The Sea Hunters

by Clive Cussler

  On a boat belonging to a pair of Long Island residents, Bill Shea and I conducted a remote sensing survey with his proton magnetometer as close as we dared to the breakers on the Atlantic Ocean side of the island in hopes of detecting the magnetic signature of any iron left on board the Savannah. Although we had planned a mile-long search grid that ran parallel to the beach, we could not distinguish landmarks over the high sand dunes that run along the spine of Fire Island. Since the boat did not carry navigation equipment, this was imperative if we were to set our boundaries for running our search lanes in the water and on the beach.

  I volunteered to swim to shore, climb the sud dunes, and take visual sightings in order to plot our search grid. Fifteen minutes later, I located the landmarks that I had plotted from a topographic chart that corresponded with the approximate site of the Savannah's burial place. After marking the eastern boundary of the grid with a piece of driftwood that could be seen from the boat, I began pacing off a mile toward the west boundary.

  Taking my terrible memory into consideration-when my wife sends me to the store for a loaf of bread, I always come home with a jar of pickles-I kept track of my progress by shifting ten pebbles one by one from one hand to another. The beach appeared totally deserted, so I merrily counted out the numbers aloud in a Mitch Miller sing-along fashion.

  About halfway toward my western boundary, I noticed a figure approaching from the opposite direction. Drawing closer, I could see that it was an elderly man wearing a big-brimmed floppy hat on his head. I was so wrapped up in not losing my count I paid no more attention to him until after we had passed. Then a tiny brain cell told me that something wasn't quite right. So I turned around.

  The old gentleman had stopped about ten paces away and was staring at me as if I were some nut case who had escaped his padded cell.

  Amusement was etched on his suntanned face. He, no doubt, couldn't imagine why someone would walk down a deserted beach while staring at the sand and singing numbers to himself.

  He couldn't have been more amused than me when I realized that beneath the floppy hat the old guy was completely nude.

  One of the practices I've come to rely on when looking for a particular shipwreck is to research other ships that went down in the same general area. Should my primary target prove too elusive or impossible to find within my time schedule, or luckily, I stumble on it early in the game, I can use the extra days to hunt for a second or third wreck. There is nothing wrong with being extra ambitious when you're given the opportunity of achieving an additional success by catching two or more fish on the same hook.

  Unable to find a solid magnetic signature of the Savannah, I decided to give her a rain check, and I moved the crew across Long Island into the Sound for an attempt at discovering the steamboat Lexington, lost for nearly 150 years.

  Bob Fleming, a nationally respected Washington, D.C researcher and shipwreck scholar', who works with me on a regular basis, put me onto the track of the ill-starred steamboat. Fleming sent me the story behind the tragedy. Cursed with a vivid imagination, I could almost hear the cries of the Lexington's victims begging for someone to find their tomb.

  Margaret Dubitsky, a Long Island schoolteacher, who worked long and hard in compiling a remarkable research package from New York state and local archives, found references to the steamboat's being raised.

  One vague report claimed it was brought to the surface and towed away, suggesting,it no longer lay on the bottom of the Sound.

  This piece of information nearly sank the project before it began.

  It was known that occasional sea hunts through the decades had failed to find a trace of the steamboat. Could this explain why she was never located by either sport divers or fishermen? Everyone, it seemed, claimed that because she couldn't be found she must no longer exist.

  I hated to give up on her. Much of my life people have told me I was wasting my time or engaging in an exercise in futility when I tackled a seemingly hopeless project. What is interesting is that they were right only 40 percent of the time.

  Shoving all pessimistic thoughts aside, I felt strongly that it was conceivable the Lexington might still rest in the murky depths, forgotten and untouched for almost a century and a half. If so, the charred wreckage of what had once been the finest steamboat on Long Island Sound had now become a historically rich and archaeologically significant vessel.

  Raising a two-hundred-foot vessel from 130 feet of water is a feat rarely if ever attempted today. Difficulties with weather, unpredictable seas, the heavy lifting equipment involved, and the expense can be enormous. Having the technology in 1842 to accomplish such an undertaking seems incredible. Hard-hat diving was in its infancy. Decompression tables were unknown. Did divers sling chains under the hull to lift her out of the water, or were cables dragged under the wreck by two vessels steaming side by side? And then there had to be a barge and a crane with the capacity to lift a 488-ton vessel to the surface.

  Even by twenty-first-century standards this takes a derrick almost the size of the one used by the Glomar Explorer to raise the Russian submarine. And yet it was accomplished, as eventually proven by NUMA in July of 1983.

  Finding no insurance-company records of a raising, no credible, detailed accounts in contemporary newspapers of a charred hull brought into port, I forged ahead and formed an expedition to search for the wreckage I felt certain was still on the seabed. I was told by any number of divers that I was laboring in vain and pouring time and money into a sinkhole. To me, this was akin to telling MacArthur he couldn't invade the Philippines.

