Cussler, Clive – Dirk Pitt 15 – Sea Hunters

573 Pages·2010·1.13 MB·English

The Sea Hunters

By Clive Cussler

Synopsis:

A nonfiction work by the creator of Dirk Pitt, this book tells thirteen

tales of searches for shipwrecks. The circumstances surrounding each

are described in detail along with the searches. This book reads like a

novel. Among the shipwrecks are the C.S.S. Hunley, a confederate

submarine-the first to sink a ship in battle, The Leopoldville, a troop

transport torpedoed by a German u-boat on Christmas eve, 1944 and the

discovery of U-20, the german sub that sank the Lucitania in 1915.

Dirk Pitt Adventures by Clive Cussler

Shock Wave

Inca Gold

Sahara

Dragon

Treasure

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cyclops

Deep Six

Pacific Vortex

Night Probe!

Vixen 03

Raise the Titanic!

Iceberg

The Mediterranean Caper

Simon & Schuster

SIMON & SCHUSTER Rockefeller Center 1230 Avenue of the Americas New

York, NY 10020

The events depicted in this book and the people who are

portrayed, past and present, were and are real. The historical events,

however, although factual, were slightly dramatized and dialogue has

been added.

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copyright (c) 1996 by Clive Cussler All rights reserved, including

the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form

SIMON &

SCHUSTER and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster

Inc.

DIRK PITT is a registered trademark of Clive Cussler

Designed by Levavi & Levavi

Manufactured in the United States Of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cussler, Clive.

The sea hunters / Clive Cussler & Craig Dirgop. cm.

1. Shipwrecks.

2. Underwater archeology.

1. Dirgo, Craig.

II. Tide.

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G525.C965 1996

910.4'5-dc2O 96-28656 CIP

ISBN 0-684-83027-2

Acknowledgments

The authors are indebted to Joaquin Saunders, author of The Night

Before Christmas; Ray Rodgers, author of Survivors of the Leopoldville

Disaster, and those men of the 66dl Panther Division who survived the

terrible tragedy off Cherbourg, France, on the evening of December 24,

1944, for their stories of horror and heroism. It is truly an event

that should not be swept away into the mist of time.

PHOTO CREDITS

All photos not otherwise credited are the author's.

Nicholas Dean, Edgecomb, MA: 8

Denver Public Library, Western History Department: 23

Imperial War Museum, London, England: 24, 25, 26

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Mariners' Museum, Newport News, VA: 1, 2, 28

Bill Shea, Lincoln, MA: 31

U.S. Naval Historical Center: 5, 6, 7, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14

Ralph Wilbanks, Isle of Palms, SC: 20, 22

To the men and women who have supported the National Underwater &

Marine Agency from its inception. Through the tough times and the fun

times, their loyalty has remained solid and enduring. This is merely a

partial record of their remarkable achievements. Without their

efforts, over sixty shipwrecks of historic significance might still lie

on the bottoms of the seas and rivers, ignored and forgotten for all

time. Some ships are gone, dredged out of existence or buried under

modern construction. Some are still intact. Now that the way has been

shown, we leave it to future generations to recover the knowledge and

artifacts that remain of our maritime heritage.

And to my wife, Barbara, for her enduring patience, and my children,

Teri, Dirk, and Dana, who grew up with a father who never grew up.

Contents

NUMA Advisory Board of Trustees 14

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Introduction 15

PART 1 The Steamboat Lexington Through by Daylight- 1840 35

II Enter NUMA- 1983 54

PART 2

The Republic of Texas Navy Ship Zavala I A Sweet-Handling

Ship1836-1842 63

II Ship in a Parking Lot- 1986 70

PART 3

U.S.S. Cumberland and C.S.S. Florida

1 Her Flag Still Flying- 1862 79

II She-Devil of the Confederacy-1864 91

III Where Did They Go?- 1980 106

IV Back with a Vengeance- 1982 112

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PART 4

PART 10 C.S.S. Arkansas They Can't Be Found if You Don't Look

I The Gauntlet-1862 121 Postscript 327

II Go Down to the Levee-1981144

Current List of National Underwater & Marine Agency PART 5

Shipwreck Surveys and Discoveries 335

U.S.S. Carondelet Foreign Ships Discovered and Surveyed 343

Additional Sites Surveyed 347

1 The River War- 1 62 153

II Some Days You Can't Win-1982 168 Index 349

PART 6

The Confederate Submarine Hunley I The Little Sub That Could ...

