by Chris Dixon
“Horror became depicted on our countenances at the terrible spectacle that greeted us,” Browne wrote. “Mr. MacRae was seen reclining upon his berth, his face in a bath of blood, the right portion of his cranium blown away, brains and integuments scattered in all directions upon the deck and bulkheads.”
On the cabin’s desk lay a note penned in MacRae’s flowing handwriting.
San Francisco, Nov. 17th, 1855.
As it may be possible for me to leave this world for another, I wish this disposition to be made of my property.
Viz: My watch to my brother John Colin; my funds in equal parts to the two children of my brother Alexander and the one of my brother Donald.
My books I will to Phelps [MacRae’s assistant during his time in Chile], and my body to be taken outside the heads and be dropped overboards on the ebb tide.
If on settling my accounts there should be money due me, I wish it should be appropriated to the purchase of seal rings to be given to each of my brothers.
My soul I give to God and I hope he will make better use of it than I have.
Signed, Archibald MacRae
Lieut, U.S.N.
In the decades after MacRae’s death, waves of immigrants and pioneers continued to knowingly and unknowingly risk their lives at Cortes Bank. Most were simply passing north aboard steamships powered by leaky, explosion-prone boilers. Others, though, sought out Cortes Bank deliberately, attracted by the same marine treasures that centuries before dazzled the ancient Kinkipar. Live coral reefs, jungles of palm and bull kelp, deep crevices, and strange, boulder-filled craters created the perfect habitat for black, white, pink, and red abalone and giant, decades-old lobsters. Plying the waters were gorgeous pelagic fishes—yellowtail, yellowfin, marlin, and massive bluefin—so big, fast, and strong they were nearly impossible to catch by lure or spear.
Still, as the twentieth century dawned, the defining aspect of Cortes Bank wasn’t its incredibly fertile waters but the perils it posed for navigation. Such was the perceived danger that in 1911, U.S. Navy Commander William Adger Moffett ignored the fact that the Bank actually lies in waters due east of Mexico. He deployed a new high-tech buoy that featured not only a bellows-driven whistle but an acetylene-powered blinking light. He hoisted a U.S. flag, and in a modest ceremony summarily claimed Bishop Rock and Cortes Bank in the name of the United States. The New York Times stated that Moffett had actually laid claim to a small island. They were, of course, several thousand years too late for the statement to be accurate, but have yet to issue a correction.
Because steamers didn’t have to cruise far offshore like sailing vessels, Bishop Rock’s waves were soon being frequently sighted, and the Cortes Bank began captivating writers for the Los Angeles Times. In 1925, Maude Pilkington Lukens joined the Coast Survey ship Pioneer, whose crew discovered that the actual location of Bishop Rock was a mile from where it should be, a supposedly precise celestial waypoint James Alden had established shortly after MacRae’s death. It was hypothesized that shockwaves from a powerful earthquake that had just struck Chile had somehow shifted the seafloor. It’s more likely that Alden’s reckoning was not quite dead.
A year later, Los Angeles Times writer George Wycherly Kirkman set out for the Bank aboard a fishing vessel. He was spellbound by the Bank’s gin-clear waters and the possibilities of what lay below. Yet he said that fisherman reported the presence of more than “finny prey.”
From unknown ports, they say, come silently sailing over these sunken isles weird phantom ships bound for harbors that are never reached by the ghostly crews that line the rails of their shadowy craft, dimly seen through the shifting many-colored mists of the sea—perhaps that once sailed from some distant forgotten port to which they never yet returned. Amid the half-lights ‘twixt dark and dawn, weird voices are heard in quaint old sea chants in unremembered tongues, the clatter of ship gear, of slatting yards against creaking masts, and loudly shouted orders backed by blood-curdling deep-sea oaths once familiar to the bearded ghostly crews. At times, from the doomed caravels and galleons rise melancholy laments like the wild wailings heard aforetime near the Isle of the Lost Woman, storm-beaten San Nicolas Island to the leeward.
Into the mid-twentieth century, ghost ships and mortal fisherman were arriving in increasing numbers, often risking their lives to do so, and it’s thus surprising that the Cortes Bank hasn’t claimed more boats or souls than it has. There have, however, been at least a few sinkings and terrifyingly close calls. For instance, in November 1952, an eighty-foot purse seiner, the El Capitan, was cleaved in half by a sister fishing vessel while both worked a giant school of mackerel above the bank in the dead of night. Twelve terrified crewmen leapt into the ocean as the ship foundered, sinking in less than five minutes. All were rescued.
