Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea (69 page)

The most confusing of all the misleading signs of gold at the site were the casings left behind by the tubeworms. As the worms bored into a beam, they created curlicue shavings of calcium carbonate, like shells, six to ten inches long. When the worms burrowed into the timbers and the timbers finally broke apart, the white casings dropped to litter other timbers in the wreckage. Then the iron oxide bleeding from hundreds of tons of corroding steam engines drifted through the water, staining the shavings a yellowish orange. At a distance of only several feet, the glare of bright lights shining on those stained shavings made them glint like collapsed piles of gold coins. The crew had seen similar trailings on Galaxy the year before and been fooled time and again into thinking they were seeing gold. The site at Galaxy II lay covered with them.

M
ILT HAD DEVELOPED
the film from the long dive on the 23rd, when they had shot for hours among the timbers before plucking the bell from the foredeck. As he studied the pictures, he saw something in one he had seen in none of the hundreds of other stills they had shot: a series of tiny bright spots with a faint, yellowish cast. The lights seemed to have hit something metallic at the right angle to ricochet back at the cameras just as the vehicle passed over a riddled beam. The beam ran way back into the timbers, under collapsed parts of the decking. Other beams ran parallel to it out of the debris, but this beam angled upward by itself another four or five feet. It was worn, jagged, its original ten-inch heft eaten down, and it tapered toward the end, where Milt had seen the glimmer. Whatever had caused the glimmer, the scene looked as if
that worn piece of timber had reached out like a catcher’s mitt reaches out to cup a foul ball. Milt told Doering about the slide.

“He was always doing that to me,” said Doering, “And it was a joke. ‘Oh, Milt, what’d you see now?’”

But Milt had seen the bell first, Doering couldn’t deny that, and he had seen it in a complex area of debris, at an odd angle, with poor lighting, and other shadows and shapes around it to confuse what he was seeing. So maybe Milt was developing an eye for discerning three-dimensional objects in a distorted, two-dimensional world. Then again, maybe he got lucky.

With the two of them in the lab and the door closed, Milt said, “I just developed these pictures. Take a look at this one.”

Doering leaned over the light table, squeezed one eye closed, and peered through the loupe. He studied the picture for a long while, saying nothing. Then he looked up with a by-golly grin and said, “You know, Milt, that does look good. It looks damn good, like gold coins laying there.”

When the vehicle flew over that part of the ship two or three meters up, everything around the beam had appeared on the monitors in varying shades of blue. No one had noticed anything unusual. And they still couldn’t be sure. “Either the camera wasn’t in focus or we were still too far away,” said Doering, “but it was really the first time we both agreed that that definitely had a possibility of being gold.”

Tommy planned each dive for efficiency. He had little time left, and much to do, and he could not land until he understood the site. He was always prepared to deviate from a plan but not abruptly and not completely, even to look for gold. When Milt and Doering showed him the transparency of the beam, he had already written the dive plan for that night, a short dive only to recover the bell. That would remain the single objective for the dive, but in the plan for the following dive, he scheduled time for an additional objective: to take another, lower photo run at that beam sticking up and analyze it for a way to land nearby without disturbing the site.

T
HAT NIGHT
, M
OORE
had the vehicle on the bottom next to the bell at nine-thirty, and in forty-five minutes he had snagged the basket with the grappling hook, winched it up snug beneath the vehicle, and the vehicle
was on its way to the surface with the bell wedged into the basket. When the vehicle swung aboard on the crane, they slid the basket from underneath, covered it with a tarp, and Tommy had everyone leave and stay away from the area.

Late that night, alone on the deck, Tommy, Bob, Milt, and Scotty slid the basket into a flood of light underneath the awning, rinsed the bell with fresh water, and brushed it lightly. Patches of pale orange and verdigris mottled the dark gray-green of the bell, and a blotch of cobalt blue appeared in the middle of the word “Morgan.” In the band around the top of the bell, they now could read the inscription “Morgan Iron Works New York,” the same foundry that had cast the fittings and the huge steam engines of the
Central America
. Although the first two numbers of the date were lost in orange rust, they could read half of the number “5” and right next to it the number “3.” The
Central America
had set to sea under her christening name the SS
George Law
in 1853.