and Did-1864 178

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H The Toughest Find of All- 1980 197

III Once More with Feeling- 1981 206

IV If at First You Don't Succeed- 1994 212

PART 7

The Lost Locomotive of Kiowa Creek I Journey to Nowhere-1878 223

II One That Got Away-1989 236

PART 8

H.M.S. Pathfinder, U-21, and U-20 I Death from the Depths- 1914

II Down in Eighteen Minutes-1915 259

III I'd Rather Be in Hawaii-1984 272

PART 9

The Troop Transport Leopoldville I Silent Night, Deadly Night1944

II Curses, Foiled Again- 1984 309

NUMA Advisory Board of Trustees I Clive Cussler, Chairman Colonel

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Walter Schob Admiral William Thompson Michael Hogan Eric Schonstedt

Commander Donald Walsh Kenhelm Stott, Jr.* Douglas Wheeler Craig Dirgo

Robert Esbenson

Deceased

Wayne Gronquist, President Dana Larson William Shea Dr. Harold

Edgerton Clyde Smith Peter Throckmorton Tony Bell* Dirk Cussler Barbara

Knight

Introduction

It's said that Jules Verne wrote Around the World in Eighty Days

without ever leaving Paris. He seldom stepped out of the room where he

created the most imaginative novels the world has enjoyed. Most

fiction authors, when I ask them what interests they have besides

writing, look at me like my head is lopsided. They can't believe there

are other pursuits in life beyond creating plots and characters,

promoting their books, arguing with editors, or demanding better deals

from their literary agents.

Their lives are entwined around what comes out of their word

processors.

A reporter who interviewed me several years ago wrote that I "follow

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the beat of a drummer playing with a marching band in a field on the

other side of town." I suppose that's true. Feeding my readers

adventure tales based on a devil-may-care character by the name Dirk

Pitt is only one chapter of my existence. I'm addicted to the

challenge of the search, whether it's for lost shipwrecks, airplanes,

steam locomotives, or people. I also collect and restore classic and

vintage automobiles. If it's old, I'm into it.

There is a piece of me in Dirk Pitt and a slice of him in me.

We're both about six feet three. His eyes are greener than mine, and

he certainly enthralls the ladies more than I ever did. We have the

same taste for adventure, although his escapades are far more extreme

than mine. I never raised the Titanic, for example. Nor have I saved

the life of the President or found a great hoard of Inca gold at the

end of an underground river.

I have, however, attempted some crazy things besides tramping through

humid backcountry looking for old cannons or being tossed around a

small boat during a Force 8 storm while searching for a sunken

submarine. Like riding a bicycle over the Rocky Mountains and through

the deserts to California when I turned fifty, taking the stick of a

glider at fifty-five, and bungee jumping at sixty. I'm thinking of sky

diving on my sixty-fifth.

How did this attempt to mirror fantasy with life begin?

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Perhaps you remember me. I was the kid in your high school algebra

class who stared out the window while the teacher lectured on

fractions.

I was lost in another time, a million miles away, manning a cannon on

John Paul Jones's ship, the Bonhomme Richard, charging up Cemetery

Ridge with Pickett's division, or reversing the tide at the Little Big

Horn and saving Custer and his 7th Cavalry. When called upon to

recite, I could only stare at the floor like an amnesiac and mutter an

answer so utterly out of context that the teacher thought I had

wandered into her class by mistake.

I was lucky growing up when and where I did. Within four blocks of

my family's middle-class, 1940s home in Southern California, there were

five neighborhood boys my own age who had imaginations as varied as

mine. Together, we built treehouses and clubhouses, dug caves,

constructed a ship out of scrap wood in a vacant lot, constructed

miniature streets and buildings out of mud and wooden molds, and

devised ghostly scenes in my father's garage on Halloween. The Little

Rascals had nothing on us. Only when five o'clock rolled around did we

dash home to Turn on the radio and listen to the adventures of Jack

Armstrong, the ' All-American Boy, picturing ourselves slogging through

the Congo jungles at his side.

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Sea stories had a particular allure to my wandering mind. I was

always immersed in books describing ship-to-ship battles, which

included the ironclads of the Civil War, the fights of famous American

frigates against the British in the War of 1812, and the Napoleonic sea

wars of Nelson, especially the fictional accounts of Horatio Hornblower

by C. S. Forester.

