Disasters at Sea Page 2

  An old-fashioned proton magnetometer

  The 1715 Treasure Fleet

  THE WRECK OF THE WEALTH OF THE INDIES

  Spanish treasure ships had been lost before, but none so dramatically, or with the loss of so many men and so much wealth, as the treasure fleet of 1715. The new king of Spain, Philip V (1683–1746), inherited a nearly bankrupt realm, ravaged from the long War of Spanish Succession (1701–14). He desperately needed the bounty of this fleet. But instead of bringing home a fortune, the 1715 treasure fleet was wrecked off the coast of Florida. Its sunken treasure became one of the most spectacular salvage discoveries in modern maritime history.

  The fleet of 11 ships—primarily galleons—had been lying in port in Havana, Cuba, for two years, held up by political strife back home in Spain. As July approached, the impatient captains, Antonio de Escheverz y Zubiza and Juan Esteban de Ubilla, must have been well aware that hurricane season was already underway. But the date for departure was set. The 1715 fleet intended to follow a well-traveled route to Europe, riding the Gulf Stream. The fleet included a French frigate, the Grifón. Historians differ as to whether the Grifón was a 12th ship, or counted among the 11. In either case, she was to become the sole surviving ship on the disastrous voyage.

  A ship goes down in a hurricane near St. Thomas island in the Caribbean Sea. Without modern technology to track such storms, ships in the Age of Sail bore the full brunt of nature’s fury.

  The same ship, shown before the storm, gliding on smooth waters

  Laden with precious metals, jewels, porcelain, and other goods, the fleet sailed from Havana on July 24, 1715. Historians believe that the total worth of the registered cargo was around $86 million in modern currency, mostly in the form of silver and gold. Hundreds of trunks were filled with cobs, crude chunks of precious metal, and close to seven million of the famed Spanish coins, pieces of eight. Treasure fleets are often called “plate fleets,” after the Spanish word for silver, plata.

  On July 31, 1715, a violent hurricane swept north from the Gulf. Those ships in the front of the fleet were wrecked in deep water and lost their entire crews and treasure. Some crew and passengers in the rear guard, whose ships were closer to land, managed to survive, but an estimated 1,000 men were lost in the powerful storm.

  THE BATTLE OF VIGO BAY

  ARRIVING HOME FROM THE NEW WORLD, the Spanish plate fleet of 1702 met with a disastrous fate. The flotilla entered Vigo Bay on the west coast of Spain and dropped anchor. On October 23, English and Dutch ships—enemy combatants in the War of Spanish Succession—attacked. Spanish and French ships, carrying millions of pesos in gold and silver, constituted the treasure fleet. Some of the treasure had already been off-loaded, but the Anglo-Dutch forces captured several of the ships—and a small fortune along with them. Under orders from the French commander, the crews of the remaining ships set fire to them in order to avoid capture or pillage. The sunken treasure in Vigo Bay has eluded centuries of salvage operations.

  A Dutch image of the Battle of Vigo Bay, with Dutch and English ships in the fore-ground. The engagement cost Spain and France a fortune in lost treasure and ships.

  They also lost an ally: Portugal broke its treaty and joined the Dutch and English side.

  A nineteenth-century illustration shows crewmen desperately rowing away from the sinking Urca de Lima. Rediscovered in 1928, the wreck became Florida’s first Underwater Archaeological Preserve.

  SALVAGE—THEN AND NOW

  When news of the wreck reached Havana, the Spanish governor had but one concern—immediate salvage of what treasure could be found. It is thought that nearly half of the fleet’s precious cargo was recovered from these salvage operations. Not all of this wealth was restored to the Spanish, however. With such riches at stake, the wreck of the 1715 fleet became a prime target for pirates and privateers. A feeding frenzy of treasure hunters and pillagers descended on the site. Others lay in wait for ships carrying salvaged goods. Among these was the notorious English privateer Henry Jennings, who made off with about 400,000 pesos from a salvage fleet.

  Two and a half centuries later, in the 1950s, a Florida man named Kip Wagner stumbled on a gold coin while walking on the beach. Wagner devoted years to the pursuit of the coin’s source. Teaming up with treasure diver Mel Fisher, Wagner and his associates discovered numerous wreck sites from the 1715 treasure fleet and the precious goods that had gone down with the ships. Many of these treasures are on view in museums; others are traded on the active numismatic market.