In Tommy’s mind, the odds that this site was the
Central America
had jumped dramatically the moment they saw the sidewheels and the engine works almost two weeks earlier, and with each successive dive, studying the configuration of the ship and seeing Bob’s tiny flakes of gold, he had become more convinced. But it was infinitely more difficult to excite his partners with another chain of circumstantial evidence than it was to say to them, “Here’s the bell from the SS
Central America
.” It wasn’t gold, but it was the next best thing. “That really confirmed it,” said Tommy. “You start thinking about the odds now: We got sidewheels, we got the right engines, we got the bell, this is really it!”

From the loop at its top down to the flair of its skirt, the bell was cast from solid bronze two feet wide and two and a half feet tall. It weighed about the same as two average-size men. To move it, they had to run heavy deck lines through the loop and knot the lines over a thick pipe. Then, with a tarp draped over the pipe, Scotty squatted at one end and Milt at the other, and the two stood together and walked with quick steps across the deck to the starboard side of the housing like hunters shouldering a carcass.

The bell was so wide, they couldn’t get it through the doorway until they took the door off its hinges, and even then they had to tilt it and twist it and jam it through in one long, continuous push with help from
Tommy and Bob. Once inside, they removed the pipe and the ropes, then Milt took two steps down the narrow stairs leading to the lower deck, the others rested the bell against his back, and he slowly descended the steps to Bob’s small laboratory, where they took the lab door off its hinges and worked the bell through the doorway as they had topside, and carefully set it on the floor. Then they put the door back on its hinges, and Bob locked the door, leaving among his specimens and artifacts and books on biology, oceanography, history, and life at the bottom of the sea, the same bell that Captain Herndon had used to sound his departure the morning the SS
Central America
had steamed from Havana.

T
HE DAY AFTER
they recovered the bell, the weather crept back up to fifteen-knot winds and six-foot seas, still low enough to launch and recover the vehicle, but that day they did not dive; they waited for parts from the beach. With the vehicle cinched down and covered on deck, Tommy, Milt, Doering, Barry, and Bob continued to study and talk about the beam. Three of them had persuaded Tommy to increase the time he had allotted in the next dive plan for shooting closer stills of the curious yellow-orange glint. Barry thought that the glint looked like mushroom caps growing on the beam, but Tommy now agreed that the beam deserved a closer look.

The following day the winds edged up another ten knots and the seas another two feet, and again the vehicle remained on deck. On September 27, despite the seas’ hitting five to eight feet, they launched the vehicle at nine-thirty in the morning. Tommy’s dive plan was to run still-camera flyovers from the rudder up the keel, then work over to the beam Milt had spotted and shoot it as close as they could. First, they dragged forty-meter track lines up and down the stern deck; although they shot 172 stills, they didn’t know how many would turn out, because the camera shutters seemed to be sticking and the strobe often was not in sync.

Moore then flew the vehicle at Tommy’s direction and came in above the area Tommy wanted to shoot. “I remember that day quite clearly,” said Moore, “because they were very interested in this one spot, and we could see some bright stuff.”

The timbers there were sharp and jagged and riddled with holes. Time and the sea and the animals of the sea had conspired to reduce the once stout beams to a forest of decayed wood with pockets and crevices and holes all filled with white pools of sediment.

As Moore flew the vehicle slowly toward the beam, Tommy said, “This is it, right here. It’s one of those.”

Moore eased down closer.

“Do not knock it off,” said Tommy. “You close enough to get a shot of that?”

“No,” said Moore.

“How close are we?” asked Tommy.

“Twelve feet,” said Moore.

Moore dropped closer. The timbers in this whole area looked so thin and fragile that if he were to touch anything, even being underwater, it would snap with a dry crack. The vehicle inched closer, now within seven feet of the beam, now within six. As it crept in, shadows moved in the background, giving Moore a better sense of the third dimension.

“It’s that thing sticking right out on the end there,” said Doering.

Down closer, the beam looked almost like the head of a mythic animal, its mouth open, a gargoyle jutting out from the front of an old library. With the vehicle five feet up, Milt fired the still cameras, the whole scene brightening in the flash. Light bubbles of particulate matter floated by. Milt fired the cameras again, and a couple of shiny spots reflected the vehicle’s lights.

