The Leopoldville, a Belgian liner converted into a troop transport during World War II, was torpedoed by a German U-boat on Christmas Eve 1944. More than 800 American GIs perished when the ship went down. NUMA found the Leopoldville in 160 feet of water off the port city of Cherbourg, France.
Not all of NUMA’s searches involve shipwrecks. On April 3, 1933, the USS Akron, a 758-foot long rigid airship of the U.S. Navy plunged into the frigid waters of the Atlantic. Only three members of the seventy-six man crew survived. In 1986, NUMA located the “ship of the air’s” galley stove and twisted beams in a 700-foot debris field twenty-seven miles off Beach Haven, New Jersey.
Still determined to discover the fate of the Hunley and her crew, NUMA returned to Charleston after a thirty-year hiatus. When Clive called the SCIAA to arrange for the necessary permits, he was put in touch with Mark Newell, an Englishman, who had spent ten years attempting to put together a non-profit organization to search for the Hunley. Motivated by the opportunity to tap into NUMA’s research gathered during the past expeditions, as well as Clive’s deep pockets, Newell suggested NUMA and SCIAA should form a joint venture. “Old softie that I am,” Clive says. “I agreed. Not a wise move on my part as it turned out.”
NUMA’S crew, aboard Ralph Wilbanks’s boat, a twenty-five foot Parker named Diversity, would tow the detection gear, which Wes Hall was responsible for monitoring. When the NUMA crew detected a promising site, they would mark it with a buoy before moving on. Following behind in another boat, the SCIAA divers would go over the side and check it out.
The two boats left the dock on August 6, and it quickly became obvious they were headed for rough water. Newell had replaced Wilbanks at SCIAA, and there was no love lost between the two men. Newell thought Clive and Wilbanks had their own agenda and were not sharing everything they had compiled from their previous expeditions. With one exception, Newell’s divers were amateurs who had no business poking around Charleston Harbor’s dangerous waters. In addition to losing equipment, the SCIAA team had difficulty finding the buoys set by Wilbanks and Hall.
Prone to jumping to conclusions, Newell would proclaim every anomaly had the same dimensions and configuration as Hunley. Clive laughs, “One target he was particularly enamored of turned out to be an old steam engine.” When Harry Pecorelli III, the only experienced diver on Newell’s boat, ended up saving a divers’ life, the SCIAA’s dive-safety officer pulled the plug on the operation before somebody got killed. Newell, insisting they were close to discovering the sub, tried to convince Clive to extend the search, but the NUMA team wanted nothing more to do with him or SCIAA.
On the flight back to Arizona, Clive mulled over the events of the few weeks. His unfortunate decision to partner with SCIAA had turned another expedition into a fiasco. All he had to show for three years of frustration was a pile of charts documenting the fruitless hours combing the waters of Charleston Harbor and bills totaling $130,000.
Before he left Charleston, Clive persuaded Wilbanks and Hall to continue the search in their free time. “Ralph and Wes went out in rain or shine,” Clive states. “They searched the grids I faxed them through the fall and winter of ‘94 and into the spring of ‘95. Those two guys wouldn’t quit.”
Sequestered in his Paradise Valley office, Clive might have been optimistic, but his team of sea-hunters - towing their electronic gear through miles of ocean with nothing to show - were becoming discouraged. Wilbanks remembers thinking, “The search for the Hunley was beginning to look like an expensive waste of time. Wes and I were starting to feel guilty about the bills we were sending Clive.”
On May 3, 1995, Wilbanks and Hall were exploring some targets discovered the year before. Wilbanks was determined to investigate each target and find out once and for all if it was, or was not, the Hunley. Also on board was Harry Pecorelli, the man who saved the SCIAA diver. He had been enlisted as an extra hand to perform the actual probing of the seabed. Hard work, but Pecorelli was excited by the opportunity to spend the day with pros like Wilbanks and Hall.