  One of the ships that sank in shallow water, the Urca de Lima, survived both storm and salvage nearly intact. Today, the Urca de Lima is a favorite site for divers. The Florida shoreline where the 1715 ships sank—the counties of Martin, Indian River, and St. Lucie—is known as “Treasure Coast.” Both long-term professional wreck divers and casual day divers continue to unearth the sunken wealth of the Indies.

  FLOTSAM & JETSAM

  The nickname “two bits” for the U.S. quarter derives from the Spanish dollar—the peso or real de a ocho (“piece of eight”). The real was sometimes cut into eight pie-shaped pieces to make smaller change.

  Above and right, Spanish silver dollars, minted in 1739, during the reign of King Philip V

  THE SPANISH GALLEON

  THE GALLEON WAS THE WORKHORSE of Spanish treasure fleets from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Distinguished by a high forecastle and an even higher sterncastle built onto a high, flat stern, the galleon also featured a prominent beak and bowsprit. Galleons carried from three to five masts. These were square-rigged on the fore-and mainmasts; the mizzenmast and bonaventure mizzen (the third and fourth masts) were lateen-rigged, or fitted with triangular sails. These powerful ships were commonly armed with a battery of cannons for protection and could engage as readily in war as in trade.

  Spain built Morro Castle at the mouth of the harbor in Havana, a major Spanish port in the New World and starting point for most treasure fleets. First built in 1589, the castle was captured by the British in 1762 and returned to Spain in 1763. The lighthouse was built in 1846.

  A Spanish galleon

  The Essex

  RENDEZVOUS WITH THE LEVIATHAN

  If truth is stranger than fiction, the story of the whaleship Essex is a case in point. Widely regarded as inspiration for Herman Melville’s classic novel Moby Dick, the Essex, an 87-foot (27 m) long ship, was smashed by a whale in 1820. Eight men out of a crew of 20 survived, 5 in open boats on the sea, 3 others on an uninhabited Pacific island. All 8 were eventually rescued, but not until those adrift had resorted to cannibalism—even drawing lots on who was to survive and who was to become fodder for his fellow castaways.

  One of the survivors, first mate Owen Chase, wrote an account of the ordeal, published in 1821 to wide acclaim. In 1980, experts authenticated another account of the disaster, this one written by then 14-year-old cabin boy Thomas Nickerson. From these two narratives, historians have pieced together a detailed picture of the horror and despair that followed the wreck of the Essex.

  Sperm whales, though hunted extensively for centuries, are today protected worldwide and are significantly less endangered than some of their cousins.

  FLOTSAM & JETSAM

  Harpooned whales could drag whaleboats at speeds up to 23 miles per hour (37 km/h). Sailors called this a “Nantucket sleighride.”

  “WE HAVE BEEN STOVE BY A WHALE”

  Whaling had become big business on Nantucket Island by 1819, when the Essex set sail for the last time. The trade in whale blubber, which furnished lamp oil, had enriched the close-knit Quaker community. The quarry of choice was the massive sperm whale, named for the highly prized waxy liquid, or spermaceti, carried in its protruding forehead.

  After hunting the sperm whale nearly to oblivion in the Atlantic Ocean, whaling crews were obliged to sail around Cape Horn and into the Pacific to track their bounty. It was here, on November 20, 1820, that a huge sperm whale attacked the Essex. Chase’s narrative puts th
e whale at close to 85 feet (26 m) in length, although few sperm whales have been recorded longer than 60 feet (18.2 m). The whale rammed the Essex twice—the second time, as Chase describes it, “with tenfold fury and vengeance in his aspect.” With scant supplies, the crew set off in three whaleboats to find land that they knew to be more than 1,000 miles (1,600 km) away.

  CAST ADRIFT

  Chase and Nickerson manned one rickety whaleboat, along with four other crewmen. Seven men each piled into the remaining two boats, but three put off at uninhabited Henderson Island to await their fates.

  The captain and one other crewman were the sole survivors of their boat; a passing ship discovered them 90 days later. The desperate men had survived by eating their dead, including Owen Coffin, the captain’s young cousin. Faced with certain starvation, the men had drawn lots for who would sacrifice his life for the others; Coffin chose the black spot. Chase, Nickerson, and boatsteerer Benjamin Lawrence, who likewise had eaten their dead, were picked up 93 days after the wreck of the Essex. Rescue arrived for the men on the island soon after. The third boat has never been found.