  Working with Zeff Loria of Port Jefferson, Long Island, who agreed to act as project director, I began analyzing the historical material gathered by researchers Fleming and Dubitsky. The enigma? Where exactly was the Lexington when she finally sank? Ship captains sailing in landlocked waters did not navigate by latitude and longitude coordinates. Nor did they estimate their positions by the stars or dead reckoning. They used visual sightings. Log books from ships sailing the Sound simply contained entries stating that "Oak Neck Point was abeam at 9:35 P.m." Few other details on position were given.

  The Lexington left few clues.

  Of all the sightings from witnesses on shore, I placed my faith in the Old Field lighthouse keeper, who reported seeing the flames die about four miles north of the Point and slightly to the west. Figuring that he was a good judge of distance across water, I laid out an initial grid of four square miles in his approximate area, and the search was on.

  The first attempt was spent primarily in studying the area, bottom conditions, run of the tide, and underwater visibility. Captain Tony Bresnah, with his boat, the Day Off, anchored us over a sunken barge and we made a test dive into the Sound. One to two feet of visibility was not unexpected, but the current was much stronger than estimated.

  We figured close to four knots, and all divers were holding on to the anchor chain while stretched horizontal like flags in a windstorm.

  We also discovered that half our search grid passed under the path of the Bridgeport-Port Jefferson ferry that ran between the mainland and Long Island during the summers. In continuous operation since 1874, it provided an excellent reason why fishermen didn't fish and divers didn't dive in the neighborhood.

  For the second attempt, Zeff Loria assembled a first-rate crew.

  The Mikado III, captained by Mike Amell, an experienced divemaster, was chartered. The dive team was led by Doug Rutledge and Sandy Zicaro.

  Equipment included a Schonstedt gradiometer to detect the presence of iron, a Klein & Associates side scan sonar to record objects protruding from the sea bottom, and a Loran navigation unit, since made obsolete by newer Global Positioning Systems, utilizing satellites.

  For once the tedium of running search lanes did not cause uncontrolled yawning. Tom Cunu-rungs, Klein's sonar technician, announced not one but three solid targets the first hour into the search. Subsequent runs over the targets suggested one large vessel broken into three sections. I
n one sonar recording the engine's walking beam and a large section of the guard from a paddle wheel could be detected.

  Captain Mike Amell then expertly moored the Mikado III directly over the wreck so the divers could descend on the anchor line. The bottom depth registered 140 feet on the boat's echo sounder and the diver's depth gauges. This time we waited for slack tide. The view inside a tunnel offered better visibility than what Rutledge and Zicaro found on the bottom, and they had to examine the wreck with powerful underwater lights.

  Using a safety line, we made narrow sweeps of the central section of the wreckage. With the divers restricted to only ten minutes of bottom time, major exploration was severely limited. The divers brought up a few bolts and pieces of charred wood. They reported seeing one of the paddle wheels and more charred timbers and described the hull construction as looking like an egg crate, verifying the Lexington's unusual box frame.

  It is a pity you cannot stand on the sandy bottom, step back, and view the wreckage in its entirety. The length of the burned and broken hull, the great paddle wheels, the walking beams of the engines are more imagined than seen. The dismal green, murky water allows you only a few closeup glimpses of how the ship must have once appeared.

  You feel as if you're groping through a haunted house in the dead of night, glimpsing its ghosts from the corner of one eye.

  Because of the many long hours of research, I felt as though I had walked the decks of the Lexington, watched the smoke pour into the sky from her smokestack, seen her passengers and crew. To the other divers, she was simply a pile of debris on the bottom. I saw her in my mind as she once was, a greyhound of the waters. And yet I was not sorry to leave her.

  After we assembled the artifacts and cataloged them, I sent a piece of a timber to Robert Baldwin, a leading expert in wood science, who identified it as yellow pine, one of the woods used in the construction of the steamship.

  Rutledge and Zicaro also described strands of a weird green wire that looped around the wreck. Believing that the wreck was raised before breaking into three pieces, I did a bit of detective work by contacting Mr. Oliver Tannet, an executive with a wire cable company.

  As luck would have it, Mr. Tannet collected antique wire and was an authority on early cable. He stated that by 1840 engineers had not achieved the technology to extrude flexible wire cable. In order to make it curl, the iron strands were woven around a core of copper.

  After a century and a half of attack by salt water, the iron in the cables used to hoist the Lexington off the bottom had eroded away, leaving the green-patinaed copper core behind.

  The lighthouse keeper was close to the mark. Instead of four miles north and slightly west, the wreck of the Lexington was found three and a half miles north and slightly west.

  The artifacts recovered by NUMA (sorry, no silver) were donated to the Vanderbilt Museum in Centerport, Long Island, for display to the public. Talk of raising the steamship soon faded, as do most recovery projects when the costs are added up and no one comes forth to underwrite the funding.

  Since NUMA's discovery, many divers have investigated the Lexington. Her resting place is now well known to the local dive boat captains.

  Perhaps someday an extensive archaeological recovery may be realized on her remains.

  The greyhounds of the Sound have long steamed over the horizon.

  The Lexington is a time capsule of an era when the United States was just beginning to flex its muscles and cross the threshold of the industrial revolution. A time when we were turning more of our energies from manifest destiny to technology. A pity we'll never see their smoke or hear their whistles again.

  A final word of caution. Diving the Lexington can be very dangerous.

