John Sands, curator at the Newport News Mariners' Museum, was most helpful in providing us with copies of watercolors and sketches by contemporary artists showing Cumberland's masts protruding from the river between two piers, approximately three hundred yards from shore.
Now, we had our ballpark.
I decided it was time to reap the fruits of our labor. I broke open a jar of Laura Scudder's peanut butter. While making my favorite sandwich of peanut butter with mayonnaise and dill pickles, I phoned Bill Shea and Walt Schob and set up a date for all of us to meet in Virginia for a four-day cursory inspection to collect initial data for a later, more in-depth search.
The next step was to apply to the Virginia Marine Resources Commission for a permit to investigate underwater historic property.
John Broadwater, head of the Underwater Archaeology Section, was most helpful and even provided a team of state archaeologists to come along and dive. Support was provided by members of a British Advanced Underwater Team, a bunch of really fun and jovial guys.
On the day that everyone assembled for the project, the officials of the Commonwealth of Virginia (the tide State isn't good enough for them) were somewhat less than impressed with our methodology, a term archaeologists are fond of using; it has an academic ring to it, like provenance and empirical data.
There are work boats and there are work boats. But our NUMA crew operated off a hundred-foot luxury yacht that was built in the 1920s and whose decks had been walked by two Presidents, Coolidge and Hoover.
She was called Sakonit, and abounded with teak decks and mahogany interior paneling. Her skipper, Danny Wilson, had spent long hours and a fair sum of money restoring her to her original state. He and his family lived on board.
One could sit on the spacious open rear deck under a colorful awning and imagine ghostly men in tuxedos and women in flapper dresses, stockings rolled down below knees red with rouge, drinking bootleg booze and dancing to a Dixieland jazz band, playing "The Varsity Drag."
Thinking the search for the Civil War ships might be a change of scene, Wilson chartered the Sakonit to NUMA for half his normal charge for five days. He offered me a stateroom and invited me to enjoy sleeping on the famous old yacht. The problem was I couldn't sleep.
The Sakonit didn't have air conditioning, and Virginia in July is not cool, nor is it dry.
I lay there staring at the reflection Of rippling water through a porthole while lying in an ocean of sweat, insanely envious of Bill Shea, Walt Schob, and my son, Dirk, no fools they, who were living comfortably in a nearby Holiday Inn, under a constant seventy-two-degree temperature while enjoying a cocktail lounge within spitting distance that served ice-cold beer.
My tongue wagged like a blind dog's tail in a meat market at the thought of joining them, but the Wilsons were such nice and hospitable people I braved it out.
John Broadwater, his staff of underwater investigators, and the British dive team were not sure we had the proper approach for archaeological survey. For some unfathomable reason they thought our survey effectiveness was severely limited. They found our equipment lacking.
Not intending a full-scale exercise, all we brought along was our trusty Schonstedt gradiometer, our own expert archaeologist, Dan KoskiKarell, two cases of Coors beer, and four bottles of Bombay gin.
I'm a strong believer in "getting there is half the fun."
On reflection I can see that our philosophies clashed. Broadwater and his crew were dead serious and expected a full-scale effort, but I was there strictly to investigate site conditions, study landmarks, and make a little whoopie on the side. A more extensive search project would come later.
Settling down to business, we began running our lanes fifty feet apart and perpendicular (I love that word) to shore. When anomalies of consequence were detected, buoys were dropped and divers went down, swimming one-hundred-foot circular search patterns around the centers of the targets.
Because all targets were at depths in excess of seventy feet, bottom time was limited to a maximum of forty minutes, and repetitive dives did not exceed twenty-five minutes. And because English dive tables restricted bottom time to thirty minutes with no repetitive dives, the British team could probe the sites only once a day.
Swimming under the James River cannot be compared to sport diving in the Caribbean. There have been attempts to clean the water since we were there in '81 and '82, but in those days we had to contend with a dark, murky void containing every pollutant known to man: sewage, ketone, chemicals, and an E. coli count that would make an environmentalist cry. If that wasn't enough, there were the river's current and the tidal surge from Chesapeake Bay sweeping back and forth over the dive sites to contend with. Ship traffic was also heavy, and the moving hulls and thrashing propeller blades of tankers, freighters, tugs, and barges, which travel up and down the river, presented a constant source of peril to divers.
Walt Schob, who dove around the world and worked on the recovery of the Mary Rose, King Henry VIII's flagship that lay forgotten for four centuries until foundand recovered, said conditions on the bottom of the James River were the worst he had ever encountered.
Our one benefit was the warm water temperature. Beyond that the only thing you looked forward to after diving through seventy feet of gloom to the ooze on the bottom was the joy of reaching the surface and sunlight again. Visibility was nil. Divers who wore glasses needed the services of an optometrist to grind prescription lenses in their face masks. Even with 20/20 eyesight, it's tough to focus on a vague object less than six inches away.
