Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea (36 page)

“There’s a whole spectrum of definitions,” said Bob. “And it’s quite different if somebody out there who is not a mariner says that a ‘light breeze’ was blowing. That just means, well, it felt nice. But a ‘fresh breeze,’ for instance, is different than a ‘light breeze.’ For a mariner, ‘fresh breeze’ means a wind of twenty knots.” With the wind chart, Bob included the amount of sail set from one hour to the next, until Friday
morning, when the wind shredded the storm spencer. Then he estimated the force of the wind exerted on the three bare masts and rigging, then on the two bare masts after they chopped one down, trying to quantify everything he could.

Stone had done search analyses on dozens of persons, ships, and other things lost at sea, but no one like Bob Evans had been there to organize the data for him; Stone had had to sort out all of the inconsistencies himself, and he sometimes had to study intensely for a week just to begin to make sense of the problem. But Bob had done this for him already. “Bob Evans seemed to have a flair for historical investigation,” said Stone. “I was taking a much more technical view, and then he came up with this rich collection of interesting detail to go with it. That made the analysis much, much easier. He had done an incredibly detailed and careful job of it, and I mean, I was very impressed.”

To understand the time line so he could picture the events and formulate the scenarios, Stone read Bob’s narrative summary of the sinking twice and then studied the map, the matrix, and the wind chart. For his initial analysis, he produced rough maps, one of each of the three scenarios they had chosen: one around the
Ellen
coordinate, one around the
Central America
coordinate, and one around the
Marine
coordinate. He took all of the information Bob had given him, converted it to mathematics, and computed each scenario separately by tossing all of the numbers into a computer, which absorbed uncertainties by producing sets of pseudo-random numbers. Then he modeled each scenario ten thousand times. From this he got a scatter of points, each a possible location of the target. Over the scatter he drew a grid of two-mile-square cells, counted up the number of points that fell into each cell, and divided by the same ten thousand; and that gave him the probability that in that scenario the
Central America
was located within that two-mile-square cell. But once he had mapped each scenario, he was not happy with what he found. He sent transparencies of the maps to Tommy so Tommy could lay one over the top of another to see the problem: The three scenarios did not overlap as they should, which meant that the information somehow was inconsistent. A piece to the search map puzzle was still missing.

OFF THE CAROLINA COAST

S
UNDAY
, S
EPTEMBER
13, 1857

W
HEN THEY HEARD
beams exploding upward in the hold and water splashing just beneath the saloon, a fireman named Alexander Grant and nine other men abandoned the bailing lines and the pumps and cut away a large section of the hurricane deck and lashed it with ropes. Then Grant hurried below to search for more life vests, but he felt the big steamer lurch suddenly in a heavy sea, and when he made his way back on deck, his companions already had launched the raft off the leeward bow. Grant saw the raft as his only salvation. He leaped, hit the water, surfaced next to the raft, then reached back with his dirk to cut the last line holding the raft to the steamer. The waves lifted the raft and dropped it again, pulling it away, ten men clinging to the ropes. Moments later, the third wave had hit the steamer and the roar of her
succumbing to the sea had drowned all other noise, and she had gone down amid cracking and hissing, sucking under men and debris. But the waves had pushed the raft with the ten men just beyond the vortex.

Seven of the men were crew members, mostly coal passers and firemen, like Grant; the other three were passengers. So heavy were the men upon the narrow timbers that the raft floated nearly two feet beneath the surface. No man could sit upright, but each had to lie on his stomach, with his feet dangling in the water, his hands gripping the ropes they had lashed. The waves lifted them and rocked the raft and then washed over them, sending them under, where they swallowed the seawater. Throughout the night, they prayed that the schooner or the brig would suddenly tack near them and the crew would hear their shouts and strong arms would pluck them from their raft. But both stayed a long way off, and all they heard in the distance were the cries of their comrades.

