Images of being thrown into a Haitian jail streamed through my mind. I called my wife, Barbara, and asked her to send the passport through the airline’s courier service. Just to play it safe, she faxed the pertinent pages to the hotel, at least so I had some kind of identification for Haitian immigration if for some reason the passport did not arrive.
Naturally, the airplane with my passport was late, which wasn’t too disastrous. I still had almost an hour before our scheduled departure. Exotic Lynx Airlines, our air carrier to Haiti, had other plans. Unexpectedly, the clerk at the counter announced that because all passengers were present, the plane would be taking off an hour early. I do believe Lynx belongs in the Guinness Book of World Records. When I bemoaned my lack of passport, the clerk laughed it off and said, “They won’t care.”
Where had I heard that before?
Somehow I didn’t relish the idea of entering into a third world country that had revolutionaries stalking the hills, without proper credentials. Left with no choice, I arranged with Craig Dirgo, who was living in Fort Lauderdale at the time, to pick up my passport when it finally arrived.
The flight was on a nineteen-passenger DeHavilland prop plane. It was uneventful except for a huge black man who resembled Mike Tyson seated in back of me. He was terrified of flying and clutched the back of my seat every time we hit turbulence. As I looked down on the islands surrounded by turquoise waters, I had dreams of arriving at a sun-drenched tropical paradise with local natives playing marimbas and steel drums while passing around piña coladas. The bubble was burst as the plane touched down at a weed-infested airstrip and I was jolted back to reality. There was no terminal, only a bunch of dilapidated shacks strung around a dusty parking lot filled with battered old French and Japanese autos.
We disembarked and headed for the immigration shack. Thankfully, my perceptive eye noted that my suitcase and John’s bag had been stowed in the nose section of the plane when we left Fort Lauderdale. I turned and saw that the Haitian baggage handler, after removing the passengers’ luggage from the rear of the plane, was pushing his load, minus our bags, on a cart across the field. With John following, I returned to the airplane, unlatched the locks on the nose section, lifted it up, and removed our bags. No one interfered. If we hadn’t snagged our luggage from the plane’s nose, they’d have been on their way back to Fort Lauderdale in another twenty minutes.
I smiled my best smile, and the immigration official graciously stamped my fax copy passport and waved me through.
“See,” said Davis, “didn’t I tell you? A piece of cake.”
“Now the trick is to get out,” I muttered, wondering what I was getting myself into.
Davis had arranged for us to stay at the Cormier Plage Hotel, a tropical paradise in a cove farther up the coast not far from the border with the Dominican Republic. The resort is owned by Jean Claude and Kathy Dicquemare, who had lived in Haiti over twenty-five years. The plan was for Davis and me to stay overnight until the boat containing the rest of the team arrived from Fort Lauderdale by sea. After clearing customs, we were met by Jean Claude’s nephew, whose name unfortunately escapes me. We came out into a mob scene stomping up a cloud of dust. There were hundreds of Haitians milling about the airport — doing what, I have no idea.
We were stormed by little boys demanding a dollar. Considering the poverty of the nation, these kids don’t mess around. In most countries I’ve visited, the little beggar boys and girls usually ask for coins.
After throwing our bags in the back of a little Honda SUV, we drove through the port city of Cape Haitian. I’ve seen squalor before, but nothing I’ve ever seen compared to this. The worst slums in the hills above Rio de Janeiro looked like Beverly Hills compared to this place. The streets were in total disrepair, with battered old cars, some moving, some parked and stripped, cluttering the landscape. Buildings were crumbling like they were rotting from within. Any place else, they would have been condemned years before. Mobs of people wandered the streets and sidewalks, as if searching for something that didn’t exist. We passed a huge ten-acre dump, where hordes of people were shoveling garbage and trash into plastic bags and carting it home in wheelbarrows. It was not a pretty sight.
We finally left the self-destructing town and traveled over the mountain on a road that had not been graded in ten years — no, make that twenty. We passed shanties with scrawny chickens pecking barren ground, long lines of people at a single water faucet, waiting to fill their plastic jugs, staring at us as if we’d just flown down from the moon. At seeing their thin bodies, I began to feel self-conscious about being twenty pounds overweight.