Fate was tempted again in 1957, when a flamboyant diver from Redondo Beach launched the only known major treasure hunting expedition to the Cortes Bank. His name was Mel Fisher.
To a great many, Mel Fisher needs no introduction. He was the son of a California chicken farmer who craved adventure and the spotlight, and early on decided that his future lay along the ocean floor. Newfangled aqualungs were making diving accessible to the masses, and in the mid-1950s Fisher and his wife, Dolores, opened a successful dive shop in Redondo Beach. Fisher became utterly addicted to the hunt, eventually moving to Florida to explore countless wrecks along the periphery of the Gulf Stream. His white whale was the Nuestra Señora de Atocha, a treasure ship that had foundered off Florida in 1622.
Some called Fisher a quixotic huckster and a shameless self-promoter with no appreciation for the cultural significance of the graves and live coral he scoured with a huge, seafloor vacuum. Yet Fisher paid a heavy price for his obsession with the Atocha, losing his son Dirk and his daughter-in-law in a 1975 dive off the Florida coast. Ten years to the day after Dirk’s death, Fisher’s team finally found their ship. Eventually, they unearthed more than $400 million in plundered Indian icons, jewelry, and bars of pure gold from the shattered hull of the Atocha—the richest undersea treasure ever discovered.
I once interviewed Fisher around 1989 and discussed the ongoing legal battles he faced in laying claim to the treasure. He was certain that courts would eventually find in his favor. When I asked how he was so sure, he spun his trademark phrase with a twinkle in his eye: “It’s simple. Finders, keepers.”
In 1957, Fisher sought to locate the wreck of the Santa Rosa atop Bishop Rock. He recruited a team that included a diving piano bar singer and a roller- skating instructor. He and his wife showed Los Angeles Times writer Lee Bastajian an array of equipment—an underwater bicycle, a high-tech sled that could detect metals, and an array of underwater cameras. Tantalizingly, Fisher also displayed bronze he claimed to have recovered from the Bank and a chart titled Ye Olde Map of Reported Facts and Tales. Just below a trident-clutching Neptune lay the Santa Rosa.
“Normally 50-foot waves break over the rock,” Fisher told Bastajian. “Thus our departure will await a relative calm—20-foot waves.”
When that “calm” window opened in January 1957, Times editors tapped a young reporter named George Beronius—a novice diver who had taken lessons at Fisher’s school—and the treasure hunters headed out to sea.
Lee Bastajian’s Los Angeles Times piece on Mel Fisher’s first major expedition out to the Cortes Bank in 1956. “The whole thing,” Times reporter George Beronius would later say, “it was just a complete fiasco.” Image courtesy of the Los Angeles Times.
I recently met George Beronius and his delightful wife, Eleanor, on a sunny October day in Santa Barbara Harbor. Now in his eighties, bright-eyed, and in possession of a wry sense of humor, Beronius was shocked when I showed him pictures of the giant waves the Bank is capable of delivering. “When we got out there, the water was calm and flat—just like a lake,” he said. “To think what you’re telling me with 40- to 70-foot waves. That would have scared the bejeezus out of me. If I’d known that, I’d never have gone.”
Beronius joined twenty-three others at Newport Harbor aboard an aging seventy-five-foot charter fishing boat, Via Jero, on a drizzly morning. Beronius later wrote in the Times: “Everyone was in high spirits, brought on in part by the knowledge that each on board was to receive a share of the $700,000 gold treasure, just as soon as we could pick it up off the ocean bottom.”
Fisher showed Beronius his map, claiming it came straight from an Acapulco museum. The young reporter was skeptical, but listened eagerly. Fisher then showed him the sled. Beronius told me: “It was really two-by-fours and some chicken wire with a glass meter on it that was supposed to detect metal. My impression was that his map—it wasn’t some chewed up, weather-beaten piece of paper—was just an ordinary map with markings. I was actually under the impression that the whole thing was kind of a fraud or a lark. That was how the editors saw it, too. A bunch of kids going out with a crazy guy and a phony map. But everybody all kind of just went along with Mel.”
