But back to the search.

The days began to run together as we scanned the shallows off Nauru, Olasana, and Kennedy islands. Other than the single target off Nauru, which the weather was preventing us from diving, we were finding nothing. Not only that, Dirk and I had yet to dive.

It might be time to address a statement I always hear: “I’d love to go with you.”

No, you wouldn’t — at least ninety-nine percent of you. The idea most people have of a search is a series of fine days of sport diving interspersed with finding a wreck and reaping untold glory. The reality is hour after hour of being tossed about in small boats, listening to the increasing squawk of a balky electronic instrument, combined with lack of sleep and having to wash your underwear in a motel-room sink. Then you rise in the morning and do it all again. I would guess diving is less than five percent of the equation.

This reminds me of a story a friend named Jedd Ladd told me in Colorado. Jedd had been at Woodstock, and I asked him about the experience. “Don’t believe all the hype about fun and free love,” he said. “It was a muddy mess, with no food and lots of rain. I lived in a tent that leaked, and the toilets were a hole in the dirt.”

“Wow,” I said.

“The music was great, though,” he said.

The same thing applies here. The work is monotonous, but you have a chance to make history. We always say in NUMA that if it were easy, someone would have already done it. Persistence is the key, repetition the norm. Dirk and I dug in — day after day we scanned the waters in a direction from Ferguson Passage north. We weren’t finding anything that resembled a wreck.

About ten days into the search, we were talking to Danny about PT-109, and we mentioned Biuku and Eroni, the natives who rescued Kennedy.

“You want to talk to Biuku?” Danny asked.

“What?” said Dirk.

“Biuku is still alive,” Danny said. “He’s a friend of mine. He lives down near Vonavona.”

“Let’s go,” Dirk said.

“Living history,” I said. “Call him up and see if we can visit.”

“He doesn’t have a telephone,” Danny said, “but if we take one of the boats down there tomorrow, we can probably find him. He’s getting old, and he doesn’t stray far.”

The next morning, Dirk, Danny, Smiling John the boat driver, and I climbed into a boat, crossed Blackett Strait, then proceeded on through the channel toward Vonavona. The journey was a trip through paradise. Clear water and tree-lined passages, like passing down a lazy river, would give way to outcroppings of white sands and colorful reefs just below the surface. The trip to Biuku’s home took about an hour. We slid up to a pier made from coral rocks and shells and climbed from the boat. Walking through the trees, we came upon a few wooden homes set up from the ground on pilings. A garden was to one side, and chickens roamed freely, squawking at our imposition.

A woman clutching a baby in her arms sat on the porch of a home, puffing on a corncob pipe.

“One of Biuku’s daughters,” Danny said, as he plopped down the large bag of rice and the betel nut we had brought as gifts.

In pidgin, he inquired as to Biuku’s whereabouts and learned he was down at Munda. One of his children was sick, and that was the nearest hospital. We set off for Munda, another forty-five minutes by boat, and splashed ashore. The night before, I had talked with Dirk about what we could give as a gift. This was the man who had rescued one of our presidents, and for the most part the act had gone unnoticed. I had a pair of binoculars — pretty good Tascos — and we figured he’d like those. Danny went inside and found Biuku and brought him outside.

Biuku is small, a shade over five feet tall and slightly stooped from his seventy-eight years. Danny explained in pidgin what we were doing, then helped seat Biuku next to me on a log under the shade of a large tree. Unrolling a chart of the area, we questioned him, using Danny as a translator. The primary question we needed answered was if by chance the wreck he and Eroni had climbed aboard off Nauru might have been PT-109. It was six decades ago, but by his descriptions we began to realize that the wreck was probably Japanese. After inquiring about any other wreckage he might have seen around the same time, and learning of none, we thanked him.

I took the binoculars out of the case.

“Danny,” I said, “can you tell him this? We wanted to thank you for your brave actions in saving the man who became president of our country and ask that you accept this as a gift from the American people.”

Danny translated, and I could see Biuku smile. I handed him the binoculars, and he placed them around his neck and glanced around the hospital grounds.

“Ah,” he said, “spyglasses.”

Then we got ready to leave and began to say our good-byes. We started to walk away, then Biuku called to Danny.

“I have a special room in my mind for you, Danny,” Biuku said in English.

Obviously, the gifts had gone over well.

The expedition was winding to a close, and we were both beginning to feel that the wreck was in deeper water. Our searching had failed to locate anything in the shallows. Our hopes for the wreck off Nauru were dashed by Biuku’s revelations that it was a Japanese barge, as well as the fact that on the last day the weather cleared and we could dive the target we had located. It was a strange coral-encrusted protrusion about the size of a large engine block. We tried to clear a small spot to see what was inside, but to little avail. The area could use a better analysis in the future to determine what it actually is, but our best guess is an old anchor or something that was encrusted over time. When we return, we’ll check it further.

We began to analyze what we had accomplished. We’d done what we’d set out to do — find where the wreck was not — and in the process we had managed to cover all the shallow water in the high-probability areas. All the waters surrounding Nauru, Olasana, and Plum Pudding Islands, as well as a large block to the north, had been scanned to a depth of around two hundred feet. PT-109 was not there. There were some areas inside the reef that we had missed, but they were low-probability and outside the parameters of reason. PT-109 was in deeper water, and that was good — it meant it has a better chance of being preserved.

It was time to take our leave and head home. We climbed aboard the turboprop, thoroughly exhausted and welcoming civilization. After a couple of nights in Surfer’s Paradise to decompress, we jumped on a flight for the United States via New Zealand.

A few days after I got back to Fort Lauderdale, I spoke to Clive on the telephone.

“Well,” he said, “what do you think?”

I’d been saving a line to use for years — it comes from the movie Jaws.

“I think we’re going to need a bigger boat,” I said.

“So, you two know where it’s not?” Clive asked.

“Yep,” I said, “and we have a pretty good idea where it is.”

So stay tuned — NUMA will be back.

Though we don’t often find what we search for, it is satisfying to bring closure to a piece of history that has been surrounded in mystery. One such project was the hunt for Samuel Morey’s boat, Aunt Sally.

Legends persisted for almost two centuries of a boat sunk in the waters of Lake Morey in Fairlee, Vermont, about a mile west of the Connecticut River. With the passage of time, colorful variations on the story have obscured the facts.

What we do know is that Samuel Morey was a true genius whose name and accomplishments are known to very few today. Born in 1763, he became a prolific inventor, whose experiments with light, heat, and steam were half a century ahead of his time. Though it is well recorded that James Watt invented the steam engine, Morey is considered the first to put a steam engine in a boat.