Clive Cussler; Craig Dirgo

by The Sea Hunters II

  Sparing three men from Dei Gratia would leave Moorhouse seriously shorthanded.

  “Let’s try it,” Moorhouse said at last, “but if we run into trouble we cast Mary Celeste adrift, transfer your men back, and report the loss upon reaching port.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Deveau said.

  “Take Lund and Anderson,” Moorhouse said. “We’ll wait here until you have the ship seaworthy.”

  At 8:26 that evening, the hold was pumped and the spare sails set in place. They set off for the six-hundred-mile journey to Gibraltar just as the moon rose over the horizon. A fool’s moon lit the ghostly journey.

  The weather stayed fair until the Straits of Gibraltar. Then, for the first time since taking command of Mary Celeste, Deveau lost sight of Dei Gratia in the rough seas. On Friday the thirteenth, nine days since the ghost ship had first been spotted, Deveau entered the port of Gibraltar. Dei Gratia was already there.

  “HERE’S YOUR CHANGE,” the telegraph clerk said to Captain Moorhouse.

  On Saturday the fourteenth of December, the disaster clerk at the New York offices of Atlantic Mutual Insurance Company received the following cablegram from Gibraltar:

  FOUND FOURTH AND BROUGHT HERE “MARY CELESTE.

  ” ABANDONED SEAWORTHY. ADMIRALTY IMPOST

  . NOTIFY ALL PARTIES TELEGRAPH OFFER OF

  SALVAGE. MOORHOUSE.

  The cable was the first notice in the United States that something had gone terribly wrong on Mary Celeste.

  Of its crew and passengers, nothing would ever be found. The Mary Celeste itself would be put back into service, but a little over twelve years later, on January 3, 1885, the ship would be wrecked on the Reefs of the Rochelais near Miragoane, Haiti.

  And while the ship was gone, the legend continued to grow.

  II

  Paradise Gone 2001

  THE TALE OF THE MARY CELESTE MAKES THE HAIR RISE on the nape of the neck. She is enshrined as the most famous ghost ship in the history of the sea. There are other accounts of ships being found abandoned, their crews having vanished, but none has the fascination and the intrigue that fire the imagination like Mary Celeste. She still wears the crown of haunted ships.

  I was drawn into her web at least twenty years ago when I asked Bob Fleming, NUMA’s researcher in Washington, D.C., to probe the archives for her ultimate end. Had she sunk during a storm while on a voyage, or had she simply outlived her usefulness and ended up a derelict in the mudflats of some port’s backwater, along with so many of her sister ships? Only a few records, and fewer yet of more than a hundred books written since her tragedy, held the answer.

  Mary Celeste was sailed for another twelve years and two months after being abandoned in the Azores in 1872. During this time, she went through a number of different owners. She set sail on her final passage from New York to Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in December of 1884, under the command of Captain Gilman Parker of Wmthrop, Massachusetts. On January 3, 1885, she was sailing on a southeasterly course through a narrow channel between the Haitian southern peninsula and Gonâve Island. The sky was empty of clouds, and the seas no higher than a man’s knee.

  Rising ominously in the middle of the channel was Rochelais Reef, a small rocky mountain rising from the seafloor, its peak capped with thick coral. The reef was plainly marked on the chart and sharply visible to the helmsman. He set a new course around the reef and was beginning to turn the spokes of the wheel when Captain Parker gripped him roughly by the arm.

  “Belay that! Stay on course.”

  “But, sir, we’ll run onto the reef for sure,” protested the helmsman.

  “Damn you!” Parker snapped. “Do as you’re ordered.”

  Knowing the ship was headed for certain disaster, the helmsman, out of fear of punishment, steered for the reef dead ahead. At high tide, the menacing Rochelais Reef barely rose above the surface of the water, as the once-beautiful ship came closer to what would be her grave. The helmsman gave the captain one last desperate look, but Parker remained resolute and nodded straight ahead where the waves were rolling over the reef.

  Mary Celeste struck dead center of Rochelais Reef. Her keel and hull planking cut a gouge through the coral, but the sharp spines cut through her copper-sheathed bottom and ripped into her bowels, sending tons of water inside her lower decks. Her bow drove up onto the reef as her stern settled beneath the water. In her death throes, Mary Celeste groaned horribly, as her hull and timbers were crushed by her momentum into the unyielding coral. At last, the agonized sounds died across the water and the ship became silent.

  Calmly, Captain Parker sent his crew into the boats and ordered them to row to the nearby port of Miragoane, Haiti, not more than twelve miles to the south. Unfortunately for Captain Parker, Mary Celeste did not immediately sink. It would not be long before an inspection of the wrecked hulk and its cargo revealed that it carried little more than fish and rubber shoes, which were not the expensive cargo listed in the manifest. The vessel, as it turned out, was exorbitantly insured to the tune of $25,000, far above the value of the ship and its cargo. Today, we call it an insurance scam. Back then, it was referred to as barratry, and was an offense punishable under U.S. law and carried the death penalty.

  It seemed that Parker’s bad luck had no end. Kingman Putnam, a New York surveyor, happened to be in Haiti at the time and was hired by the insurance underwriters to conduct an examination. His examination of the waterlogged cargo was instrumental in Parker’s arrest when he returned to New York. Parker was tried in court, but the jury hung, and another trial was immediately ordered by the court. True to form, Parker died before a new trial could be held.

  Mary Celeste soon disappeared into the coral that grew over her timbers and buried her decks. Despite her previous notoriety, she died neglected and forgotten, her drama played out on a barren reef in Haiti, perhaps in revenge by the ghosts of her vanished crew.

  ARMED WITH ENOUGH research data to give it a good shot, I began making plans to charter a boat and sail to Rochelais Reef. I contacted Mr. Mark Sheldon, who had purchased my favorite old search boat, Arvor III. This was the vessel I had sailed on when searching for the Bonhomme Richard in 1980. I chartered her again in 1984, when my team and I encountered all sorts of wild adventures in the North Sea, finding sixteen shipwrecks while losing a war of words with the French navy in Cherbourg, France, who refused to allow us to search for the Confederate raider Alabama.

  I had planned to meet the boat in Kingston, Jamaica, and then run across the Jamaica Channel and around Cape Dame Marie to Rochelais Reef, about a two-day trip. Unfortunately, Sheldon became ill and was not available for charter until the following year.

  John Davis of ECO-NOVA Productions then stepped in and offered to set up an expedition to conduct the search. Since John and his team are from Nova Scotia and Mary Celeste was built in Nova Scotia, they had a strong incentive to find the wreck. They were also enthusiastic about making a Sea Hunters documentary about the ship.

  In April of 2001, John set up the logistics, chartered a boat, and sent me round-trip airline tickets to Haiti. I arrived in Fort Lauderdale in the evening and was mildly surprised to see no one there to meet me. I hailed a shuttle van and headed for the Sheraton Hotel, then walked alone into the lobby, to the surprise of Davis. He had sent a friend to meet me, who had somehow missed picking me out of the deplaning crowd.

  With a face like mine, I wondered how I could be lost in the crowd. I began to wonder if this was the start of an ordeal. I was sure my guardian angel had gone on vacation and an evil demon taken his place, especially when I found I’d forgotten my passport. How’s that for dementia?

  John didn’t give it a thought. “You’ll be all right,” he said cheerfully. “The Haitians won’t care.”

  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 f
rom 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.