIN.

  But not entirely.

  When the legendary pirate Jean Laffite was ordered out of Galveston in 1821, he engaged in a few piratical operations that angered not only the Americans but the British as well. Combined naval units of both countries chased him down the coast of Texas, pressing him hard. Reaching Cavallo Pass, his fleet of pirate ships was chased by five British frigates and several American armed sloops. His band of pirates was in a desperate situation. Throwing caution to the wind, during a violent storm he ordered his fleet to run over the bar at the entrance to the Pass, into the inner channel. With fortitude and luck, Laffite made it into Matagorda Bay with all his ships intact. The British frigates tried to follow him in, but two grounded and were lost.

  Laffite, so the story goes, having achieved a short reprieve, divided up the booty among his pirate crews, burned his ships, and vani
shed. Rumors put him in South Carolina, where he married Emma Mortimer of Charleston, who knew him as successful merchant Jean Lafflin. After several years in the South, he and his wife moved to St. Louis, where it is said he manufactured gunpowder. On his deathbed he confessed to his wife that he was Jean Laffite the pirate, and was buried in Alton, Illinois, sometime in 1854.

  Target 2, where the flintlock firearms were found, and Target 4, the wreck that produced the British cannon, intrigued everyone. Could these be the lost British frigates? There is little doubt that both were early warships. Future research and excavations by Texas archaeologists may well identify them.

  That left us Target 8.

  This was the most elusive, engaging, and enticing anomaly of them all. She gave a large magnetic signature of 560 gammas, which is consistent with a shipwreck with three to five tons of ferrous metal on board. Ralph conducted four underwater surveys with the handheld proton magnetometer. Each pass put the magnetic mass in the same area. The site was then probed with a twenty-six-foot jet probe. After several tries, the probe became lodged in something under the sand and was abandoned.

  The location is also in the approximate latitude of L’Aimable and buried far deeper than the other wrecks Ralph found, a sure indication of an old vessel that has every potential of coming from the seventeenth century. She remains the most promising of all and the most obstinate to reach. Uncovering her for identification would take a major excavation effort.

  As they say, so near, yet so far.

  DISCOVERING KING TUT’S tomb was scooping ice cream compared to the hunt for La Salle’s flagship L’Aimable. This was the toughest survey NUMA ever tackled. No search in a cemetery full of unmarked graves for a particular body could have been more formidable or challenging than this one. Ralph Wilbanks worked incredibly hard and left a legacy of investigative marine survey that will take a while to equal.

  His long and arduous search resulted in the identification of sixty-six targets. Every magnetic anomaly in the entire Cavallo Pass area, including targets on shore, was surveyed and pinpointed on GPS. Eighteen were identified as shipwrecks or potential wreck sites. Ten shipwrecks were dated to the twentieth century, five are from the nineteenth, two are from the eighteenth century, and one, Target 8, has the potential to be a seventeenth-century wreck. If she is L’Aimable, she is beckoning and daring us to reach down and touch her.

  Now all we have to do is go back and dig a bigger hole.

  PART TWO

  The Steamboat New Orleans

  I

  Penelore 1811-1814

  “GOOD LORD,” NICHOLAS ROOSEVELT SAID.

  A giant comet was hurtling through space on an elliptical orbit back to the sun. The diameter of the orb was estimated to be more than 400 miles, with a gaseous tail stretching back nearly 100 million miles. The comet moved slowly and steadily through its orbit—an orbit that required more than three thousand years to complete. The comet had last been seen on earth during the reign of Ramses II.

  The date was October 25, 1811. The time, 10:38 p.m.

  ROOSEVELT WAS MEDIUM height, about five feet six inches, and medium weight, around 150 pounds. His hair was brown, not favoring blond or drifting toward black, but a single shade like a varnished walnut log. His eyes, which twinkled when he became excited, were green and flecked with gold dots. In general, his appearance was average. What set Roosevelt apart from his fellowman was an undefined and indescribable demeanor, a zest for life that oozed from him like sap from a tree. Call it confidence, attitude, or ego—whatever it was, Roosevelt had it in spades.

  STANDING ON THE steamboat New Orleans, Lydia Roosevelt stared overhead in awe.

  Lydia was dressed in a high-necked dress with a hoopskirt accented by a white straw hat interwoven with wildflowers. Her attire was out of place given her rough surroundings. She was graced with a face that was one of extremes. Her eyes were large, her mouth surrounded by puffy lips, and her nose slightly wider than usual. She was young and filled with life. Her chest was heavy and wide, her hips broad but without fat, her legs thick but shapely. She was not a delicate miniature rose but instead a robust sunflower in bloom. Lydia was eight months pregnant with her second child. The Roosevelts’ first child, a daughter named Rosetta, was three. The Roosevelts had been married five years. Nicholas was forty-three, Lydia twenty.