Grant already had survived three shipwrecks. In one he had tossed in a storm so violent that the masts had snapped and toppled across the deck, crippling the mate, and the waves had swallowed the brig only moments after the crew had leaped to a passing ship one hundred miles off Boston. In another, he had floated in the icy North Atlantic with one other shipmate on a fore-hatch, standing with water up to his waist, holding on to a rope. Three times sails had appeared and bore down upon them, first topmasts, then mainsails, then a hull coming into view, and they had blessed the ships and were poised to shout to them, when suddenly the wind had shifted, and just as the ships reached where their crews could spot the fore-hatch, the crews had jibbed the sails and blown forth on another tack. For three days and two nights, they had stood in the cold water with no food and nothing to drink, the bleak Newfoundland wind raking the North Atlantic. And then at noon of the third day, they had seen another sail, again bearing down upon them, and every few minutes she had grown larger, but the sea was running high, and their legs were numb with cold, and half a dozen times the waves had swept Grant off the hatch. Then, when the ship was no more than a mile or two distant, they saw a flag run up the yardarm, as the ship drew closer and closer, until, just before dark, she plucked them from the sea.

“I thought then,” said Grant, “that I had suffered as much as mortal man could.”

The third time Grant was shipwrecked the sea had slammed his sailing vessel onto a reef in the Bahamas. One of the crew shipwrecked with him was a black man named George Dawson, who was a steerage passenger aboard the
Central America
when it went down. At daybreak on Sunday, a black man floating with a life preserver and small boards under each arm approached Grant’s raft and the survivors clinging to it. It was George Dawson. Since the raft already was overloaded and floating beneath the surface, the men said he could not get on, but that he could take hold of one of the ropes and float along with them. So with the pieces of board still under his arms, Dawson grasped a rope and floated beside the raft.

W
HEN THE
Central America
sank, Dawson had been sucked straight down headfirst into the vortex, but his life preserver had popped him quickly back to the surface. A man who could not swim had grabbed him by the neck, and only by ducking under the man and prying his arms loose had Dawson escaped his grip. Then he had found three pieces of board and placed the largest under one arm, the two smaller pieces under the other arm, and he had floated on the three boards until late in the night he had seen the lights of a bark tacking back and forth. The bark had sailed within a hundred feet, and Dawson had cried out for help, but no one heard his cries.

Soon after Dawson reached the raft early Sunday morning, the men saw the bark four or five miles distant, too far to try to signal. They watched her until midmorning, when she disappeared, and they never saw her again. The men had been in the water now over twelve hours. The sea had dropped and the clouds had parted and the sun shone brightly, but the men were thirsty and exhausted. Many nodded on the verge of succumbing to sleep and had to be roused, but the others lacked the strength to prop them up or even tie them to the raft. As the morning wore on, delirium began sprouting inside the heads of some of the men. They babbled of cool springs bubbling and rich feasts set just beyond their reach, and lost in their sublime hallucinations they often came
near to upsetting the raft. Before noon one fellow dropped his face into the seawater, drank heartily, raved for moments, then rolled from the raft to drown before the eyes of the others. By nightfall three more had sunk down too exhausted to lift their heads, drowned, and floated off into the sea.

Dawson still clung to the ropes lashed to the raft, but with four of the original ten men now gone, he abandoned his boards and pulled himself onto the raft. During the night, despite his pleas and the pleas from Grant to fight sleep and not swallow the seawater, four more men perished. By Monday morning, there remained only Grant, Dawson, and one other man.

The raft now was so light they could kneel, the water being barely a foot deep, and in this kneeling position they braced themselves and tried to sleep. That evening just before dark, the three of them picked up another man floating alone. But the following day, now Tuesday, the new man grew despondent, and his despondency deepened into delirium until he, too, began to hallucinate. He said that by God he was going down to the pantry and the mess and get himself some food and water. The steward himself had told him he could have some water if he’d just come down for it. Then, as though the delirium were contagious, the other man entered the same hallucination, his talk just as deranged as that of the first, and the two ranted with the imaginary steward about the food in the pantry and the water below. Dawson and Grant tried to talk them down, to bring them back, but by evening the two men had whipped themselves into such a frenzy, they suddenly pushed themselves from the raft and swam off together in the dark.

