The Sea Hunters Part 14

"Port guns prepare to fire," Walke shouted down onto the gun deck at seeing the Arkansas's superior speed closing the distance between them.

"Can you give us more speed," he called through the speaking tube to his Chief Engineer, Samuel Garrett.

"Steam Pressure is in the red now," Garrett's disembodied voice replied through the tube.

Ominously, Arkansas pulled alongside until they were blasting away at each other hull to hull. The two ironclads were so near one another that Walke thought he caught a glimpse of Isaac Brown. His old friend looked to be standing beside a sh.e.l.l-torn opening on the side of his Pilothouse, directing the fight. It appeared as though he had a bandage around his head.

With a thunderous roar across the narrow gap of water, Arkansas launched a wall of solid shot into Carondelet's casemate.

"I've lost the wheel!" Hoel shouted. "She doesn't respond."

A mids.h.i.+pman burst into the Pilothouse, his face white as a sheet.

"Captain, they've hit the boilers!" he gasped breathlessly.

"Some of the steam pipes are destroyed! The chief engineer says our steam is dropping fast!" "Run back to the gun deck and report to Lieutenant Donaldson," Walke said calmly. "Tell him the steering gear is disabled, and I need him to tie the rudders to port. We're going to run the boat onto the bank." Helpless while his gunboat was pounded unmercifully by the heavy Confederate cannon, Walke waited patiently until his orders were carried out. Already, the casemate looked as if it had been a.s.saulted by a giant can opener.

"She's coming around," announced Hoel.

"Run the bow squarely into the mud, Mr. Hoel. Our anchors are shot away."

As Arkansas began pulling ahead, Walke saw Isaac Brown standing his hands and shouting across the on the roof of his casemate, cupping water. "Better luck next time, Henry!" Brown yelled.

The b.a.s.t.a.r.d has nerve, thought Walke. He made to shout a reply, but instinctively ducked as a broadside from Arkansas smashed into Carondelet and rolled her over on a twenty-degree angle that allowed water to rush through the gunports onto the deck. At the same time, the Union gunboat's bow slid up on the bank, coming to a stop as the mud gripped her hull. Walke was thrown against the wall of the pilothouse, badly bruising his shoulder.

After he struggled to his feet and stepped out of the pilothouse to answer Brown, it was too late. Arkansas was already pulling away, locked in a fight with the brave little Tyler Walke could only shake his fist in frustration. she had taken Carondelet's famed fight with Arkansas was over, and the worst of it.

"Carondelet, " Rear Admiral Henry Walke recalled many years later, 6 6 was a most successful craft." Under seven different skippers throughout the war, U.S.S. Carondelet fought in more battles against the enemy (over fifteen engagements) and came under more fire than any other vessel in the Union Navy. From Fort Henry through her battering at Fort Donelson, her incredible run past Island Ten through the siege of Vicksburg and the fight with the durable Arkansas, and to the battle of Memphis, the defense of Nashville, and the Union campaign up the Red River, Carondelet ran up a battle record that would not be surpa.s.sed until World War U.

During continuous service from early 1862 until the end of the war, she was struck by enemy shot and sh.e.l.l over 300 times, 37 of her crew were killed and 63 wounded. She suffered 35 casualties from her drubbing by Arkansas alone.

A week ere close of the w aft the Carondelet cast off on her final voyage and steamed up the Mississippi River to Mound City, Illinois, where she was decommissioned. A few days later, all her guns and stores were removed, her crew was paid off, and her officers transferred to other commands. The career of the grand old fighting lady of the western rivers was finished. In November of 1865, she was auctioned off to Daniel Jacobs of St. Louis for $3,600.

For the next few years, Carondelet's fate is shrouded in mystery.

It was presumed she was sold by Jacobs and taken to Cincinnati, where it was rumored she was to be demolished for sc.r.a.p. But for some reason she managed to survive. Her whereabouts from 1865 until 1872 are unknown.

