Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea (18 page)

Tommy’s thoughts and observations about shipwrecks in the Caribbean began to fill notebooks.

“That summer was a very fertilizing experience for me,” said Tommy, “just thinking about historic shipwrecks, where they were, and how they could be found, and what kind of technologies could be used to find them. Part of how to turn ideas into a project is being able to examine lots of different situations. The more you understand about the world, the better your perceptions are and the better decisions you can make. I was looking at wealth in terms of growth and knowledge and education as opposed to money, so it was a great experience. I didn’t get paid much and there may have been all kinds of hazards, but I was the only engineer in the whole operation.”

I
N THE FALL
of 1976, Tommy left Key West and traveled with Fisher and some of the other divers to Washington, D.C., to present Queen
Sophia of Spain with the bronze cannons from the
Atocha
. Then he drove the old Mercedes to an oceanography conference in Ottawa, stayed for a while with his parents in Defiance, where he ran up phone bills of four hundred dollars a month, then left for Columbus to work on a solar energy project.

In Columbus, Tommy visited Dean Glower and told him of his experiences working with the treasure hunters in Key West and what he had been pursuing at various libraries in Florida. Then he called one of his advisors from his summer at Stone Lab, Eddie Herdendorf, who was teaching an evening course in oceanography; Herdendorf asked Tommy to talk to the class about his work for Mel Fisher. Herdendorf recalled the presentation as “real matter-of-fact,” some engineering graphs Tommy had drawn and put on an overhead. “But he emphasized the importance of not just randomly looking for something,” said Herdendorf. “You need to have a plan and establish an electronic grid and systematically explore. It had to be done scientifically.”

Next, Tommy left for Texas to consult with a start-up company trying to develop a flywheel transmission for ultra-fuel-efficient cars, then east to New York, and back over to Chicago, like a good shepherd tending his flock of seven-to-fourteen. He earned just enough money consulting to put diesel fuel into the Mercedes and pay off the two phone cards he used when he stayed with family and friends. But he was filling notebooks with what he learned, and he had a stingy old car that provided him a place to sleep when nothing else was available. And that was all he needed.

The winter of ’77, he lived in Chicago with his sister Sandee and his brother-in-law Milt Butterworth, who supervised the lighting and photography of art objects at the Chicago Art Institute. In Chicago, Tommy pursued another of the seven-to-fourteen, a computer modeling of the commodities market. Much of his time there he spent on the phone. When Sandee and Milt asked him what he was doing, he would say he was “making contacts.” “These phone calls were very important to him,” remembered Sandee, “a matter of life and death.”

In Chicago, two men he had met while working for Mel Fisher introduced him to a treasure hunter named John Doering. Doering was funny, unassuming, easy to be around, and he liked Tommy’s
quirkiness. He also admired Tommy’s engineering skills. A year after they met, Doering called Tommy about his latest venture:
La Concepción
, the legendary ship wreck on Silver Shoals, about eighty miles off the coast of the Dominican Republic. The
Concepción
had gone down in 1641 with a registered consignment of 150 tons of treasure, mostly silver. Doering worked for Seaborne Ventures, and he was in Seattle trying to overhaul a 157-foot minesweeper called the
James Bay
. They had fired the previous engineer, and before he left, the engineer had done something to the engines so they couldn’t advance the throttle above idle or run the ship on automatic pilot. They needed an engineer to get her running again and sail with them down to Panama, through the locks, and into the Caribbean Sea. Tommy signed on and flew to Seattle, where he and another engineer worked on the sabotaged engines. “Harvey kept coming up to the wheelhouse and playing with stuff,” remembered Doering, “and somewhere along the line he figured it out. He was just invaluable.”

As he had with Mel Fisher’s operation, Tommy watched closely how Seaborne Ventures was run. When the
James Bay
left Seattle in late July 1978, three months after the projected departure date, Doering and his partners were still trying to raise money for the expedition. They got to Panama in August, but had to hang offshore for three more weeks, waiting for enough money to arrive to get it through the locks. Yet Seaborne was a lot more organized than other treasure hunting outfits Tommy knew of. They had a plan, and they had thought most things through. “It was pretty well run,” said Tommy, “but it was still a treasure hunt. One of the problems was they didn’t really have a solid project.”

