The Sea Hunters II: More True Adventures with Famous Shipwrecks

by Clive Cussler

  Werner began climbing down the ladder in the center of the conning tower.

  “Sir?” Dieter said.

  “Yes, Dieter,” Werner said, pausing.

  “We’re down to four torpedoes.”

  “Duly noted,” Werner said.

  * * *

  When Carpathia passed Fastnet Rock, it was 11 P.M. and pitch black.

  Already, there had been trouble. One of the ships in the convoy was having problems maintaining speed. She could make the prescribed ten knots, but when she did, the huge volumes of smoke from her funnels could be seen nearly twenty miles away.

  Prothero knew that at sunrise they would be sixty miles into the Atlantic Ocean, and if the skies were clear, the plume of smoke would be a beacon to any nearby U-boats. The captain of the vessel reported that his engineers were working on the problem with little result, and Prothero knew it was a lost cause. Most likely the ship’s bunkers were filled with bad coal. There was no way to change that while at sea.

  Prothero walked Carpathia’s passageways toward his cabin.

  He would deal with the problem in the morning.

  * * *

  It smelled like feet. Werner’s pillow smelled like feet. Rolling over on his back, he stared at the deck above his hammock bunk. As soon as these last four torpedoes were expended, U-55 could make her way back to the submarine base at Bremerhaven for a long-needed cleaning and refit. Hopefully, he would receive enough liberty time to go home and see his wife. His wife was a fine cook and housekeeper — her house never smelled of feet — and she had yet to serve Werner meat from a can.

  On the conning tower above, it was as dark as a madman’s moods. Franz Dieter stared skyward, waiting for the stars to appear. Tonight they were hiding behind the clouds. Some nights the air was playful and fresh, but tonight it had all the comfort of a lead blanket. Dieter reached into the tin pail by his side and removed a slab of slightly moldy cheese and a hunk of blood sausage. Taking his pocketknife out of his uniform pants, he sliced the food, then nibbled it slowly.

  It was going to be a long night.

  * * *

  As though in a maze with no barriers, the convoy zigged and zagged as it made its way west. So many minutes at this heading, then a change. So many minutes at that heading, then a turn. To a plane passing overhead, the wakes of the convoy looked like the jagged steps from lightning flashes. To those on board, however, the constant changes meant safety.

  Carpathia carried a total of 215 passengers and crew. At this instant, half of the crew and most of the passengers were asleep in their berths.

  * * *

  “Captain,” Dieter whispered.

  Werner bolted upright, rubbing his eyes. Dieter’s breath smelled of sausage.

  “Yes, Dieter.”

  “Destroyers in the distance.”

  Wemer stared at his watch; it was just past 1:30 in the morning.

  “Have you ordered a dive?” he asked.

  “No, sir,” Dieter said. “They’re still far in the distance.”

  “What’s our position?” Werner asked.

  “Approximately a hundred and ten miles from Fastnet,” Dieter said.

  “The destroyers will be turning back soon,” Werner said. “Stay above water and maintain a safe distance. Stalk the prey until the time is right.”

  Then Werner rolled over and went back to sleep. The hunt would take hours.

  * * *

  Breakfast was served on Carpathia at 8 A.M. Oatmeal porridge and milk, fried fish and onions, bread and butter and marmalade. Tea or coffee to drink. The passengers and crew ate their meal in leisure, never knowing a wraith from below was slowly stalking them.

  Captain Prothero stared back at the smoking vessel. The repairs had made little difference in the emissions from the stacks. A black rope trailed in the sky far behind the ship.

  “Mark,” he said.

  The helmsman changed course and began a zag to the north.

  * * *

  On U-55, breakfast was powdered eggs and coffee that tasted like diesel fuel.

  “The lead vessel has a single stack and ample beam,” Werner said. “If I was to hazard a guess, I’d say she might be Carpathia.”

  “The Cunarder?” Dieter asked.

  “Yes,” Werner said.

  “Is she your intended target?” Dieter asked.

  “She’s the lead vessel,” Werner said, “and the largest. We might as well try for the best.”