Late in 1872, she was recognized as a wharfboat at Gallipolis, Ohio.

Her owner was a Captain John Hamilton. A photo taken at the time shows her much modified, but still afloat.

At Gallipolis the old gunboat deteriorated until Hamilton decided to burn and sc.r.a.p her for what iron remained in her hull, estimated at $3,000. But, before he could tear her apart, the spring flood of 1873 snapped her mooring lines and washed her 130 miles down the Ohio River. Carondelet finally came to rest at the head of Manchester Island, where she eventually settled into the soft silt and disappeared.

After twelve years of hard service and undying fame, Carondelet was no more.

Some Days You Can't Win April 1982 smart person once wrote, "An object lost and hidden, waits and whispers." I'm remiss for not recalling the author. I hope he or she forgives me, but the phrase comes to mind because of the many lost s.h.i.+pwrecks that have whispered to me through the years.

Carondelet, it seemed to my imaginative mind, whispered the loudest.

It was as though she called out through the mists of time, 110 years in the past, begging to be found. Sadly, like the cavalry troop that arrives after the wagon train has been burned by marauding Indians, I rode on the scene too late.

I've always had a soft touch for Civil War ironclads because their design was so radically different from that Of any s.h.i.+ps that came before and after. The rough, often crude vessels constructed by the South were marvels of expedience and improvisation. Some built in ironworks, some knocked together in cornfields, their trademark sloping sides were a necessity, owing to lack of heavy-metal-forming machinery and the shortage of iron, a commodity that went mainly to build cannons for the Confederate Armies. Their armor plate was often train rails slotted together to form a s.h.i.+eld.

The United States Navy ironclads, predominantly based on the monitor design, revolutionized naval warfare with their revolving gun turrets, flush decks, and total lack of sails and rigging. So successful were the monitor-cla.s.s vessels, the U.S. Navy built and commissioned fifty up until 1903. The last monitor was not stricken from navy rolls until 1937.

It can safely be said that the original Monitor was the grandfather of the giant battlewagons that followed and fought in five wars.

learning that the famous old warhorse of the river battles was sold for sc.r.a.p after the Civil War, and later became a whaleboat on the Ohio River at Gallipolis, it became a simple matter for me to trace her route after the spring floods swept her 130 miles down river to Manchester Island. Even if her owner, John Hamilton, had burned the derelict for whatever iron was left in her bones on Manchester Island, experience taught me that a considerable amount of her lower hull and timbers should still be intact.

There are two islands in the river off the town of Manchester.

The smallest is named Manchester Island Number One, the largest, Number TWo. The dilemma? On whose sh.o.r.e did Carondelet run aground?

The solution came with researcher Bob Fleming's penciled overlay sketch from an atlas of Adams County, Ohio, circa 1875. Before the Turn of the century, the smaller piece of land in the middle of the river was called Tow Head Island. The Manchester Island that held the remains of Carondelet was now called Number TWo.

Enlarging Fleming's sketch to the same scale as the modern chart and performing the old overlay trick, I quickly determined the 1982 head of Manchester Island was now two hundred yards downstream from where it split the river in 1873. This gave me a search grid not much larger than a soccer field.

Armed with enough data to inspire an attempt to find Carondelet, Walt Schob and I flew to Cincinnati, Ohio, along with our Schonstedt gradiometer. We rented a car and drove along the Ohio bank of the river across from Kentucky. The valley carved by millions of years of flowing water is quite scenic. Rolling hills, thickly forested, drop onto picturesque farms, most of them growing tobacco.

Suddenly, I called out to Schob, who was at the wheel. "Stop the car and Turn around."

He looked at me questioningly. "Why, did I run over something?"

"No," I answered excitedly. "There's a barn back up the road. I have to get a closer look at it."

"A barn?"

"A barn." and followed my directions until I Walt dutifully made a U-turn motioned for him to stop. I walked about fifty Yards Feeling as if I were carried back in time, air-sized barn with dark down a small, dusty road until I stood beside a feathered walls. A man was standing on a ladder, painting a large gray, w sign across the vertically laid boards.

