Confluence

By Ken Baysinger

A century of political, military, and social history come together in a devastating confluence of evil in this panoramic tale woven out of seemingly unconnected people and events. The fictional plot is intricately interwoven with little-known historical facts that make the incredible story frighteningly believable.

A treasure hunter in Key

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ken Baysinger
• Release date: Jun 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9798218007782

Book preview

Prologue

Reflections

The extraordinary events of last year are a matter of record. But my role in the story has sometimes been greatly exaggerated, and I want to set that straight. It is in my nature as a police detective to pursue the truth, tie-down loose ends, and answer all outstanding questions. That is why I’ve continued my investigation long after the events played out.

My investigation started with the discovery of a body in Beer Can Eddy. But the chain of events that led up to that go back at least seventy years. As my original investigation progressed, I discovered bits and pieces that hinted that the case was something far bigger than a simple act of protest. Indeed, as the staggering scope of the case became apparent, I found it increasingly difficult to convince others that what I was finding could possibly be true.

And yet it was true. Still, even after that was proven beyond any doubt, there remains a broad lack of understanding of who the principals in this case were and why they did what they did. There is even a great deal of confusion about how it was done. My intention here is to settle all of those questions.

To do that, I have spent the last year following every lead and tracking down every loose end relating to what happened. I’ve traveled to the far corners of the continental United States and talked with hundreds of people who had some peripheral involvement in the case or who were merely acquainted with one of the principals. From my conversations with those people, I was able to construct a narrative of the events, which I have carefully documented through available records, publications, and periodicals.

The things that I discovered need to be included in the history of the event. That is the purpose of this book. Organizing the massive amount of data that I’ve compiled into a coherent narrative has been no easy task. There are two distinctly different kinds of information in this book. First, there are the events of which I have first-hand knowledge. These things are told to you from my personal perspective, as I experienced them.

But then there are the events that occurred long before my time or far removed from my personal experience. These things, of necessity, must be told from the viewpoint of an outside observer. I suppose I could have told you how each piece of history came into my possession, but I think it would make for tedious reading.

Presenting this material in narrative form required that I take certain liberties. Mainly this involves the dialog of the characters involved. Obviously, I wasn’t there to hear the conversations, so I have constructed what I believe to be a reasonable and fair representation of what may have been said at the time, based on what I found in my research. Clearly, that is not foolproof, but keep in mind, this is not a history book.

Eric Larsson

Town Marshal

Riggins, Idaho

Part One

Backstory - 1950s

Mack McGuire

The sound was unlike anything he had ever heard, but it was the shock wave that rattled Mack McGuire out of his berth and planted him on the steel deck. It felt as though the stern of his 45-foot tugboat had been lifted out of the water and then dropped. The sound of water crashing down onto the roof of the pilothouse only reinforced the impression.

Great leaping Jesus! What the hell was that? shouted McGuire, as he bolted up the ladder from the crew compartment into the pilothouse.

Gene Bancroft stood at the helm, staring back at the wake, where only a moment before his 18-foot pontoon boat had been.

I don’t know! It just blew up! Gene yelled.

Still wearing only his stained underwear, Mack ran out onto the aft deck and tried to force his eyes to see something in the darkness. The boat was stopped, but the propeller was still turning, kicking up a frothy wake. At about that same moment, Gene hastily pulled the throttle back to idle and shifted out of gear, and the wake subsided.

Hit it with the spotlight, Mack called.

Before the words were out, the huge spotlight mounted atop the pilothouse lit up. Gene turned the light to starboard as far as it would go, which wasn’t far enough to illuminate the area behind the old tugboat. He shifted into reverse, and then spun the helm to port. As the boat came about, the spotlight revealed a field of floating debris that was all that remained of Gene’s dive platform. Off to the side there was something that looked at first like the rounded back of a great whale.

What the hell is that? Gene asked.

Peering off the stern, Mack called back, Can you tell what that thing is?

As the boat continued to come about, Gene trained the spotlight on what turned out to be a floating mass of some sort of fabric. A second too late, he recognized what it was and cut the throttle. But by then, the parachute shroud lines were thoroughly entangled with the propeller, and the parachute itself wrapped tightly around the drive shaft.

Son-of-a-bitch! That’s just what I need, Mack thundered.

As Gene shifted into neutral, he automatically checked his navigation charts. The depth where he was should be no more than 30 or 40 feet, so he released his anchor and listened to the rattle of the chain, still trying to grasp what had gone wrong.

After letting out a hundred feet of anchor chain, Gene set the capstan lock and went back to the helm, where he shut down the engine. In the silence that followed, Mack heard the distant sound of a jet aircraft somewhere overhead. Military, he immediately concluded, because virtually all jet aircraft were military, although within a year Boeing and Douglas would both be producing passenger jets.

