Finders Losers
by
Jack Slack
Copyright 2011 Jack Slack
Smashwords Edition
(Revised edition Dec. 2011)
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ISBN 978-0-9849589-2-4
Contents
11 Fringe Benefits on the Cuff
14 Subs, Cubs, and Watercycles
16 Pussy Cat, Pussy Cat, Where Have You Been?
Patcheye
On August 27, 1964, a Thursday, we dropped anchor in ten feet of water at the edge of our beautiful coral reef. The sun was dazzling and the day was gaudy even by Caribbean standards. Yellow and purple sea fans formed a background for bright green and red sponges amid a forest of massive golden staghorn. Gary, the youngest member on board and a promising but inexperienced diver, had come upon a wreck the previous day. After snorkeling over the reef for a few hours, he had returned to the boat.
“Jack, there’s an old anchor covered with coral about fifty feet off the stem. Looks like it came off one of the old wooden ships. Take a look.”
We were out on a diving charter and since Gary was just along for the ride and since my cash customers were ready to quit, I promised to poke around his find the next day. On the way back to the dock I explained that tropical seas are full of these wrecks, particularly in shallow areas, and that visions of treasures were usually destined to remain just that.
“It’s the first one you’ve seen underwater; you’ll see plenty.” I said in response to his beginner’s enthusiasm and its contagious effect on my own dormant treasure-hunting impulse.
We decided to indulge Gary by investigating his wreck more thoroughly. On our return visit, we found the old ship’s anchor almost as soon as we hit the water. Teredo worms had long since eaten away the wooden crosspiece, but otherwise the anchor had survived the centuries intact. What seemed to be a pile of debris attracted Gary’s attention and he started puttering about in it. Soon he motioning me to the surface.
“Take a look down there and tell me what you make of that stuff.”
Up close, the debris turned out to be a curiously formed, coral-encrusted lump that glittered dully. Mica? No, not here, and not like this. And this doesn’t look like a solid chunk. There are spaces between each of those tiny edges… like coins pressed together… Good God, that’s what they are! The edges of thousands of coins!
I must have surfaced fifteen feet out of the water, yelling or shrieking or babbling in some incoherent but entirely comprehensible manner. In those days, we could all communicate the subtlest feeling and thought without words, with little more than a glance or nod. Today, with everything—each piddling detail spelled out in contract after contract—were ucky if we talk to each other at all.
“Let’s put on tanks and go get it.”
“Tanks? It’s only ten feet down.”
“Breaking that stuff loose is going to take time, Gary.” I was trying to make a free diver out of him, and he had never seen me wear an aqualung and didn’t think I believed in them.
By this time, I was already in my scuba gear and swimming toward the coins. A snap of a pry bar beneath the conglomerate broke it loose and toppled it into the sand. Easier than I thought. But it must have weighed about two hundred pounds, and the best I could do was hobble along the bottom with it to the boat about twenty yards off. It must have taken half an hour to get it under the stern, but it never occurred to me to move Mohammed closer to the mountain. Dick and Gary were still on board, digging out equipment, looking with stunned eyes for weight belts and uttering strange sounds to each other. After a considerable struggle, the three of us managed to hoist our new and welcome burden—a mass of coins stuck together under a black calcium deposit mixed with silver sulphide—over the gunwale. And then, there it was lying on the deck, like some new god exposed to our silent, most reverent, most bewildered worship. Finally, some prayerlike noises:
“Good Lord, that’s a pile of money!”
“My God, a treasure! We’ve found a treasure!”
Followed by more silence. Then Dick started scrounging mysteriously about the boat until he came up with a galvanized inner lining of a fish box. Perforated, it was an ideal container for collecting the loose coins underwater, he said, and commenced gathering into it the few loose coins that had broken free and were scattered on deck.
“Let’s not waste time. Let’s get down there and fill this thing up.”
“Don’t you think these are safe enough here? Why carry them back down?” Gary looked and sounded as though he were humoring an imbecile.
Dick laughed. “Are you implying that I’m shook, Mr. Simmons?”
None of us felt very bright at that moment, or for that matter, for some time to come.
Over the next several hours, until just before dark, we brought up thousands of Spanish pieces of eight. Cruising slowly back to the dock, we had a long discussion about strategy. Having found a treasure, what were we going to do with it? Above all else we stressed secrecy. Unanimously, we agreed to tell no one, not even—in fact most particularly not—our women. Dick and I were married and living with our wives in a small cottage. On second thought, the treasure was sizable in bulk as well as, we hoped, in value, and it would be impossible to conceal it in such quarters. Generously, we agreed to bring the ladies in on it. Thus we reached and reversed our first decision. Before the treasure was even dry, it began to complicate our lives.