"Well done," I said to him. "YOu do nice work."

He turned around, stared down at me, and grinned. "I've been doing it for forty-five years, so I kinda got the hang of it-" I studied his handiwork. "I didn't think they still painted Mail Pouch tobacco signs on the sides of barns. I thought Mail Pouch outdoor advertising went the way of the Burma Shave highway signs."

"Nope, they're still in business, and I'm one of a dozen guys still painting them."

After a short chat, I returned to the car. "What was that all about?" asked Walt.

"When I was a kid in Minnesota, I used to watch for Mail Pouch signs on barns when my dad took the family for drives through the country. I thought they'd become extinct."

"Do they smoke Mail Pouch?"

"They chew it."

Walt made a face. "Nasty habit. Rots your teeth."

poor Walt, he just didn't have any romance and sentiment in his soul.

Reaching the town of Manchester late in the afternoon, we stopped at the sheriff's department and asked to see the sheriff. He turned out to be a large, smiling man by the name of Louis Fulton. Although his department didn't have a search-and-rescue boat to work the river, a nice fibergla.s.s outboard for that purpose was owned by the local fire if,s good fis.h.i.+ng buddy was Fire Chief department. Naturally, the sheri Frank Tolle, and before you could say, "It PaYs to have influence," we had ourselves a search boat, and early the next morning we were cruising the beautiful Ohio River, with the boat manned by fireman Earl Littleton.

There was a small catch, however. As a favor to Sheriff Fulton, we agreed to use our magnetic search gear to look for a woman who had inexplicably vanished three years previously.

The enigma was cla.s.sic Unsolved Mysteries material. The story told to us by the sheriff concerned a widow in her late sixties. One afternoon, while she was roasting a chicken in the oven, she left her house and made a quick trip a mile or so into town to buy a few groceries.

After leaving the store, she was never seen again, nor was her car ever found. When investigators learned she was missing, they immediately searched the house. Except for a chicken roasted to a crisp, nothing appeared out of place or missing.

Since the lady's house was situated on a road that sloped down toward the river, the sheriff's investigators speculated that she might have been approaching her house when she either blacked out or suffered a heart attack. A brick-enclosed mailbox appeared damaged at the entrance to her driveway, suggesting the car might have struck it a glancing blow after she became unconscious. Now out of control, the car rolled down the road into the river and sank out of sight, or so the theory went.

Divers swept the river with no luck. The lady and her car remained lost.

A sucker for a good puzzle, I gladly offered to help with a search before tackling the hunt for Carondelet. With the sheriff and two of his deputies on board, curious to see how we went about searching for a sunken object, Walt and I began running search lanes back and forth in the water below the end of the road. After covering a hundred yards downstream and nearly @ yards out into the channel, we came up empty.

We struck no magnetic anomalies that suggested the ma.s.s of an automobile.

I have a strong antipathy to searching for an object when totally unprepared. I suggested we return to the boat ramp and knock off for lunch. This gave me time to check out a few details. I walked the road from the main highway past the lady's former house and down the hill to the edge of the river. Then I asked the sheriff what month the lady went missing.

"Early December," he answered.

I looked at him. "The weather must have been cold."

"That time of year the temperature gets below freezing."

"Then it stands to reason that she'd have the windows on her car rolled up."

He nodded. "Sounds logical."

"What do you figure the speed of the river current?" I asked.

"About two to three miles an hour until spring runoff. Then it can hit four to five."

"Close to the pace of a walking man."

suppose so."

I pointed up the road past the house. "The grade is a good ten percent. A fairly steep slope. If she blacked out before she could Turn into the driveway and the car continued another eighty yards down the road with her foot still on the accelerator, she could have driven into the river at over thirty miles an hour."

"A safe bet," the sheriff agreed. "Actually, our estimates were closer to thirty-five."

"All things considered," I said, "we're looking in the wrong place.

