At two o’clock in the afternoon, I pulled open a drawer labeled Survey of the Pamunkey River, 1931. One by one, I went through a stack of old photographs, survey drawings, and sheets of statistics. Then, out of the blue, I ran across a sheet of thick transparent paper 28 inches by 18 inches, with a scale of 3/4 of an inch equaling 50 feet, and pulled it from the drawer. At first glance, it appeared to be a drawing of the banks along a section of the James River. It clearly didn’t belong in the Pamunkey River drawer. How it got there, and for how long it had been there, was anybody’s guess.

I stood spellbound as I examined the artwork that was uniquely tinted from the back of the transparent paper. The wording at the top in front read, “Disposition of wrecks below Drewry’s Bluff, 1881.”

The illustrator signed his name Benjamin Mallifert.

I felt as though I’d stepped into the Twilight Zone. This had to be more than mere luck. It could only come under the heading of fate. Researchers spend half their lives stalking the mother lode. I found it after only four hours of looking in what should have been the wrong place.

Benjamin Mallifert. I couldn’t believe we had met up again, three hundred miles away in Virginia and ten years after his salvage efforts in Charleston. There before my eyes was his illustration that interpreted detailed locations of the ships of the James River fleet scuttled by Admiral Semmes.

A comparative analysis showed why we had missed the wreckage of the ironclads. The warships had been moored along shore when they were destroyed. As the years passed, they had built up a huge shoal of sedimentation that covered them over and moved the main channel of the river below Drewry’s Bluff 150 feet toward the opposite bank on the south.

The team from Underwater Archaeological Joint Ventures that I hired probed the mud and discovered that Mallifert had called the right plays. Some wrecks were in bits and pieces. Most were pretty well scattered. But they were all there: the steamer Northampton; steamer Curtis Peck; pilot boat Marcus, steamer Jamestown; steamer Beaufort; ironclad Fredericksburg; and ironclad Virginia II. The third ironclad, Richmond, we found around the bend off Chaffin’s Bluff. It appeared that only five feet of sediment had covered the ironclads over the past 120 years.

I owe a considerable debt to old Ben for Charleston and the James River. A fascinating man. I wish I could have known him. A great pity no one has written a biography on his life and the colorful salvage projects he directed.

Back to Charleston: Keokuk was the first warship on my list to be found and surveyed. A chart drawn by a Union navy officer by the name of Boutelle showed her almost in a direct line east of the old Morris Island lighthouse, which had once stood on land. Morris Island had eroded since the Civil War, and now the lighthouse rose out of the water nearly five hundred yards from the beach.

Cussler’s Law: Riverbanks and coastal shorelines are very restless and are in a constant state of motion. They are never where they were when the target you’re looking for came to rest.

I chartered a reliable thirty-two-foot wooden boat owned by a big German, Harold Stauber, a quiet man, dependable as a rock and completely unshakable. He knew the waters off Charleston, having fished them for many years. His boat was called Sweet Sue, after his wife. One cup of his coffee and you’d never have worms again.

Ralph Wilbanks came on board. Those were the days when he worked for the South Carolina Institute of Archaeology. He was sent by the director of the institute, Alan Albright, to monitor our operation, along with a terrific guy named Rodney Warren who acted as Ralph’s assistant. Ralph and Alan didn’t quite know what to make of us. Shipwreck hunters who were interested purely in history and not treasure did not just drop out of the trees. In short, they didn’t trust us. Oh, ye of little faith.

As we neared Morris Island and the lighthouse, I became cocky. I turned to Ralph and pointed to the lighthouse. “Bet you ten bucks I can find Keokuk on the first lap, and ten bucks a lap until we find her.” I was that sure of myself.

Ralph gave me his best this guy must be a jerk stare and nodded. “You’re on.”

I told Harold to aim the bow for the lighthouse and run a straight course until he was about a half-mile from shore before making a 180-degree turn for another try. Then I sat back and waited for the Schonstedt gradiometer to sing as it detected Keokuk’s iron hull.

We reached the end of the lane. The needle on the instrument dial hadn’t so much as twitched, and the sound recorder had remained as silent as a tomb. Woe is me.

As we worked north, the next ten search lanes refused to cooperate, and I began to feel like a fox that had found a coyote with indigestion sitting alone in an empty henhouse. I was out a hundred bucks, and my blood pressure had risen twenty points. Where was that dirty Keokuk?

I looked at Ralph. Now he was blatantly smirking. “I’m going out tonight, and I’m going to have a blast.”

“I’ll bet you are,” I muttered under my breath. I put my arm on Harold’s shoulder as he stood at the helm. “Run south of our first lane, and don’t turn until I give word.”

“Will do,” Harold acknowledged, blissfully unaware of the silent skirmish between Wilbanks and Cussler.

As we closed the distance to the lighthouse, Stauber kept one eye on the fathometer as we went beyond our normal turn mark. The depth began to rise beneath the keel from thirty feet to twenty, then ten. Another few minutes and the keel would scrape the sand. The lighthouse looked close enough to hit with a tossed rock. Yet, judging the distance by eye, it seemed to me that the beach was still too far from where I estimated Keokuk’s site to be.

One hundred yards, two hundred. Everyone on board wondered when I was going to give the order to turn. The tension began to build.

“Now?” asked Harold, apprehensively. I didn’t doubt that he would throw me overboard before he ran his boat aground in the surf.

The waves could be heard curling onto the sandy beach of Morris Island back of the lighthouse. “Give it another fifty yards,” I said, standing like Captain Kirk holding his fire on the Klingons.

After a few minutes, Harold was sure that gray matter was leaking out of my ears, yet he stood firm.

“Okay, now!” I burst out, looking up at the looming lighthouse.

He swung the wheel to port. At almost the same instant, the gradiometer sound recorder squawked loudly. He had struck Keokuk in the turn.

Only then did a happy Ralph do his Charleston jig on the stem deck.

Divers Wilson West, Bob Browning, Tim Firme, and Rodney went over the side and probed the bottom. They found the wreck buried four to six feet deep in the silt. She lies north to south, almost under the shadow of the lighthouse. Without dredging, there is no way to tell how much of her hulk is still intact.

Good old Ralph. He wouldn’t take my money and settled for a bottle of Bombay gin instead.

It’s times like this that I take an almost sensual pleasure from shipwreck hunting.

Weehawken is buried deep, more than ten feet, a mile or so north of Keokuk Her bow points on an angle toward Morris Island, not far from where Fort Wagner once stood. The remains of the fort, famous for the attack against it by black soldiers from a Massachusetts fighting regiment, depicted in the movie Glory, now lie a hundred feet out into the water. This vast erosion came after the long rock jetties were laid along the channel into Charleston Harbor shortly before the twentieth century.

Because of Weehawken’s fame as the only ironclad to capture another ironclad in battle, I hope that someday archaeologists will excavate her as a historic treasure.