  A harpooned whale attempts to flee the surrounding boats. After a harpoon caught in a whale’s flesh, sailors would “play” the whale from whaleboats up to 30 feet (9 m) long. Male sperm whales can weigh as much as 45 tons (41 metric tons), so this pursuit risked life and limb.

  THE WHITE WHALE

  HERMAN MELVILLE’S 1851 novel Moby Dick owes a direct debt to Owen Chase’s narrative. Melville’s dramatic, biblical prose, rendered in first-person narration, tells of a captain’s relentless quest for vengeance on a white whale that had wrecked his boat years before. In 1841, on board the whaler Acushnet, Melville met Chase’s son William, whose ship had paused for a “gam,” or meeting, with Melville’s boat. William Chase gave Melville his own copy of his father’s narrative.

  USS Monitor

  THE ILL-FATED IRONCLAD

  Built for battle, the USS Monitor was cheated out of her promised military glory when she met with an untimely end. The Monitor was the first ironclad warship in the U.S. Navy’s fleet and served as a prototype for dozens of similar vessels. The brainchild of Swedish engineer John Ericsson, the Monitor was built in 1862 in just over 100 days, part of a Civil War arms race. She was to be the answer to the Confederacy’s own ironclad, the CSS Virginia. The two ships would soon stand off in the hallmark naval battle of the Civil War, the Battle of Hampton Roads. Neither ship survived her first year.

  With a length of 172 feet (52 m), the Monitor carried an innovative revolving gun turret on her deck, providing 8-inch (20 cm) thick walls of iron protection for the gunners inside. Two 11-foot (3.5 m) Dahlgren smoothbore cannons could fire and retract through gun ports fitted with hinged doors. The 9-foot (2.9 m) high, 22-foot (6.7 m) wide gun turret, along with the deck, the smokestack, and the pilothouse, were the only portions of the ship that sat above the waterline. The remainder lay below water, making her a semisubmerged ship. A steam-driven propeller, or marine screw, powered the Monitor at a steady but slow pace; her maximum speed was 5.5 knots.

  The Monitor’s first military engagement, the Battle of Hampton Roads, was also her last. She served her duty to the Union army on March 9, 1862, holding off her Confederate ironclad rival, the CSS Virginia, and maintaining the Union blockade of the Virginia port. The four-hour battle was a draw. But the Monitor never fought again; eight months later, less than a year after her launch, she sank in high waves off the coast of North Carolina.

  Sixteen men died when the Monitor went down, but the United States continued to build ships of her design—called “monitors”—through World War I.

  Although the battle did not affect the course of the Civil War, the engagement of the Virginia and the Monitor marked the beginning of a new age in naval warfare, one which made wooden warships obsolete.

  John Lorimer Worden commanded the USS Monitor in her historic battle with the CSS Virginia.

  VIRGINIA, NÉE MERRIMACK

  THE MONITOR’S IRONCLAD rival in battle, the CSS Virginia, was built from the charred remains of a wooden Union ship named the USS Merrimack. Just two months after the Battle of Hampton Roads, Union forces surrounded the Virginia. Rather than allow capture, her commanders ordered the Virginia to be blown up. She met her fiery end on the night of May 10, 1862.

  The Virginia explodes into flaming debris. Her builders had used the remains of the USS Merrimack to build this Confederate ironclad.

  THE GRAVEYARD OF THE ATLANTIC

  THE MONITOR WAS NEITHER THE FIRST SHIP nor the last to sink in the waters off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. The area is so rife with shipwrecks that it has earned the nickname “Graveyard of the Atlantic.” By some estimates, more than 2,000 ships have been wrecked here, from the earliest English brig recorded in 1585 to the present day.

  In geographic terms, the Outer Banks of North Carolina are really barrier islands. Two strong ocean currents meet here—the cold Labrador Current, which flows south from Labrador and Newfoundland, and the warm Gulf Stream, which originates in the Caribbean Sea. This confluence creates turbulent waters and unpredictable currents and has carved a series of shifting undersea sandbars known as the Diamond Shoals. These sandbars extend from the point of Cape Hatteras as far as 14 miles (22 m) offshore. If this treacherous geography isn’t enough, the Outer Banks is also one of the most hurricane-prone regions in the Atlantic.