Via Jero reached the Bank the next morning, anchoring alongside the clanging Bishop Rock buoy in a steady rain. The divers were soon leaping cheerfully into a placid ocean. Cliff Hanson, a retired speedboat racer, first tried out his own 150-pound motor-driven sled—which may have actually been a disarmed navy torpedo—that he called a “sub-glider.” Unfortunately, the machine’s nose shattered due to the depth pressure, rendering it inoperable. A few hours later, water pressure also shattered the glass of the viewfinder on Fisher’s chicken-wire magnetometer.
The mission then degenerated into a wine-fueled lobster fest. “The water was so clear,” said Beronius. “You could see the rocks and all the growth. There wasn’t much agitation at all. We brought up the biggest damn lobsters you ever saw. That certainly did help mitigate the fact that we didn’t find any treasure.”
The divers hunted, drank, and feasted for two days, heading home at sunset on the second day. Beronius awoke at around 1 A.M. , feeling a searing heat radiating from the bulkhead alongside his bunk. “I said, ‘That ain’t right,’ and went to tell the captain.”
When Captain Irving Chaffee opened the engine room hatch, a giant geyser of flame erupted. Beronius and the crew grabbed extinguishers, but the rubber hoses were so rotten, they disintegrated. Everyone formed a bucket brigade. “But we didn’t even have buckets,” he said. “Just dishpans from the galley.”
As the fire neared a fifty-five-gallon fuel drum, the first mate suggested to the captain that it might be high time to call the Coast Guard. “The captain replied, ‘Well, I suppose we could do that,’” said Beronius. “He called them. But when they asked, ‘Do you need assistance?’ He said, ‘No, we’re okay.’ We were okay? We were on fire and we’d lost an engine. Turns out he didn’t want them to know that he didn’t have a charter license.”
Moments later, the first mate volunteered to don a water-soaked wetsuit and a tooth-to-toe wrap of wet towels. He waded into the inferno and managed to heave water directly onto the flames. The fire was extinguished.
Via Jero continued on its remaining engine, but Beronius was spooked and unable to sleep. He marveled at schools of dolphins playing in the phosphorescent glow of the ship’s bow wake and wondered what else might go wrong. At 4 A.M. , the fire reignited. “We damn near burned down that time,” he said. “If that boat had been gasoline- instead of diesel-powered, we would have blown sky high.”
By this point, at least a few lights along Orange County’s rural shoreline were visible. Beronius breathed a sigh of relief when the captain told him he was heading toward the green and red entrance lights to Newport Harbor directly ahead. But a quarter mile out, Beronius realized something looked funny—the lights were switching from red to green. He grabbed the binoculars. “It wasn’t Newport Harbor,” he said. “It was a stoplight.”
Chaffee slammed his only functional engine into reverse and the boat slowly, painfully came to a halt within earshot of the crashing surf along the Pacific Coast Highway in downtown Laguna Beach—just shy of a nasty slab of barely submerged reef. Slowly and carefully, Chaffee turned north toward Newport Harbor.
“You know, I had never actually made the connection that this was the Mel Fisher until you brought it up to me,” Beronius said. “Looking back and realizing that this guy found all this treasure in Florida—this was really the beginning of a big career for him. This is all really going to make a nice after-dinner story,” he chuckled. “The whole thing—it was just a complete fiasco.”
The mystery of whether treasure exists atop the Cortes Bank lingers today. Despite repeated inquiry, the determined silence of the Fisher family hasn’t helped resolve the question. Maybe they found nothing, and would rather not discuss an embarrassing lark on the part of their old man. Or maybe, after a generation of legal wrangling over their past discoveries, they’re simply sticking to the unofficial treasure hunter’s law Mel shared with me in 1989: “Finders, keepers.”
Mel Fisher discovered the wreck of the Nuestra Señora de Atocha on July 20, 1985. It was the greatest treasure ever discovered on the sea floor. Coincidentally, singing storyteller Jimmy Buffett, a friend of Fisher’s, happened to be nearby. “I was fishing about a mile away when the wreck was discovered,” Buffett recalled. “Then they called me on the radio and said, ‘You might want to come over here.’” In the photo, Buffett is singing “A Pirate Looks at Forty” on the day of discovery, while seated alongside Fisher atop a pile of gold and silver bars from the Atocha. Photo and story courtesy of Jimmy Buffett.
