Heckle and Jeckle stared enthralled. It was as if they were witnessing the second coming of the Messiah. Even Doc looked impressed.
Skipper Bob peered at the expanse of smooth feminine flesh that filled his entire windshield, turned to me, and muttered vaguely. "I can't see around her."
I shrugged. "Steer with your compass and do the best you can."
It goes without saying that we didn't accomplish much that day.
Even the final voyage before we rang down the curtain on that year's expedition did not go without incident. On the way in, Skipper Bob decided to save three miles and twenty minutes attempting a short cut by crossing over the rock jetty at high tide. There are times it's better to be safe than sorry. This was one of them.
With a dull thud Coastal Explorer bounced onto the rocks of the jetty and came to an abrupt halt.
I dropped into the water and dove under the hull. The keel appeared to be hung up between two rocks. I found that by standing on a rock and putting my shoulder against the bow I could actually move the boat a few inches as the crest of each wave passed under. While I was engaged in saving Coastal Explorer for another day, I heard a splash behind me and felt the presence of someone who had joined in the effort. I turned, and there was Doc in his shorts pushing for all he was worth.
A newspaper reporter, who had come on board for the day and was apparently a good Catholic, thought the boat was doomed when Doc and I went over the side. To him, we were abandoning a doomed ship.
He began running his rosary beads through his fingers so fast smoke came out of them.
Then I looked up. The fearless crew were all leaning over the railing and idly watching while drinking cans of Pepsi. Doc was seventy-seven, I was only fifty, and none of the high and dry observers had yet to see twenty-five, yet they all stood by while two old farts grunted and eventually heaved the boat into deep water.
Coastal Explorer had been holed, and by the time we reached the dock there was nearly two feet of water in the engine compartment and main cabin.
The following year when we returned for another try at finding Hunley, I was saddened to see the remains of the faithful boat all chopped into pieces, lying forlornly in the marsh behind Sullivan's Island.
Despite a short run, the NUMA follies managed to eliminate a two-mile-long grid, beginning at Breech Inlet and extending a half mile out to sea. We were now reasonably sure that the elusive little submarine had not gone down close to shore or in the surf but must be lying further out toward Housatonic.
I've always affectionately recalled this expedition as the Great Trauma of '80.
Once More with Feeling
June 1981 ost of the old gang came back for another try the following summer. This time Walt put us in a big, comfortable house on the beach at Isle of Palms. He even obtained the services of a cook. She turned out sumptuous meals, usually drowning in grease.
She went through Crisco faster than a whale through plankton. Her only quirk was that she refused to make grits, a dish I've always enjoyed. But since I was the only one partial to grits, the rest of the team couldn't have cared less.
I love that old Southern down-home cooking. Give me red-eye gravy and biscuits, grits with butter, and chicory in my coffee, and I'm ready to snatch up a sword and lead Pickett's charge up Cemetery Ridge.
Obtaining the permit this time was merely a formality. Alan Albright generously offered a top-of-the-line archaeological dive team and firstrate outboard boat. The total crew ballooned to seventeen people with the arrival of half a dozen young volunteers: Coast Guardsman Tim Firiney; two students from the North Carolina Institute of Archaeology, Bob Browning and Wilson West; my son-in-law, Bob Toft; my son, Dirk; and a local young man, David Farah, who proved most helpful and whose parents threw a wonderful barbecue for the search team.
This time we were also joined by Ralph Wilbanks and Rodney Warren from the university. Bill O'Donnell and Dave Graham of Motorola flew in to operate the Mini Ranger positioning system.
This expedition went as smoothly as a fashion model's shaven leg.
The equipment ticked away without missing a beat, the weather cooperated with smooth seas, and the only injuries, luckily, were sunburn, seasickness, and hangovers. Running @-meter lanes, we searched a total of sixteen square miles, taking up where we left off the year before, searching out and beyond Housatonic. Success was mingled with failure. Although we did not find Hunley, we discovered five Confederate blockade runners and three Union ironclads.
Walt Schob handled the university boat and tracked the grid lines, while Bill Shea, fighting mal de mer every foot of the way, operated his homemade proton magnetometer. During communications over the portable radio, Walt referred to the outboard as the Steak Boat. His reason for calling it that came from not wanting it known he was associated with state property. There are some things that just can't be explained articulately.
Dirk and Dave Graham sat in a Budget rental van, parked in the backyard of a house next to Breech Inlet, and operated the Mini Ranger.
When the boys on shore got bored keeping the Steak Boat on track, they engaged in elaborate fly-killing contests, keeping score by scotchtaping their victims to the wall of the van.
The lady who owned the house was most accommodating. One afternoon, she invited the crew in for cocktails. She was a very gracious host until 6:30 rolled arOUnd- Then we were informed that we had to leave because she was having another party for her friends and neighbors and she didn't think we had anything in common. I guess there are some idiosyncrasies about Southern hospitality that those of us from the North and out West will never quite fathom.