  A crewman handed Dieter a slip of paper.

  “The latest position, as you requested, Captain,” he said.

  “What is it?” Werner asked.

  “Forty-nine degrees, 41 minutes north,” Dieter said. “10 degrees, 45 minutes west.”

  “Good. Sound the alarm and have the torpedoes readied,” Werner said. “It’ll be a twin shot from the surface.”

  “Yes, sir,” Dieter said.

  Wemer scanned the ship in the distance with binoculars.

  “Fire two,” he shouted into the speaking tube a few seconds later.

  * * *

  Nine-fifteen in the morning. Captain Prothero was scanning the water with a pair of binoculars, but he didn’t see the wake of the first torpedo until it was almost upon them. He sounded the alarm only seconds before the first torpedo struck Carpathia just below the bridge. This was followed a minute later by a second explosion directly in the engine room. The second torpedo would be the one that claimed five lives.

  “Sound the alert,” Captain Prothero said loudly, “and get me a damage report.”

  “Yes, sir,” Second Officer Smyth said.

  Five minutes passed before the voice of Smyth called from the engine room.

  “Sir,” Smyth said into the speaking tube, “we have five dead — three firemen and two trimmers.”

  “Damage?”

  “It’s bad,” Smyth said, “but it might be contained. The engineer has the pumps operating, and he’s attempting to fill the hole below the waterline so we might have a chance at port.”

  “Good,” Prothero said, “keep me posted.”

  Scanning the water with his binoculars, he caught a glimpse of the German U-boat in the distance. One of the new types, five hundred feet in length.

  Prothero considered firing the deck guns, but the U-boat was too far away to hit.

  * * *

  “They can see us,” Werner said. “Dive.”

  U-55 slipped beneath the waves and moved closer to Carpathia.

  Raising the periscope, Werner studied his prey.

  The torpedoes had run true. One had struck below the bridge, the other where Werner felt the engine room was located. Even with the fine shooting, the steamer was still afloat. Through the periscope, he could see the pumps below dispelling water over the sides in ever-increasing amounts. If this continued and they could get another ship alongside Carpathia for a tow, they might be able to pull her back to port.

  “Prepare to fire another,” Werner ordered.

  “That will leave us only one for the trip home,” Dieter noted.

  “Then you’d better hope that puts her down,” Werner said, “or I’ll fire that one, too, and we’ll have none.”

  “Yes, sir,” Dieter said.

  “Loose it as soon as ready,” Werner shouted.

  * * *

  “I think we’re gaining,” Smyth shouted through the speaking tube.

  “A ship will be alongside in minutes,” Prothero said. “We’ll try to make Ireland.”

  “I could use a few more seamen down here,” Smyth said.

  “They’ll be down directly,” Prothero said.

  Then he scanned the sea again.

  To see it coming is sometimes worse. A bulge on the top of the water as the torpedo raced toward them just below the surface. Lines like a bullwhip, with a sting that went far deeper. A visible death with nowhere to hide.

  * * *

  “Straight and true,” Werner said. “That should finish the job.”

  He held hi
s breath as the torpedo drew closer to Carpathia. Time seemed to slow to a crawl. The twin propellers of the torpedo bit at the seawater and moved the weapon forward. Her nose cone was packed with explosives, and her fuselage was filled with fuel that would burn. Yards, then feet, then inches. Slamming into the hull at the gunner’s room, the charge exploded and shredded the iron like a paper bag blown full of air and ruptured.

  The explosion ignited the powder and shells in the hold. It made the hole in the hull larger, and much more water than the pumps could ever handle flooded into the hull. Carpathia settled lower in the water.

  * * *

  No one needed to tell Captain Prothero the seriousness of the situation, but they did.

  The order was given to abandon ship.

  Those still alive aboard Carpathia were rescued, and at just past 11 A.M., she slipped below the waves for the final time.