The potholes looked like the size of meteor craters, and the ruts were as deep as the trenches in World War I. Yet the landscape was scenic and quite beautiful. The few areas on the mountain where the trees had not been cut down were quite picturesque. I have found it easy to imagine Haiti as a beautiful nation in the years that have passed.
We finally dropped down into a delightful cove with hundreds of palm trees. Village shacks lined one side of the road, and the children were playing happily while their mothers washed clothes in a stream flowing down from the mountains. Jean Claude’s nephew turned the truck through the gate of the resort and we met Jean Claude and Kathy, a quiet lady who obviously ran the show behind the scenes. Jean Claude is a genuine character — someone that everyone should have as a friend. Though we were both pushing seventy, he was twice as active as I was. He dove at least once every day, and often two or three times. He kept a record that revealed he had already slipped beneath the waves 165 times. The term half manlhalf fish applied to Jean Claude.
The hotel was very charming, with neatly cut lawns, a long sandy beach, and white buildings with a restaurant and a bar under a beautifully crafted thatched roof of palm fronds. The only drawback is that the coral comes up to within a few feet of the beach, and though it makes for great snorkeling, you’d scrape your chest off if you tried to swim in it. The food was gourmet quality. Seven different lobster dishes cooked in different ways and tinged in exotic sauces were only a small part of the menu. Then on to the bar for after-dinner drinks and hours of telling tales of shipwrecks and the people who search for them.
The boat showed up the next day. Owned by Allan Gardner of Highland Beach, Florida, Ella Warley II is a fifty-four-foot steel-hulled vessel specially designed by Allan for underwater research. She carries the latest dive and detection gear with state-of-the-art electronics. Allan is a very successful businessman who owns a large computer technology company. When not directing his corporate empire, he spends his time searching for shipwrecks in the Caribbean. My kind of guy.
Allan is a truly nice guy with the patience of Job who smiles constantly and, after a few shots of scotch, laughs continuously. Joining him on the voyage from Fort Lauderdale was the team from ECO-NOVA, including Mike Fletcher, master diver, and underwater photographers Robert Guertin and Lawrence Taylor — all friendly and good-hearted guys with enough esprit de corps to turn a grueling expedition into a proud moment of achievement and success.
John and I boarded a boat from a dock in a lagoon used by Carnival Cruise Lines ships to send their passengers to a tropical cove to enjoy a day of sun and surf. Like Allan, Jean Claude generously gave his time to come along, because he knew Haiti and could converse with the natives in Creole — a handy arrangement, as it turned out.
The voyage to Rochelais Reef began early the next morning. The seas were very rough, but I fortified myself with a bottle of Porfido tequila I had brought along for just such an occasion. Though a fairly stable boat, Ella Warley II rolled with the punches. With her flat bottom, she makes the perfect dive platform for underwater survey, but she’s not exactly what you’d call a luxury yacht. She was built for a purpose without the niceties of plush furnishings, a deep keel, or stabilizers. Plus she suffered from heads that always clogged when you flushed them.
Sleeping accommodations were austere. Allan, as owner, had the only stateroom. Two
of the team slept in bunks in the wheelhouse. Two slept on the deck outside. Jean Claude and I shared the main cabin, me on a small foldout couch, he on the bench of the dining table.
We were both outcasts from the others because we snored. Jean Claude began from ten to two, while I took up the trumpet calls from two to six. Now I know what my poor wife goes through.
But our seven-man crew was tough. No one ever suffered seasickness or complained, except me.
We anchored for the night on the northwest tip of Haiti. The next morning, we sailed around Gonâve Island and reached Rochelais Reef by midmorning. As we approached, I was peering through binoculars into the distance where the reef was supposed to rise. An image materialized, and I adjusted the focus.
I turned to Allan and John and said, “If I didn’t know better, I’d say there is a village with huts sitting on the reef.”