We wrapped our cargo in rags and burlap to disguise it from any prying eyes at the dock. In our state of mind all eyes were classified as prying. We had, of course, often returned from our trips heavily weighted with objects of various size and shape that had taken our fancy. Since we were known as divers, there was no reason to explain why, where, or what; no one cared anyway, at least for the present. If any questions were asked, we would simply admit that the debris on our deck was the fruit of a wreck we were working. In the Bahamas, though wrecks abound and sunken treasure burdens so many minds, wrecks are more closely synonymous with junk than with gold.
Still, we were relieved that it was dark when we surreptitiously loaded the first spoils into our 1957 Ford station wagon and drove home. There we encountered the usual disinterest as to what the “boys” had been up to all day, as well as the usual injunctions.
“Don’t bring any damn fish or lobster into the house because we just cleaned it,” and “Keep your smelly gear out on the porch.”
For once we felt justified in ignoring our dearly beloveds. Cautioning them that they were about to see something very old, very dirty, and very smelly, indeed, we dragged in the conglomerate, set it smack center on the kitchen table, unwrapped it, and stood back to enjoy the reactions.
“Get that thing off the table; it’s filthy.”
“Look closer.”
“Maybe when you clean it up, it’ll make an interesting table base, or something.”
Then, suddenly, exactly as it happened with us, almost reluctantly, grudgingly, came the recognition, the silence, the stuttering acknowledgment:
“Treasure!”
“Those are coins!”
“They found a treasure!”
“We’re rich! Rich!”
Hysteria followed by silence followed by glee and dancing and again sobering silence until, at last, woman’s nature regained its balance and once again asserted itself:
“Meanwhile, would you mind taking your millions off the table? Or would you rather eat on the floor?”
As the weeks passed, and we became more and more engrossed in cleaning the coins, the mess in the cottage grew ubiquitous and unmanageable. Then it became “your damned treasure,” or “those damned coins,” and “Can’t you clean them someplace else? I can’t take a step without tripping on one of those crummy things. See what you’re doing to the porch?”
On the day following our discovery, I flew to Miami to pick up the necessary salvage equipment. Our basic piece was to be an airlift, the wreck hunter’s underwater vacuum cleaner. The last time I had tried using one had been in a country-club lake to recover golf balls, an innovation of mine that was never quite perfected. For this job we needed compressors and other incidentals. Dick scurried around the island for a ten-foot piece of plastic pipe which would be the major component of the airlift, and by the following night—two days after our discovery—we had accumulated enough gear to start the salvage operation.
That same night I introduced a possibly touchy subject to Dick.
“You realize that Bissell put up seventy-five per cent of the money to get our dock business off the ground…”
“And you think we ought to bring him into the treasure deal.”
“Well, yes. But I want your agreement.”
“You’ve got it. But how about Gary?”
“We don’t need Gary. If you and I will share with Bissell, it needn’t affect Gary’s portion.”
“Strictly speaking, he was a passenger on our boat.”
“That’s hairsplitting.”
“O.K. Go call Biss.”
Bissell was running a business back in the States and he was a hard guy to reach. For once, however, he was near the phone.
It was a cryptic conversation, alive with words that couldn’t be spoken.
“We did better here in Freeport than you did on your Cay Lobos trip.”
This was in reference to a treasure-hunting expedition to Cay Lobos that failed to turn up anything.
“What do you mean?”
“We hit here what you missed there.”
“You’re kidding!”
“Nope. And we hit big. Come on down. You’re in.”
“Light or heavy?” (He meant silver or gold.)
“Light, but probably the biggest ever recorded.”
“I’ll be damned!”
Silence.
“Are you still there?”
“I’m on my way.”
A week later he arrived. A few hours each day were now set aside for salvaging our wreck. The airlift worked beautifully; the four-inch pipe sucked sand off the bottom with the speed of a tiny tornado, uncovering cluster after cluster of silver coins. It was a simple device: a plain PVC pipe, open at both ends, with air fed into the side near the bottom. The air rushing up the pipe created a vacuum behind it, pulling sand, stone, and sometimes a glove with it. We were happy with our four-inch pipe, and months later, watching the far greater accomplishments of an eight-inch pipe, we were to appreciate more exactly how happy we had been: We penetrated the bottom to a depth of three feet and found no coins below this mark. But in twenty hours of air-lifting, we covered only a circumference of some twenty feet, and there were coins everywhere; they showed no signs of thinning out. Estimated airlift productivity—three hundred coins per hour. Then came “Patcheye.”