For the dive and chase boat, we chartered a dependable vessel owned by Harold Stauber, a guy with the patience of a tree trunk, who knew the waters around Charleston like his own living room. with this boat, named Sweet Sue, our team followed up the targets picked up by the Steak Boat, dove on them, and identified them as either old shrimp-boat wrecks or sunken barges. Most anomalies proved to be junk tossed off ships. Over a span of three hundred years enough debris has accumulated on the bottom in and around Charleston Harbor to keep a scrap dealer in business for three generations.
During slow days when Steak Boat failed to run across any anomalies that remotely suggested a submarine, my team on Sweet Sue searched for other historic Civil War shipwrecks. The previous month I had stumbled on an interesting piece of data. While comparing old nautical charts with new ones, I noticed longitude meridians prior to the twentieth century ran approximately four hundred yards farther west than later projections. What caught my eye was that the 52nd meridian seemed much closer to Fort Sumter on an 1870 chart than on a 1980 chart. Testing this revelation, we discovered several wrecks four hundred yards west of where they were marked on contemporary charts.
The first ship we located was Keokuk, a dual-turreted citadel ironclad that went down after being struck ninety-two times by Confederate cannon fire. She lies off the old abandoned Morris Island lighthouse under four feet of silt. The Union monitor Weehawken caine next, a famous warship sunk in heavy weather, the only ironclad that actually defeated another during the war. We found her buried eight feet under the seabed.
Most people think that shipwrecks sit proud on the bottom. A few lie exposed, but the majority that went down close to land settled in the soft silt and were slowly buried by wave action over the years.
One surprising discovery was Patapsco, a Union monitor that struck a Confederate mine in 1865 and sank off Fort Moultrie, taking sixty-two members of the crew with her. Because she sits in the channel, which is scoured by currents, we dove and found her sitting upright on the bottom. Though she was extensively salvaged after the war, the U.S.
Navy still considers her a burial site. So we looked but didn't touch.
Whenever we found a wreck, Ralph Wilbanks would entertain Sweet Sue's crew by dancing a country jig. Solidly built and no lightweight, Ralph made the whole boat shudder when he began stomping. There is nothing like
brisk and boisterous free-wheeling humor and frivolity to lighten up monotony.
Probably the luckiest find I ever made was a Confederate blockade runner. One day, when the sea was too rough to run the grid lanes, I thought we could use the lost time to look for the blockade runner Stonewall Jackson, lost during an attempt to run into Charleston in the spring of 1863. She was shot up by blockading warships of the Union fleet, ran aground on the Isle of Palms, and was destroyed along with her cargo of artillery pieces and forty thousand shoes. Over the years, she became deeply buried under the sand by wave action.
An 1864 chart of the waters outside Charleston Harbor showed the general location where she had come ashore and burned. When laying a transparency of the '64 chart over a modern one, I could see that the beach now stretched a good quarter of a mile farther out to sea than it did during the Civil War. Allowing for the four-hundred-yard difference in longitude, I laid out a rectangular search grid for the team to walk that encompassed one mile parallel to the beach by a quarter of a mile either side of the surf line. This was possible because the water was shallow for a considerable distance.
An area this size is easy to cover while sitting in a moving boat, but walking up and down a hot, sandy beach with a metal detector is a tiring and time-consuming process. On land, your forward movement is about one-half mph while swinging the detector from side to side as you work a swath, but from a boat you can cruise along at eight knots.
Several members of the NUMA team and I assembled on the beach and marked out the lanes we intended to walk with our magnetometers.
I carried the Schonstedt gradiometer and set its recorder down on the sand. Then I hooked up the batteries and tried to calibrate the settings while studying the readings on the dial and listening to the squawk of the speaker. If set correctly, the gradiometer emits a low buzzing sound that increases to a screech when its sensor comes near the presence of iron. Strangely, the readings kept flying off scale and the speaker screamed. I became irritated when I couldn't get the instrument to settle down. What was wrong with this thing? I wondered. Rechecking the battery connections and fiddling with the adjustment knobs failed to remedy the situation.
And then it hit me. Not only had I walked out onto the beach and laid the gradiometer squarely on top of the wreck of the Stonewall Jackson, I was reading the metal mass of its buried engine and boilers.
Discoveries like this only happen with the regularity of being struck on the head with a meteor. And yet no other recorded shipwreck lay within a good half mile.
While waiting for a maintenance man from the Isle of Palms street department, a congenial guy whose name was call, to appear with a backhoe, Bob Browning, Wilson West, and Dirk Cussler eased stainlesssteel probes through the sand and struck a large piece of metal. Interestingly, the impact of the probes set up a vibration under our bare feet.
Everyone became excited at the prospect that they were rapping on the ship's boilers. As soon as word spread along the beach, a large crowd gathered to watch the excavation.
The backhoe dug an eight-foot trench but struck only salt water.