Forty-five minutes later, we reached Rochelais Reef and anchored a hundred yards offshore. This place was an anthropologist’s dream. The story is that about eighty years ago, two brothers decided to take up residence on the reef to hunt conch. Over the decades, more native Haitians moved onto the reef, until now it is an island four feet above the water, built from more than a million conch shells. There are about fifty shacks erected from every scrap of flotsam you can imagine. We estimated the population at about two hundred. There wasn’t a tree or a bush to be seen. The sun beat down unmercifully on the conch-shell landscape. The nearest land was twelve miles away, and all the food and water had to be brought in by dugout canoes. We could not believe human beings could survive in such harsh conditions, much less spend their entire lives there.
John and his film crew, along with Jean Claude, took the thirteen-foot Boston Whaler over to the man-made island sitting atop the shallow reef. Naturally, the natives were curious about our presence. Jean Claude did not tell them we were looking for a shipwreck. They might have mistaken our intent and thought we were after treasure, which could have caused problems. He simply told them we were making a movie and pacified them about our intrusion by giving them ten gallons of gas for their outboard motors and a case of Coca-Cola.
We had studied the oldest accurate chart of the reef dating to 1910 and laid it over a modem chart. The reef had not changed. According to both charts, there was a pinnacle labeled “Vandalia Rock” on the southern end of the reef, but the natives assured us that no such rock existed. This would cause extra time in research later, exploring the possibility that a ship named Vandalia had also grounded on the reef.
The wind picked up, and Allan took the boat into a small bay on Gonâve Island, where we settled in for the night. With an early start the next morning, Allan dropped his cesium marine magnetometer over the side and began circling the reef for any magnetic anomalies. From fifty yards offshore, only one ten-gamma reading showed on his computer monitor. It came from the dead center of Rochelais Reef, where Mary Celeste was reported to have crushed her hull on the coral. The site also perfectly matched the direction a ship sailing from the southwest would have met the reef.
My demon must have taken a break.
Mike Fletcher suited up and dropped over the side, followed by Robert Guertin with his underwater video camera. The rest of us sat on the stem of the boat, soaking up the tropical breeze, wondering if Mike had found anything. Half an hour later, he returned to the boat and threw some copper sheathing, ballast rocks, and old wood with brass spikes driven through them onto the deck.
We had a shipwreck right where Mary Celeste was supposed to lie. But without finding the bell, which was no doubt salvaged, with the ship’s name in raised letters in bronze or inscribed ceramics, or some other artifact to identify her, we could only speculate. Everyone dove and retrieved what pitifully few artifacts we could find. The coral was some of the most beautiful I’ve seen in fifty years of diving, but I wished I weren’t there. What remained of the ship’s timbers was deeply buried in the calcareous growth that had rapidly buried the ship. After 116 years, the ship was entombed in an impenetrable burial shroud.
We found part of the anchor chain and an anchor. I tried to remove a bar from the coral, but it was stuck fast. Jean Claude and Mike brought up enough wood to fill a fair-sized bucket. And we removed some loose artifacts that were embedded in the sand. Every item was videotaped in position, tagged, and catalogued. Once the team returned home, the wood would be sent to laboratories to determine a date and source. It’s incredible how science and technology can tell you how old the wood is within years, as well as what part of the world it originally came from.
The ballast stones would also show characteristic mineralogy and texture that can identify the location from which they were extracted. They had to come from either the Palisades above the Hudson River, where Mary Celeste was rebuilt during the summer of 1872 in New York, or the mountains or shores of Nova Scotia, where she was originally constructed and then launched under the name Amazon. The brass spikes might give only an approximate age, but a clue might come from the copper sheathing. Whatever the case, it would take time to find the answers we sought.
Satisfied we could do no more, the anchor was pulled, and we bid a fond farewell to Rochelais Reef, now affectionately known as Conch Island, then set a course back to the Cormier Plage Hotel. We had a few rough hours battling choppy seas, but it actually became relaxing after a while. I was transfixed, staring at the color of the water in this part of the Caribbean. It was not the blue-green turquoise of shallow water around the reefs and islands. This was deep water, the fathometer showing three thousand feet to the bottom, and the color was a deep violet, almost purple.