Every sunken galleon deserves some protecting spirit to guard her against lusting treasure hunters. These spirits also serve the treasure-hunting profession by increasing the risks to the point where only the dauntless, the capable, the strong—or the most foolhardy—will venture life and limb and soul on a frothy pipe dream. Such spirits hold down the competition and deserve our appreciation. Perhaps ours had once been a sailor who had loved this nameless old hulk when proudly she sailed the seven seas. In any case, he did exist.
Bissell was his first target; a small introductory warning cost him a bit of skin burnt from his right palm. Nothing less than a ghost determined to shock could have made Biss reach for an exhaust pipe that he knew was hot because he was staring at it even as he grabbed for it. All under the guise of balancing himself in a rocking boat.
Gary and I were next. Working the wreck together one day, we were both underwater, with our compressor feeding a constant supply of air down each hose. Although the water was warm, we grew unaccountably cold after only an hour’s work. We were more than cold; we were chilled to the bone. Surfacing, we climbed into the boat to warm ourselves in the hot sun, expecting to get back to work after a few minutes’ rest. We didn’t. Dizzy, freezing, suffering tremendous headaches, we wrapped up in towels, canvas, whatever was at hand, and lay flat on the deck. The slightest movement worsened our head pains, caused attacks of nausea and violent dizziness. I prepared to die.
For three hours we lay like this, awaiting death or rescue; it no longer mattered which. Dick or Bissell must certainly be wondering what was keeping us. With an awful effort and the slowest possible motion, we dragged the equipment aboard, cut loose the anchor, and let the boat drift for a while as we collapsed back on deck. A gust of fresh air suddenly hit my face, which made me wonder what we had been breathing until then. Fumes! Why hadn’t it occurred to me before?
“Gary! Get up here in the air and start taking deep breaths. We’ve got monoxide poisoning.”
I started up the engine, jammed the throttle forward and headed in at full speed. Gary was unconscious when Dick met us at the dock and immediately called for the doctor and oxygen. Once we got him to the clinic and into an oxygen tent, he was all right. Outside of a nasty headache and a miserable night spent with alternating fever and chills, I felt fine.
The following morning, bleary-eyed and sleepy, I figured out what had gone wrong. Somehow the exhaust fumes from the compressor engine had been leaking into our air intakes. Despite the precaution of placing the engines high up in the boat and downwind from the compressor, we had been breathing deadly monoxide gas.
“Fellas,” Gary said, “Patcheye’s getting serious.” Gary was a believer.
We extended the engine’s exhaust four feet into the air and carefully checked for leaks. Engine and compressor were connected only by a pulley belt. Fumes don’t travel on belts. Our unit was now as safe as we could make it, and Gary and I volunteered to test it. In a little while Gary was giving me the sign to surface.
“Let’s put on wet suits. I’m chilly.”
“Chilly hell. We’re getting it again. Get in the boat.”
The chills hit me, too, as I climbed over the gunwale. Gary said his head felt fine, but he was cold.
“The air temperature is ninety-two degrees and the water is ninety. We shouldn’t be cold. Head for the dock before it’s too late.”
By this time we were wise to Patcheye and didn’t give him a chance to work us over. The chills left us within the hour. Again we examined our equipment, but we couldn’t locate any leak. Our respect for Patcheye was growing. As a pacifying ritual, we decided to name the salvage boat after him, and we mounted a human skull on the bow, with a black patch over one socket.
With old Patcheye on our side, we hoped that we would be safe from storms and sharks and other natural disasters. We should have asked that he keep his free socket sharply trained on some of the humans who were soon to enter our lives.
Kill Shot
How could four individuals so unanimously agree to make as many mistakes as we were about to? Three of us had known each other for years, and had shared a long history of fiscal fiasco. With the addition of Gary, our financially fateful camaraderie was extended to a fourth.
Gary Simmons was the youngest of us. Twenty-three, handsome and well built, with a mop of unruly blond hair, he turns beet red in embarrassment and dead-white in rage.
