Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea (70 page)

For over fifteen years, Doering had been looking at things underwater. He had seen artifacts lying on the bottom of the ocean that dated back three or four centuries, back to when explorers and conquerors still plied the Caribbean in ships stuffed with booty from the New World
and an abundance of their own tools of daily existence that would become archaeological treasures after aging at the bottom of the sea. From societies long past, he had seen jugs and dishes and bowls and canisters and vials and cut glass. He had seen armor and swords and arquebuses and cannons. He had seen collections of jewels and bars of silver. He had seen gold. But nothing prepared him for what now lay on the light table waiting for his eye.

With the first strip laid out, he placed the loupe over one of the pictures, and in a twinkling appeared the most spectacular sight he had ever seen.

“It was just … it was just …
covered
with gold! I couldn’t believe it! I
couldn’t
believe it! That was the most thrilling…. We had hit right on a pile, nice low pictures, nice and clear. I mean everything was perfect, man. It was incredible! But I looked at it, and I looked up, and, Naaaah, this can’t be. I thought, That’s gotta be a bunch of brass laying there. So I looked again! Holy! And I just started looking at the other shots, and I … mean … it … was … PILES! I’m not kidding you, it is awesome! It is absolutely awesome! Stacks of coins and bars of gold of every size and shape are just sitting there!”

Doering picked up that five-foot strip, grabbed the loupe, and took the steps two at a time up to the next deck, where he found Tommy and Barry in the communications room. The door was open, so he walked in and ceremoniously closed the door behind him.

“I’m telling you my heart was pounding,” he remembered. “I mumbled something incoherent like, ‘Wah, wah, wah.’”

He handed the strip to Tommy, who held it up to the light.

Doering heard Tommy say something like, “Boy, I never thought …,” and then he heard a yahoo.

“God, he was happy,” said Doering. “We were just on top of the world! We had done it! We had found it!”

But Tommy warned Doering to say nothing about the pictures and do nothing that would make the others suspicious. He was excited, he felt great, but they couldn’t let on to anyone what they had just seen. Tommy needed to deal with the information responsibly.

Bob was on deck with Burlingham, Tod, Bryan, and a few others, preparing the vehicle for the day’s dive. Doering had to get down on deck
to run the crane. He hurried back to the photo lab, laid the strip out on the light table, locked the door, and went out on deck. Bob was in his life vest standing just behind the crane, ready to handle one of the lines on the vehicle during launch. Doering knew that Bob had a key to the darkroom; he also knew that when they had the vehicle ready to launch, Moore or somebody would spend another twenty minutes checking the switches and doing other little deck checks. He perched himself on the crane pedestal with a sassy grin on his face and aimed it at Bob. Bob saw the grin and hoisted himself up onto the rail next to the crane; Doering leaned over.

“I think there’s something you ought to see,” whispered Doering. “When we get a break here, there’s some film laying on the light table. Take a look at it, and let me know what you think.”

After listening for a second, Bob started hearing between the lines, and then a grin sprouted on his face, too. He set his line down, but just as he turned to walk down the deck, Doering stopped him.

“Oh, Bob,” he said, “better take along a change of underwear.”

B
EFORE THEY COULD
launch the vehicle, the weather dropped further, and they could not dive that day. Nor could they dive the next day or the next. For three days the seas rolled in at eight to ten feet, and the wind peaked at thirty knots. And during those three days, the vehicle sat on deck and Tommy and Bob studied the pictures of the site, those taken earlier at higher altitudes and the later tight shots, looking for a place they could work the vehicle in close enough to photograph the area and then reach out with the manipulator and recover coins and bars. Because the vehicle left a footprint four feet by twelve feet, Moore needed a flat patch of sediment that size plus a margin of a few feet on each side. But the gold lay in a fragile area near the edge of the core, where remnants of timbers crisscrossed and jutted out. “It looked like it could all just cave in,” said Tommy.

Now into October, the seas remained at five to eight feet, and the wind came in at a stiff twenty to twenty-five knots. They launched on the morning of the 1st anyhow, and the vehicle arrived on the bottom at 9:19, suspended just above the area they now called the Bank of California. Tommy had one objective on this dive: Shoot magazine-quality photos of the gold.

