$3,678.40.

Now, how can you beat that?

The story of Manassas, however, does not end here.

I turned over my records to the chief archaeologist for the Army Corps of Engineers, who contracted with Texas A&M University to do a magnetometer study of the site. I returned the following year with my wife, Barbara, and pinpointed the spot where Walt and I had found a huge magnetic anomaly. The investigation was led by Ervan Garrison and James Baker of the university.

The survey was conducted with a magnetometer, sidescan sonar, and subbottom profiler. The project determined that, indeed, a very strong anomaly existed over a large shoal that had formed over the site. The magnetometer readings of 8,000-plus gammas and the hard subbottom reflections indicated that an object the same size as Manassas was buried beneath the shoal where contemporary reports put the ironclad. They also found a large mass of steel dredge pipe directly opposite the site and eighteen feet deep in the river. I was surprised at this, since Walt and I recorded no ferrous activity away from the bank.

Everything was fine and dandy, until Garrison and Baker turned over their report to the Corps’s chief archaeologist. He blew a fuse, then caused an uproar, when he claimed the report was totally inconclusive and proved nothing. His refusal to accept the report was almost vehement in its condemnation.

The good people at A&M were dumbfounded. These were the nation’s leading experts in remote sensing. I read over the report and found it one of the most concise and detailed I’ve ever read. I was as mystified as Garrison and Baker.

The Corps archaeologist then called in a local marine archaeologist to do another survey of the site. After investigating, he went on television to bemoan the agony of defeat by proclaiming that the magnetic anomaly was not Manassas but a pile of old pipe dumped there in the 1920s.

This made absolutely no sense to anyone. Our target was practically under the levee, not eighteen feet deep and thirty-six feet out into the river. That was the pipe, but where had it come from? The Army Corps’s rejection of A&M’s mag study struck me as strange. The mystery wasn’t solved until much later.

Fifteen years passed before I returned to the Manassas site. Ralph Wilbanks, Wes Hall, Craig Dirgo, Dirk Cussler, and I had just finished an expedition to find the Republic of Texas Navy ship Invincible, without much luck. Working off Ralph’s boat, Diversity, we dredged a site off Galveston and identified it as a shipwreck, but nothing more specific, since we couldn’t find any artifacts. From Texas, we towed Ralph’s boat to the Mississippi River Delta.

My thought was that since mag technology had improved and Ralph and Wes were far more professional than Walt and I, it was time to go back and check out the Manassas site again.

We lowered Diversity down a boat ramp in Venice and leisurely studied the west bank of the Mississippi with Ralph’s state-of-the-art magnetometer. While Ralph steered, Wes ran the mag. Just as it had fifteen years earlier, the recorder’s needle showed a steady line that meant the cupboard was bare of wrecks.

I watched the shoreline carefully, keeping a keen eye on the landmarks across the river and the top of a big oak tree that was not far from the site. I also noticed that many huge rocks had been laid against the shore by the Army Corps of Engineers.

Before I could alert the team that we were entering the target zone, Wes let out a gasp as the magnetometer went into hysterics.

“What’s your reading?” Ralph asked, turning.

“Eleven thousand gammas,” Wes muttered. He’d rarely ever seen a reading that huge.

“We’ve passed between the pipe and Manassas,” I explained. Ralph finished the run almost to Fort Jackson before turning around and making another survey along the bank. This time, by hugging the base of the levee, we got a lower reading, since the sensor was farther from the submerged pipe.

“There’s something big running on an angle under the levee,” Wes announced, examining his mag records.

We couldn’t get ashore, because the river was running too high and the shoal between the bank and the levee was underwater. Returning to Venice, we pulled Diversity out of the water and hauled it to the Manassas site. There we walked the mag up and down the levee. The signals were still there, but not as strong.

After dinner, a few of us were sitting in the bar of the boat marina in Venice when an older fellow came up and offered to buy us a drink. He was of medium height, with a tanned face and a finely brushed mane of white hair. He said he had retired a few years before from the Army Corps of Engineers and lived just outside Venice.

“You them fellas looking for that old Confederate ironclad?” he inquired.

“We’re the ones,” I answered.

“I remember some other fellas was looking for her a long time back.”

“That was me, about fifteen years back.”

“You sure got scammed by the Corps report, didn’t you?”

I looked at him. “Scammed?”

“Sure, after you found the Manassas, word came down from the chief archaeologist and his boss to drop a load of old dredge pipe on top of it. Boy, was he shook up when that Texas bunch ignored the pipe and concentrated on the wreck under the levee.”

“The pipe was dumped there after we found the wreck?” I asked, baffled.

“That’s the way it went.”

“But why?”

“The Corps had planned a big project to reinforce the west levee. If the state archaeology commission had got wind of an old shipwreck under it, they’d have named it a historic site and stopped the Corps from throwing rock on top of it. That’s why the Texas survey was tossed out and another survey contracted that said there was no shipwreck, only a bunch of dredge pipe.”

I felt like a man who’d come awake after a hernia operation. I never did understand why a first-class remote-sensing survey was rejected out of hand. I thought it ridiculous then. Now I can see why.

The old guy and I talked long into the night. I shouldn’t say “old guy.” We must have been about the same age. I can’t recall a more satisfying evening.

There are currently plans afoot by John Hunley and a group of interested Louisiana citizens to dig an exploratory hole on the site and see if the Manassas is truly there. If so, its removal and restoration would stand alongside that of the Confederate submarine Hunley. Not only is she the first armored ship built in America, but she is the first one actually to see combat. The battle between Monitor and Merrimack did not take place for another five months.

Over the years, the chief archaeologist and I had exchanged Christmas cards. On the back of the last card I sent, I wrote, “You dog.” Then I proceeded briefly to relate the story I’d heard from the retired Corps worker.

I never heard from him again.

On the heights of Port Hudson overlooking the Mississippi River, the Confederate batteries had managed to withstand the daylong bombardment by the Federal fleet, and now the night of March 14, 1863, was curiously quiet. Twenty miles above the state capital at Baton Rouge, Louisiana, the small riverboat landing was perched on a steep eighty-foot-high bluff at a point where the river made a sharp turn to the west. A narrow beach ran along the precipice, overgrown with willows and cottonwoods that provided cover for a two-gun battery.