Bissell Shaver, whom I’d known longest, was a construction engineer. He is quick-witted, intelligent, with an easy sense of humor, and so slightly built that, despite his better than six-foot height, we often think of him as “Little Bissell.” As a diver, few are his equal. At the time of our “find,” he looked considerably younger than his twenty-nine years and women were always wanting to mother him. He has since aged a bit.
“Father” Dick Tindall, vaguely thirty-five, has the look of a man who has spent much time at sea—in the metaphorical as well as the literal sense. The sun has bleached his sandy hair straw blond on top, and his tanned face has the permanent fine mesh of wrinkles that comes from squinting into the weather. He’s the epitome of a “good guy,” maddeningly passive, entirely incapable of—and therefore immune to—argument, or of taking advantage of an adversary.
In April, 1964, Dick came to me in Miami with the notion of getting away from it all; there were great opportunities awaiting us in a boom town named Freeport, Grand Bahama. For him it was simple. Like Bissell, Dick was a construction engineer, and thriving communities need builders. I had worked variously as a cartographer, skindiver, and sometime sculptor. Skindiving, of course, would recommend itself most naturally in the Bahamas.
Actually, it wasn’t that simple. Commercial diving opportunities were limited. There are thousands of skindivers, each with a dream of spending his life working that incredibly clear underwater world just a few score miles off the Florida coast. I had been diving for fifteen years, and had long since given up my desire for the Bahamas. In Florida, at least, I was certain of eking out a living in commercial spearfishing, salvage, testing underwater equipment, underwater photography, marine surveys, anything connected with the water. Old wrecks had become a rather common sight to me, but I had little practical interest in them except as a hiding place for fish. Many of my skindiving friends are “professional treasure hunters,” who spend most of their energies working one wreck after another. I’d always been impressed by the futility of this preoccupation. Their chance of striking a treasure is remote; instead, they dredge up artifacts that supply them with an uncomfortable and undependable livelihood. Knowing this, I’d never paid wrecks much homage; a look at their cannon, a glance at the anchors, and I’d go on my way seeking more negotiable fish.
As luck would have it, however, Freeport just about that time needed a street map. The area was growing fast, and new roads were going down all over at such a rate that it was hard to keep track of them. Here was a way of sustaining myself while I looked for something that interested me far more than making street maps. The Grand Bahama Port Authority granted me a license, and Dick and I formed a company. For the next few months, we worked feverishly on the street map while we slowly moved to Freeport.
Before the map was off the presses, an opportunity to go into skindiving presented itself. Tourists were pouring into Freeport by the thousands, and there were no skin diving facilities for them. . We applied for a license and were duly refused.
However, came the advice, the man who operated a fishing fleet might be looking for a partner, and he had a diving license. The fleet owner was an astute gent, although one didn’t have to be very sharp to sense how badly we wanted to swing this deal. We had everything to recommend us: diving experience, the ability to raise the cash for boats and equipment, enthusiasm—and as an extra special bonus, we were wholeheartedly and dedicatedly dumb. A perfect combination.
Yeah, he held the diving licenses, but heck, that’s too small an operation for a busy fellow with a fishing fleet to look out for. But he’d be generous; we could operate under his license for 35 per cent of our gross. After all, he’d be paying our license fee and carrying a lot of our operating expenses. Whadda we say? Hell, we’d be turning over seventy thousand dollars a year business in no time, whadda we say? But first, before we sign anything, there’s a little matter of proving our good intentions by turning over a thousand dollars to him. Whadda we say?
Well, diving was what we loved most, so we bit. We raised the thousand and watched it going into his pocket, which was the last we saw of it. Then we really started to borrow. My best friend and long-time diving buddy, Bissell, went into hock to supply the cash on which we floated. Dick and I opened on July 4, 1964, in the Freeport Harbor, operating water sports for the Imperial Bahama Hotel, once the liner, SS Italia, now a permanently docked floating hotel. Our agreement stipulated that we open with two ski boats and a dive boat with a plan for considerable expansion within the next few months. Bissell was still in Illinois.
We died on the vine.