Since I'm a Cancer, I've always had an affinity for water. The first

time I looked upon the Pacific Ocean I was six years old. I ran

directly into the surf, only to be promptly deposited back on the beach

by a breaker. Undaunted, I ran back in over my head. Not a bright

move because I had no idea that you were supposed to know how to swim.

I recall opening my eyes and marveling at the blurred world beneath

the surface. I even saw a small fish before it dawned on me that I

couldn't breathe. My father, since it was the only decent thing to do,

frantically groped around in the depths until he found me and pulled me

back into the atmosphere. My mother, fearing a repeat of my underwater

ballet, quickly signed me up at the nearest public pool for swimming

lessons.

Because I was an only child, I made up games to play. One was with

poker chips stacked in the shape of warships. Some hulls had a row of

single chips, others two and three rows. The size of the cannon was

dictated by the strength of rubber bands. Naturally, the rubber slings

of my fleet always blew the chips of the enemy fleet all over the

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linoleum floor of my mother's kitchen and dining areas. The same basic

concept was used in the bathtub, where I floated ships folded from

newspaper and then dive-bombed them with marbles until they either

soggily disintegrated or sank under the weight of the shooters and

aggies that failed to penetrate their thin decks.

I did all the crazy things kids did in the leisurely days before

television, like riding my bicycle down a hill and off a small cliff

into the tree branches below, jumping off the roof of a house under

construction into a sandpile, or building a makeshift raft and sailing

down a rushing stream during a rainstorm. There must be guardian

angels somewhere up there who watch over crazy, daredevil boys.

Amazingly, I never broke a bone until I passed the age of fifty.

Since then, I've suffered one fractured ankle while jogging; two

cracked vertebrae, when thrown out of a jeep careering over a beach

while I held a metal detector, looking for a buried shipwreck; and six

cracked ribs, two of them surfing and one on a mountain bike. The

others came from stupid accidents.

One thing I learned early is that adventure can come cheap. In

college, a close friend, Felix Duprey, and I loaded up his 1939 Ford

convertible and set out one summer on a drive around the country. In

three months we covered over thirteen thousand miles and thirty-six

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states. We slept in bandstands in Vermont, railroad boxcars in Texas,

and in the bushes beside the nation's capitol in Washington, D.C. The

entire trip cost me only $350. We returned home just in time to enlist

in the Air Force after the outbreak of the "police action" in Korea,

more out of boredom with school than any great patriotic fervor.

I have never forgotten Felix, Jack Hawkins, and me, sitting in the

recruiting office looking at each other and repeating over and over,

"I'll go if you go," or "If you join, I'll join." I can't recall who

raised his hand first and took the oath to defend the country from

foreign invaders, but I have never forgiven him.

Despite my applying for aerial photography or the intelligence

department, some sneaky sergeant in the Training Command found out I

was a California hot-rodder and sent me to aircraft engine school.

After my graduation, the Air Force demanded I be attached to Hickam

Field, Hawaii, to work on mammoth twenty-eight-cylinder radial engines

mounted on C-97 Boeing Stratocruisers. These were large

propellerdriven aircraft the Air Force used as transports to fly

critical personnel and supplies to Korea before airlifting the wounded

back to hospitals in the States.

During the three years I was stationed on Oahu, my buddies Dave

Anderson and Al Giordano, a gritty and witty Italian who was the model

for Al Giordino in my books, and I explored the inner jungles of the

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island, searching for lost aircraft, ancient Hawaiian burial caves, and

missing people. I recall finding none.

We also became early diving fanatics. This was in late 1951 and

there was little in the way of underwater equipment. We made our own

camera cases, spear guns, and floats. My first mask was a weird affair

made in France that covered the entire face, with two snorkels that

contained Ping-Pong balls to halt incoming water. As I recall, it was

made of gum rubber. The early commercially produced dive fins fit your

feet like bedroom slippers with flaps.

We hit the water every chance we had, exploring the bays and coves

around Oahu. I also took my gear and dove around Midway and Wake

islands during refueling stops on flights to Tokyo. Those were the

days when you seldom ran across another diver.

Wanting to go deeper, my buddies and I ordered what we were told was

the first tank and regulator to be shipped to Honolulu. After picking

it up in a crate from the sporting-goods store, we rushed back to an

aircraft maintenance hangar, where we pumped two hundred pounds of

stale air from a compressor into the tank. Then we took turns diving

off a reef in twenty feet of water. Those were the days before scuba

certification by qualified instructors, and it was a wonder we didn't

suffer any number of diving maladies. Air embolisms and decompression

times were vague terms and were not considered by most sport divers in

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