  For nearly an hour, the crew of New Orleans watched as the massive orb crossed from east to west like God’s own exclamation point. The crew watched the spectacle in bemused amazement as the comet moved soundlessly through space. Even Tiger, the Roosevelts’ Newfoundland dog, was strangely quiet.

  “One more strange occurrence,” Lydia said, as the comet faded from view. “First, northern lights and rivers out of their banks, then squirrels and pigeons. Now this.”

  Lydia was referring to a recent rash of strange events.

  The spring floods of 1811 had been worse than usual. After the water finally retreated, sickness from the stagnant water left behind had gripped the land. Shortly thereafter, the aurora borealis became visible farther to the south than usual. To compound the odd turn of events, the strange flickering lights were visible for months. Then even more strange phenomena: On the day New Orleans left Pittsburgh, the crew had witnessed thousands of squirrels, an undulating wave of fur, traveling south as if being chased by a coordinated pack of dogs. The squirrels seemed hell-bent on escaping something, and the sight had been mildly disturbing to all aboard.

  Then, a few days later, the crew witnessed another bizarre incident.

  While everyone on New Orleans was asleep, the leading edge of a flock of passenger pigeons crossed over the river. The flock flew from north to south, a mass of birds stretching some 250 miles from Lake Erie into Virginia. The next morning when the crew woke, the decks of the New Orleans were spotted with droppings, and the sky overhead was still dark.

  “What do you make of it?” Roosevelt asked Andrew Jack, the pilot.

  “Sometimes these migrations can take days to pass,” Jack said.

  Lydia waddled down the walkway and now stood outside the door as well.

  “I don’t like that sound,” she said. “Like the beating of tiny drums.”

  “A few more minutes and we’ll be under way,” said Jack. “Once we’re a few miles downstream, we should be out of the migration path.”

  That night, after they tied up alongshore, Roosevelt supervised the deckhands as they washed New Orleans from stem to stern. Tomorrow they would stop for a few days in Henderson, Kentucky, to visit friends. Roosevelt wanted New Orleans to look her best. Even with all the strange events, his enthusiasm was undiminished.

  Nicholas Roosevelt was a constant source of optimism.

  New Orleans’s itinerary was Pittsburgh to New Orleans—a trip never before attempted by a steamship. The trip was part of a well-funded and well-planned play for Roosevelt and his partners. Their goal was to secure a patent on western steamboat traffic. At the time of the voyage, laws pertaining to steamships were still in their infancy. In New York State, Robert Fulton’s company had managed to patent steamboat travel on the Hudson River, creating, at least for a time, an extremely lucrative monopoly. Now Fulton, along with partners Robert Livingston and Nicholas Roosevelt, wanted to do the same on the Mississippi River. The planning for his trip had been meticulous and detailed. First, the trip needed to be successfully completed. If the boat sank, no investor would want to ante up. Second, the trip needed to be completed quickly, to prove to investors the economic benefit of steam over paddle.

  Robert Fulton, the inventor of the world’s first functional steamboat, had designed New Orleans, while Robert Livingston, a wealthy New York businessman who was a confidant of Thomas Jefferson, had provided the funding. Roosevelt, himself no slouch when it came to powerful contacts, was a descendant of the Dutch settler who had purchased Manhattan Island from the natives, as well as a close friend of John Adams. The previous year, Nicholas and Lydia had made a test journey down the river on a
flatboat, stopping to visit influential people along the way.

  Nothing was left to chance, but there are some things that cannot be predicted.

  NEW ORLEANS WAS 116 feet in length with a 20-foot beam. Constructed of yellow pine—not Roosevelt’s first choice, but the only wood available within their rushed timetable—the vessel featured a rounded belly like that of a trout.

  The middle section of New Orleans’s deck was open, housing the 160-horsepower steam engine, copper boilers, and walking beam that transferred power to the pair of side-wheel paddles. Having the machinery in the open gave the ship an unfinished appearance. Two masts with wrapped sails were stationed to each side of the open engine pit. From the stem mast flew the flag of the United States, a red, white, and blue cloth featuring seventeen stars and seventeen stripes. A pair of rectangular cabins, men’s forward and women’s aft, sat on the deck to each side of the engine pit. In the forward cabin was an iron cooking stove, and atop the ladies’ cabin were a table and chairs covered by an awning. In the stem, constantly diminishing piles of firewood gave the boat a rough edge. All in all, New Orleans was a crude but functional-looking affair.

  The morning after the comet passed, New Orleans continued downriver. By ten that morning, the ship was fifty miles from Cincinnati and steaming at eight miles per hour. This was the third day since leaving Pittsburgh, and the crew was finding a routine. Andrew Jack, the pilot who was guiding the newfangled steamship downriver, was tall, nearly six feet five inches in his work boots. Lean, with long narrow feet, he came across as a bit of a stork. His cheekbones were pronounced and his jaw square and defined. Jack had sandy-colored hair combed to the left. Bushy eyebrows topped pale gray eyes that looked far into the distance. He was twenty-three years old.