We spent half a day dragging the gradiometer all around the seascape before we passed her tomb in the silt. Hers was a tale so gripping, it shocked the world. Unfortunately, the crew slept through most of it.

It was a hot, humid, miserable day without a breath of wind on the water, a day that made me wonder what the local temperature would be in the next life. Then a voice came over the boat’s radio and announced that the temperature was 96 degrees and the humidity pegged at 100 percent. I gazed up into a totally cloudless sky. Dumb westerner that I was, I couldn’t fathom how the humidity could be 100 percent when it wasn’t raining.

To pass time during the search, I asked Ralph, “Did you know Shakespeare wrote Hamlet and Macbeth?”

Ralph looked thoughtful for a moment, then replied, “Oh really, did they ever answer his letters?”

This business requires patience sometimes — a whole lot of patience.

Finding Patapsco came as a surprise. Unlike the other vessels that rest under a thick blanket of silt, she rests upright and exposed on the bottom of the channel off Fort Moultrie. We gambled that part of her might be protruding from the bottom and engaged the sidescan sonar. The search took less than twenty minutes, and we found her on the first pass.

Harold anchored the boat. No one wanted to remain on board when we had an honest-to-gosh wreck to investigate — especially one standing up proud out of the mud. The whole crew went over and swam down forty feet to the hulk. There were artifacts galore, from ship’s hardware to cannonballs. None was retrieved. We had to maintain our squeaky-clean NUMA image of searching for history and leaving salvage to others. Besides, the U.S. Navy considers Patapsco a tomb, since the bones of sixty-two of her crew remain inside. Still, she is a historical treasure that should be studied in the future.

Though she was extensively salvaged by Mallifert’s divers, he made no mention in his diaries of finding any remains of the crew.

We went on that summer to find several blockade runners that had been run ashore and destroyed. We also looked for the Confederate ironclads Chicora, Palmetto State, and Charleston, destroyed when Sherman marched into Charleston, but found no sign of wreckage. Benjamin Mallifert also salvaged these wrecks, and whatever was left when he finished was dredged out of existence by the Army Corps of Engineers when they deepened the ship’s channel to the navy base up the Cooper River. Some people just don’t have a love for history.

I am reminded of personal loss in my past. I hate to belittle my poor old mother, but I find it hard to forgive her for throwing my comic book collection in the trash after I enlisted in the air force. Many years later, I found a list of my comics in my old Boy Scout manual. I asked an expert to appraise the first Superman, Batman, Torch, and a hundred others I’d owned. The results hurt badly. According to the appraisal, if I still owned them today, they would be worth three million dollars to collectors.

My mother also sneaked stamps out of my collection and mailed letters with them. I wish I could have seen the face of the postal worker when she handed over a letter with a two hundred-year-old stamp worth $500. I suppose most men have the same stories about their mothers.

In February 2001, I asked Ralph to go back and correct the positions of the wrecks we had located with the Motorola Mini Ranger system using the newer differential global positioning system. He also completed a magnetic contour map of the wreck sites. All neat and tidy.

Keokuk was relocated and now found to have 6 feet of silt covering her. The water depth was only 16 feet, and her contour indicated a mass at least 130 feet long, so much of her lower hull had to be intact.

Weehawken was also pinpointed and found to be resting northwest to southeast in twenty-two feet of water under twelve feet of silt. Ralph also located a magnetic target about a hundred feet from the suspected bow. This could well be Weehawken’s anchor and chain, since the mag contour runs in a straight line.

Ralph’s report brought down the curtain on the Siege of Charleston shipwreck hunt. My fondest wish is that once the Hunley is finally conserved and mounted for public viewing, the museum building will be large enough to accept and display hundreds, perhaps thousands, of artifacts from Charleston’s glorious maritime history that wait in the silt to be retrieved and preserved.

“Damn them,” Henry Graves said, “Damn them straight to hell.”

“What is it, Hank?” Sol Thomas asked.

Graves wiped the sweat from his brow and motioned with his head for Thomas and the others in their party to follow. The afternoon was sweltering, the land covered with a blanket of wet, oppressive heat. August in Houston is never temperate, and this, the fifteenth day of August 1865, was no exception. Climbing off the Galveston, Houston & Harrisburg Railroad platform, Graves led his party around the back of the wood-framed whitewashed building until they were out of earshot of any Union sympathizers.

“You see that pile of cannon?” Graves whispered.

“Sure,” Jack Taylor noted, “damn Yankees are probably shipping them north to the smelter.”

“Well,” Graves said, “two of them are the Twin Sisters.”

“You sure?” Ira Pruitt asked. “You sure those are Sam Houston’s San Jacinto guns?”

“Positive,” Graves said. “I read the plaques mounted on the carriages.”

Sick with measles, John Barnett crouched in the dirt before he fell over. “Lord,” he said.

The men were standing in a semicircle on the packed dirt. Off to the side was Dan, Henry Graves’s friend and servant. It was four months after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, and other than a few skirmishes in Texas, the long War Between the States was finally over. The five soldiers were dressed in the Confederate butternut-colored wool uniforms used in the last years of the war. The uniforms were tattered, dirty, and soaked with sweat. The men didn’t look much better.

Thomas had a swollen jaw, the result of a rotting rear molar he had been unable to have extracted. Pruitt looked like a walking skeleton. The scant rations available to a common soldier on the losing side of the war had caused him to shed nearly fifteen pounds. His uniform hung on his frame like coveralls on a scarecrow. Taylor was limping. The soles of his boots had worn through in several places, and he had stepped on the bent end of a rusty nail while aboard the railroad cattle car.

And then there was Barnett, a proud citizen of Gonzales, Texas. Barnett had emerged from the war relatively unscathed, only to be infected with measles upon mustering out. His face was splotchy and covered with tiny spots. The skin that was unaffected was a pale white. Bamett had a temperature of 101 degrees — not much higher than the temperature outdoors. Only Graves looked reasonably healthy.

Graves stared to the west at the sun, a glowing red orb clouded in haze hanging low near the horizon.

“Be dark in a few hours,” he noted, “and the train north doesn’t leave tomorrow until midmorning.”

Thomas reached into his pocket and removed a tattered piece of paper. “My commanding officer said there was a hotel here that was supportive of Confederate soldiers.” He handed the paper to Graves, the de facto leader of the defeated soldiers.

“Harris House,” Graves read. “Let’s make our way there and talk this over.”