  The list of ships wrecked here tantalizes wreck divers and romantics alike. But it is also a pointed history lesson, as the staggering variety of craft buried here attests. The Outer Banks have long been critical points along many shipping routes, serving vessels bound on widely diverse errands. Pirate galleons harboring pieces of eight, four-masted schooners, luxury liners, coal barges, oil tankers, battleships, submarines, and hundreds of small craft have all met the same fate off these shores. In the powerful San Ciriaco hurricane of 1899 alone, nine ships were lost in the course of two days. Locals claim that the feral horses that roam the Outer Banks are the remains of a herd brought on board a Spanish galleon. Many such mysteries remain unsolved in the Graveyard of the Atlantic.

  SWEPT UNDER

  The Monitor’s great advantage in battle—her low profile and fully submerged hull—was also her Achilles’ heel as a seagoing craft. Built for the calmer waters of rivers and inlets, the Monitor was unable to hold her own in the open sea. She also lacked sufficient buoyancy, for reasons that experts have been debating since her demise.

  After the Monitor’s historic battle, the navy sent her to Washington Navy Yard for refitting. The side-steamer Rhode Island towed her on the return trip. On December 31, 1862, the two ships encountered heavy waves off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, and gale winds of an estimated Force 7 on the Beaufort scale—wind speeds up to 38 miles per hour (61 km/h). Powerful waves easily broke over the Monitor’s low deck, overwhelming it until the deck was nearly flush with water. The Rhode Island’s crew and lifeboats saved many of those aboard the Monitor, but the flat deck of the ironclad offered little purchase with waves breaking over the turret. The pounding waves relentlessly swept overboard those unable to reach the lifeboats.

  FLOTSAM & JETSAM

  The Monitor’s low profile and protruding turret gave her the nickname “cheese box on a raft.”

  Letters from surviving Monitor crew members describe the horror of the sinking. Many watched from the deck of the Rhode Island as their iron “home” tossed helplessly in the storm. Paymaster William Keeler wrote, “What the fire of the enemy failed to do, the elements have accomplished.” The tossing waters claimed not only the ship, but also 16 men out of the 62 aboard the USS Monitor.

  RECLAIMING THE MONITOR

  Just over a century later, a 1973 expedition from Duke University discovered the remains of the Monitor. Lying 16 miles (26 km) off the coast of Cape Hatteras, she was submerged about 230 feet (70 m) deep, lying upside down on the ocean floor. In 1975, the area around the wreck was designated a National Marine Sanctua
ry. Considered an artificial reef, the Monitor wreck sustains numerous marine life forms, from corals and sponges to sea bass and barracuda.

  A brass signal lantern from the Monitor. Before the age of radio or electronic communication, ships communicated by flashing lights from signal lanterns, not unlike Morse code.

  Scientists have been studying the Monitor and her undersea environment since her discovery. In the 1990s, when experts found that she was deteriorating at an accelerated rate, they began to raise pieces of the ship, one by one. First came the propeller, raised in 1998, followed by the steam engine. The massive gun turret, along with its two Dahlgren cannons, was raised in 2001. The Monitor’s relics are housed in a museum, while her wreck lies protected below.

  A school of amberjack swims about the wreck of the Monitor.

  The General Grant

  GOLD, CASTAWAYS, AND SEALSKIN SUITS

  Gold was discovered in the sheep country of Australia in 1851, triggering a fevered gold rush that lasted more than a decade. By the 1860s, prospectors from all reaches of the British colonies had amassed small fortunes. On May 4, 1866, the American clipper ship General Grant left Melbourne for London, laden with wool and sheepskins. Also on board were a number of gold miners and their families, carrying home their new wealth in the form of 2,567 ounces (73 kg) of gold bullion. Most of them never made it home. On May 13, the General Grant, a victim of drift, tide, and bizarre bad luck, was shipwrecked on the forlorn Auckland Islands.

  A contemporary picture of the General Grant’s slow demise, with survivors pulling desperately away in lifeboats

  BETWEEN A ROCK AND A TIDAL PLACE

  The General Grant was a three-masted clipper ship, measuring 179.5 feet (55 m) long, with a beam of 34.5 feet (10.5 m). On May 11, only a week out from port, heavy fog, dead winds, and near zero visibility overcame the General Grant. She began to drift, pulled by a strong current toward the treacherous Auckland Islands, which lie between New Zealand and Antarctica. When the ship emerged from the fog, she was face to face with a cliff of jagged black rock, towering some 400 feet (122 m) above the sea.