Leaving the lion's share of the diving to the young guys, I spent my time keeping a sharp eye on the water for passing ships and any signs of problems under water. My other job was to field questions by dignitaries and news people. I was @lways amused when a visitor came on board the Sakonit to observe the operation and spotted an artificial leg lying on the deck. Their expressions were priceless. It belonged to Dick Swete, one of the Virginia Research Center archaeologists, who had lost a leg in Vietnam. Before they could ask, I told them the divers had found it while probing the river bottom. I don't believe Dick ever knew about the story I created and handed out to the gullible about the one-legged sailor who was urinating on the casemate of the Virginia when it rammed the Cumberland.
One reporter asked me, "Do you have a doctor on board?"
"Not in the strict sense," I answered. "I handle all medical emergencies myself."
"Did you go to medical school?"
"No, but I subscribe to the Reader's Digest.
I'm constantly amazed at how the ladies and gentlemen of the news media can't take a joke.
Of the two targets that seemed the most promising, one turned out to be an old coal barge constructed from iron. The other target, however, revealed a lumberyard full of won-neaten planking the archaeologists classified as coming from a nineteenth-century shipwreck.
Could it possibly be Florida's remains? iv
Back with a Vengeance July 1982 after giving it my earnest consideration over two martinis one evening, I decided to make another attempt on Florida and Cumberland.
Somehow it seemed the only sane thing to do.
Since we were reasonably certain where Florida rested, and had a grid site no larger than a football field for Cumberland, I felt that, in keeping with my image as a good fellow, salt of the earth, and the backbone of America, it was time for a professional survey conducted by a team of hard-core professional archaeologists.
Fortune smiled. I didn't have to call Kelly Girls or run a classified ad under Help Wanted. Four of the archaeologists from the Commonwealth of Virginia, who dove with NUMA in 1981-James Knickerbacker, Sam Margolin, Dick Swete, and Mike Warner-had resigned and launched their own organization, called Underwater Archaeological Joint Ventures (U.A.J.V). I couldn't have found a better team if I'd offered a reward. Between them, they had amassed over eight hundred hours of bottom time in the James River, and despite god-awful conditions had achieved a proven record
of success in both search and survey and expedition.
The first hurdle was obtaining a permit from Virginia and the Army Corps of Engineers to excavate the wreck sites.
Having a nonchalant flair for trivial details, I found the procedures and ensuing hurdles thrown out by the bureaucracy, the restrictions, the consideration of everything from the threat to shell-fishing activities and cultural resources to the requirements for daily logs, dive logs, excavation and artifact registers, monthly reports, methodology (that word again), and a hundred other stipulations rather exasperating. What you could and could not do reminded me of watching a nree Stooges film festival without being allowed to eat hot buttered popcorn and Milk Duds.
Because of some genetic short circuit, I have not become a slave to the acquisition of historical artifacts, and so the permit was finally issued, thanks in large part to the patience of the U.A.J.V gang, who plodded unflinchingly through a mountain of paperwork.
Before the actual survey began, U.A.J.V interviewed local watermen, sport divers, clam and crab fishermen, charter-boat captains, anyone who might shed light on variations in the riverbed. They struck gold when veteran clammer Wilbur Riley offered his services and showed our team the site where, during an effort to retrieve his tongs, which had caught and hung on a submerged object, he had pulled up artifacts from the Civil War era.
Divers went down and discovered heavy concentrations of scattered wreckage of a large wooden ship, whose huge hull timbers rose out of the muck like ghosts frozen in the past. Almost immediately they observed the shaft of a large anchor, decking planks, and ordnance accessories used by the men who manned the cannon. Over a period of several days, a number of interesting artifacts were recovered from the ship that tenaciously fought a battle she could not win. One was an irregular frame that a sailor had fashioned around the broken edges of a mirror. Perhaps the most dramatic find was Cumberland's large bronze bell, standing 6 inches high and 19 inches wide. When you stare at it, you can imagine it rung by an unseen hand, sending her crew to their guns at the approach of the Virginia.
The one object any maritime museum would give its curator's left leg to put on display is the ram of MerrinwckIVirginia which still lies buried inside the hull of Cumberland. This is the most prized artifact of all, but its recovery calls for a very expensive and extensive project far beyond NUMA's means.
An enigma that plagued the search team was the constant loss of their site-marker buoys. On the progress report there is constant mention of "New buoys set." "Buoys missing...... Buoys relocated."
"Buoys missing." The buoy anchor lines appeared to be torn from the bottom.
Surely passing ships and fishermen did not sweep across our dive sites every night of the week. We could not help wondering if someone didn't like us. But with no suspects, and certainly none with motives, we wrote off the phenomenon to ghosts from the wrecks who love to play pranks on the living.
Having proven with little doubt the ship of Pier C was indeed the Cumberland, Warner, Nargolin, & Company moved six hundred yards upriver to the site we had surveyed two years before off the Home Brothers Shipyard Dock. A section of hull, 121 feet, was found and recorded.
The length of wreckage that showed above the silt was 135 feet, with a width of 23 feet. A large number of artifacts were retrieved, including boxes of Enfield bullets, champagne bottles in their original box, ship's hardware, fuses for cannonballs, a shoe, rigging blocks and spikes, and a tall, ornate pewter pitcher.
