Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea (73 page)

Tommy talked for over an hour about their accomplishments on the site that summer, the dramatic viewing of the sidewheels on the first dive, and the progression of finds at the site: the bell, Bob’s tiny gold filings in the sediment, the false sightings of rust-stained tubeworm shavings, then the discovery of a gold bar, and finally the storm that almost wrecked the vehicle as they brought the bar to the surface. He talked of his plans for the following season and how he intended to upgrade the vehicle to the next level of capability and find and recover the rest of the gold. He cautioned them again about keeping in confidence everything they had read in his letters and everything they were hearing and seeing that morning.

“Tommy,” asked someone from the audience, “what about the coins?”

“Oh,” said Tommy, as though he had forgotten. “Just a minute.” Then he reached into his pocket and pulled out two 1857 double-eagle twenty-dollar gold pieces and held them up. “I don’t know if you can see them,” he said, “so I’ll pass them around.” As he walked over to hand them to the first partner to examine, he looked up at the audience and
grinned. “Don’t anybody pocket ’em,” he said, which brought loud laughter from the group.

Bill Arthur loved the whole setting. “This gold bar, the double eagles,” said Arthur, “I mean, you couldn’t have written a better story. That was absolutely a coup. These guys all brought their wives so their wives could go
ohhhhhhhh!
and of course Tommy was so blasé about it.”

Tommy could not reveal even to the partners the fairy tale scenes of gold he and the tech crew had witnessed at the site. Many suspected that he had already found more than one bar and two coins anyhow, but they understood his decision not to reveal everything the crew had seen. “There was absolutely no reason,” said Jim Turner, “for Tommy to share with me, or the other partners, or a reporter from the
Columbus Dispatch
, the fact that they had recovered twenty bars, or fifty, or three. It was important for a lot of reasons that they could show that they recovered one bar and the coins. But in one of those letters they made it very clear that they weren’t going to talk about the amount of gold until they had recovered a significant enough volume.”

When Tommy had finished his speech, a partner named Donald Dunn stood up and said that this was an incredible moment and he wanted to reflect on it. “I don’t know how the rest of the people in this room feel,” he said, “and I don’t know whether you’re really going to find any more gold, Tommy, but whether you do or not, I want you to know it’s been a privilege and a pleasure to be associated with you and to have been on this journey with you.” The room erupted in applause.

“Naturally, the investors were really feeling good about being a part of this success,” remembered Wayne Ashby. “People like to be a part of anything that’s successful, but being a part of something so unusual and spectacular and adventurous, there isn’t any question they were feeling good about that.”

Some of the partners, “the more naturally worrisome members of the investor group,” as one put it, were still concerned about pirates, protection from the court, and how much of the treasure the court would award to the group. But for now they enjoyed the feeling and secretly applauded themselves for having the perception to invest in the venture. Tommy continued to worry far beyond the partners’ worries about technology, the court, science and archaeology, the further recovery and
eventual disposition of the gold, but for a few moments, in the presence of these people who had believed in him, he enjoyed the warm satisfaction of success.

Arthur was in line to look at the gold bar just ahead of Jim Turner and his wife. Arthur, who is a big man, held the bar in both hands, and as he turned slowly to face Turner’s wife, he said, “Now before I hand this to you, let me tell you, IT’S REAL HEAVY!” Arthur was afraid she would drop it on her foot, and after Turner held it he understood why. The density of gold always played tricks on the eyes. “It’s one of those wonderful problems to have,” said Turner.

Within one week of the partnership meeting, they had oversubscribed the $4 million remaining from the stock offering the previous spring. “It was a very exhilarating week compared to the other four offerings,” said Ashby. “I mean, they were very responsive.”

One partner had told Art Cullman he’d never go near Tommy again. “Tommy hasn’t done a damn thing all summer,” the partner had said. “I’m not gonna do a third round. I’ll stay where I am. Why don’t you get somebody to run that damn place?”