Now alone on the raft, Dawson and Grant had had nothing to eat for five days and nothing to drink for four. Although small fishes often came up to the raft and swam about between the beams, they moved too quickly to capture by hand. But on Wednesday, a fish weighing several pounds jumped onto the raft and before it could flop and slither back over the edge, Dawson grabbed it by its tail and beat its head against the timbers until it quivered and died. With his knife, Grant cut it up and gave small pieces to his comrade, but the flesh was so tough and
unpalatable that hungry as they were, neither man could chew it. After a day of lying in the sun, the fish was more tender, and they forced themselves to eat small portions.

On Thursday, a man floating on a plank saw the raft and paddled slowly in their direction. When the plank thumped against the raft, Grant and Dawson helped him on board. He had been floating alone for four and a half days, and within hours of his arrival, he too suddenly became boisterous. Grant and Dawson tried to console and encourage him, but his suffering was so intense he seemed not to hear, for he soon lay down in the water and slipped away.

No one knows if this man was James Birch, or if one of the two men who swam off into the night was James Birch, or if one of the other two passengers originally on the raft was James Birch; but James Birch, the former president of the California Stage Company, the man who had established the first transcontinental stage line, at some point was on the raft with Dawson. An hour before the sinking, Dr. Obed Harvey had talked to Birch, and Birch had said he had little hope of being saved. Wearing a long, heavy overcoat, he seemed saddened but resigned. Ansel Easton had finally persuaded him to exchange the overcoat for a life preserver, and when the ship went down, Birch ended up on either the tenman raft or a stout plank with a single possession: a small silver baby cup, with which he had boarded the
Sonora
back in San Francisco three weeks earlier, a cup ornately engraved as a gift from a friend to Birch’s new son, Frank.

Birch’s stage line stopped in Oroville, where Dawson worked in a hotel, and perhaps they had come to know each other from regular stops. Maybe the relationship began and ended that night. But sometime in the night, Birch explained the significance of the sterling silver cup to Dawson, handed him the cup, and asked that if Dawson be saved he deliver it to Birch’s son in Massachusetts. Then Birch either lost consciousness and slid into the sea or became delirious and swam away, Dawson and the others too weak to stop him.

Now Dawson himself began swinging through moods of despondency, and in one of these moods he called to Grant: “For God’s sake, look out and see if you can see anything.” To appease Dawson, Grant
lifted up and peered out at the horizon, and in the distance, he saw a lifeboat with an oar raised, and from the oar flapped an overcoat.

J
OHN
T
ICE, THE
second assistant engineer on the
Central America
, had had no time to grab a life preserver before the steamer sank. When the first of the final waves had hit and the stern had rapidly begun to drop, Tice ripped loose a board about ten feet long and an inch and a half thick and sprang as far out from the ship as he could, then paddled hard to get away. He had cleared the stern by about forty feet when he saw the waves closing over the bow. By the time the steamer had begun its slow spin, he was beyond the vortex. The last thing he saw of the ship was Captain Herndon standing on the hurricane deck. Then the steamer disappeared and the sea began to boil where she had been, and in the midst of the boiling, debris from the wreck shot to the surface.

His chest on the center of the board, Tice paddled with the wind. He saw lights way in the distance, and he continued to paddle toward them for two hours until they disappeared. Two more hours passed when he again saw ship’s lights, only this time they were much closer than before. In the lights he could make out the black silhouette of a hull heading directly toward him, but at less than a quarter mile, the vessel altered its course. First the hull, then the lights disappeared, as the others had earlier. During the night, Tice encountered seven other men, all floating on pieces of the wreck, and they spoke to him, but he remembered none of their names.

The following day, though the sea still swelled, the storm had passed, and the sun blazed through parting clouds. Once again he saw the bark, but she was standing off, and as the sun climbed higher in the east the bark moved closer to the horizon in the west. By eleven o’clock, the day was hot and the bark was gone. Tice floated alone on the swells, rising and falling, seeing nothing but water and sky and the front of his plank. Occasionally, a wave would lift fragments of the wreck into his sight, and once he saw a life preserver dance over the summit of a wave, then disappear. In the darkness of Sunday night, his fatigue overcame him several times and his head dropped and he fell into a deep sleep, only to awake suddenly to find his hands frozen at the sides of the plank. The
awakenings frightened him, for moments would pass before he realized where he was, and then the deep loneliness would engulf him so completely that after a while he fought sleep. All through Monday and Monday night, he drifted.