  The tides are treacherous and can run as high as four knots.

  Ambient light is almost nonexistent and disorientation is a sure bet unless the diver makes good use of a guideline attached to the anchor chain. I highly recommend that you dive only during slack tide to avoid a nasty current.

  The Republic Of texas Navy Ship Zabala 1836-1842 early morning, the sun was blotted out by black, sinister clouds, and the wind gained in velocity with each passing hour.

  Lightning streaks were followed by the threatening rumble of thunder . A driving rain was accompanied by fast-rising seas as the worst storm in recent memory struck the mid-Atlantic coast in October of z Captain Henry May peered into the growing tempest from the wheel house of his ship, the steamship Charleston. The sea had turned from beautiful to ugly in less than forty minutes. A veteran of the run between Philadelphia and Charleston, South Carolina, May knew from experience that conditions were building into the worst storm he'd ever co faced in his twenty-five years at sea.

  "Better warn the passengers to tie themselves to their berths, Mr.

  Lawler. We're in for a nasty blow."

  May's first mate, Charlie Lawler, forced a tight grin. "Nasty blow, captain? She looks more like the furies run amok."

  "While you're at it, tell Chief Engineer Leland to mind his fires.

  Judging from the rise in the waves, we'll be taking on water."

  The full force of the storm fell on them without mercy. Within another hour, the seas became heaving mountains that rushed out of the sheets of pouring rain and curled down on the bows of Charleston as she took them head-on. The bulwarks and railings along the main deck were swept away along with the lifeboats. The shutters that shielded the lower windows of the passenger cabins were crushed inward by the force of the water.

  May was blessed with an experienced crew, who fearlessly took to the decks to clear thedamage and nail canvas and boards over the shattered windows. They labored under a drenching downpour that blocked out the sky and turned the sea into a boiling caldron.

  Lawler's voice was lost in the howling wind, and he had to use hand motions to direct the crew to heave any wreckage overboard.

  In the wheelhouse, May added his strength to that of the helmsman as they struggled to quarter Charleston's bows into the wave crests before the steamboat dropped sickeningly into the troughs. "Help me bring her around," he ordered the helmsman. "We'll try and run her ashore."

  "The waves will pound our broadside," helmsman Jacob Hill protested. "We'll never make it before being crushed to pieces."

  "We'll sink if we don't!" May snapped.

  Tall, broad-shouldered, with muscles raised for the task, Jacob Hill nodded in grim silence, murmured a short prayer, and took a new grip on the wheel spokes.

  Slowly, too slowly, it seemed to Hill, the hull slewed broadside to the onslaught of the seas that smashed into the entire length of the helpless ship. She rolled on her beam ends until May could look out the side windows of the wheelhouse directly down into the menacin gray waters. Charleston was tossed like a helpless block of wood and buried repeatedly by the mountainous seas. After what seemed an eternity, the waves finally lifted, and dropped the stern as the great paddle wheels began churning with the current. She had incredibly survived the 180-degr&e Turn without springing her timbers.

  "Only God knows why," Captain May said, sighing, "but she's still sound as a dollar."

  "She's a sweet-handling ship," muttered Hill. "I know of no other that could have done it."

  At 569 tons, Charleston was a side-wheel steamer with a length of 201 feet and a 24-foot beam and was propelled by two walking-beam engines fired by two boilers and a smaller auxiliary. She was built in Philadelphia by the well-respected shipbuilding family of John Vaughan & Son in 1836. A fast ship for her day, she could make 16 knots.

  Though Charleston was riding easier, the margin between life and death for her passengers and crew was still paper thin. Incredibly, the storm increased in its fury. The deckhouses were smashed in, as were the windows of the wheelhouse. May and Hill found themselves fighting to keep the ship on a steady course while whipped and deluged by the driving rain.

  Broken and confused, the waves surged up and under the sponsons, the wooden projections fitted under the g
uards of the paddle wheels and running the length of the hull, shoving the decks upward and allowing water to flood the ship's interior. All too quickly, the ship began to sink deeper in the twisting water.

  Unable to spare any of his crew, Lawler beat on the doors of the cabins and ordered the male passengers to man the pumps and form a bucket brigade to bail out the water flowing into the cargo deck below.

  No man refused Lawler's demand. They kept at it for the next eighteen hours without rest, often helped by their wives, who insisted on lending a hand. Even the few children on board were pressed into service, to stuff rags and cotton around the sprung doors and windows of their cabins.

  Just after twelve noon, the forward hatch cover was smashed in, and the water that poured in Put out the fires of one of the two boilers.

  Thankful for the auxiliary boiler, Chief Engineer Leland stoked it to life. With the ship made nearly unmanageable by the mountainous seas, May ordered sails set in another attempt to run the battered Charleston ashore. But the vicious wind suddenly blew in from a new direction and tore the exposed canvas to shreds. For the moment it appeared that all hope was lost and the Charleston was going to the bottom, along with three other passenger ships that were pounded to pieces and sunk by the same tempest. But the contrary wind that dashed May's hope of grounding the ship in the safety of the shore began working in his favor, driving Charleston around Cape Lookout off the North Carolina coast and into more sheltered waters.