This would be the umpteenth business venture centered around skindiving in which Bissell and I had gaily plunged to financial ruin. Like the time we decided that there had to be a “kill shot” in a shark’s head somewhere, and with the proper speargun and a well-placed shot, we’d find it. Not only would we find it, but we would film all the experiments, sell the footage, and make a lot of money besides having all that fun. We bought five different types of spearguns and the Hawaiian Sling, a sort of underwater slingshot used by a very small percentage of skindivers and requiring very advanced skills. We also needed a 16-mm. Bell & Howell electric-eye movie camera, and once we had that, we needed an underwater housing for it. As usual, our plans were elaborate and expensive. For safety, we would have a “shotgun” diver to accompany the cameraman and the shark shooter. This safety diver would have the real kill rig, on the end of a pole a 12-gauge shotgun shell that detonated on contact with the shark. That should be the very last word in any dispute that might arise with our sharp-toothed friends.
Needless to say, the project began and ended badly. As usual, we were short of cash, and no divers could be found who were lunatic enough to play safety for the kind of pay we offered. To hell with it! We’d do it alone. I’d shoot film, and Bissell would shoot sharks. Aqualungs were out; they would cut our speed and maneuverability, and they made for clumsy “shark entries”—an ungraceful but quick way of getting into the boat and out of the way of a pursuing shark.
Attracting the sharks was easy. We shot several fish and let them thrash and bleed at the bottom of about twenty-five or thirty feet of water. The mutton snapper is an excellent fish for this purpose, a game fighter and quite tasty to a shark’s palate. All of our shots were to be made with “free spears,” that is, five-foot spears shot from the gun with no line attached. With the exception of a few varieties of pelagic fish, most tropical-water species do not travel far after being speared. They either find a cave or thrash about on the bottom.
That’s where my position was, on the bottom alongside the thrashing fish and away from the side where the shark would approach. They normally enter downstream. Bissell would dive between me and the shark and shoot as the shark reached the bleeding fish. This meant my staying at the bottom for about one minute and forty-five seconds, possibly two minutes, at a clip. I was sorely tempted to use the aqualung after all; but after several sequences necessitating frantic shark entries, I was grateful that I hadn’t.
The first experiments went well. The sharks, mostly Blacktips, casually—almost contemptuously—reached for the dying fish, and Bissell shot them just before they touched the bait. Each shot was a spear lost, and we didn’t seem to be coming any closer to that elusive kill shot. Frantically, the sharks fled, each with a five-foot spear through his head. Some came back. Bissell’s determination grew stronger with every failure. He drew closer and closer to his prey until his firing range was down to twelve inches!
But the real trouble started with a Hammerhead. To enrage the poor brute even more, Bissell decided to pick up the bait just before the shark reached it, put it behind his back, then lean forward and fire a spear point-blank into the oncoming snout. A ten-foot hammerhead shark was the first victim, so called. As Biss fired, the monster stopped and shook its enormous head, almost slashing his tormentor with the protruding spear. Then it took off in a wide circle, obviously deciding that the lunatic with the gun was to be avoided. Victory enough to get his cameraman associate.
At that point, I stopped filming and swung with my camera as hard as I could. It connected with the charging fish and he departed as fast as he had advanced. The housing wasn’t damaged from the impact, but I was having difficulty controlling my quaking legs. I made a beautiful shark entry.
Several days later, we tried again and had awesome luck in attracting sharks—seven of them—with an investment of only one mutton snapper. Even Biss was a bit reluctant to replay the bait-snatching scene while surrounded by this toothy gang.
After losing three more spears on a Blacktip, a Hammerhead, and a Lemon shark, I signaled Bissell to dive on a beautiful twelve-foot Tiger shark. I swam along, idly filming and waiting for my partner to enter the view finder. He never did. Instead, the Tiger suddenly turned in my direction and charged right into my outstretched camera.
I remember as a child standing on roller skates in the middle of a street watching a large van bearing down on me. The van had stopped; the shark didn’t. My legs started to slip in front of me; they were going to slide right under that massive snout. My terror was complete.
“Bissell!” I shouted.
I drew the camera back and hit that shark as hard as I could; miraculously he stopped. In a second I was at the surface, shouting, “BISSELL!” again.
There he was, sitting in the boat, oblivious of what was going on. The boat was too far away to reach in time, so I submerged to see where the great spotted body was, cursing Bissell as cowardly, dilatory, stupid. The shark was furiously circling me at a radius of about ten feet when Bissell made his grand entrance. He never looked so brave, so powerful, so swift, so glorious and formidable as he did then, swimming straight at that tiger.
They met nose to nose and both stopped. Biss drilled that monster square in the schnozz, and with a great flurry, the big fish touched bottom, turned, surfaced, and took off into the blue water beyond the reef.
