Mysteries Below

A SINGLE GRAY BOAT was the only sign of life on an industrial end of Tacoma's Commencement Bay one Sunday afternoon this summer. It puttered in a meandering path, so slowly that it almost bobbed.

It was fishing in a way, scouring the muddy, irregular bottom of the bay for a certain shape, a straight line - some hint of a ship called the Andelana.

The four-masted British bark had been moored here, roughly 500 yards from shore, 101 years ago. The crew had unloaded its cargo of steel and was bunked down for the night. The plan was to load up with wheat in a day or two and set sail for San Francisco. Without ballast, the 300-foot ship was kept on even keel by chains fastened to heavy logs on either side.

Then, during the night of Jan. 6, 1899, a windstorm hit and the ship vanished, slipping silently below the waterline and entombing all 17 sailors aboard. It had not been rammed or burned; no one saw or heard it go down. It appeared that the rigging broke during the storm, tipping and capsizing the Andelana.

The loss of life - the worst ever in the bay - and the way the Andelana simply disappeared in a protected harbor made it something of a mystery ship as years passed.

It has been found from time to time. In 1935, a diver looking for a tugboat's anchor stumbled upon the silt-covered hulk of the Andelana. In 1954, some of the ship's ironwood railing was hauled up and made into gavels for Republican clubs around the state.

Then the Andelana was forgotten and essentially lost all over again. Yet when Robert Mester, a Puyallup marine explorer and salvor, returned to the bay last summer, he was confident.

Over decades, Mester has searched for lost anchors, buoys, sunken planes, even drowning victims, and has hunted for underwater treasure from Alaska to Uruguay. He is one of a special breed of entrepreneurs who mix a thirst for speculative long shots with technical know-how that allows them to glimpse the dark, claustrophobic depths.

Looking for a big ship in a relatively small area didn't strike him as too hard, especially since he held location coordinates left by someone who claimed to have found the ship decades before.

"A 300-foot ship," he said, inching closer to those coordinates, "can't hide in here."

The Andelana is but one of many underwater mysteries in Northwest waters and along the Pacific Coast, the legacy of maritime trade and its risks. More than 1,000 shipwrecks and sinkings have been recorded in Washington waters, from Elliott and Commencement bays to the rough water of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and along the coast to the sandbars of the Columbia River. Freighters, frigates, passenger ships, schooners have all gone down, often taking lives with them.

Most of those that sank along the rugged shores of the strait in the 1800s and 1900s have been ground to rubble by churning currents and rocks. Yet government archaeologists and treasure hunters still search that area, one looking for history, the other opportunity.

Some ships have been preserved like time capsules by the sheer inaccessibility that deep and sometimes treacherous water provides. There are a few down there, according to legend, with treasures that could make a shrewd and dogged explorer rich.

At the bottom of Elliott Bay, near where dredge material is disposed of and ships anchor today, sit two historic wooden ships, the A.J. Fuller and the Multnomah. The slimy bones of a once-glorious clipper ship that was scrapped and burned on a West Seattle beach in 1923 still peek from the surf at each year's extreme low tide.

There are more than ships. In Lake Washington alone, there are at least portions of eight Naval warplanes and 18 railroad cars.

For most of us, what is out of sight is out of mind, but for others, shipwrecks are fascinating relics of courage, carelessness, bad luck and tragedy. They are prized targets in a murky, overlooked world of hazy maritime laws, frontier ethics and opposing forces: preservation and adventure, history and financial gain.

Advances in sonar scanning and other technology are illuminating the depths more than ever, and remotely operated underwater vehicles have extended our reach. As a result, disputes are intensifying between private salvage speculators, who usually have the technology, and governments, which often consider long-lost ships their property.

Yet as good as the technology has become, and as solvable as the mysteries appear to be, like that of the Andelana, this is also a world of romantic notions and, very often, disappointments.

LAST MONTH, two very different shipwreck searches occurred within the 3,300-square-mile Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary, which extends 30 miles off shore between Neah Bay and Copalis Beach.