After they had surveyed the scene for ten minutes, Moore eased the vehicle lower and settled in next to an area Tommy had selected to begin their photography. It was safe and at the edge of what looked like a dense concentration of gold. With the vehicle resting on the bottom, they all stared at the monitors for a long while as Moore panned the cameras back and forth across the site. The piles of coins and bars that had shocked Doering still lay mostly covered with sediment. Doering had seen gold peeking from beneath the soft whiteness, hard angles of yellow bars askew and large spills of small, round, flat objects with hints of orange and brown and yellow showing through the silt, and piles obviously of coins and bars coated in white. Along the gargoyle, the hundred or more coins that had caught Milt’s eye glinted because the beam stuck up a few feet from the debris, and the slow current constantly washed them clean.

Moore aimed the forward thruster downward and dispatched a gentle wash of water to blow away the cover material. The sediment was thin, but when the wake of the thruster hit, it exploded upward, swirling into clouds, blotting out the rotted timbers, turning the monitors white. For several minutes the techs could see nothing but the roiling sediment. Then the clouds began to drift with the light current; the picture on the monitors began to clear and slowly revealed a scene few people could imagine.

“The bottom was carpeted with gold,” said Tommy. “Gold everywhere, like a garden. The more you looked, the more you saw gold growing out of everything, embedded in all the wood and beams. It was amazing, clear back in the far distance bars stacked on the bottom like brownies, bars stacked like loaves of bread, bars that appear to have slid into the corner of a room. Some of the bars formed a bridge, all gold bars spanning one area of treasure over here and another area over here, water underneath, and the decks collapsed through on both sides. Then there was a beam with coins stacked on it, just covered, couldn’t see the top of the beam it had so many coins on it.”

Like deep-ocean sentries, sea creatures guarded the treasure: gorgonian corals, feathery and white, stood erect above the gold; brisingid sea stars, a brilliant pink-orange, sprawled across piles of yellow bricks or perched atop a single bar, their arms drooped possessively; red anemones, their tentacles splayed, stuck to ledges and inside crevices spilling
with coins and bars. The scene was live, yet seemed forever like a photograph: piles of gold, much of it as yellow as the night it went down, surrounded by the neighbors it had known since that night in 1857.

“There’s so much of it,” said Doering, “and it’s shiny, and some of it’s real bright, and some of it sparkles at you, and some of it has this reddish cast to it, beautiful hues, all unmistakable. I wanna pick it up! I wanna bring it home!”

So many bricks lay tumbled upon one another at myriad angles that the thirty-foot pile appeared to be the remnants of an old building just demolished. Except these were bricks of gold: bricks flat, bricks stacked, bricks upright, bricks cocked on top of other bricks. And coins single, coins stacked, coins once in stacks now collapsed into spreading piles, some coins mottled in the ferrous oxide orange and brown from the rusting engines, others with their original mint luster. Besides a tiny squat lobster carefully picking its way across piles of coins, the scene lay perfectly still.

“Look at those damn fire bricks,” laughed Moore.

Milt saw a collection of bars and coins watched over by a pink-orange anemone softly fluttering in the current. “Boy, that’s nice,” he said.

Sticking up out of another area was a coin tower, eight stacks of gold coins, twenty-five coins to a stack, all of the stacks abutting one another like poker chips still in the rack, the whole thing frozen together and angled upward at sixty degrees.

“Isn’t that amazing,” said Bob.

“That is amazing,” said Doering.

In a couple of hard days, they could have grabbed every brick and most of the coins, but Tommy wanted the scene fully documented before they touched anything. Then he wanted to document the recovery of each bar and each coin carefully, one at a time.

Directly in front of the vehicle, only a few feet apart, were the first three scenes Tommy wanted to photograph and film, and the new rotating base allowed them to swivel from one to another without moving the vehicle: from the coin tower, to a pile of collapsed coins, to a mound of gold dust frozen ten inches high, dotted with nuggets, and capped by two small gold bars. As Tommy orchestrated the shoot, Moore rotated the vehicle, extended and retracted the camera trolley, and operated
the light booms; Milt combined aperture settings with shutter speeds and tried as many lighting angles as he could think to use. Sometimes they fired the cameras every ten to fifteen seconds, sometimes they rested the cameras to think through the next sequence. With the cameras sweeping the piles, everyone watched the monitors as gold eased into view, passed by, and was replaced by even more gold, the scenes continuously brightening with the pop of the strobes. After two hours, they had taken dozens of pictures, but they had touched none of the gold.

