Текст книги "Adventures of a Sea Hunter: In Search of Famous Shipwrecks"

Автор книги: Clive Cussler

Соавторы: James Delgado
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Текущая страница: 14 (всего у книги 16 страниц)

Over the course of a week, we make more dives, sometimes surfacing in the bright twilight of the midnight sun as we work around the clock to gather as many images and as much information as we can. We may not only be the first but perhaps the only team of divers, and me the only archeologist, to visit Foxat the bottom of the sea. Even in the twenty-first century, this is a distant, hard to reach spot.

After surfacing on my final dive, I look out at the wind-whipped waters of Qeqertarsuaq’s harbor. Ice is drifting in, in small chunks, and the sun has gone, replaced by gray skies. Snow dusts the cliffs above the settlement. Winter is on its way, and soon the wreck will again be covered by many feet of ice. Slowly, inexorably being ground away by the forces of winter, Foxis returning to the elements in the Arctic where she gained international fame and spent most of her working life. It is a perfect grave for this polar explorer, and as I float over it, I think of Sir John Franklin’s epitaph, carved in marble over his empty crypt at Westminster Abbey:

 
Not here: the white North has thy bones; and thou,
Heroic Sailor-Soul,
Art passing on thine happier voyage now
Towards no earthly pole.
 

CHAPTER FOURTEEN
A CIVIL WAR SUBMARINE

A MYSTERY IN PANAMA

Standing on the hot sand beach of San Telnio, a small deserted island in the Bay of Panama, I look out at the water. Nothing. Not a thing to be seen, and yet here, according to the locals, lies the wreck of a “Japanese two-man submarine,” sent in secret to attack the Pacific entrance to the Panama Canal. An unlikely tale, to be sure, but after a few years of sea hunting with Clive Cussler, I’ve come to realize that the truth is often stranger than fiction.

The tide starts to drop, and suddenly, I see a rusted bit of metal sticking up out of the surf. As the water continues to recede, the unmistakable form of a submarine emerges, dripping wet, stained red and orange with corrosion. But it looks nothing like a Japanese midget submarine of the Second World War. In fact, it looks nothing like most submarines I’ve ever seen, save one, a turn-of-the-century precursor to the sub Holland I.That 60-odd-foot submersible, the first of the Royal Navy’s fleet of submarines, is preserved ashore at the Royal Navy Submarine Museum in Gosport, England, not far from where navy divers discovered the sunken Holland Iand raised her for exhibition.

But while this looks a little like Holland Iand its numerous early sister subs, the products of the genius of an eccentric Irish-American inventor, John Holland, it’s not one of his. It is simply too small. Football shaped, with a low conning tower, this riveted iron craft looks like something out of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

^{James Delgado in the hatch of Sub Marine Explorerin Panama. Photo by Ann Goodhart}

Wading out into the ocean, I splash in water up to my chest to reach the wreck. As the sea washes over and around the hull, I can see that it is firmly bedded down in the sand and that the sea has opened a hole in the iron plates that form the hull. Crawling inside, and ignoring the pain as the sharp metal bites deeply into a shin, I ponder the spider-web lattice of thick iron bars that brace the chamber. I’ve never seen anything like it. The hull form looks to be from around the year 1900, but these iron bars look like they’ve been forged with a heavy hammer, like something out of the 1850s. After crawling out and nicking myself again, I scramble up the slippery top of the submarine to reach the conning tower. It is small, barely big enough for me to fit, and as I look in, I hear the booming of the surf and feel a rush of cool salty air hit my face. There’s more than one hole in this hull.

Balancing myself on my hands, I drop into the hatch. My feet catch on a lip – the seat for another, inner hatch, perhaps. But it is missing, and so, camera in one hand, I carefully line myself up and drop into what I hope will be chest-high water. It turns out to be only waist deep. My feet hit sand, and I’m suddenly in darkness as my eyes adjust. I grab my camera and hit the flash, and see that I’m in an iron cavern that’s dripping with water and rust. I hit the flash again and look into the water. I wish I hadn’t. This submarine, half filled with sand, looks like a perfect haven for the region’s well known venomous sea snakes. At this moment, I know exactly how Indiana Jones felt in the Well of Souls. “Snakes. Why did it have to be snakes?” I jump up, catch the lip of the hatch and pull myself out of the hull just as my imagination pictures a tiny pair of fanged jaws reaching for my ankle. As I jump off the sub and wade to shore, I speculate about just what it is I’ve found on this deserted beach. Whose ancient submarine is it, and how did it end up here?