  II

  It’s Never Easy 2000

  I’ve always been amazed at how the obituaries of ships of historic significance end up lost and forgotten. No curiosity seems to exist over what happened to them after their moment of tragedy or triumph. Mary Celeste was like that, and the ship that performed what is perhaps the greatest rescue in the annals of the sea, Carpathia, was another. Few of the marine enthusiasts whom I contacted knew what had happened to Carpathia after her intrepid dash to save Titanic’s survivors. Most simply thought she had outlived her time and was sent to the scrappers like so many of her ocean liner sisters.

  Intrigued by a ship whose story has never been fully told, I decided to delve into her epilogue, along with that of the Californian, the cargo ship that has come down through legend as the ship that stood by, silent and unresponsive in the ice floes, as more than fifteen hundred souls perished in the icy Atlantic water a few miles away. Her failure to come to Titanic’s rescue has all the makings of a classic mystery.

  Both ships are irrevocably linked with the most famous ocean liner in history. No story of Tetanic is complete without Carpathia and Californian. Unlike Captain Smith of Titanic, Captain Stanley Lord of Californian was more cautious. Rather than navigate through the huge ice floes at night, he prudently stopped and drifted among the bergs until daylight. After midnight, members of his crew saw flares rising across the ice pack to the south. Tragically, the ship’s radio operator had gone to bed and did not receive Titantic’s frantic SOS. Alerted by his crew, Captain Lord ignored the flares and chose to believe they were simply fireworks fired during festivities on the passenger liner and lamentably failed to see a calamity in the making.

  The questions without hard answers still persist.

  Could the Californian have responded in time and saved the poor souls of Titanic? Or was she too distant to reach the stricken liner before she sank? The controversy rages. There are revisionists who believe the lights seen by Titanic’s officers during the sinking came from a sailing ship, called Samson, that was engaged in illegal seal-fishing. Mistaking the flares for a government patrol boat out of Halifax, the crew of Samson fled the scene out of fear of being arrested. They didn’t find out about their part in the tragedy until almost a month later.

  What became of Carpathia and Californian, the two ships forever linked together in one of the sea’s great disasters? Were they scrapped at the end of their shipping careers? Or do they lie in solitude beneath the sea?

  In a strange historical coincidence, they were both torpedoed by German U-boats in World War I. One lies in the Mediterranean, the other in the Atlantic, but exactly where?

  To find keys to their final resting places, I went directly to the most knowledgeable source, Ed Kamuda of the Titanic Historical Society in Indian Orchard, Massachusetts. Ed sent me not only charts showing the approximate positions of the wrecks but also reports of the sinkings.

  The S.S. Californian was torpedoed on November 11, 1915, off Cape Matapan in the Mediterranean Sea, thirty miles from the coast of Greece. She slipped under the sea at 7:45 in the morning while on a voyage from Saloniki to Marseilles. She had been sailing as a troopship, but fortunately she was empty when she was struck by a single torpedo. Most of the crew escaped, and a French patrol boat took her under tow. But later in the afternoon, the persistent captain of the U-boat threw another torpedo at her, and she sank in thirteen thousand feet of water.

  I scratched Californian off my wish list. The reported position of the sinking given by the ship’s officers, the patrol boat, and the U-boat captain was not a good match. The site was quite vague. This is understandable, though. It’s hard to take a sun sighting with a sextant — these were the days before LORAN and GPS — while a disaster is going on around you. You can’t operate on luck alone, however, and searching the seafloor for a shipwreck lying over two and a half miles deep within a two-hundred-mile search grid, and operating strictly on guesswork, is certain folly.

  So I left the Californian, along with her legacy of what-might-have-been, alone in the depths.

  The Carpathia was a different story. Here we stood a fighting chance of finding her. That’s all I ever ask. If the odds are a hundred or fifty to one, forget it. But I’m a sucker for a ten-toone bet. Perhaps that’s why the red carpet is always out for Cussler in Las Vegas and at Indian casinos. I simply give my money to the croupier and dealer, then walk away. Why waste time suffering the agony of losing? It’s much simpler doing it my way.