When they reached a location known as Target 1, 1,000 feet from where the Hunley sank the Housatonic, Pecorelli went over the side in twenty-seven feet of water. Choosing a center point, he began to probe the sand, moving in a circle around the point. A few minutes later, he hit something, returned to the surface, grabbed the sand dredge and was soon back on the bottom, enveloped in a cloud of blinding silt. After clearing a three-foot wide hole, Pecorelli groped blindly in the opening and his hand brushed against something he described as “corroded but fairly smooth . . . in much too good a condition to have been down there a century.” Back in the boat, Pecorelli told Wilbanks, “I don’t know what it is, but it’s not the Hunley.”
Unwilling to move until he knew exactly what Pecorelli had uncovered, Wilbanks ordered Hall and Pecorelli to go down and take another look. As the duo began to extend the hole, a shape appeared in the murk. Hall thought “it looked like an iron pipe with a tree stump growing out of it.” Blindly feeling his way around the projection, Hall came upon what he knew had to be a hinge. Kicking his way to the surface, Hall pulled the regulator out of his mouth and calmly announced, “It’s the Hunley. That’s it. That’s all it can be.”
Wilbanks joined Hall and Pecorelli on the bottom and, working furiously with the sand dredge, they exposed a section of a curved iron hull, covered with a thin layer of corrosion and listing forty-five degrees to starboard. In addition to the submarine’s forward conning tower (Hall’s “tree stump”), the Hunley’s breathing box (a primitive snorkel) and port side diving plane were also visible. They had seen enough. After carefully covering the wreck with sand, the three divers climbed back in the boat and Wilbanks hit the throttle. Wilbanks relationship with Clive and the ongoing search for the Hunley were well known around Charleston, and he did not want anybody figuring out what had just transpired.
After a celebratory steak dinner, Wilbanks called Clive, but nobody was home. The three men headed for the Charleston Museum. As they walked around the full-size facsimile of the Hunley displayed on the lawn, Wilbanks pointed at the hull. “That’s wrong, that’s wrong, and that’s wrong. And we’re the only people on earth who know it!”
When the phone rang in Paradise Valley, Clive remembers looking at the clock and thinking, “Who the hell is calling at six o’clock in the morning?”
It was Wilbanks. “I guess I’m going to send you my final bill.”
Baffled why Wilbanks would call at the crack of dawn to quit, Clive, still half-asleep inquired, “Are you giving up?”
“No,” Wilbanks declared, “we found it.”
Clive recalls, “wandering around in a fog for three days before the significance of our achievement truly sank in.”
To provide unequivocal documentation of their discovery, Wilbanks, Hall, and Pecorelli returned three days later and filmed the submarine’s most distinguishing features with a video camera. Before he returned to the surface, Wilbanks shoved a watertight plastic box through a hole in the Hunley’s forward conning tower. In addition to their business cards, the box contained a laminated note Hall wrote on a piece of NUMA stationery: “Today, May 3, 1995, one-hundred thirty-one years and seventy-five days after your sinking. Veni, Vidi, Vici! Dude. Yours respectively, Clive Cussler, Chairman, National Underwater & Marine Agency.”
Before they left, the men once again cloaked the hull with a mantle of sand.
Shipwrecks, unless they happen to contain chests filled with Spanish doubloons, seldom cause much of a stir. The Hunley was different. A hallowed Confederate relic, the little submarine was a tomb holding the remains of eight brave sons of the South who paid the highest price in an attempt to turn the tide of the Civil War. “Almost immediately,” Clive recalls, “the vultures came to roost like gargoyles brooding over a derelict cathedral.”
Since the Hunley was built in Mobile, the state of Alabama wanted it. South Carolina claimed ownership because the Hunley sailed into battle from the state’s shore
and was sunk in Charleston Harbor. The Federal Government got involved because all abandoned Confederate property falls under the jurisdiction of the General Services Administration. Adding to the mix, several descendants of sailors who were aboard the Housatonic when the Hunley sent her to the bottom filed claims for ownership of the submarine.
Things really heated up when SCIAA not only demanded NUMA turn over the wreck’s coordinates, they suggested a buoy should be placed on the site, ostensibly to dissuade vandals. Clive told them to forget about it. “I wasn’t going to share anything with those incompetent clowns,” he growls. “A buoy was no different than a big neon sign proclaiming, THIEVES, COME ONE, COME ALL.”
