Adventures of a Sea Hunter: In Search of Famous Shipwrecks

ships and the dramatic damage wrought by the atomic bomb. Saratoga has a huge dent in the flight deck caused by the falling column of water and silt thrown out of the lagoon by the bomb. It’s just one dent, but it’s a big one: 230 feet long, 70 feet wide and 20 feet deep. It looks like Godzilla stomped on the flight deck. The battleship Arkansas, a quarter mile away, is in even worse shape. The armored hull is upside down, warped and smashed nearly flat. A hundred feet of superstructure, masts and turrets lie buried in the coral sand, with only several feet of clearance between the main deck and the seabed. The force of the blast flipped and smashed Arkansas, then hammered her down with such violence that she is nearly one with the bottom of the lagoon. The attack transport Gilliam is something else altogether. Caught in an atomic fireball and swept by extreme temperatures equal to those on the surface of the sun, the ship has partially melted. It looks like a child’s plastic toy left out on a hot sidewalk, thick steel drooping and deformed. A bulldozer from the ship’s deck, tossed off by the blast, lies nearby with its thick blade twisted into an “S” by the heat.

On our first dive on the massive Japanese battleship Nagato, Lenihan, Nordby, Murphy, Livingston and I realize that we’re the first to visit her since the 1940s. We swim around the stern, past the huge bronze propellers that are surrounded by a swarm of sharks. Dan Lenihan and I drop down to the seabed and slip under the overhang of the stern to make our way in the gloom towards the barrels of the aft gun turret. As we hover in front of the gun muzzles, we both think of our dives at Pearl Harbor. Japanese ordnance experts modified some of the 16-inch shells from Nagato’s magazines into the aerial bombs dropped at Pearl. One of the bombs punched through Arizona’s decks and set off the magazine explosions that destroyed her. I can’t help think that this is a full circle for us, particularly Dan, who has worked very hard to document Arizona and bring more of her story to the public.

That full circle feeling comes back on a later dive that we start aft from Nagato’s bow. As I slip out from under the deck, my eyes catch something ahead in the gloom. Dan and Murphy also see it, and we all swim forward at a fast clip. The entire superstructure of the ship, instead of being crushed like that of Arkansas, is laid out on the white sand. It’s the bridge; it’s the bridge of Nagato, where Admiral Yamamoto heard the radio message that the attack on Pearl Harbor was successful: “Torn, tora, torn!” It’s incredible. Sometimes, science be damned, you just get excited by what you find.

My last dive at Bikini Atoll takes place a decade after the National Park Service survey. With John Brooks, a former NPS colleague, and Len Blix, the assistant dive master at Bikini, I drop down to look at the destroyer Anderson. (Since our 1989–90 survey, Bikini has been opened to the world as a unique dive park for those with the skill and the cash to journey to what has been called the “Mount Everest of wreck diving.”) Anderson is a famous ship that fought in many battles, screening aircraft carriers in some of the greatest sea fights of the Pacific War, including the Coral Sea and Midway. She shelled Japanese shore installations at Tarawa and survived the war only to die beneath the dragon’s breath of the atomic bomb.

Anderson lies on her side in the dark blue gloom. We approach the stern, passing over a rack of depth charges that have tumbled free and lie scattered on the sand. The decks seem undamaged, except for a torpedo-launching rack that has fallen off. The bridge lies open, its hatches blasted off. When I look down into the bridge, the dark interior swarms with hundreds of small fish that have sought shelter inside this sunken warship. Moving forward, I see a subtle reminder of the power of the atom. One of the destroyer’s 5-inch guns has been twisted by the heat of the blast so that it points straight back to the bridge.