Then call suggested that he run to the city maintenance shop and bring back a portable water pump and a length of plastic pipe. The idea was to shoot water through the pipe and sink it in the sand, much as kids do when tunneling in the dirt with a nozzle on the end of a garden hose. call quickly returned and ten minutes later we began to strike the past. At ten feet, coal and beautiful pieces of mahogany came bubbling up. Since the probes indicated the presence of a boiler, the coal seemed to confirm it. We dredged up no shoes but we felt reasonably assured that we were standing on the remains of Stonewall Jackson. The wood served to add credence to the discovery. Someday, I hope they excavate and see how much of her is preserved beneath the sand. In light of the cost and a growing lack of interest in our history by the young people of our nation, it's a pity that such an event may never happen. Our NUMA team, all history buffs, felt they had had a productive day at the beach and went home happy. Hence the motto of NUMA: "Do it big, do it right, give it class, and make 'em laugh."
One episode occurred during the expedition that still haunts a few of us.
Late one afternoon, we accidentally ran over a large metallic anomaly while returning to the dock in Sweet Sue. The magnetometer's recorder had been left on, and one of the dive team happened to glance at it when the stylus zigzagged across the graph in the blink of an eye.
An anomaly with a large iron mass from the look of it. We immediately turned back to the site and ran a grid pattern until we picked it up again.
Then we threw in a buoy and anchored.
The student archaeologists, Bob Browning and Wilson West, along with Coast Guardsman Tim Firmey, dove in and began probing the site.
Within-minutes, West came to the surface and announced, "We've got an object over thirty feet long by about four feet wide. Don't quote me, but the ends appear to be tapered."
Anticipation set eight hearts pounding. The time was nearly six o'clock, but we had a good two hours of daylight left. So we raced to the dock, lifted a suction dredge onto the boat and hightailed it back to our buoy. We passed Steak Boat, which had knocked off and was returning for the day. Schob and Shea stared at us as we waved, at a loss as to why we were heading out so late in the evening.
With Ralph Wilbanks and Rodney Warren in the water operating the dredge, the rest of us sat and waited expectantly. Sharks often appear during a dredging operation, attracted by the sea life caught up in the induction hose. One did come snooping while the divers were down, and we threw cans of Pepsi and shouted at it till it swam off in search of easier pickings. It was nearly dark when the divers surfaced and we called it quits. Ralph drew a sketch of what he and Rodney found after digging a two-foot hole.
It appeared to be a quarter-inch piece of iron standing at an angle and attached to a metal plate that disappeared in the silt.
Since they saw no rivets holding the object in place, it looked as if the object were welded to the plate. Knowing that metal welding was as yet unknown in the 1860s, we assumed that what we found was a sunken Coast Guard buoy, approximately the same size and mass as Hunley.
Time had run out. We had covered a great deal of territory and discovered over seven shipwrecks, but the search for Hunley came up as empty as a hermit's address book. She still refused to be found. Or had the sub played a cruel trick on us? iv
If at First You Don't Succeed July 1994
I can't really explain why it took me thirteen years to give the sub another go. Perhaps I'd developed a mental block or just wasn't in the mood. For various reasons some shipwrecks can never be located. I did not believe this to be the case with Hunley. Many were those who said it wasn't there simply because it had been salvaged by someone who left no record. I could not accept that. It had to be Out there off Charleston somewhere, and this time I was not going to cry quits.
It was deja vu all over again. Walt came early and arranged for boats and lodging. Bill Shea came in with his television camera and shot video of the expedition. We enjoyed watching the results, especially the scenes where Bill ran on camera, repositioned his subjects, and then dashed off again without turning off the Record button.
Conversations were held with new people at the South Carolina Institute of Archaeology. Instead of giving a permit, they asked if we could make it a joint venture. Old softie that I am, I agreed. Not a wise move on my part as it turned out.
Because Hurricane Hugo had flattened our old motel and the big house on the beach (not so much as a stick of wood remained of either one), Walt Schob set us up in the local Holiday Inn. We were moving up in the world. The fact that my book royalties had increased significantly over the ensuing years didn't hurt either.
I've frequently complained about returning to certain towns or cities for another attempt at finding a shipwreck, but I was always happy to come back to Charleston. There are few cities finer in Caroliner and most other states. The people are cordial
and as affable as old friends, the city is picturesque, and what is especially appealing to someone like me with sensitive taste buds and a warehouse for a stomach, they have great restaurants. Despite its being the middle of summer, we were greeted with mild and balmy weather.
I was indeed fortunate that Walt had hired the services of Ralph Wilbanks, who had left the university and now headed his own underwater survey company, Diversified Wilbanks. Ralph is as steady and enduring as the faces on Mount Rushmore. Humorous, with a sly smile fixed beneath a Pancho Villa mustache, he worked tirelessly day after day, fighting choppy water to keep the search boat on track, with never a discouraging word.
His favorite comment when he was staring at the magnetometer recording graph while high swells tossed the boat like a cork in a blender was "Boy, we're maggin' now!"
His partner, who watched over the detection gear, was Wes Hall, archaeologist and owner of Mid-Atlantic Technology. He and Ralph often worked together on underwater survey jobs. He is as handsome as they come, and women believe he could double for Mel Gibson.
The Sea Hunters Page 23