The truth is often stranger than fiction. A return trip to the beach in November 2002, this time armed with a tape measure and a pad for making notes, gives me more than a basic understanding of the submarine. I e-mail photographs of it around the world to colleagues who study old submarines. No one can figure it out, though one researcher, Gene Canfield, says it looks similar to Intelligent Whale, a submarine built for the Union Navy during the Civil War but never finished. Could it be that old? I wonder as I continue to send out my queries. Then, in mid-2003, I get an answer from Rich Wills, who thinks it looks more like another long-forgotten Civil War submarine, the Sub Marine Explorer.No one knows what happened to that sub, Rich explains. After the war, it ended up in Panama, working for the Pacific Pearl Company, harvesting pearls from deep-water oyster beds.

I sit up and take notice. After all, the wreck lies in the Bay of Panama, in an island group known as the Pearl Archipelago. But is it really a Civil War submarine that vanished from the pages of history after 1869? Could a submarine survive, half submerged on a tropical beach, for more than 130 years? Rich sends me a copy of a 1902 article on pioneer submarines of the nineteenth century. It reproduces a profile plan of Sub Marine Explorer andgives its basic dimensions. As I look at it, I smile. The profile matches perfectly, down to the placement and size of the conning tower. The rounded chamber at the top of the submarine with the forged iron braces would be filled with air for buoyancy. And, as I compare the measurements with my notes, it all fits. The 36-foot Sub Marine Exploreris a perfect match.

But how does Sub Marine Explorerfit into the history of submarine development? Built in 1865, what role did it play, if any, in the Civil War? And how does it compare with another recent discovery, the Confederate Civil War submarine H.I. Hunley?Found after years of hard work by Clive Cussler’s National Underwater and Marine Agency team and raised by the State of South Carolina, Hunleyis one of the great archeological treasures of the Civil War, on a par with the ironclad USS Monitor, whose engine and turret have also been pulled from the depths. Even as I sit pondering the mysteries of Sub Marine Explorer, a team of archeologists is carefully excavating and dismantling Hunleyto reveal its secrets. So for the answers on Sub Marine Explorer, I turn to Hunleyproject historian Mark Ragan. “There’s no one better,” Clive tells me as he reads Ragan’s number to me over the phone.

Mark answers his phone with a laconic drawl that quickens with excitement as I tell him what I’ve found on a Panamanian beach. I e-mail him a handful of photos, and as he opens them on his computer 3,000 miles away, I hear the subtle but sharp intake of his breath. That’s a good thing, because Clive is right. No one knows Civil War submarines better than Mark Ragan. He literally wrote the book on them, and he now turns his considerable energy and skill to dig deep into the archives to learn more about Sub Marine Explorerand its inventor, a forgotten American engineering genius named Julius H. Kroehl.

PIONEER SUBMARINES

War spurs terrible and magnificent inventions, often taking ideas and concepts developed in peacetime and testing them hurriedly in times of crisis. During the Civil War, technology played a significant role. Among other innovations, the war introduced new guns and more powerful cannon, ironclad warships with rotating turrets, undersea mines – and the submarine. There was nothing new about each of these inventions save their first practical and deadly use in combat. The pioneering naval accomplishments of the war started with the attack on the wooden fleet of the Union Navy at Hampton Roads, Virginia, by the Confederate ironclad CSS Virginia, demonstrating that this new type of warship doomed the “wooden walls” that had dominated naval warfare for centuries. The first clash between ironclads took place when the Union’s USS Monitorinterceded between Virginiaand the Union wooden fleet the following day and fought the Confederate ship to a standstill.

