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 Fox at 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, Fox is 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:
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
A CIVIL WAR SUBMARINE
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 I and raised her for exhibition.
But while this looks a little like Holland I and 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.
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 and gives 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 Explorer is a perfect match.
But how does Sub Marine Explorer fit 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, Hunley is 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 Hunley to reveal its secrets. So for the answers on Sub Marine Explorer, I turn to Hunley project 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 Explorer and its inventor, a forgotten American engineering genius named Julius H. Kroehl.