Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea (29 page)

After Tommy had finally persuaded a small group of tough, cynical, self-made investors to back him, a consultant from the outside who had been involved in every major deep-water recovery since man began recovering things in deep water was coming to Columbus, and Tommy knew what he was going to say.

“Anybody brought in from the outside was going to say that it was impossible. I knew that going into the meeting. And I knew who it was, one of the top consultants in the ocean community, a guru in the ocean field, a very prominent guy, a former supervisor of salvage for the navy, top position in the salvage field. The top position. So I had to figure out how to talk about it, how not to overtalk about it, how to counter everything he did. I had to explore his background. I had to have a whole database search done on exactly everything he’d done. All his experiences. What he knew about. What he didn’t know about.”

If Bill Searle and Bob Kutzleb cast doubt on everything Tommy had proposed so far, the partnership that had just started to blossom might suddenly wilt and die.

S
EARLE AND
K
UTZLEB
first had lunch with the investor at the Columbus Club downtown. Then their meeting with Tommy, Wayne Ashby, and Robbie Hoffman began about 2:00
P.M.
in a small room upstairs in the club. The meeting did not conclude until a quarter past five.

When Searle, Kutzleb, and the investor walked into the room, Ashby glanced quickly at Tommy, because tight in the fist of one of the consultants was a copy of Tommy’s concept paper. Tommy’s face went from flush to the color of lead. The investor had violated the nondisclosure agreement not only by inviting two deep-ocean consultants to come question Tommy, but also by sending them and asking them to review Tommy’s bible on the
Central America
.

“These guys walked in with Tommy’s treasured secret book,” remembered Ashby, “and Tommy just about had a heart attack.”

The investor introduced Searle and Kutzleb by saying, “I just happened to have these two good friends of mine who know something about the deep ocean, and I figured you wouldn’t mind if …”

Tommy did mind. He reminded the investor that he had violated his nondisclosure agreement by even mentioning the project to anyone outside the partnership, and that he had further violated that agreement by revealing the contents of the concept paper to consultants in the deep-ocean community. He said he would not talk to the consultants until they had signed nondisclosure agreements, which they refused to do. But Tommy reiterated that he would not talk to them about his theories until they did, so Searle and Kutzleb took a few minutes to read the two-page nondisclosure, and with an attitude that Robbie described as, Well-I-suppose-we-can-do-this-since-we-don’t-believe-you-in-the-first-place, they agreed to sign, but only after they had made a few changes. Then Tommy watched them cross out nearly half of the nondisclosure.

When Tommy objected, they said, “Hey, we’re in the business of salvage. What if somebody asks us to do a salvage of this ship? We won’t do it?”

As bad as he thought the meeting would be, Tommy never envisioned it would get as bad as this, and it had hardly begun. “They had all our information, access to the ocean community, and they marked out the two sections that really said the important stuff, like they weren’t going to compete, and signed it. It was like, ‘Okay, go on.’ It was terrible, but I couldn’t walk out now, that really would have been bad.”

With the nondisclosures marked up and signed, Searle showed a movie about the deep ocean; then he and Kutzleb talked about their experience and gave what Searle described as “a general tutorial on underwater search at these great depths.” They said that if this young man had good equipment and good people—“And we can lead him to good equipment and we’re good people,” Searle interjected—he might locate the ship. But locating the ship was “only scratching the surface on cost,” said Searle. Next he had to recover the treasure, and that couldn’t be done. “First,” said Searle, “it would be hellishly expensive,” and that was not the worst part. Searle was an expert not only on deep-water recovery but also on the
Central America
. The ship and the
aftermath of its sinking had long intrigued him, and for years he had researched and filed articles on the story. At his home in Virginia, he kept a huge box of information on the
Central America
, and he had concluded that without the federal government behind it and national security at stake, no one could get to it. The technology did not exist to do what this young man said he was going to do. “It’s never been done,” said Searle. He and Kutzleb were aware of every recovery ever attempted at those depths. “This includes H-bombs, airplanes, missiles, nuclear generators that NASA put up and nobody ever knew about,” he explained. “Between us, we have a handle on everything that has been looked for and either not found or found and left lay. Some of it is still classified.”

