Clive Cussler; Craig Dirgo Read Free

considered fit to sail the seas as a raiding cruiser, she was sold and put into service as a mail packet between Lisbon and the Cape Verde Islands, where she was soon captured by a ship of the Union navy as a prize of war and returned to the United States. After a legal battle between the United States and Britain, she was sold to a series of shipping companies, before finally being bought by the Gulf-port Steamship Company for passenger and cargo service between Halifax and Portland, Maine.
    When on a passage south from Nova Scotia in January of 1875, the old steamship, still named Georgia, struck the rocks known as the Triangles ten miles west of Tenants Harbor, Maine. The crew and passengers took to the lifeboats and rowed through a snowstorm to shore. No lives were lost, but the ship became a total wreck and was abandoned. She was the last of the Confederate raiders to die.
    Historian Michael Higgins produced a small mountain of research on Georgia and her grounding, contacted me, and, soft touch that I am, I agreed to arrange a search off Maine for the remains of the fabled ship. After arriving in Tenants Harbor with Ralph, Wes Hall, and Craig Dirgo, we settled into a hotel reminiscent of a Steinbeck Monterey fish cannery. We passed time throwing rocks from one side of town to the other and watching the rails rust at the train depot, before finding an old-fashioned drugstore with ancient white octagonal tile on the floor and a genuine antique soda fountain.
    I ordered my all-time favorite from my childhood, a chocolate malt with chocolate ice cream churned in a metal canister by a 1930s mixer. One sip and I was in paradise.
    Early next morning, with Ralph at the helm, Diversity swept out toward Triangle Rocks, dodging literally hundreds of colorfully painted buoys attached to lobster traps. Every lobsterman has his own distinct color-coded buoy, and more and more they are being purchased by collectors.
    Wes manned the sonar and I watched the magnetometer, and Ralph threaded Diversity in and around the rocks, while Craig kept a wary eye for lobster buoys or scallop divers. Waves were washing over the rocks all around us, but Ralph seemed oblivious to them as he grimly studied the echo sounder. At times, they seemed so close you could spit on them, and yet they yielded no hint of Georgia.
    There were a few small mag hits, but nothing showed on the sidescan sonar. After crisscrossing the Triangles three times, we stared at one another in surprised disappointment. We had come up empty. There was no indication of a shipwreck to be found.
    We knew we were in the right spot. The only other rocks were too far out of the area, according to the old reports. Just to play it safe, we checked those out, too. How could an iron-hulled wreck the size of Georgia simply disappear?
    The answer came from local historians whom we consulted after the unsuccessful hunt. Since urchin and scallop divers had been all over those rocks for many years without sighting wreckage, the only answer was that Georgia had been salvaged. Records from the 1870s and 1880s are sparse, but it was suggested that, owing to the extreme economic hardships of the citizens of Maine at the time, they’d pulled up almost every pound of her, including the keel and boilers, which they sold for scrap.
    Curses, foiled again.
    Shipwreck junkies that we were, the gang continued on to Saybrook, Connecticut, to take a stab at finding David Bushnell’s famous Revolutionary War submarine, the Turtle. This was the first practical submarine in the world at the time—every submarine built in the following centuries owes its ancestry to the Turtle.
    The son of a Connecticut Yankee farmer, Bushnell had a creative mind and was self-taught in his early years. Entering Yale at the advanced age of thirty-one, he roomed with Nathan Hale, who later became America’s most famous patriot-spy. While in school, Bushnell became fascinated with the untried concept of producing underwater