While the
James Bay
lay off Panama, Tommy flew back to Miami to work in the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science. Then he went back to Texas and back to Columbus and back to Chicago, still tending his flock. With Tommy in Chicago, Doering and his partners altered their plans to head straight for Silver Shoals, instead hoping for some quick success along the banks due north of Panama: Roncador, Quita Sueño, Serranilla, Baja Nuevo, shallow water reefs that in storms could have snagged galleons from the Spanish treasure fleet leaving Cartagena. “We were stopping at all the
good places,” said Doering, “hoping to find something that would keep us financially alive.” Shipwrecks littered the banks, but they found nothing of real value.

They traveled on to Kingston in September and up to the Inaguas, Great and Little, where they found cannons and anchors and a crashed airplane, and a sweet little brass, breach-loading cannon five feet long, but little treasure. After a brief respite in Key West, they finally left for their original destination, Silver Shoals, but on a dock in Bimini, Doering heard that a treasure hunting rival named Burt Webber had just arrived in the Dominican Republic, signed a contract with the government, found the wreck of the
Concepción
, and was now salvaging her tons of silver. “It was almost irrelevant at that point anyway,” said Doering, “’cause we were out of money as usual.”

With Christmas nearing, they returned to Key West to raise money and mobilize for a new project: searching the coastline of the mountainous island of Dominica. According to their research, at least a hundred shipwrecks lay covered in the black sand of Dominica’s Roseau Harbor, and in Portsmouth Harbor at the north end of the island six ships from a treasure fleet had gone down in 1567 with a cargo that Doering’s partner estimated to be worth $700 million.

While Seaborne prepared for the Dominica expedition, the
James Bay
sat dockside in Key West. Wary of other treasure hunters on his turf, Mel Fisher showed up at the dock one afternoon and saw hanging off the stern of the
James Bay
a pair of the biggest blasters he had ever seen. Doering had designed the blasters to blow through the bane of all treasure hunters: deep sand. Each was seven feet across. Fisher still had not found the
Atocha
, but he had some fresh capital from new investors. He hired Doering and the
James Bay
to poke around in a new area near the Bank of Spain, where Tommy had worked on the
Arbutus
three summers earlier. The sand there was fifteen feet deep.

With Tommy still in Chicago, Doering and some of his divers took the
James Bay
and those big blasters out to the new site. In fifteen minutes they had blown a hole eighty feet wide at the mouth and tapering all the way to bedrock. After a week, the divers began finding cannonballs, musket balls, and a few muskets and swords, signs of an old Spanish ship. But Fisher had enough swords and arquebuses and musket balls
and cannons to fill the Smithsonian. He needed gold and silver. Some emeralds would be nice. He had been searching for ten years, and he was getting desperate.

On the 29th of June, the blasters blew another sand crater, and a diver named Rich Banko and his dive partner jumped into the water and went down. Before he hit bottom, Banko saw a gold disk five inches across. He grabbed the disk and pushed off the bottom. But when he broke the surface, waving the disk and hollering, no one heard him. After waiting a week for something to happen, a film crew from
National Geographic
had folded and left that morning, and the ship crew were forward or down below. When Banko finally got someone’s attention, the crew radioed Fisher on the ship-to-shore. Fisher immediately motored out to the site, bringing with him an East Indian mystic named Baba Ram. With him, Baba Ram had brought an entourage, and from the entourage Doering learned that Baba Ram was really a rug merchant from Minneapolis, but Fisher was convinced that Baba Ram could help him find the
Atocha
.

Baba Ram was a little guy with a goatee, and he had given up speaking. He could talk as well as anybody, but for reasons that went unexplained he had given it up. He communicated by grunting, and that’s what the entourage was for, to interpret the grunts.

“You’d ask Baba a question,” remembered Doering, “and Baba’d say, ‘Grunnt!’ and his entourage would say, ‘Baba says that you will find much gold today.’”