When they resumed the dive in the early afternoon, Tommy had Moore shoot another ten pictures before he directed him to recover the first artifact. Eight minutes later, he told Moore to pick up another artifact; five minutes later another artifact; five minutes later another; six minutes later another; twelve minutes later another. Each recovery came only after shooting several more stills of the scene and ended with Moore setting each piece of gold carefully in its own numbered compartment in a plastic tray resting on the seafloor. They now had six artifacts, each a small bar or coin collected at the edge of the scene. But Tommy would allow Moore to touch nothing else.

After they had completed the final shots of the three scenes, Moore rotated the vehicle beyond the mound of gold dust, and Tommy directed him where to aim the cameras for the pictures he wanted of a pile of fifteen to twenty gold bars, each about the size of a house brick. Moore swiveled the vehicle slightly, and into view came what looked like the head of an animal with scales: the coin-encrusted beam they now called the gargoyle.

“There’s the lure,” said Bob. “That’s what brought us here.” The gold coins stretching the length of the rotted beam, the coins that had glinted with just enough light to catch Milt’s eye, now looked like gold coins: shiny, yellow, round, engraved. As the cameras focused on the beam, more particulate matter drifted slowly by in the water, little white reminders that the otherwise still scene was not a photograph. Moore shot a dozen new stills of the beam. Then they focused on a pyramid of at least a hundred more coins, slowly moving the cameras in closer and closer. In the background, slightly blurred, a light pink-orange anemone opened its frondlike tentacles, which waved hypnotically in the current. Moore slid the camera so close to the pile, only inches away, that the crew
could see the precise grooves etched around the edges of the coins, which now appeared huge on the monitors. One had its back turned, and when Moore adjusted the camera, across the top they could read, “United States of America.” At the center was an eagle shield and the rays of the sun, and they could count thirteen stars in a tight oval above the eagle. Curving upward like a smile along the bottom appeared “Twenty D.,” and right above the “n” in “Twenty” was a tiny “s,” the mark of the San Francisco Mint.

“Look at that eagle shield on the back,” said Bob, “the luster on it!” Bob wanted an even closer shot of the mint stamp. “Just to the left and down,” he said to Moore.

Moore tapped the camera to the left.

“Look it!” yelled Milt. “Eighteen … you can read it!”

In adjusting the camera for Bob’s shot, Moore had passed another coin with the front side facing the camera, but he had swung about two inches too far to the left.

“Wow,” said Tommy. “Read that date, John.”

“We’re working on it,” said Moore.

Everyone laughed as Moore tapped the camera back again. There stood a coin upright, face front, just as pure and lustrous as the day it left the San Francisco Mint. It was emblazoned with the bust of Lady Liberty, lovely in profile, her hair crossed with a tiara and cascading in ringlets down her neck, thirteen stars surrounding her, and her ringlets stopping just short of the date “1857.” In a pocket thirty feet across, the ocean floor lay covered with these coins.

Doering figured he had now seen more gold in one place at one time than any other treasure hunter in history, and that included Cortés and Pizarro. He was ready to pluck some of that gold from the ocean floor, drop it into the artifact drawer, and bring it to the surface, so he could feel it right there in the palm of his hand. “Harv’s rationale,” said Doering, “was that this is the last time this gold will ever be in this untampered state, that you can’t have too many pictures of it ’cause you’ll never have that opportunity again. Couldn’t agree with you more. So we started taking photographs. And we took photographs. And we took photographs. And we kept on taking…. ‘Okay, Harv, we’ve got thousands of photographs from every conceivable angle, every conceivable
lighting situation. Let’s start picking this stuff up!’ He wouldn’t do it. We just tried everything, and of course, he’s still not satisfied. It drives me up a wall!”