Another innovation was the use of an electrically detonated “torpedo,” or mine, one of which sent the Union’s ironclad Cairoto the bottom of the Yazoo River, giving the ill-fated gunboat the dubious distinction of being the first warship in history to be sunk by a mine. Later, there was the brave but doomed sortie of the Confederate submarine H.I. Hunleyinto Charleston Harbor to sink the Union warship Housatonicwith a spar-mounted “torpedo” projecting from her bow. Shortly after this victory, Hunleysank, taking her crew with her, just a few hundred yards from her victim. No one knows why Hunleysank, but the tiny craft gained fame as the first submarine to destroy an enemy vessel in combat. Quickly buried by silt, Hunley’’s grave remained undiscovered for 150 years.

As for submarines, both sides embraced this new technology. Inventors proposed various underwater craft and built some that operated with various levels of success, killing their builders and crews on more than one occasion. A number of projects were launched, some in secrecy, others more publicly, leaving behind an unfortunately incomplete record of pioneer submarines and submariners. But the rediscovery of Julius Kroehl’s Sub Marine Explorerand a slow unraveling of his wartime career, buried in the National Archives, suggests that at every step of the way, as the Confederates developed both their “torpedoes” and submarines, Kroehl was there to develop something to counter them for the Union side. It may well be one of the last great untold stories of the Civil War.

Julius Kroehl was a German-born immigrant who came to America in 1838. He studied to become an engineer, and in 1845 he won a U.S patent for a flange-bending machine for ironwork. In 1856, he was well enough established to win a contract from New York City to build a cast-iron “fire watch tower” in Manhattan’s Mount Morris (now Marcus Garvey) Park. In an age before fire alarm boxes, volunteer fire fighters watched the city from towers, ringing a bell to sound the alarm.

But Kroehl’s real interests lay underwater. At the same time that he was engaged in his fire tower project, Kroehl and his business partner, Peter Husted, were contracted by the City of New York to remove part of Diamond Reef, near Governor’s Island in the East River, as it was a hazard to navigation. According to the Scientific Americanof August 5, 1856, “Messrs. Husted & Kroehl” were blasting to remove 6 feet of depth on the 300-foot reef. “Large tin canisters attached to the lower ends of strong pointed stakes, are sunk to rest on the face of the reef, and are discharged with a galvanic battery.” It was on this job that Kroehl became interested in diving. In 1858, Husted and Kroehl hired a new partner, Van Buren Ryerson, who had just built a pressurized diving bell that he called Submarine Explorer. Eight years later, Kroehl used the basic principle of Ryerson’s bell to build the world’s most sophisticated submarine.

With the outbreak of Civil War in April 1861, Julius Kroehl was the first inventor to write to the U.S. Navy to offer a submarine that could be used to enter Southern ports and destroy “obstacles” from below. His “cigar-shaped” design was not adopted, as the Union Navy ended up with another submarine, courtesy of a daring demonstration by French inventor Brutus de Villeroi, who had built a 32-foot submersible and tested it on the Delaware River. Chased by the harbor police and captured when it ran aground, de Villeroi’s submarine attracted the attention of the press and the Navy, which ended up buying it and commissioning it as USS Alligator.Never successful and plagued by problems, the tiny craft ended up being cast adrift off Cape Hatteras in a storm on April 2, 1863, and was lost.

Meanwhile, Julius Kroehl, his proposal for a submarine rejected, joined the war effort as an expert in underwater explosives. He worked to clear the way for the Union assault up the Mississippi River, which the Confederates had blocked. On the night of April 10, 1862, “Mr. Kroehl went with a party in two boats to make a close reconnaissance of the hulks, rafts and chains below the forts. On the strength of his report plans were made by Admiral Porter and him for the destruction of the obstructions.” Unfortunately, the attempt, made with electrically detonated charges, was “not completely successful,” but the Union fleet did successfully navigate the river.

In recognition of this and other efforts, the Navy promoted Kroehl to Acting Volunteer Lieutenant and in January 1863 assigned him to remove the Confederate rafts blocking the Yazoo and Red rivers. Just then, Kroehl heard that a Confederate “torpedo” had sunk the ironclad gunboat Cairoon the Yazoo. Ironically, the commander of Cairo, Thomas Oliver Selfridge, had served as captain of the ill-fated submarine Alligator.A colleague sarcastically noted that Selfridge “found two torpedoes and removed them by placing his vessel over them.”