Clive was aware of the rumors that collectors of Civil War artifacts had offered $50,000 for the Hunley’s hatch cover and $100,000 for its propeller. When he refused to tell them the location of the Hunley, Clive was, “accused of desecrating the grave of Confederate war heroes, raping the wreck, ransoming the sovereign state of South Carolina, and scheming to carry off the Hunley and set it in my front yard. I didn’t spend fifteen years looking for it only to have it broken up by amateurs. The Hunley was going to stay lost until we were reasonably assured the submarine would be recovered and preserved in a proper and scientific manner.”
When Mark Newell learned of the discovery, he was incensed. Not only had NUMA found the Hunley, they did it without him. He would later claim his “competent research was preempted by a glory-hunting millionaire.” Newell quit SCIAA, and a month after the sub was discovered, a group of his supporters announced a Cussler book burning would be held in Augusta, Georgia. When the fire department put the kibosh on the roast, Clive was disappointed. “I might have shown up to strike the first match. You can’t buy publicity like that.”
A press conference to officially announce the discovery of the Hunley was held on May 11, 1995. Standing in front of the replica of the submarine on the Charleston Museum’s front yard, Clive played the underwater videotape of the wreck and answered reporters’ questions about the prolonged search for the submarine and its discovery. Brian Hicks, a reporter for the Post and Courier, recalls, “The assembled media ate it up. Cussler knew what they wanted to hear and told great stories. In reporters’ parlance, Cussler gave good quote.”
After the press conference ended, one of the onlookers congratulated Clive on his find and then went on to remind him, and anybody else who would listen, that he had actually discovered the Hunley.
Edward Lee Spence grew up on Sullivan’s Island, a small town located at the mouth of Charleston Harbor. By the time he was twenty-three, Spence claimed he had dived on more than fifty shipwrecks along the South Carolina coast. In 1970, a local newspaper reported he was planning to lead an expedition to find the Hunley. A few months later, Spence and a few friends were fishing a few miles outside of Charleston Harbor. When a trap snagged on the bottom, Spence volunteered to dive down to free it and discovered the trap was hung up on something made of iron. He would later describe, “running his fingers along its raised rivets.” Back in the boat, Spence, convinced he had found the Hunley, lined up a channel buoy with the Sullivan Island lighthouse and drew a large X on a map.
For the next thirty years, Spence wrote letters to every agency he could think of, including the state of South Carolina, the U.S. Navy and the General Services Administration, recounting his discovery of the Hunley. In newspaper articles, television appearances, and lectures at Civil War conferences, Spence advertised himself as “The Man Who Found The Hunley.” When nobody was willing to give him the official recognition he thought he deserved, Spence filed an admiralty suit in federal court in Charleston, claiming he was the sole owner of the Hunley under the law of salvage and the law of finds. Although the judge refused to hear the case, Spence left the courthouse claiming victory.
Over time, Spence’s attempt to persuade the world he discovered the submarine became increasingly strident. In addition to writing several books, numerous magazine articles, and rambling dissertations on the internet, Spence graciously donated his “rights” to the Hunley to the state of South Carolina in 1995. After NUMA’s discovery, Spence called Clive “a liar” saying, “Cussler uses his alleged shipwreck discoveries as a way to garner free publicity for himself and his novels.” In 2001, Clive ran out of patience and filed a suit to prevent Spence from further attacks on his reputation. Spence filed a countersuit, claiming he had suffered damages anywhere from $100,000 to $309 million, but a judge ruled against him. A year later, Clive ended his lawsuit. “Being one who is by nature not litigious, I am pleased with this step toward ending the long unnecessary conflict with Mr. Lee Spence. Thought I commend Mr. Spence’s perseverance, it has been proven time and again that he did not locate the H.L. Hunley.”
Commenting on the outcome, Clive’s attorney, Ric Tapp, stated, “The court has now barred Mr. Spence’s claim, and the public, the Hunley Commission, and the National Park Service have expressly credited NUMA with the discovery of the H.L. Hunley.”