One involved the National Oceanic and Aviation Administration's periodic inventory. The federal agency must protect the sanctuary's resources and it considers sunken ships part of its preservation mission. As a first step, it must determine what's there.

For a week or two nearly every year since 1995, NOAA or its contractors have used sonar and magnetometers (which detect iron objects) to peer into the waters around Cape Flattery and Tatoosh Island. Occasionally, divers have been sent down for a closer look.

This year's search, conducted by a marine-archaeology group from East Carolina University, focused farther south, near Destruction Island.

While NOAA was looking for ships to preserve, a Florida-based treasure-hunting group was scouring a different swath of the sanctuary for signs of The Pacific, which may hold a treasure trove.

Early in its Victoria-to-San Francisco run on Nov. 4, 1875, the ship collided with another south of Tatoosh Island just off Cape Flattery. It sank, killing 275, and remains one of the worst maritime disasters in U.S. history.

Odyssey Marine Exploration of Tampa, Fla., as treasure hunters often do, refers to The Pacific by code word, calling it "the Republic." The company has told prospective investors it believes the ship went down with 48,000 troy ounces of gold that could be worth $13 million.

In the "wreck report" that must be filed after a ship capsizes, a representative of The Pacific wrote in 1875 that he "could not say" what the value of the cargo was. Could not or would not?

NOAA so far has little to show for its attempts to inventory shipwrecks. Working with a list of 176 reported capsizings compiled by shipwreck historian Robert Schwemmer, NOAA has turned up nothing new, other than fields of debris.

To archaeologists like Bruce Terrill of NOAA, who organized the sanctuary searches, a submerged ship sometimes presents a cleaner opportunity for study than a land-based site, which can go through a series of overlapping societies and cultures or be disturbed by foragers. A submerged ship, unless plundered, is frozen in time and tells about the people who built it - their seamanship, commerce and cultural influences.

Few if any shipwrecks along the rocky north Washington coast could have withstood years of pounding by storms and currents, Terrill says. But out in deeper waters, where the seabed is gentler, it might be a different story.

Odyssey is the latest of many speculators to hunt for The Pacific. It has received NOAA's permission to retrieve minor artifacts - under an archaeologist's supervision - if it actually finds the ship. Odyssey also has acquired rights to the hull and cargo from owners and insurers, said Gregory Stemm, co-founder of the publicly traded company.

Odyssey searched in June and returned last month to finish probing in a 400-square-mile swath it has focused on. In some areas, the hunt was in water 3,000 feet deep.

As the September search began, Stemm said Odyssey would concentrate on a 35-square-mile "high probability" area, but would scan 120 square miles to allow for margin of error.

If Odyssey were to find The Pacific, before any meaningful salvage work could begin, it would have to comply with federal regulations that emphasize cultural, archaeological and historic preservation.

"These ships aren't like coral," Terrill said. "They aren't a replenishable resource."

But he also sees room for compromise. Well-financed private groups like Odyssey, with its advanced technology and willingness to gamble millions of dollars in a search, can help archaeologists learn about a shipwreck and collect artifacts. With government's help, searchers can get access to potential treasure.

The kind of cooperation being attempted between the Pacific-searchers and Olympic-sanctuary officials is the exception to the rule, however.

Across the world, the gulf between competing interests has widened as technology enables salvors to find and reach more ships. When ships are found, disputes of ownership often arise. The rules are even murkier when the shipwrecks lie in state waters, and the past summer, a federal appeals court added a new wrinkle: upholding Spain's claim of ownership to a long-lost galleon that U.S. searchers found off the coast of Virginia.

This month, when the U.S. Supreme Court reconvenes, there will be three shipwreck cases seeking its attention.

THE LATEST SHIPWRECK case decided by the U.S. Supreme Court (in 1998) involved the S.S. Brother Jonathan, a side-wheel steamer that capsized in 1865 off Crescent City, Calif., just south of the Oregon border. The vessel was bound from San Francisco to Victoria and among the 225 people who died was Washington Territory Gov. A.C. Henry.