Everyone watched the monitors as Moore eased the vehicle closer and closer, and Milt snapped pictures of decayed wood covered with silt and the occasional spindly-legged sea star.

“It’s these bright things, right here,” said Tommy, pointing at the monitor. He agreed with Milt and Doering—they could be looking at coins. “Those things here are what we’re …” His voice trailed off. “Boy, look at those. What do you think, Bob?”

“In this area,” said Bob, “it’s deceiving.”

The vehicle now was directly above the beam, only two feet away. Except for the intermittent moan of the thrusters, the control room was silent as the techs studied the monitors and strained to see beyond what
the resolution of the video cameras would allow them to see. “Those are the droppings of the infamous tubeworms,” said Moore.

“I don’t think so,” said Tommy.

“Yep,” said Moore. “We have lots of tubeworms that are exactly that color in the photographs.”

“I don’t think so,” Tommy said again.

“Yep,” Moore said again, “they’re tubeworms.”

“Okay,” said Tommy, “down on that …”

“… there are tubeworms,” Moore finished Tommy’s sentence. “Can show you in other photographs why. It’s that color they turn out.”

The vehicle was rotating slowly to the right, the cameras looking into a depression where they saw many short, straight, gray lines, like small bricks covered with dust.

“What I find interesting,” said Moore, “are those blocks right there.” Milt fired the cameras at the depression several times, and Moore got increasingly excited about what he was seeing. “I don’t give a shit about your tubeworms,” he said, “but those are goddamn bricks! I don’t know if they’re bricks out of an oven or if they’re bricks out of a boiler, but those are goddamn bricks right there, and that’s where I’d go down and take a look!”

Milt shot another forty-three photos around the gargoyle, until just shy of five o’clock in the afternoon, when the power blew in the subsea computer and they had to end the dive.

T
HAT NIGHT THEY
worked on the vehicle till late, and the next morning they were on deck again at seven o’clock, continuing their work. Although the seas were at eight feet, they would try to launch. At mid-morning Milt began preparing the cameras for the dive and Doering went to the darkroom to develop the film of the gargoyle from the previous day.

Between the two cameras, they had shot 215 stills during the flyovers and the hang-and-shoot above the beam. Doering developed the 164 frames from the port camera first. When he pulled the film from the chemical bath, cut it into strips, and hung them up to dry, he noticed that the first strip was black. So was the next, and so was the next. The entire cassette had somehow been overexposed.

Doering knew they had had problems with the camera during the dive, but he thought at least some of the pictures would turn out. Now he wondered if he was doing something wrong in the developing. Without the stills, they couldn’t tell what they were looking at, and without that finer vision, they could be on top of gold and not even know it. Weather and technical problems already limited the number of dives, so each opportunity to shoot stills was becoming more and more precious, and they couldn’t afford to waste these opportunities. Any dive could be the last, and then they would have to head back to the beach with only a bell and hundreds of interesting photographs to present to their partners.

When Doering saw the black strips of film, he was so disgusted with himself and the cameras, he left the other film cassette in the darkroom, locked the door, and went to the galley for lunch. At lunch, one of the other techs asked him how the film looked from the last dive, and Doering drooped his shoulders and widened his eyes without looking the tech in the face. “Well,” he said, “they didn’t turn out at all.”

“It was fairly demoralizing,” Doering said later. “I was feeling kinda bummed out about it.”

After lunch, he returned to the photo lab to process the film from the starboard camera. According to his records, they had shot that camera fifty-one times. When he pulled the film from the chemical bath, he cut it into five-foot strips, hung them from clips, and screened off the chemicals. As he screened them off, he glanced at the strips to see if he had images; he did, and that made him happier. After he had all of the strips up and drying, he cleaned up the chemicals and put everything away, and when he returned to the film, he laid the strips on the light table to check the exposure. At those depths using artificial light, they constantly had to guess at the aperture setting and how fast they were firing the shutter; that was usually the first thing he checked when he developed the film. Then he would cut them into six-slide strips, coax them into plastic sheaths, and hook them into a three-ring binder.