Given what Cortes Bank is most known for today—as one of the world’s premier big wave surfing spots—one obvious question is: Who, exactly, was the first person to ride a wave above the Bishop Rock? Like most other “truths” about the Bank, this has proved hard to pin down.
The most widespread assumption was that Philip “Flippy” Hoffman must have surfed Cortes Bank while abalone diving in the 1950s, and if not Flippy, then perhaps his brother, Walter, or his hard-charging son, Marty. If not Marty, people said, maybe it was another surfing godfather, like Pat Curren or Jose Angel. Yet none appears to have surfed out there. I queried other editors and old-timers I knew, and chased frustrating dead-end leads, until finally, on the urging of Surfer’s Journal publisher Steve Pezman, I tapped the encyclopedic mind of Mickey Muñoz. A diminutive man, Muñoz once charged Waimea Bay alongside Greg Noll and donned a woman’s swimsuit to stunt double for Sandra Dee’s Gidget. Today he’s in his mid-seventies, but he’s still a regular fixture in the lineups from Lower Trestles to San Onofre.
Mickey thought it possible that two hard-core California watermen might have surfed the Bank. The first was Pete Peterson. “He was an intrepid explorer,” Muñoz said. “He was surfing out at San Nicolas Island before people would even go out there—before the navy got really entrenched. Another intrepid diver who had cojones grandes was Frank Donohue. He wrote for the Santa Monica Outlook, he was a movie stuntman, a commercial diver, a construction diver. That guy was so ballsy, he’d load his boats up with so much lobster and abalone that if he’d stopped, he would have sunk. He’d run across the border and unload by going by a pier and throwing off sacks till he was light enough that he could stop. I definitely would not have put it past him to have gone out to Cortes Bank to surf.”
Unfortunately, both Petersen and Donohue died in recent years, and I’ve been unable to confirm any claim made on their behalf. Still, Muñoz’s leads revealed a loose brotherhood of interwoven lives, through which the mystery has perhaps been solved. Like Flippy Hoffman, Muñoz told me I absolutely had to talk to a Hawaiian named Ilima Kalama. “Oh, and there’s another guy you should speak with,” he said. “You ever heard of Harrison Ealey?”
I met Harrison Ealey on a bright October day in Oceanside, California. Today, he’s a fit senior with a tiny gray ponytail, blazing blue eyes, and a root canal with a lightning bolt. “I had one with a dolphin, too,” he said with an impish laugh. “But I pulled it out flossing my teeth.”
When Ealey was little, he spent his
childhood in Dana Point, Laguna Beach, and an amazing little bungalow he still owns on a hillside several blocks from Oceanside’s fishing pier. “It was a great place to grow up,” he said. “My dad had a little sailboat, and I was an adventurous little kid. I’d sail down along the street and into the estuary when the winter rain opened it up. It was a great time to grow up, too. I mean, Laguna Beach was all seashells and dirt roads. We had a little skiff over there in Woods Cove—near Betty Davis’s house. Her boyfriend and Flippy Hoffman taught me how to dive and take abalone. Dive down ten, fifteen feet with a speargun and pull out whatever you needed for groceries—abalone, white sea bass, and corvina.”
Ealey showed me a quiver of battered surfboards, including a couple he surfed as a kid. He grew up surfing with Mickey Muñoz and Phil Edwards, one of the best surfer/shapers ever to emerge from California. Through the mid-1950s, they surfed the legendary point break known as Killer Dana (before the Army Corps of Engineers buried the wave). There were then so few surfers on the California coast that if you saw another car with boards on the roof, you pulled over and talked story. Often as not, you’d turn around and follow them to their destination.
In the late 1950s, Ealey became an avid sailor and began regularly crewing and later captaining on racing and pleasure vessels that plied the waters between California, Mexico, and Hawaii. In 1961, Phil Edwards joined Ealey in helping to ferry to Hawaii a big ninety-foot sailing yacht owned by the president of Matson shipping lines. Shortly after they disembarked on Oahu, filmmaker Bruce Brown (of Endless Summer fame) captured Edwards on the first documented ride through the cylindrical barrels of Oahu’s infamous Banzai Pipeline—a wave up to then presumed unrideable. Pipeline would become the performance wave by which all others would be judged. A few miles away, Waimea Bay would simply become known as the biggest rideable wave of its day.