A month after the fall of Vicksburg on July 4, 1863, Kroehl was discharged with malaria. During his convalescence, he planned a submarine that could descend into the water and there, on the bottom, send out a diver to disarm torpedoes and set charges of his own, beyond the reach of Confederate guns. His submarine would be a perfect counter to the South’s own program of underwater warfare. Kroehl needed backers and money to build his sub, knowing full well from experience that the Navy would not accept plans alone and authorize funds to build an experimental craft. He found his backers in the Pacific Pearl Company, which was interested in exploiting the pearl beds off Panama.

“Discovered” by Spanish conquistadors who seized examples from the natives of the isthmus in the early sixteenth century, Panama’s pearls had been the source of many fortunes in the succeeding centuries. But as divers cleaned out the shallower beds, that left only the ones in deeper water. Using a submarine was one way to tap into the hitherto inaccessible riches in the sea off Panama. Kroehl appealed, doubtless, more to the profit motive of his employers than to their patriotism. If the Navy wouldn’t buy the submarine, they could always take it to Panama and use it to rake up pearls off the seabed.

Work on the submarine began in early 1864. On June 14, Kroehl wrote to the Navy’s Chief of the Bureau of Yards and Docks to press his case: “I sent you last week a pamphlet issued by the Pacific Pearl Company, for whom I am now building a submarine boat… In the operations against some of the rebel forts and harbors I have no doubt the Navy Department will require submarine boats, and I think it would be advisable to bring this to the attention of the Honorable Gideon Wells, and have the plans examined by a proper board.” The following day, he received a reply. The plans were interesting, and he should send them to the Secretary of the Navy. Kroehl did so, and on June 18, just four days later, was told by Secretary Welles to present his plans to W.W. Wood, the Chief Engineer of the United States Navy.

Sitting in a folder in the National Archives is Wood’s meticulous eighteen-page report on Kroehl’s submarine, written after he toured the vessel as it was being built in New York. Wood also drew up a large plan of the submarine – a sheet of paper that rolls out 3 feet – fully one-twelfth of the length of the actual craft. Reading the report and perusing the plan, it is obvious that the submarine on the beach at Isla San Telmo is the same vessel. The chamber on the top, according to Wood, was the “compressed air chamber… it has a semi-elliptic form and is built of two shells of best boiler iron % inch thick, the different pieces lapping 4 inches are double riveted with % inch countersink rivets, and braced with ribs of 3½” × 3” × ½” angle iron and 1 inch braces.” That kind of intricate detail is invaluable to an archeologist.

Wood’s report goes on to explain how a compressor inside the submarine was used to build up sufficient pressure to not only clear the upper ballast chamber to enable the submarine to rise but also to pressurize the hull to allow the unbolting of bottom plates so that the crew could reach into the water and harvest pearls – or to serve the purposes of war. This self-propelled “lock out” dive chamber – which many historians think is an innovation of the twentieth century – was designed and built in 1865. Wood’s report concluded by enthusing that “the uses to which a boat… in Naval Warfare, would be the removal of submerged obstructions in the channels of rivers and harbors. Approaching hostile fleets at anchor and destroying them by attaching torpedoes to their bottoms and exploding such localities as are commanded and covered by the guns of an enemy. The importance of a successful application of the principles involved in such a vessel for such purposes are of much importance and can not be too highly estimated.” Julius Kroehl couldn’t have said it better himself. It is a glowing endorsement, and I wonder what happened. Why didn’t the Navy buy the sub?

^{A section drawing of Sub Marine Explorerfrom the Journal of the American Society of Naval Engineers, 1902. James P. Delgado.}

Part of the answer is that the submarine was not yet finished. Another is that the war was winding down. Most of the major ports of the South had fallen, the Mississippi was secured and the collapse of the Confederacy was just a few months away. With the end of the war imminent, the Navy Department probably viewed Kroehl’s submarine, brilliant though it was, as coming a bit too late. A genius, yes, an engineering breakthrough, yes. But the time for such an invention to help “win the war” had passed.