This senseless churning and roiling continued for another month, at the end of which we had some thirty seconds’ worth of viable commercial footage with which to entice film audiences from coast to coast and to win our Oscar. We decided to take what we could get for our camera, and considered ourselves lucky to come out of this thing alive. We never did find that kill shot.
In any case, our first Freeport enterprise was proving an absolute and total disaster. No business. Only the map saved us from total ruin. That turned out to be a howling success—“howling” by Freeport’s small-city standards, that is. Our initial printing of fifteen thousand copies was sold out almost immediately, thereby absorbing the highest initial costs, and, with subsequent printings, we finally netted about thirty-six hundred dollars, which paid the rent, put gas in the boats, and kept us pouring good money after bad.
Our benefactor, the man with the licenses, asked us to move one ski boat to the Lucayan Beach Hotel. This meant separating from Dick and hiring somebody to handle the third boat, since I couldn’t operate the water-ski school and take dive parties out at the same time.
Business with the Lucayan Beach Hotel was better in that we lost less money, but it was the hotel’s first summer season and the gaming set was flocking to the casino; no one wanted to come out into the sun. Treasure was to be had in the casino, not the sea. Reluctantly, we had to agree.
The Trouble with Treasure
The trouble with treasure is the expense of owning it. Our salvage work was being hampered by lack of proper equipment, time, and personnel. We were all going broke. We had no idea of the value of the find. Certainly the cannon with the hundreds of pieces of eight encrusted to its breach must be an artifact of enormous value. To have an anchor that matched it, with coins on the fluke, was like finding matched Cellini cuff links in the mouth of a fish! The ten thousand pieces of eight dredged up so far represented an unknown value on a numismatic market of which we were all ignorant. We had a treasure, but no money, and we needed working capital.
All of which brought us to Jim Magee, who was producing a travelogue called, “The Road to Freeport.” We approached him, hoping to combine our treasure story with his film to “our mutual advantage.” Jim quickly became a good friend and a trusted adviser. It was his suggestion that we go to James H. Rand for financial assistance. This was the Rand of Sperry and Remington-Rand renown, legend in the business world. The legend, we discovered, was living and operating in Freeport, still very active in his large foundation, the Colonial Research Institute, which he had donated to Grand Bahama island for medical research.
Jim, as it turned out, was Rand’s son-in-law.”C’mon, I’ll take you to him.”
James Rand! We didn’t stop to ask what he was doing on the island; we all just buttoned our collars, pulled up our neckties, and ran to him with our problem. If anyone could help us, he could. And why wouldn’t he?
The setting was austere; not at all suited to such a potentate. Instead of a desk, two long tables set side by side formed a large, square, and unpretentious work space, strictly functional. The walls were completely lined with books, mostly medical, and light poured in through two large French windows. James Rand, eighty-four, but looking twenty years younger, rose smiling to shake our hands. His hair was snow white and thinning.
Jim spilled about one thousand coins on the desk, and started to explain them and us. The old man listened without saying a word, picking up a few coins now and then, examining them, setting them down.
“That’s very interesting,” he said as Jim concluded.
He asked a few questions about the origin of the coins, then began to chat about the scientific exploration of the ocean bottom, about extracting minerals from sea water, underwater farming, and medical research programs. Fascinating conversation all that, but we were finding it a little difficult to relate to our specific problems. As we left his office, he walked us to the door saying, “I want to shake the hands of young men I consider really to have accomplished something.”
We weren’t sure that we had accomplished anything at all. Jim assured us that we had, but that it would be up to us to decide in what areas we wanted help.
“Well, that’s easy,” said Bissell, “we need money to continue and a bank won’t loan money on a treasure.”
“Why?” asked Jim.
“Because they can’t be sure the Government won’t take it all from us.”
“Well,” said Jim, “the banks over here are a bit unusual. It might pay for you to talk to them.”
I thought about that.
“Not if Rand will loan us the money.”
“You won’t know unless you ask him.”
At our next meeting with Rand we asked him, and he readily agreed to loan us the necessary capital if we would agree to repay it from the first proceeds of the treasure. At that time, we were approximately twenty thousand dollars in debt and figured this amount would put us back on our feet. Jim pointed out that this figure would merely get us out of debt, but leave us no operating capital and he suggested we ask for a working arrangement until the treasure was completely salvaged and sold. This made sense, but we limited it to capital expense items for equipment needed to work the wreck, not daily living expenses. The whole operation should only take a month at most, we thought.