"You don't think she's near the end of the road?" he asked.

I shook my head. "The momentum and speed would have sent her almost to the middle of the channel. And because she must have rolled up her windows against the cold, water seeping in would have taken several minutes to fill and sink the car. Enough time for the current to carry the car a good hundred yards or more down river."

"It's been three years," said the sheriff. "I can't recall exactly whether we swept that far. I do know the divers had a hard time fighting the cur-rent and covered only the primary area around the end of the road."

This was a situation similar to the drowning of Susan Smith's two boys in Union, South Carolina. Though that tragedy took place in a lake and not a river, visibility was so poor the divers' first search missed the car. A second attempt found the boys farther out and deeper in the lake.

Underwater search is seldom a cut-and-dried affair.

"What do you suggest?" Sheriff Fulton asked.

"I propose we extend the search farther offsh.o.r.e and down river."

Half an hour later the gradiometer was trailing behind the boat ten feet beneath the water surface. While Walt kept a sharp eye on the instrument readings, I tied a float to the end of a rope. Next, I slipped on a pair of work gloves I usually carry on expeditions and dragged a grappling hook across the riverbed. If we were lucky and it hooked a piece of the car, the gloves would keep the palms of my hands from being rubbed raw, and the float would mark the spot.

Nearly two hundred yards from the road, Walt hit a target with a large magnetic ma.s.s. We crisscrossed it several times and received the same high readings. However, the grappling hook refused to catch its p.r.o.ngs in anything but river silt.

"Whatever is down there is big and it's buried," I said.

The sheriff looked up the river. "Sure seems a long way off."

I shrugged. "Perhaps, but it's the only credible target you've got between here and the end of the road."

"You couldn't snag anything with your hook?"

"After eight pa.s.ses over the site and no prize, I think it's safe to say the car is buried over its roof in silt."

The sheriff looked thoughtful for a few moments. "Then I guess we'll have to get some divers and a dredge in here and see what we've got.

Walt and I left for home the next day. We never did learn whether the missing lady and her car were found in the river at our target site.

Since we still had five hours of daylight left, we deposited the sheriff and his deputies at the boat ramp and headed upriver to where I suspected Carondelet might lie. As we rounded the head of Manchester Island, the biggest dredge boat I've ever seen loomed over the river.

It had the appearance of a ma.s.sive rectangular building with corrugated metal walls and a seemingly endless row of great steel buckets with jagged teeth that marched into the water and reemerged, filled with tons of riverbed silt. I felt as if I were about to lose a jackpot lottery on a technicality when I estimated that the dredge was working no more than a hundred yards from my prime search grid.

Without bothering to drop the gradiometer in the water, we headed straight for the dredge, and pulled alongside. The superintendent in charge stepped from his office and invited us on board. A tall, floridfaced man with about the same dimensions as a phone booth, he held out a beefy hand in greeting. I took his grip and heard my knuckles crack.

""What can I do for you?" he asked with a wide smile.

I explained that we were on a survey for a sunken gunboat and inquired if he was working his way down river. If so, I wanted to stop his insatiable dredge before it ate any remains of Carondelet.

His smile faded. "We're not working down river," he said. "We're working up."

Cussler's little world teetered on the edge of the abyss. There was still a chance the trench carved by the big buckets missed the wreck.

I Pointed to my prime search location. "Did you dredge over in that area?" I asked.

The Superintendent nodded. "We dredged through there no more than four hours ago."

"Do you know if you brought up any wood?"

"Sure did. Even saved some of the pieces. Would you care to see them?"

Without waiting for a reply, he disappeared inside a door of the dredge and returned after a minute carrying the remains of a wooden beam, brown and slimy from long years of being immersed in water, a fire brick that could have come from a steam engine, and several pieces of heavily rusted iron that included a bracket plate, long spikes, and fragments of a steam pipe.

Walt and I exchanged looks of agonized defeat.

"What kind of a boat did you say this was?" inquired the superintendent.