The divers apparently came down on the ship's hospital and dispensary, and brought up an assortment of apothecary jars and bottles. One bottle, with its glass stopper firmly set, still contained the yellow liquid contents that had remained undisturbed for 120 years. A white ceramic pharmaceutical bowl displayed a red serpent curled around a palm tree.
The inscription advertised a pharmacy in Brest, France, the port where Maffitt turned over command of the Florida.
With the wreck sites now proven to be the two famous Civil War ships, at least to me if not to certified, card-carrying archaeologists, who insist on finding an engraved plaque giving the name, serial number, blood type, and DNA, we dropped the curtain on our field activities and concentrated on the preservation of the artifacts.
For the time being, we rented a small garage and placed the recovered antiquities in holding tanks containing that good old James River water to keep them stabilized and prevent them from crumbling into dust. Not ones to squander their budget on hot dogs and beer, the U.A.J.V team bought a dozen vinyl kiddie pools to immerse the goods.
Originally, the Virginia Historical Landmarks Department offered to take on the job of preservation. But after the artifacts were raised and stabilized, they backed out, claiming they had run out of funds for the year. Their solution? Throw the precious antiquities back into the river.
I looked up to God, and I asked him, "God, why am I fleeced and inconvenienced at every Turn?" And he looked down upon me, and he said, "If you're not happy, why don't you take up stamp collecting?"
He finally sympathized with me. Enter Anne Garland of the Conservation Center at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, who offered to split the cost of chemically treating the recovered objects for eventual display at the Newport News Mariners' Museum. The deal was struck, and they did a remarkable job on over thirty different pieces. I've always had a soft spot for William and Mary, especially since when all was said and done they only charged me a fraction of the final cost.
Then the rug was pulled out from under everyone again.
John Sands, the curator at the museum, built a magnificent exhibit around the Cumberland and Florida artifacts. They were on display for nearly six months, when some Navy admiral and the curator of the Norfolk Naval Museum walked in, asked to see Sands, and contemptuously demanded he Turn over, as @ they charitably put it, "our artifacts."
It seems the Judge Advocate of the Navy had a dream. He envisioned that my two years of research, the small fortune I spent on the project, and the indefatigable efforts of the U.A.J.V guys were for the navy's sole benefit. He sanctimoniously claimed the Department of the Navy owned both ships and all bits and pieces thereof. In the case of the Cumberland, he maintained that whoever sold it for salvage after the Civil War did not have the proper authority. Normally the Florida, he conceded, as Confederate property belonged to the General Services Administration. However, naval research showed that Florida had been captured as a blockade runner and was appropriated into the Union Navy.
Demonstrating a definite lack of style and sophistication, the navy threatened to go to court in order to claim the antiquities, to whose recovery they contributed zilch. And because they stoke the economy of the Virginia tidewater area with nearly 30,000 jobs, the Commonwealth of Virginia rolled over and threw in the towel. John Sands's exhibit was dismantled and the artifacts trucked to the Norfolk Naval Museum, where they are now on display.
I could have called their bluff, fought, and easily won in Admiralty COurt- The navy did not have a pegleg to stand on. I have copies of correspondence from the original Cumberland salvors, who were sold the rights by Gideon Welles, Secretary of the U.S. Navy. If Welles didn't have the right to sell the wreck for salvage, who did?
The navy's claim on the Florida was equally ludicrous. They had the wrong ship.
The vessel they referred to was not the famous Sea Devil raider, captamed by the redoubtable John Maffitt, but a garden-variety commercial blockade runner that was captured and appropriated into the navy as a warship they named Florida. it is times like this I'm tempted to take up psychedelic eyelid painting. Through the years I've had many dealings with the U.S. Navy, mostly beneficial to both sides. But there have been times when I wondered how in hell they ever won the war in the Pacific. So long as the artifacts went on display to the public at the navy's Norfolk museum, I decided not to create a fuss. If they had hidden them away in the basement, the U.S. Navy would have cursed the name of Clive Cussler, something they probably do
anyway.
What thanks did NUMA and U.A.J.V receive for their struggle to preserve our country's maritime heritage?
Several years later, I was visiting friends in Portsmouth, just across the Elizabeth River from Norfolk. I visited the naval museum one day and was admiring the fruits of our labor when a navy lieutenant came out of an office and passed by the exhibit.
"Odd that they didn't recognize the people who found the wrecks and recovered the artifacts with a token placard," I remarked aloud to no one in particular.
He stopped and stared at me. "Who are you referring to?"
"The team from the National Underwater and Marine Agency along with the Underwater Joint Venture Archaeologists." his face reddened. "Do you know Clive Cussler?" he brusquely asked.
"Cussler, yes, I've seen him," I replied, alluding to the million times I've looked in a mirror.
"Well, you can take it from me," the lieutenant snapped, "that son of a bitch and his gang of thieves didn't have a damned thing to do with what you see here. A navy SEAL team salvaged all this."
The Sea Hunters Page 12