And so the Union Navy, which had already invested much in the unfortunate sub Alligator, declined Kroehl’s offer. But there were still pearls to harvest in Panama, and the Pacific Pearl Company used Wood’s letter as an endorsement, publishing it in a promotional pamphlet to sell stocks in 1865. They mentioned it again in an article in the May 31, 1866, edition of the New York Times:

Yesterday afternoon there was a private trial of the Pacific Pearl Company’s Sub Marine Explorer, in the dock foot of North third-street, Eastern District… Julius H. Kroehl, engineer, with Frederick Michaels, August Getz and John Tanner, entered the explorer through her man-hole, which being finally dosed and the signal given the boat was submerged, and for an hour and a half she traversed the bed of the dock. During the submersion the friends of those onboard the boat exhibited considerable anxiety for their safety, but then at last when she rose to the surface… they gave vent to their feelings in repeated cheers. These were again and again repeated, when the engineer held up a pail of mud which he had gathered at the bottom of the dock, showing conclusively the success of the experiment.

But even if the end of the war had not ended the Navy’s interest in submarines, then the failure of its own great wartime experiment, the submarine Intelligent Whale, decisively closed the door. After three years of work, the shipyard finally launched Intelligent Whalejust a month before Kroehl’s highly publicized demonstration of Sub Marine Explorer.Unlike Kroehl’s boat, Intelligent Whalewas not a success, reportedly killing dozens of crewmen in various trials and tests. Renamed “Disastrous Jonah” by wags, Intelligent Whaleended her days laid up, unused. Thirty-one years would pass before the U.S. Navy acquired another submarine, in 1897. Another seventeen years would pass until a submarine again sank an enemy vessel in wartime, when the German U-21sent HMS Kentto the bottom of the North Sea, an act that heralded the opening of a new and far deadlier campaign of submarine warfare and that changed the way war was fought at sea.

TO PANAMA AND OBLIVION

After the demonstrations of Kroehl’s submarine, both he and his invention left New York. Sometime that fall, or early the following year, the Pacific Pearl Company shipped Sub Marine Explorer tothe Pacific coast of Panama. There, it worked for a while, according to a report published in a company prospectus published in or around 1867, and a 1902 article reported that at Panama, Sub Marine Explorer“was successfully used, and Mr. Kroehl said, the divers employed in the boat enjoyed better health than the other divers… The bottom of the boat could be opened or closed as desired. When exploring in considerable depths the bottom was closed, to save the crew from the heavy pressures.” But at some stage the submarine was abandoned, perhaps as early as the fall of 1869. Kroehl was not around then. He had died of the “fever” in Panama two years earlier.

Why there and when? Just off the beach where Explorer nowrests is a large pearl bed in about 100 feet of water, and it was there that the submarine was working in 1869 in the last known contemporary mention in print. Perhaps Explorerwas left on the beach after something broke, or perhaps the pearl bed was fished out. Perhaps, without Julius Kroehl around to care for his invention, no one else could. We may never know. Someone did try to salvage the wreck at some distant time, because the conning tower is wrapped with wire cable, and the tower and the hull around it are slightly deformed from torquing from an offshore direction, as if someone had tried to pull it off the beach and failed. And some features are missing from the submarine – the propeller and the conning tower hatch are gone, stripped for salvage.

Julius Kroehl’s Sub Marine Explorer, now abandoned on a little-known island off Panama, was the only successful “Union” Civil War submarine, the brainchild of an undersea pioneer whose service in the war was relegated, along with his magnificent invention, to the backwaters of history. History is often dominated by “what if?” What if Kroehl had invented his submarine earlier and sent it into combat against the Confederacy? What if, on one of those missions, Sub Marine Explorerhad sunk, carrying vessel and crew into the honored halls of wartime sacrifice like H.I. Hunley?There would have been two Civil War submarines, forever linked in history. But events didn’t work that way, and Sub Marine Explorerhad a more peaceful career, far from home, where the memory of her location and identity faded with time, to be resurrected only by chance by a vacationing archeologist.