As I sail away from Bikini for the last time, I pause to reflect on all that I’ve seen there over the years. The crushed hulls, toppled masts and abandoned test instruments are material records that preserve the shocking reality of Operation Crossroads in a way that can never fully be matched by written accounts, photographs or even films of the tests. This ghost fleet is a powerful and evocative museum in the deep. It is a very relevant museum, too. Operation Crossroads and the nuclear age that followed have had and continue to have a direct effect on the lives of every living being on the planet. The empty bunkers and the abandoned homes of the Bikinians remind us of David Bradley’s 1948 comment that the islanders might not be the last “to be left homeless and impoverished by the inexorable Bomb. They have no choice in the matter, and very little understanding of it. But in this perhaps they are not so different from us all.” As I leave Bikini, I hope that it is a record of the past and not the harbinger of a terrible future.

CHAPTER FOUR A CURSED SHIP

MUTINY ON THE USS SOMERS: NOVEMBER 26, 1842

On November 26, 1842, Captain Alexander Slidell Mackenzie of Somers adjusted his uniform and stepped forward to the young midshipman. “I learn, Mr. Spencer,” he quietly said, “that you aspire to the command of the Somers.”

Philip Spencer smiled slightly. “Oh, no, sir.”

“Did you not tell Mr. Wales, sir, that you had a project to kill the commander, the officers, and a considerable portion of the crew of this vessel, and convert her into a pirate?” Mackenzie pressed.

“I may have told him so, sir, but it was in joke.”

Mackenzie glared at the boy. “You admit then that you told him so?”

Spencer’s smile vanished. “Yes, sir, but in joke.”

“This, sir, is joking on a forbidden subject,” Mackenzie said. “This joke may cost you your life.” Now furious, he leaned forward. “You must have been aware that you could have only compassed your designs by passing over my dead body, and after that, the bodies of all the officers; you had given yourself, sir, a great deal to do; it will be necessary for me to confine you, sir.” Mackenzie turned quickly to First Lieutenant Guert Gansevoort. “Arrest Mr. Spencer, and put him in double irons.”

Soon, Spencer was sitting on the open deck next to the ship’s wheel, hands and feet manacled. Mackenzie and his officers searched the ship, looking for incriminating evidence and for co-conspirators. They found both, or so they believed. The first was a note, written in Greek, with the names of those said to be “certain” or “doubtful,” and those to be kept, “willing or unwilling.” The night before, Spencer had approached Purser’s Steward Josiah Wales to confide his plan, joke or not, and had alluded to a plan on paper hidden in his neckerchief. Wales, fearful and sleepless, had reported his conversation with Spencer and told about the paper. A search of Spencer failed to find it, but a hunt of his berth turned up the incriminating document. As for co-conspirators, several of the crew had acted sullenly or had expressed contempt for the captain — led by Spencer, who had from the start of the voyage called the captain a “damned old granny” behind his back.

Then, the next evening, there was an accident with the rigging and a rush aft by the crew to fix. The crew’s dash to the quarterdeck, stopped by Lieutenant Gansevoort, who cocked his pistol and aimed it at the advancing men, was taken by Mackenzie as evidence that Spencer’s fellow plotters were trying to free him. The following morning, Mackenzie arrested two more men: Boatswain’s Mate Samuel Cromwell and seaman Elisha Small. On November 29, four more men joined them in chains. Mackenzie, on a small, 100-foot vessel with a 120-member crew — an extremely crowded ship — faced a real problem. He had no safe place to keep his prisoners, and he was not sure that there were not more mutineers in the ranks. He asked his officers for their opinion. They interrogated members of the crew and offered their advice on November 30: execute Spencer, Cromwell and Small as punishment, and quickly, to re-establish control of the ship.

The following day, in the afternoon, Mackenzie mustered the crew on deck. Most of them were young boys, teenagers, on a training cruise as part of an experimental program to create seagoing schools instead of the rough-and-tumble, often sordid, world of the between decks of a man-of-war. Now these boys were getting a strong lesson on the Articles of War, the rules that regulated naval life, and on the consequences of defying the absolute authority of a captain and his officers. Spencer, Cromwell and Small, with hoods over their heads and nooses around their necks, stood on the deck. Mackenzie asked Spencer if he wanted, as an officer, to give the order to fire the cannon that would signal the crew to haul on the lines and hang them. Spencer had accepted, but now, at the end, found that he could not.