Six months after the Hunley was located, a deal was worked out that satisfied everybody involved. The U.S. government would retain the title to the Hunley, but the submarine would have a permanent home in Charleston. The Hunley Commission, an agency set up by the state of South Carolina, would have the final say on how the restored craft would be displayed. Satisfied his find was finally in good hands, Clive provided the submarine’s coordinates to the Naval Historical Center on November 9, 1995.
Five years later, the little sub was lifted off the bottom, secured to a barge, and towed past boatloads of cheering spectators to the Warren Lash Conservation Center.
Dirk Cussler believes, “The Hunley really is Clive’s most important legacy. I would like to think that people will be standing before the remains of the Hunley centuries from now, and that at least a few of them will give a small nod to the guys who found her.”
During the summer of 1995, shortly after Wilbanks, Hall, and Pecorelli found the Hunley, Clive became convinced a non-fiction book, detailing NUMA’s search for shipwrecks, including the Hunley, would appeal not only to his existing fans but an entirely new audience intrigued by the world of underwater archeology.
Clive also knew, despite his success with the Dirk Pitt series, the book would be a tough sell. He had spent the last thirty years writing bestselling fiction, and his publisher would be extremely reluctant to let him venture into unknown territory.
His first job was to convince Peter Lampack since it would be the agent’s job to sell the idea to Simon & Schuster. Clive explained he would select a group of NUMA’s preeminent discoveries and tell two related stories - the history and events surrounding the ship’s demise, followed by an account of the search and ultimate discovery. Although Lampack had reservations about Clive shifting gears, he thought the idea had enough merit to run it by Paul McCarthy.
“I thought it was a natural,” McCarthy says. “The book would be a real-life extension of Dirk Pitt, guaranteed to attract the same audience.” McCarthy shopped the idea around Simon & Schuster but ran into a brick wall. “Management didn’t want to take the risk,” he says. “They were concerned if the book didn’t do well, it would drag down Clive’s future books. To be fair, it had happened before when authors went from fiction to non-fiction, or the other way around, but I knew Clive could pull it off.”
Unwilling to let a potential winner die on the corporate vine, McCarthy kept pushing, and Simon & Schuster reluctantly gave in, offering an extremely modest - for Clive - $50,000 advance: $35,000 earmarked for research and $15,000 for the author.
When he signed the contract, Clive was working on Shockwave, the thirteenth Dirk Pitt adventure. Since the Pitt book had to take precedence, Clive selected Craig Dirgo to assist him with the non-fiction book, the first time Clive collaborated with a co-writer.
The son of an Air Force officer, Craig Dirgo grew up on air bases in England and the United States. While he was attending high school in Colorado, Dirgo met Bob Esbe
nson’s son, and Esbenson hired the boys to help maintain Clive’s car collection. In 1986, Clive invited Dirgo along on NUMA’s unsuccessful hunt for the Alamo’s cannons in San Antonio. Three years later, he was selected as NUMA’s special projects director and produced the short-lived NUMA NEWS.
Dirgo had always wanted to try his hand at writing and Clive’s offer to co-author the book was a godsend. The Sea Hunters was published on October 7, 1996. The nine chapters, divided into two sections, are each devoted to a particular ship (or group of interrelated vessels) including the Republic of Texas Navy Ship Zavala, the troop transport Leopoldville and the Hunley. The first section, based on historical records, presents a fictional account documenting the events leading to the disaster that sent the doomed ship to the bottom. The second section describes NUMA’s dogged, stirring, often humorous and sometimes futile search for the wreck.
In addition to the shipwrecks, one chapter documents the search for the Lost Locomotive of Kiowa Creek. This was the disaster that inspired Deep Six. Although the Kansas and Pacific Railroad attempted to recover Engine #15 almost immediately after the wreck, the search team only found the tender. It was assumed the locomotive was swept downstream and buried in quicksand. Clive and his NUMA cohorts launched an intensive search for the engine in 1989. Despite the efforts of an army of volunteers armed with shovels, metal detectors, and ground-penetrating radar, they came up empty-handed.