Four days after Banko found the gold disk, he lifted a pottery shard from the sand and found a gold chain seven feet long. “We came up with that,” said Banko, “and things got really wild. Mel had a bottle of Crown Royal with him, and this Baba character was putting the Crown Royal away faster than anybody.” Banko had pictures taken of himself and Mel and little goateed Baba Ram, all wrapped up in this seven-foot gold chain.

On his next dive, Banko was on the bottom again, fanning the sand, and right there in front of him was a bar of gold, seven inches long and about two fingers thick. It bore the royal seal of King Philip IV of Spain. When he surfaced, he showed the bar to Fisher and Baba Ram. “The guy grunts,” remembered Banko, “and uses his little sign language to say, ‘See, I told you, I brought you good luck.’”

A week after the
James Bay
returned to Key West, Banko and two friends snuck down to the pool at the Casa Marina one afternoon, and Banko noticed Mel Fisher talking to two men on the other side of the pool. About two hundred people were lounging around the pool deck when Banko saw Fisher pull a gold bar out of his shoe. Five minutes later Fisher pulled Banko’s seven-foot gold chain out of his other shoe. The deal with Doering and the
James Bay
was over, and Fisher was trying to persuade the two men to put another boat out there over the quicksands. Banko ambled across the pool deck toward the three men, and when he got closer, Fisher yelled, “Here’s the guy that found it!”

“By the time we left,” Banko said later, “he had those guys eating out of his hand. He signed them to a deal right there at the pool!” Banko told Fisher he would love to have one link from the chain he had found, and Fisher said, “You got it.” The next day they went to Fisher’s boat, and Fisher broke open that 350-year-old Spanish gold chain and gave Banko a link.

Doering and his divers on the
James Bay
had found pottery, arquebuses, silver coins, swords, and an amethyst one and a half inches across, plus four gold bars, a two-pound gold disk, a chunk of gold the size of a quarter, a smaller gold chain about ten inches long, and Banko’s seven-foot gold chain, which weighed ten pounds. For their work, Doering and his partners received $100,000 and 5 percent of the find: a small gold bar and a small gold chain. The finds kept Fisher’s hopes alive, but after ten years of constant searching he had found only enough of the
Atocha
to lure him onward: parts of cargo and bits of armament, some coins and bronze cannons, a little gold, and a few fine pieces from her wealthy passengers. He would not find her treasure for another six years.

A
LTHOUGH
J
OHN
D
OERING
’
S
Concepción
project on Silver Shoals had never materialized, and Tommy had seen enough treasure hunting in shallow water, Doering’s plans to search the coastline of Dominica intrigued him: Dominica was a mountain rising from the sea, and the slope all around was precipitous; a few hundred yards off the beach, the bottom dropped quickly to two or three hundred feet. The search would be more of a challenge; they would need better magnetometers and maybe even a small submersible to search the harbors. It would give
Tommy an opportunity to try new ideas in deeper water. But before anyone could try anything, Seaborne had to solve another problem.

Because the underwater terrain of the island dropped away so quickly, every accessible shipwreck lay well within Dominica’s three-mile territorial limit. If Doering and Seaborne Ventures wanted to work those waters, they had to have the government’s permission, but the government changed hands so quickly, they had to be careful not to alienate one faction while schmoozing with another. Negotiating with Dominican officials took over a year, and during that time the prime minister left office amid accusations of graft and corruption; then the populace ousted the interim prime minister by electing a third prime minister. As the political winds blew one way and then another, Hurricane David ripped through the middle of the little island packing a blow of 160 miles an hour. Tin roofs sailed off into the sea, thirty-eight people died, two thousand were injured, sixty thousand were left homeless, the only road on the island became impassable, and all telephone and electrical power was out for at least six months. In a country so rural and poor, that meant no shore support, which was vital to any salvage operation.

Tommy kept abreast of the negotiations, noting how long they dragged on, and he added to his list of problems in searching for historic shipwrecks in shallow water the delays and uncertainties inherent in dealing with unstable island governments.