While we were working out the details of the contract, our corporation papers came through—Sosco, Ltd. Let particular note be taken of those prophetic first three letters. Our incorporating attorney examined and approved the contract with Bahamas Oceanographic Society, one of Rand’s nonprofit organizations. Rand himself did not need a lawyer for anything so simple as a contract with us; he composed and dictated it to his secretary in our presence.
We thus found ourselves giving up 20 per cent of the treasure in return for Rand’s financial assistance. If the Government took 25 per cent of the treasure as its “share,” then we stood to lose 45 per cent! We figured the minimum cost of salvage would run another 20 per cent of the value, this would leave us 35 per cent to divide among the four of us. At this writing, even that looks like an extremely attractive figure. To think… once upon a time we believed that e could actually end up with 35 per cent of our own treasure!
But the percentages weren’t through with us yet. B the time all this was settled, it was almost Christmas, and e still hadn’t made our peace with the Government. In the tropics winter changes something in the air. Residents look on in amazement as the tourists sun themselves on the beaches and bathe in the ocean. How can they stand the cold? Those of us who spend each day under the sea dread entering the water as winter sets in, and we change our diving dress.
Now we wear the diving “wet suit,” of black neoprene, tight-fitting and warm even though it keeps no water out. The temperature of the water drops as low as 78 degrees Fahrenheit and for residents accustomed to the summer water temperature, some 10 to 15 degrees higher, this is cold!
One day, Rand sent an urgent message to me at the dock. I was to be at his house as soon as possible for a meeting with the Premier, Sir Roland Symonette! We had no advance warning that such a meeting was to take place and had no idea of its purpose. I rushed home to change, and made it to Rand’s home a few scant moments before the Premier arrived. I had in mind a rather formal gathering: Rand’s staff, the Premier’s entourage, and the Government liaison officer. Instead, it turned out to be just Rand, the Premier, and myself. After introductions, the conversation immediately turned to the subject of oceanographic research and long-term leasing of ocean-bottom areas. I was to head the research groups. The Premier was congenial and interested, but noncommittal. Before leaving, he promised action on the matter within a few weeks.
I didn’t like any part of the deal. High finance and political wheeling and dealing were not my areas of competence. I didn’t like the idea of leasing ocean bottoms and acquiring, in the name of scientific research, absolute rights to what was found there when my aim was to salvage a treasure ship. Besides, I had no authority from my three partners to make such an agreement. I saw Dick, Gary, and Bissell right after the meeting and they agreed we would nip this in the bud. The Government was formally notified of our find, and the Premier requested that we suspend salvage operations temporarily until a cabinet meeting could be held to determine the Government’s interests, if any, in the treasure.
My pitch was that treasure finds, large or small, were great publicity. Not only would the Bahamas be mentioned in newspapers and magazines throughout the world, but the rich pirate lore of the islands would attract both movie makers and authors. Droves of tourists would be drawn to the “treasure islands.” However, if the Government took more than a token percentage of the find, there would never be another major “find” in the history of the Bahamas—or a minor one, either. No one is going to report a find if he stands to lose most of it, or even a good chunk of it. Just pick up and run. Get the most valuable, salable items as quickly as possible; never mind the care and restoration of historical artifacts, forget saving little bits and pieces that could help identify the vessel. There would be no research to re-create a page of history. The situation was similar to taxing one of the out islands that was starting a small industry so heavily that no other business would open there. A tax on the net profit of the venture, to the extent that any business operation is taxed, would be fair, and some government supervision over the salvage methods could even be helpful.
Just about now, LOOK entered the picture thanks to the public relations man who worked with the Port Authority. Then we also met Walter I. Fischman, the man who was going to write the LOOK story, and for the next week we were all constantly together. Walter and I spent hours, sipping drinks, and talking about darn near everything but the subject he came down to write about. Between conversations, the five of us got together and finished the story for the magazine. This was in December,1964, and the LOOK story was not to hit the newsstands before March 8.
Meanwhile we were still trying to find a way to stay in business. Jim suggested expanding the dock business.
“You’re kidding! What with the salvage and the deals, we can’t run the business properly even as it stands now,” I said.
“Get somebody else to take the charters. You supervise.”
“There isn’t anyone around here qualified, and we haven’t time to train anyone.”
“Well, if you’re not going to give up your dock business, then you’d better take the time to expand it, or be swallowed up by the competition.”