  I learned that Carpathia had been torpedoed by U-55 on the morning of July 17, 1918, while sailing as part of a convoy carrying 225 military passengers and crew. The U-boat pumped two torpedoes into her, instantly killing five men in the engine room. Amazingly, Carpathia remained afloat. Captain William Prothero gave the order to abandon ship and lower the lifeboats. Impatient to finish the job, the U-boat’s commander sent a third torpedo into the battered liner. Ten minutes later, she went down. Interestingly, Lusitania sank in eighteen minutes after a single torpedo strike and lies just forty miles west of Carpathia.

  Again we were confronted with conflicting position reports of the Carpathia’s sinking. The H.M.S. Snowdrop, the ship that rescued the 225 survivors, gave one position while the officer from Carpathia gave another one 4 miles away. The U-boat’s commander put the sinking 6 miles north of the others. Admiralty charts showed a wreck in the general vicinity, about 4 miles from Carpathia’s last visual sighting, but it failed to coincide with the other sightings. The search grid now worked out to a lengthy area 12 miles by 12 miles, or a box covering 144 square miles.

  The dilemma never ends. This wasn’t going to be as easy as I thought.

  About this time, Keith Jessup contacted me. He is the legendary British diver who found and directed the salvage operations of the H.M.S. Edinburgh, the British cruiser sunk in the Baltic Sea during World War II with millions in Russian gold aboard. More than ninety percent of the gold was brought up by divers living in a decompression tank eight hundred feet deep.

  During our conversation, I asked Keith if he knew anybody with a boat that I might charter to search for Carpathia. He replied that his son Graham was in the shipwreck survey business and would be delighted to join in and oversee the search. Graham and I hit it off, and plans were under way to form an expedition, funded by me and directed by Graham through his company, Argosy International. I would have given my left arm to lead it myself, but I was buried in work, my wife Barbara was suffering serious health problems, and negotiations were under way to sell my books to Hollywood. As much as I would have enjoyed participating, there was simply too much hanging over my head to leave the homestead in search of an old shipwreck.

  Graham chartered a survey boat called Ocean Venture, skippered by an experienced seaman named Gary Goodyear. After loading the remote operating vehicle (ROV) on board to take underwater video and photos, the ship and crew cast off during the middle of April from Penzance, England, the town made famous by Gilbert and Sullivan.

  The weather was not kind, and it was a rough trip to the search area in the North Atlantic off southern Ireland. Once on
-site, they began to run survey lines in a box between the positions given by Carpathia, Snowdrop, and U-55, using a forward-seeking sonar that sent out sweeping arcs ahead of the ship and a sidescan sonar that threw out signals to both sides of the boat to detect any objects rising from the seafloor. The sonar units were backed up with a magnetometer to detect magnetic anomalies.

  On the second day, the forward sonar turned up a target. They had a wreck with the approximate dimensions of Carpathia located almost seven miles from her last reported position. The sidescan sonar showed a sunken vessel that appeared to be lying upside down with scattered debris along her hull, a common situation with ships that invert on the way down.

  With great anticipation and excitement, the crew prepared to explore the wreck. At 550 feet, the depth was too great for divers, so the crew prepared to deploy the ROV and its cameras to examine the wrecks. There were high hopes that it was indeed Carpathia. The weather was choppy and the waves high for such an operation. With the forecast calling for storms, they rushed to shoot the video and head for harbor before the seas turned uglier.

  Captain Goodyear positioned Ocean Venture over the wreck site. To minimize the length of cable between the ship and the ROV and to reduce the effects of a strong current, they employed a tether management system. Along with the ROV, a cage is lowered near the wreck with a winch that reels out a shorter length of cable to prevent the vehicle from bouncing around and becoming entangled in the wreckage.

  Unfortunately, at this point, Graham jumped the gun and made the announcement over the radio that Carpathia had been found.

  Not so.

  The video cameras revealed a large wreck similar to Carpathia lying atop her crushed superstructure, rudder and propellers rising toward the surface like grotesque fingered hands. The first tip-off came from the propellers. They were four-bladed, and Carpathia’s were known to have been three-bladed. Her length was also a hundred feet short.

  This was not looking good.