“So he got down to this meeting,” remembered Cullman, “and saw the gold bar and the coins come out of the pocket, and two days later, I heard he’d put a hundred and fifty thousand dollars into that last round.”

One of the partners closest to Tommy, and the one who had waxed most eloquent for that million dollar “insurance policy” in 1987, was Buck Patton. Patton had been out of town the weekend of the partnership meeting, but he had read the letters, and he met with Tommy the following Monday. When Tommy showed him the bar, Patton said, “Tom, if this is the only thing that’s down there, we will have more than paid for the project in a number of ways.” Patton called Tommy a “rascal” for the way he held out that gold bar and grinned. “That’s about the best closing tool I’ve ever seen,” said Patton.

Patton thought that the majority of big risk was behind them, that what remained were the need to recover and the need to keep quiet. Out of the remaining eighty units, he took ten and gave Tommy a commitment of $500,000.

“A lot of things depend on how you feel about them,” Patton said later. “Sometimes, financially, you do okay, or real well, or extremely well. Occasionally,
you hit the Babe Ruth home run, and other times you might just lose a whole bunch of money but everybody worked hard and tried, so it’s okay, because everybody put their heart into it. It’s when you get into deals where you’ve got scabs running a partnership and you know the money never gets to whom it’s supposed to and you say, ‘I’m gonna file suit, here’s my attorney, and I just took his leash off.’ That’s when you feel bad about things. But you couldn’t help but feel great about this. I told Tommy, ‘I don’t care how much gold is down there, you’re a hero. I think every investor feels the same way. I can’t speak for them, but they’ve got to feel like you just went to the edge of the world in terms of commitment and innovation and creativity and just sheer love, guts, and determination, and homework, and you did it. You put the points on the board! This may be the only gold bar there is, but it’s real, and you did it.’”

Now Tommy had the money to build an even bigger, more complex, more capable vehicle to explore the site further and recover the rest of the gold. And next season there would be no competitors, no rush to get to sea, no wondering if he was on the right ship.

O
NE OF THE
more remarkable accomplishments of the Columbus-America Discovery Group is that from October 1988, when Tommy announced to the partners in a letter that they had found gold eight thousand feet beneath the sea, until they finally announced to the public that they had recovered the treasure of the
Central America
, that news never traveled outside the partnership. “We don’t discuss it,” said Mike Ford. “We just don’t discuss it. It’s almost like the Manhattan Project.”

The partners’ commitment to secrecy allowed Tommy and his tech crew to concentrate on refining their technology and returning to the site for further exploration and recovery. After much thought and conversation with the lawyers, Tommy decided not even to file a claim on the new site, but to let the matter rest until he was ready to return the following summer. Because of the hearing in federal court in July 1987, everyone already assumed that the Columbus-America group was on the
Central America
at the old site; why announce to the world that the treasure really lay somewhere else and give them the coordinates to pinpoint it? “It was a pretty bold move not to file on the new site,” said Tommy. “If you want protection from the court, then you file; but you’re
not obligated to file anything. We were still somewhat convinced that Lamont-Doherty and Kreisle had gotten our coordinates from the court on the first site. So from a business point of view, we had to keep things in perspective. I thought about that a lot, and I just kept running scenarios on it. What if we go out to sea and our equipment doesn’t work? This stuff we’re doing was almost impossible to do. We ought to get some sense that we’re going to be able to operate all season before we file. So that’s what we ended up doing. We took the chance of not being protected by the court.”

Robol filed a substitute custodian report, informing the court that gold had been recovered, and that it appeared as though the gold was from the
Central America
. “But I felt kind of naked out there,” said Robol, “without an injunction.” Robol thought that Judge Kellam should view some of what they had found. Late that fall he called the judge and told him he had a matter of some urgency to discuss and that he preferred the meeting take place in a secure and confidential environment. He also mentioned that some members of the Columbus-America Discovery Group would be in town over the upcoming weekend, and the judge invited the group to his home. On a Saturday morning, Robol, Tommy, Barry, and Bob drove a van to the judge’s house in Virginia Beach, the three-hundred-pound bell preserved in back in a tank of water. When they arrived, they found the eighty-year-old judge wearing an old hat and khaki pants, mowing his lawn with a push mower.