By most accounts, the ship was overloaded with cargo, which ranged from heavy machinery to 346 barrels of whiskey to circus animals. It also carried lots of money. Safes held payroll for U.S. Army troops at Fort Vancouver and Walla Walla, treaty payments for tribes, cash for banks and valuables from passengers; crates held $20 coins, some straight from the San Francisco Mint.

The value of the cargo, exorbitant for its day, is far higher today - as much as $100 million, investors have been told.

The Brother Jonathan was found seven years ago. The legal tussle over who owned it took five years to resolve. And lately, the efforts to salvage its treasures have taken on a distinct Washington flavor.

Seattle's Global Diving and Salvage, a three-man partnership based on Harbor Island, spent most of last month poring over the wreck in search of gold, strongboxes and a safe. It was the second time that Global, working for California-based Deep Sea Research, has sent divers to the ship.

The broken 220-foot wood-hulled ship sits upright in strong currents. It is also 240 feet deep, so divers had to live in a cramped hyperbaric chamber that reproduced the pressure felt at the depths. That consistent pressure allows divers to spend more time at the bottom.

For each visit to the hulk, they would crawl directly from the chamber into an enclosed diving bell. The bell was lowered near the wreck and the divers took turns searching, illuminating the pitch-black waters with the lamps on their helmets.

There are other Washington connections: Rick Hansen, managing member of Puyallup-based Maritime Consultants and Robert Mester's business partner, said he helped secure investors for the latest search. The base ship for the search was the massive M / V American Salvor from Seattle's Crowley Maritime Services.

The Brother Jonathan is not only one of the West Coast's major treasure finds, but, not coincidentally, involved a protracted legal fight between the discoverer and the state of California.

Deep Sea Research found the ship in 1993 by using sonar, then claimed title to it under maritime law that essentially is built on the maxim "finders keepers."

California officials argued that the ship belonged to the state under the 1987 federal Abandoned Shipwreck Act. According to the law, states can claim an abandoned ship if it is "imbedded" in the floor of state waters and has historic value. The Brother Jonathan is clearly historic. Aside from the loss of life, it led to federal laws limiting cargo loads.

The five-year legal fight cost DSR and its investors about $1 million, but ultimately the Supreme Court ruled the state did not have automatic right to the ship. In sending the case back to federal court, justices said each shipwreck dispute must be decided on its own set of facts.

The decision left unanswered the pressing legal question affecting cases across the country: When, exactly, is a ship abandoned?

The state eventually settled for a share of the retrieved coins, some artifacts and the right to oversee the recovery.

Even before last month's search, a total of 1,207 coins had been retrieved during the first two dive missions on the ship. Two hundred went to the state of California. The historical museum in Crescent City got one.

A few more of the coins belong to two Port Townsend men, Gene Seton and John Nesset, who invested in the initial hunt.

Nesset owns Jefferson County Title Co., but also runs tour-boat excursions (in which the tickets are fake gold coins) and searches Olympic Peninsula waters with his own sonar system.

Seton, an entrepreneur who has ventured into logging, wood processing, construction and real estate, is also a coin expert and arranged the Brother Jonathan auction.

Last year, DSR auctioned 1,006 coins for $5.3 million. One 1865 $20 gold coin, with its date mistakenly inverted in the San Francisco Mint, sold for $115,000.

As spectacular as the find and auction was, investors didn't strike it rich. Profits had been whittled by the legal fight and search.

Harvey Harrington, director of offshore operations for DSR and a 40-year veteran of underwater treasure hunts, said it is all about persistence.

"You grind through the politics, fund-raising, red tape. The search is the interesting thing, the challenging thing. Recovery holds mystique and thrill but it's like when the hunter shoots the deer - then the work starts."

BY FAR, MOST of the known sunken ships in Washington waters are valued for their history, not treasure.

