Free Adventures of a Sea Hunter by James P. Delgado Page A

drop into the murky depths. Sixty feet down, I’m in a cloudy haze of grayish-green water, my dive partner a blurry form. Ninety feet, and the blur clears as I switch on my dive light. The bottom is approaching, so I give the buoyancy vest a quick hit of air. My descent slows and stops, and I’m hovering over a large iron anchor, nearly no feet below the surface. In front of me, the curving form of a ship’s bow rises up out of the silt, sweeping sharply back like the edge of a knife blade.
    Sleeping in her grave, the clipper brig
Somers
, perhaps the most notorious ship in the history of the United States Navy, lies before me at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. Canted on her side, the wooden hull largely consumed by marine organisms,
Somers
is now truly a ghost ship, her form outlined by the copper sheathing that once protected her hull from the voracious appetite of marine creatures. Impervious to the attack of the teredo worms that eat wooden ships’ hulls, the copper has leached its metallic salts into a thin layer of wood so that this fragile remnant of
Somers
still holds her form perfectly more than 140 years after she went down. A slow and steady decay, this, and as a result, everything lies on the seabed exactly as it once did on the decks and in the holds: iron cannon, anchor chain, the ship’s stove and other gear, even the iron fittings and blocks from the masts. Everything inside
Somers
, after she sank, lay trapped in the hull as it deteriorated and collapsed over the decades, and presumably much of it should still be here, buried in layers of rotten wood, sand, silt and thick masses of corroded iron. Indications of what was once inside the ship, and of lives interrupted and lost, include a small white plate, an oval serving platter from the officers’ wardroom and a small black glass bottle.
    I drift past the iron davits for the port quarter boat. Lying flat on the sand, they are a reminder of the only boat to get away from the sinking
Somers.
It ferried several men to the safety of the nearby island of Isla Verde. Many others never made it, trapped below by the rushing water or drowned in the open sea as their heavy boots and uniforms pulled them under. I also recall, as I float for a moment over this spot, that this is where young Philip Spencer lay manacled to the deck on that long-ago night of November 26, 1842, in the first of a chain of events that cost three lives and ruined others. Spencer, Cromwell and Small were all chained at the stern, Small next to the aftermost 32-pounder carronade on the port side. That gun lies here now, and I swim up to take a look at it.
    As I continue my tour of the wreck, I see that three of the four carronades on the starboard side lie buried muzzle down in the sand, showing that
Somers
sank sideways, never righting as she dropped into the depths, and landed on the starboard side. I stop and carefully run a small iron probe up inside the barrel of one of the guns. The probe stops 24 inches into the 4-foot bore of the carronade. I turn to another gun and try it. It, too, is blocked. I smile and turn to Pilar Luna, who is shining a light on the gun to help me guide the probe. These guns are loaded, as we expected. After all,
Somers
was ready for action, in the middle of a chase, when the squall hit.
    A long metal tube, topped by what looks like an open trough, is the brig’s pump, once used to remove water from the hold, but useless on that fateful morning. Lying on the bottom, it is now being mapped by Larry Nordby and Jerry Livingston. Their tape measure indicates it is just over u feet long—a perfect match for the depth of the hold. A metal flange, almost halfway up the iron tube, would not be noticed by most people, but Larry instantly recognizes that it means the area below decks was divided into a berth deck, where the men lived, and a lower hold. This flange marks the location of that divide, a feature not recorded in the few surviving plans of the brig. It is