The judge offered them some refreshments, then led them the back way into his home to a study. Bob carried a cosmetics case, and when they reached the judge’s study, he placed it on the judge’s desk. Robol thanked the judge for agreeing to meet with them on the weekend and spoke for a minute about why he had requested the meeting. Then Bob opened the cosmetics case and pulled out a towel, inside of which was a layer of felt, and inside that was the gold bar they had showed to the investors. Bob peeled back the felt, and the judge examined the bar and its markings. “Lordy, lordy,” said the judge, and everyone, including the judge, laughed. The meeting lasted ten minutes.

D
URING THE OFF-SEASON
, Tod had a lot of long talks with Tommy. Now that they had found the
Central America
and recovered some of
the gold, Tommy seemed more relaxed and approachable. “He realized what everybody had been through,” said Tod. “He made a point of getting back in touch with everybody, and he basically conceded that what happened last year was wrong, because everybody was always upset about this need-to-know thing. But he said it was a business decision that he needed to make, and I said I understand that.”

Throughout the winter and into the spring of 1989, Tod and Bryan worked in the back of the warehouse with a welder, cutting channel aluminum into four-foot lengths and welding the cubic frames together for the skeleton of the new vehicle. Tommy directed Hackman, Scotty, John Moore, and other engineers from Battelle and Ohio State in designing the new systems. That year, they would have more cameras and more reach, finer controls, better storage for the ascent, and more power on the bottom.

The office space at the front of the warehouse served as a mock control room. Cables ran from the growing vehicle back in the warehouse forward into the office, connecting the vehicle to the master arm control that John Moore would use at sea. As Moore stood in the warehouse next to the vehicle, he gave commands into a microphone, like, “Extend camera boom number three,” and another engineer in the office moved the controls so Moore could see if the vehicle responded appropriately. “Rotate camera boom clockwise.” The camera boom moved clockwise. “Counterclockwise.” It moved counterclockwise. As the parts moved, Bryan watched for leaks in the hydraulic system and tightened them with a wrench. This year they had the luxury of running the systems and searching for problems before they went to sea.

The first week in June, Tommy drove his mentor Dean Glower out to the warehouse to show him the vehicle. Almost ready for shipment to Wilmington, it now stood over seven feet tall, five feet wide, and fifteen feet long—a mass of aluminum framing, booms, cameras, batteries, junction boxes, and electronic spheres all crisscrossed and interlaced with twelve hundred feet of orange hydraulic hose. The vehicle had over a hundred electrical functions and ninety hydraulic functions. One manipulator alone had seven functions, at the shoulder, the elbow, the wrist, the fingers, and each function required two hydraulic hoses, fourteen
hydraulic lines all massed together, each about the width of a little finger. Drooping off the front of the vehicle like praying mantises was a thick assortment of camera and light booms.

“When I first looked at it,” said Glower, “I was in a state of shock. It’s an enormous design.” Glower was struck by the vehicle’s complexity and its place in history, “almost like designing and building an automobile,” said Glower. “He was building a whole new apparatus, and it looked complicated as hell.”

His question to Tommy in 1973—How are we going to work in the deep ocean?—had led to a two-and-a-half-ton vehicle that eventually would grow to six tons, with nine mechanical arms, some having as many as eleven segments, with pan and tilt capability and telescoping booms, 3-D video, and seven other broadcast-quality cameras, two still cameras, five strobes, and twelve spotlights at all angles for backlighting, two mechanical arms to collect, a suction picker, a vacuum, blower nozzles, a silicone injection machine weighing over one thousand pounds, thrusters, dusters, a retractable drawer, collection trays, and excavation tools, many of which could be added at will as they worked below. It was similar to the design Tommy had envisioned five years earlier but, because of competition and then thruster problems and a closing weather window, had never been able to build.