Two exceptions are the Admiral Sampson and the Governor, two early 1900s passenger ships. Both, thanks mainly to hazards, are still believed to hold their booty.

The severed steel hull of the Admiral Sampson lies almost 300 feet deep in the southbound vessel lane of Admiralty Inlet, near Point No Point. The 296-foot luxury liner was headed from Seattle to Alaska in 1914 when it was broadsided by another. Sixteen people died.

The ship was located in 1991 by Argonaut Resources, a Snohomish company. Argonaut has used a two-man submarine to haul up artifacts such as portholes, an 85-pound brass whistle, a teacup.

Many groups have tried to locate money thought to be within the Governor, a 417-foot liner that sank in 1921 near Port Townsend off Point Wilson. It was rammed by another ship in heavy fog. All aboard made it off safely, but a safe containing gold pieces went down with the ship. Various hunters have estimated the value of the booty from $1 million to $8 million.

Currents, shipping traffic and the 240-foot depth have thwarted every attempt to recover any treasure the Governor holds. Mester, an experienced diver, made the last try and calls it the most dangerous dive mission he's ever been involved with.

Most local shipwrecks don't hold treasure; they are more like the A.J. Fuller and Multnomah, which sit at the bottom of Elliott Bay near Harbor Island.

Despite their significance, the ships sit undisturbed. They don't hold enough monetary value for salvors to bother with and they would be too expensive to recover, maintain and exhibit for the state or a historical group to take on.

The A.J. Fuller, a square-rigged ship, was anchored just offshore when it was struck at about midnight on Oct. 18, 1918, by a steamer, Mexico Maru. The 229-foot Fuller, which had been turned into a floating cannery, sank in 10 minutes while all its workers were enjoying the Seattle waterfront.

The Multnomah, a wooden stern-wheel steamer, was built in 1885 and became part of the fleet of Willamette Steamboat Co. of Portland. There was another Multnomah plying Northwest waters, but the one on the bottom of Elliott Bay was famous for speed and efficiency.

On Oct. 28, 1911, the passenger ship was en route from Duwamish head to Pier 57 when she collided with a steel steamer, Iroquois. The only casualties were 15 head of cattle.

There are also historic ships that were sunk on purpose, as in the case of a great clipper ship, Glory of the Seas.

It was the last clipper produced by renowned builder Donald McKay of Boston. The Glory began its distinguished career in 1869 and logged fast runs across the globe. Its career ended ignobly in 1923 when it was stripped of usable scrap on a West Seattle beach. Salvors then burned the broken hulk to reduce its girth even more and pushed it into the surf for an underwater burial.

But the Glory refused to go quietly. Instead, it settled at low tide and over the decades became buried in about three feet of sand. At extreme low tide, parts of it still poke out of the surf just south of the Fauntleroy ferry dock.

All that most people see are portions of barnacled, rusted, mangled steel, but Michael Mjelde's imagination and four-decade obsession with the ship has allowed him to re-create it.

Mjelde, editor of the Puget Sound Maritime Historical Society's journal, has written two books on the ship. He also has inspired a volunteer effort to map, document and recreate the essence of it.

Mjelde, 61, of Bremerton was 18 when he first saw a magazine image of the clipper at full sail. Finally, and mainly through his persistence, the Glory's resting place was confirmed in 1996.

The sand that hides it has actually preserved it, protecting it from churning water, leaching effects of organisms and oxygen as well as from rough human hands.

At this year's extreme low tide, back in July, volunteers from the Kitsap County branch of the state Land Surveyor's Association used 6-foot rods to probe the sand, feeling for the outline of the Glory. Parametrix, a Bremerton engineering firm, has developed a topographic map that details the ship's suspected below-ground footprint.

Mjelde's group has been careful to treat the remains gently but may ask the state for permission to excavate a trench, perhaps 30 feet wide by 7 feet long, to expose the hull long enough to confirm what is left and to photograph the remains.

ON THE SAME DAY that volunteer surveyors last tiptoed around the Glory, Mester was on his boat, peering into the bottom of Commencement Bay, looking for the Andelana.