Two days later, we docked near the hotel, amused at having the land seeming to sway around us after seven days without stepping foot off the boat. Everyone relaxed on the beach and in the hotel bar and talked long into the night about what we had found. The following morning, the whole team departed for Fort Lauderdale by boat while I made arrangements to fly out later that afternoon. We said our good-byes and I took a shower, packed my bags, and breathed a sigh of relief that I was escaping Haiti without being bitten by a ring-necked fuzz-wort or infected with Haitian jungle fever.
I sallied forth, expecting a car to carry me to the airport, but the local police thought Jean Claude had failed to pay his license fee and confiscated his Land Rover. I was pointed to a battered, dust-laden little Nissan pickup.
Any port in a storm.
One of the workers at Jean Claude’s hotel drove me over the obstacle course road to Cape Haitian, picking up hitchhikers along the way and then throwing them all around the bed of the truck before they would pound on the roof to be let out. Once we reached the city, I noticed it was the same filthy mess, with nonexistent pavement, traffic surging nowhere, and pollution that would have sent an environmentalist into cardiac arrest. My only apprehension now was whether my fax passport would get me passed through immigration.
We arrived at the Lynx Airlines boarding shack. If I’ve ever made a wise move in my life, it was when I told the driver to wait just in case the flight was canceled. I entered the shack, counting the minutes until I would be in the wild blue yonder to the U.S. of A.
“You’re too late,” said the attendant behind a counter I didn’t dare lean on or touch with my bare hands.
“What do you mean I’m late?” I replied indignantly, naively thinking she was kidding me. I pointed at the time printed on my ticket. “This says departure time is twelve-thirty. It is now only eleven-twenty. I have an hour and ten minutes.”
She glanced at the ticket and shrugged. “That’s Miami time.”
“You don’t print your tickets with local arrival or departure time?” I was beginning to panic.
“No, you should have been here an hour ago. Now it’s too late. The plane is taking off in five minutes.”
“Let me talk to the pilots,” I pleaded in desperation.
She nodded and accompanied me out through a weed-covered field to the airplane, where the pilots were stand
ing with hands in their pockets. I pleaded my case to no avail.
The chief pilot shrugged. “You’ll never get through immigration in time.”
“Let me try?” I begged.
Then the pilot and copilot grinned like the Artful Dodger and Oliver, after having adroitly picked a pocket. “Not a chance. We’re about to take off.”
There I stood, like a kid who’d had his bicycle stolen. My only salvation came from the airline attendant, who promised me a seat on the next day’s flight. “You get here two hours early” she admonished me. “You hear?”
I heard.
Never in my life have I felt so miserable. Thank God I had the foresight to ask the driver to wait for me. If he had driven off and left me stranded in the mob at the airport, I’d probably have been torn limb from limb for my Nike sneakers.
Now it was time for another ride through the wretchedness and over the road to hell. I felt like Roy Scheider transporting nitroglycerin through the jungles in the movie Wages of Fear. Distress turned into rage at having been abandoned in the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. If I had known that while I was in Haiti an American businessman had been shot and killed and two others taken hostage, I would have really been depressed.
Back to my room, where I lay in bed that afternoon, staring at the whirling blades of the overhead fans. A lonely meal, and then I headed for the bar, where I was lucky enough to join the company of some young Americans who worked for Carnival Cruise Lines over in the cove where the big ships docked. I enjoyed the conversation and several beers before retiring for the night with visions of my own bed dancing in my head.
No fooling around this time. I hauled the driver, who spoke almost no English, to the truck and gestured at the steering wheel. He got the drift from the devil expression on my face. By now you know the routine to reach the airport. This time, however, there was no stopping and picking up hitchhikers. If the driver even thought about stopping, I stomped my foot on his foot and mashed the gas pedal to the floor. We jolted over the road like a race car in an endurance rally.
The Sea Hunters II: More True Adventures with Famous Shipwrecks Page 22