Adventures of a Sea Hunter_ In Search of Famous Shipwrecks - James P. Delgado [92]
James Delgado in the hatch of Sub Marine Explorer in Panama. Photo by Ann Goodhart
Wading out into the ocean, I splash in water up to my chest to reach the wreck. As the sea washes over and around the hull, I can see that it is firmly bedded down in the sand and that the sea has opened a hole in the iron plates that form the hull. Crawling inside, and ignoring the pain as the sharp metal bites deeply into a shin, I ponder the spider-web lattice of thick iron bars that brace the chamber. I’ve never seen anything like it. The hull form looks to be from around the year 1900, but these iron bars look like they’ve been forged with a heavy hammer, like something out of the 1850s. After crawling out and nicking myself again, I scramble up the slippery top of the submarine to reach the conning tower. It is small, barely big enough for me to fit, and as I look in, I hear the booming of the surf and feel a rush of cool salty air hit my face. There’s more than one hole in this hull.
Balancing myself on my hands, I drop into the hatch. My feet catch on a lip—the seat for another, inner hatch, perhaps. But it is missing, and so, camera in one hand, I carefully line myself up and drop into what I hope will be chest-high water. It turns out to be only waist deep. My feet hit sand, and I’m suddenly in darkness as my eyes adjust. I grab my camera and hit the flash, and see that I’m in an iron cavern that’s dripping with water and rust. I hit the flash again and look into the water. I wish I hadn’t. This submarine, half filled with sand, looks like a perfect haven for the region’s well known venomous sea snakes. At this moment, I know exactly how Indiana Jones felt in the Well of Souls. “Snakes. Why did it have to be snakes?” I jump up, catch the lip of the hatch and pull myself out of the hull just as my imagination pictures a tiny pair of fanged jaws reaching for my ankle. As I jump off the sub and wade to shore, I speculate about just what it is I’ve found on this deserted beach. Whose ancient submarine is it, and how did it end up here?
The truth is often stranger than fiction. A return trip to the beach in November 2002, this time armed with a tape measure and a pad for making notes, gives me more than a basic understanding of the submarine. I e-mail photographs of it around the world to colleagues who study old submarines. No one can figure it out, though one researcher, Gene Canfield, says it looks similar to Intelligent Whale, a submarine built for the Union Navy during the Civil War but never finished. Could it be that old? I wonder as I continue to send out my queries. Then, in mid-2003, I get an answer from Rich Wills, who thinks it looks more like another long-forgotten Civil War submarine, the Sub Marine Explorer. No one knows what happened to that sub, Rich explains. After the war, it ended up in Panama, working for the Pacific Pearl Company, harvesting pearls from deep-water oyster beds.
I sit up and take notice. After all, the wreck lies in the Bay of Panama, in an island group known as the Pearl Archipelago. But is it really a Civil War submarine that vanished from the pages of history after 1869? Could a submarine survive, half submerged on a tropical beach, for more than 130 years? Rich sends me a copy of a 1902 article on pioneer submarines of the nineteenth century. It reproduces a profile plan of Sub Marine Explorer and gives its basic dimensions. As I look at it, I smile. The profile matches perfectly, down to the placement and size of the conning tower. The rounded chamber at the top of the submarine with the forged iron braces would be filled with air for buoyancy. And, as I compare the measurements with my notes, it all fits. The 36-foot Sub Marine Explorer is a perfect match.
But how does Sub Marine Explorer fit into the history of submarine development? Built in 1865, what role did it play, if any, in the Civil War? And how does it