Often, his searches take place in wide open and rough water and depend on sophisticated gadgets like robotic subs that carry video cameras, grab and retrieve objects and are controlled from aboard a mother ship. Mester owns two hard-shelled, canary-yellow diving suits, capable of going 1,000 feet deep.

Although he and his partner, Hansen, are involved in various treasure hunts and competed with Global for this year's Brother Jonathan dive mission, Mester also searches inland waters looking for far-more-mundane targets, like lost anchors.

He is particularly fascinated with submerged planes and has long sought permission to recover some of the Navy aircraft known to rest on the bottom of Lake Washington. The Navy has blocked his every attempt - as well as others across the country - insisting the forgotten planes are still its property.

Looking in wide, deep and dark water is long and expensive work, but Mester thought the coordinates he had acquired for the Andelana, even if four decades old, might take him right to it. He eased his boat into position while a crew member studied shadow images sent back by side-scan sonar.

After several passes to align the boat just right, it became obvious the Andelana was not there.

Mester sighed. "I have been doing this a long time. People always tell me, `I can take you right to it.' And I can tell you they never, ever, ever take you right to it."

So Mester began patrolling back and forth in overlapping paths, as if mowing a lawn. The boat dragged a torpedo-shaped sonar buoy that sent out acoustic sound waves to each side. One crew member constantly lowered and raised the depth of the buoy to make sure it stayed the same distance from the bottom.

Mester believes he might get recovery work should the Andelana draw interest from a museum, historical group or government entity, but that's a long shot. Searching also provides practice for the crew. More than anything, though, he looks for the 300-foot ship because he doesn't know where it is.

He gave up for the day after three hours of searching. Perhaps the Andelana now is buried by tons of silt carried in by the series of waterways that feed the bay. Maybe it has disintegrated.

Mester scanned a map of the bay, with portions scribbled on in yellow. Those were the areas he had already ruled out. After reviewing the day's work, the yellow would grow.

"Well, that was certainly disappointing," he said, piloting his flat-bottom boat back to shore, "but at least I know where it isn't."

Richard Seven is a staff reporter for Pacific Northwest magazine. Benjamin Benschneider is staff photographer for the magazine. Paul Schmid is a Seattle Times news artist.

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Washington Shipwrecks

Notable sinkings on our waters 1.Pacific - The American steamship was struck by another vessel Nov. 4, 1875, with 275 lives lost. A target of treasure hunters today. Exact whereabouts unknown.

2. Henry Scott - The American schooner was rammed by another ship in fog and sank on July 16, 1922. Four crewmen died.

3. Andalucia - A Panamanian freighter carrying 5 million board feet of lumber, Andalusia caught fire, ran aground and broke in half 4 miles east of Neah Bay on Nov. 4, 1949.

4. Diamond Knot - On Aug. 13, 1947, the cargo ship carrying $3.5 million worth of canned Alaskan salmon collided with another ship 6 miles north of Port Angeles.

5. Governor - The 417-foot steamer was rammed in 1921 in fog near Port Townsend. It is believed have sunk with treasure, but deep, swift water makes salvage dangerous.

6. Al-Ind-Esk-A-Sea - The 222-foot fish processor caught fire and sank while at anchor in Port Gardner on Oct. 22, 1982.

7. Admiral Sampson - The 296-foot luxury liner was broadsided in fog in 1914 while bound for Alaska. Its severed steel hull lies 300 feet deep in the south-bound vessel lane of Admiralty Inlet.

8. Multnomath - The wooden stern-wheel steamer collided with another vessel on Oct. 28, 1911, while en route to Pier 57 in Elliott Bay. The only casualties were 15 head of cattle.

9. A. J. Fuler -- The 229-foot square-rigged ship was anchored just offshore when it was struck the night of Oct. 18, 1918, by a steamer.

10. Andelena -- The British bark vanished during a Jan. 6, 1899, windstorm while moored in Tacoma's Commencement Bay.