The authors are extremely grateful to the kind and gracious people who helped to make this book possible. Their efforts and considerations are deeply appreciated. Ralph Wilbanks of Diversified Wilbanks, John Davis of ECO-NOVA Productions, Bill Nungesser, Wes Hall, Connie Young, Robert Fleming, Richard DeRosset, Emlyn Brown, Gary Goodyear, Graham Jessop, Elsworth Boyd, Carole Bartholmeaux, Colleen Nelson, Susan MacDonald, Lisa Bower, John Hunley, and Wayne Gronquist.

Clive Cussler, Chairman

Craig Dirgo

Colonel Walt Schob

Douglas Wheeler

Admiral William Thompson

Michael Hogan

Eric Schonstedt*

Commander Donald Walsh

Dana Larson

Barbara Knight

Dirk Cussler, President

Robert Esbenson*

Ralph Wilbanks

William Shea

Dr. Harold Edgerton*

Clyde Smith

Peter Throckmorton*

Tony Bell*

Kenhelm Stott, Jr.*

^*Deceased

We all have a fascination with the sea and the mysteries that lie in the deep. It is still one of the great unknowns. Adventurers climb the highest mountains in order to reach the summits and feast on the horizons fifty miles away. A diver does not share that pleasure. Unless he is diving in the clear water of the tropics, his visibility is seldom more than twenty feet. He can only wonder what lies in the murk beyond.

Men and women have hiked over most of the world’s landmass, and what little we have not encountered has been photographed from satellites. Giant observatories and the Hubble telescope have shown us the wonders of deep space. But the human eye and the camera lens have recorded less than 1 percent of the wonders that lie hidden below the surface of the seas.

The deep liquid void is still a great enigma.

Thanks to mushrooming scientific interest, however, deepwater technology has awakened. Probes have studied everything from bottom storms and the migration of sea life to currents, geology, underwater acoustics, and the increasing bugaboo of pollution. Because of new, sophisticated equipment that can probe thousands of feet down, great shipwrecks of history have been discovered in the silent darkness, after lying centuries in unmarked watery graves.

Men like Bob Ballard and companies like Nauticos have reached and photographed several of these lost wrecks, but many lie there yet, waiting. That’s what we do: We try to find them. The National Underwater & Marine Agency (NUMA) searches for lost ships of historic significance, in the hopes of finding and surveying them before they have deteriorated and are gone forever. Since we are a shoestring operation funded mostly by my book royalties, our expeditions concentrate solely on wrecks in shallow water.

NUMA was formed in 1978 after our first venture — the unsuccessful hunt for John Paul Jones’s Bonhomme Richard— and while we were preparing for our second crack at the same ship. Wayne Gronquist, a prominent Austin attorney, suggested that it would be more advantageous as a legal entity if we incorporated as a not-for-profit foundation. I agreed, and Wayne, who served twenty years as NUMA’s president, filed the documents. And, yes, it is the same name as the government agency in my Dirk Pitt adventure books. The trustees thought it would be sporting to name the foundation after my own fictional creation, so I could say, “Yes, Virginia, there really is a NUMA.”

When it comes to salvage, we leave that to others. No member of NUMA has ever kept an artifact. People who visit my home and office are always surprised to find only models and paintings of the ships we have discovered, never any relics. Any item brought up from a wreck is preserved and turned over to the state in whose waters it was found. For instance, the artifacts from the Confederate raider Florida and the Union frigate Cumberland—both NUMA finds — were preserved by the College of William and Mary before they were put on public display at the Norfolk Naval Museum in Virginia.

My desire is that our discoveries should be followed by federal, state, or local governments; by corporations, universities, or historical organizations with the funding either to raise the wrecks or retrieve the artifacts for exhibit in museums.

In the twenty-three years of its existence; NUMA’s search and survey teams have conducted more than a hundred and fifty expeditions and have discovered or surveyed sixty-five wreck sites. We’ve also searched for a lost locomotive, a pair of cannon, an airplane, and a zeppelin. The successes, I’m sad to say, have been outnumbered by the failures. When you tackle the hunt for a lost object on land or sea, you quickly learn that the odds against finding it are far steeper than your chances of winning at a Las Vegas roulette table.

To look for a shipwreck is at best a crapshoot, and to launch and fund a search, it helps to be the headmaster of the village idiot school or else the kind of stubborn lunatic who tries to walk through walls simply because they’re in the way. I probably fall in the latter group.

You have to live with failure — all too often, it seems. Let me describe just a few of our recent disappointments.

In 2000, we hunted for John Holland’s sixteen-foot, one-man submarine in New York’s East River. Along with his competitor Simon Lake, John Holland is considered to be the father of the modem submarine. Their designs established the underwater navies of Europe and America just around the turn of the century.

Holland’s tiny submarine was thought to be quite sophisticated for its time. Unfortunately, plans and reports on her construction are sparse. She was lost when she was stolen by the Fenian Brotherhood, an early parent organization of the Irish Republican Army, who funded Holland’s early experiments with submarines for the express purpose of putting the British navy out of business. For the Brotherhood, Holland designed and built the most advanced sub of the time, aptly titled the Fenian Ram. Though never created to ram a steel-hulled ship, the three-man, 19-ton boat was 31 feet in length, with a 6-foot beam, and was propelled by a 15-horsepower Brayton twin-cylinder gas engine.

Not content with merely developing an efficient undersea boat, Holland conceived and perfected the instrument that turned the submarine into one of the most devastating weapons of warfare. Taking advantage of a missile developed by John Ericsson, the famed creator of the Civil War Monitor, who graciously allowed the sub builder to use copies of his experimental models, Holland fitted the missiles to a weapon of his own design in a 6-foot-by-9-inch tube. This gun, as it was called, was fired pneumatically by high-pressure air. The brilliant concept has changed little over the past 120 years.