Tommy now had to try to refute their assertions without revealing his research on the SeaMARC’s capability, or what he had learned about the bottom characteristics of the Blake Ridge, or how he had rethought the whole concept of working on the floor of the deep ocean. Robbie noted that the conversation began to deteriorate about the time Tommy opened his mouth. He got out a sentence or two, and either Searle or Kutzleb said, “That’s not the way it is.”

“He was immediately attacked,” said Robbie, “as to location, his thoughts about recovery, everything, and it was done in kind of a sarcastic, you’re-just-a-young-kid type of way. Searle was probably a little more sarcastic about it, speaking about the age difference and all their experience picking up salvage off the bottom for the navy. How could Harv do it if they couldn’t?”

No matter what Tommy said, they countered with, “No, that won’t work because. …” They pointed out that the
Central America
was somewhere under the Gulf Stream, and that working in the Gulf Stream was extremely difficult because of the currents. They reiterated that even if he could find it, he could not recover it. “Nobody’s ever gone that deep,” they said. “What makes you think you can do it?”

Tommy had thought about it all, and he had answers to everything, but he couldn’t give them. “All the stuff it took me all those years to figure out, like about the bottom characteristics and what kind of side scan could be used. These guys didn’t even know about the SeaMARC.

So he had to phrase his answers to counter their accusations without revealing too much. But sometimes he got so irritated and angry that he had been forced into this confrontation, he became emphatic. “You’re just thinking about the problem in general, you’re not thinking about. …” And then he had to catch himself and carefully consider what he was going to say next and whether he should say it. Wayne Ashby was listening, and the investor was listening, and Wayne had had so much faith in him up to now, he couldn’t disappoint him, and who knew how many other people the investor would tell about what happened at this meeting. “But I was really getting into the nitty-gritty of what I knew at the time, and I didn’t want to tell them how to do it.”

“I’ll never forget it,” said Robbie. “One of the guys would interrupt and deliver his theory, and Harvey’s sitting down at the end of the table, ‘Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope,’ shaking his head, ‘nope, nope,’ just the whole time. ‘You old guys have no idea what’s going on!’”

They would say, “Well, how’re you going to do it then?”

And Tommy could hear the investor thinking, “Yeah, how’re you going to do it?”

He had to answer, so then he would stop and say, “You sign those nondisclosure agreements the way they’re originally drafted, and I’ll tell you.”

But he couldn’t say that all the time, because he would appear to be avoiding difficult questions. He tried to explain the SeaMARC without saying too much about how it could be adapted to image a wooden shipwreck, and Searle interrupted, “The ship’s in the rocks on the cliffs, so this piece of equipment won’t work there.” Tommy had the answer, but he didn’t want to divulge such a critical piece of information, even if it did help him win the argument. So he countered with, “You’re just making assumptions that are different than mine. What you’re objecting to doesn’t apply to our situation.”

But sometimes they would push him until he had to say, “Well, I can’t … I can’t tell you that.”

As the confrontation continued into its second hour and then the third, Ashby and Robbie noticed that Kutzleb seemed to be agreeing with Tommy on some of the issues. More than once, when Searle said, “Young man, that won’t work,” Kutzleb interjected, “Yeah, Bill, they’re doing that now.”

“Not that Kutzleb was agreeable,” said Robbie. “Harvey just caught the guy with the facts, and he couldn’t walk away from that.”

Although Kutzleb seemed to understand more of what Tommy was saying, he still challenged most of it, especially the amount of money Tommy was proposing and the time frame he was proposing: About $5 million and three years. Kutzleb never said how much or how long, just that if it were possible, it would take longer and require more money than what Tommy had proposed.