“Competition, what competition?”
“There’s a skindiving hotel being built. They’re going to have all the water sports divided into departments, even departments within the various phases of skindiving. Your business won’t stand a chance unless you expand or join them.”
“When are they due to open?”
“In about a year.”
“Do they have any experienced divers?”
“That’s just it. Their over-all plan is a winner, but the details are appalling. They need you guys bad, even if they don’t know it.”
They planned to open with a fleet of small outboards as dive charter boats, and most of their prospective skindiving instructors, although good divers, had no experience in more dangerous tropical waters. It was folly to run outboards in commercial dive charter. The maintenance figures on outboard engines, fuel consumption, and small number of passengers carried would easily prove that. But it would be a little harder to show them where tropical-water experience pays dividends in cash.
Jim looked worried. “If you kill your customers, you’ve got no business.”
“I’m not talking about endangering anyone’s life. Their personnel will be adequate from a safety point of view. But they won’t be able to give the customers what they want, and they’ll lose a lot of business.”
“How so?” Jim asked.
“Usually, about 80 per cent of the customers are either novices or rank amateurs with preconceived notions about skindiving that have to be satisfied, even though the notions may be absurd. Disillusionment is lousy for business. For example, most people picture underwater scenery as a myriad of fishes and coral with lots of color. This is common on a very shallow reef, ten feet of water or less, but the amateur doesn’t think of himself as a very romantic figure in ten feet of water, especially if he’s been instructed in the use of the aqualung. An instructor has to be a diplomat and at the same time satisfy his customers.”
“I’m starting to get the picture.” Jim said.
“So you take them to two different places. One to satisfy their notion of underwater beauty and the other to give them a sense of accomplishment.”
“A bit involved,” Jim commented.
“Dfferent people respond to different underwater sights. Most men like large coral-head formations with caves in them. Women prefer a profusion of colorful sea fans with a lot of tiny tropicals swimming about. And you don’t very often find these two seascapes in the same place. Sometimes you find a particular coral formation like pillar coral that appeals to everyone. A good instructor must be able to return to these spots. In fact, he should have in his mental catalogue about fifty spots where he can drop anchor effortlessly.”
Dive customers want to get into the water; they don’t like cruising around the ocean trying to find a good spot to dive. These spots can’t be marked with a buoy either. That takes the customer’s sense of adventure right out of it.”
“Yeah, you’re definitely in the adventure business, “ he said.
“For the 20 percent who are advanced divers—well, they represent another problem. An instructor has to prove himself capable of keeping up with them, and that means being able to dive at least seventy-five feet, and go down two hundred feet in a lung. Again, he has to know his area, exactly, not generally. He has to be able to put his customers on a spot that has cuda, snapper, grouper, tropicals, or whatever interests them. If he’s really good, he can also offer a choice of a modern wreck or an ancient one. Only experience can accomplish this, and only experience in tropical waters.”
“Are you that good, Jack?” Jim asked, as I completed my unsolicited lecture on my favorite subject.
“Come on down to the boat and tell me what you want to see.”
“O.K., I’m convinced. They really need you for your experience, as well as your treasure. They’re building a hotel centered around skindiving and an underwater explorer’s club. They need both publicity and a central idea to kick it off. In other words, they need a treasure ship and the guys who found it—a display in their lobby from an actual treasure ship. This is top drawer, the largest find of its kind in history. When the news breaks, it’s going to be world-wide. Why let the Lucayan Beach Hotel be in every headline in the world, when it can just as easily be the Oceanus Inn?”
“Will that be the name of the place?”
“Yeah, it’s a subsidiary of Greater Freeport Industries. A guy by the name of Maclnnes is president of G.F.I.; he runs the show. Tell me what you guys want and we’ll have a meeting with him at Gene’s place.”
“We’d be interested in a concession at their dock to run the water sports.”
“You’re nuts. It’s worth a lot more than that to them.”
“Maybe so, Jim, but let’s keep the offer simple.”
Jim arranged a brief meeting during which we mentioned our treasure and showed some films of it. And that was the end of it. Although we made some polite inquiries afterward, we never even reached a preliminary discussion of the business. We couldn’t understand such a lack of response.
Shoot First
Meanwhile, we had to start thinking about disposing of the coins. Treasure is a nice thing to own—colorful and romantic—but we had to sell it or we might just as well have left it in the ocean. How? That was the question. As treasure owners we were just bewildered tourists seeking directions.