Ashby knew little about the technical side, but after listening to the debate, he concluded, “I had more belief in Tommy than I did in these experts.” Kutzleb implied that sooner or later the deep ocean would be accessible, which is what Tommy had been saying all along. And the debate reinforced that the
Central America
really did exist, there really was gold on it, and it was in the area where Tommy was looking. “I was encouraged,” said Ashby.

But while Ashby was hearing that at least the project was viable, Robbie was hearing that the experts had decided that Tommy was not the one to do it, and that anyone who tried was going to need tens, maybe hundreds of millions of dollars behind them.

Searle was adamant that even if someone could develop the equipment, it was going to cost “one pocketful of money.” He had been there. He had developed equipment to do fancy things on the
Scorpion
recovery. His advice to the investor was, “Don’t be taken in by the odds of success towards the search. You’ve got to think in terms of the whole goddamn operation, search and recovery, and the critical item of that pair becomes the recovery. So when somebody says, ‘I’m raising five million to go and look for the wreck,’ ask if the five million includes recovery or does that just get me a photograph or some television of the wreck on the bottom, which then becomes just more enticement? That amount was not near enough to fund a recovery. If the search costs five million, you’re talking about at least another order of magnitude, that is to say fifty million, to even begin to be in the ballpark for success of recovery. Maybe orders of magnitude. I’ve been in situations where it’s almost like this but the object was not gold. The object was some weapon or some object of great national interest and value.”

Searle compared a project to recover the
Central America
with the
Glomar Explorer
project, the top-secret attempt to recover the Russian submarine in 1974, when the government poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the project, and he estimated that the
Central America
project would be more difficult, “because you don’t have any idea where to look.” Then he put the whole thing into perspective. “Say this had been proposed to me: Do I think he can do it for ten million? The odds of that happening are maybe one percent. It’s remote. Man, I have been on several operations and we were trying to do things like that, but they didn’t work that smoothly, and we had the whole goddamn United States treasury behind us!”

Despite the concerns of Searle and Kutzleb, Searle’s friend invested in the project, although less than he had planned. Within three months, Tommy had thirty-eight partners who had invested a total of $200,000 in him. Their vote of confidence said, We like you, we trust you, your idea seems sound; here is enough money to mold that idea into a project we all can see and hear and touch. Now get your concepts down, finish your historical research, arrange for contracts with your suppliers, consult with your expert on search theory, start looking for a vessel, and line up the SeaMARC. Then come back to us and show us what you’ve done, and if we like what we see, we’ll give you more.

OFF THE CAROLINA COAST

M
IDNIGHT
, S
ATURDAY
, S
EPTEMBER
12, 1857

A
BOUT SIX THAT
evening, a man-of-war hawk had tumbled from the grayness, then swooped across the quarterdeck, grazing Captain Anders Johnsen’s shoulder as he stood with the helmsman and two of his crew. Seamen’s superstitions long had held that an encounter with birds far at sea was a harbinger of danger ahead, but Johnsen ignored the bird. The bird flitted into the rigging, beating its wings incessantly, and then it dived again and circled the captain’s head in what he later described as “an extraordinary maneuver.” He ducked away, the bird darted over the deck, banked, and for the third time came at him, aiming for his face. When it neared, wings flailing, the captain grabbed it by the throat.

The bird was like none Johnsen had ever seen. Its feathers were iron gray, its body a foot and a half long, and its wings tip to tip more
than twice its length. The beak was a weapon, eight inches long and lined with teeth like a hacksaw. They ripped into Johnsen’s right thumb, then the bird bit two of the crew as they tied its legs. The bird lunged at everyone who came near, until Johnsen told one of his men to cut off its head and throw the body overboard.

The bow of the
Ellen
heaved in a sea pocked with hills of water blown white by a wind still harsh. On the 17th of August the Norwegian bark had departed Belize, her hold laden with mahogany logs, her course aimed across the Caribbean Sea for the Straits of Florida to catch the Gulf Stream, which she would ride most of the way to Falmouth, England. Caught in the storm, she had made considerable water, lost most of her shrouds, and had her foremast ripped from the deck.