It was 2:00 a.m. on February 5, 1958. An unusual cold snap had dropped the overnight temperature down into the thirties, a fact that slowly penetrated Mack McGuire’s adrenalin-induced euphoria, and he started to shiver violently.

I’ve got to go below and get dressed before I freeze my ass off, he told Gene. Then I want you to tell me exactly what happened.

Ten minutes later, sitting with a steaming mug of coffee that was at least eight hours old, Mack listened to Gene’s recounting of the event, which did little to clarify what had happened.

I was just plugging along at about five knots when all hell broke loose. There was a huge crash, and the boat just stopped cold. One time I was in the crew on a trawler, and our net got snagged on an uncharted shipwreck. It felt just like that—except we didn’t have no net out. Then about a thousand gallons of water crashed down on the boat, and that was it. I didn’t do nothing!

Mack took a deep breath. Well, switch on the anchor light, because we’re not going anywhere before daylight.

Key West, Summer of 1954

How McGuire and Bancroft happened to be in Wassaw Sound on the South Carolina coast that night was, in a sense, the story of Mack’s career—if you chose to call it that. Mack was a salvage diver. And that meant that he was a treasure hunter, though he never used that term to describe himself.

He’d learned scuba diving in the Navy, back during the Korean War—not that he ever went to Korea. In fact, he’d been stationed at Key West, where he was part of the EOD unit—Explosive Ordinance Disposal. The original Navy SEALS, a decade later, had all been EOD divers.

You had to be a tough son of a bitch to be part of EOD, and James McGuire Jr. was, if nothing else, a tough son of a bitch. Living in the enlisted men’s barracks on Key West in the early 1950s, Mack had heard a lot of talk about the legendary shipwrecks all along the Keys and up the Florida coast. In those days, much of the local economy was built around sponge diving, and Mack spent many off-duty hours in the watering holes on lower Duval Street drinking warm beer and listening to the sponge divers tell stories of finding Spanish coins—mostly silver pieces of eight, but also an occasional gold doubloon.

In the old days, sponge collection was done by free-diving, without the benefit of any air supply beyond what the diver could hold in his lungs. Some divers used stone or lead weights to help them go deeper, sometimes as deep as fifty feet, but they were always limited by how long they could hold their breaths. Then the large-scale operations moved in, with their hard hats, canvas suits and lead-weighted boots, and before long, they dominated the business.

But the old timers, the free-divers, resented the hard-hat divers, claiming that their weighted boots destroyed the young sponges and threatened the future of the sponge diving business. But both the free-divers and the hard-hats were intrigued by the newly invented scuba gear that the Navy was using, and they pumped McGuire and the other EOD men for any information they could get.

Scuba diving as a sport developed only after it was applied first for military work and then for salvage diving—meaning treasure hunting. And Key West was at the epicenter of that evolution. Mack was among the very first to see that scuba—an acronym for Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus—would be a huge advantage in the search for and recovery of sunken treasure.

One weekend he smuggled two sets of Navy scuba gear off the base, and accompanied by a sponge diver, he went to a site where Spanish coins were often found. Even though he found nothing of value that day, the ballast rocks, pottery shards and cannon balls that he saw convinced him that his future was in salvage diving.

In the summer of 1954, when his enlistment was just about up, Mack heard about a big Navy surplus yard in Orlando, where it was rumored that you could buy everything from used shoes to PT boats for pennies on the dollar. Using his last week’s leave, he drove his Indian motorcycle 400 miles up Highway 1 to see for himself what was there. And that’s where he found his destiny, in the form of the 45-foot harbor tug that he simply had to buy.

She was a diesel-powered, steel hulled craft built in 1944 by the Burger Boatworks. Mack knew next to nothing about boats, but this one had everything he thought he’d need for an underwater salvage operation. The price was $5,000—an almost unfathomable fortune, especially for a Navy E-4 diver about to be discharged and with no sign of gainful employment on the horizon. But he had to have that boat, so he did what under any other circumstances would have been unthinkable. He called his old man.

There’s a fortune out there—thousands of dollars, hundreds of thousands, maybe—just waiting for someone with a good boat and scuba gear to dive down and pick it up, he told the old man.

James McGuire Sr. had the money. Mack knew that. He was an investment banker in Buffalo, New York, and had managed to amass a fortune, mainly through hard work and force of will—two things that the old man sincerely believed his son was incapable of. In that regard, he was wrong, but that’s not what ultimately led him to put up the money to buy the boat.

"Jimmy, what you need to do is get yourself a college education and make something of yourself," the old man insisted.

Mack pretended to consider the suggestion, which he’d heard many times before. Well, they say that Congress might expand the G.I. Bill to include everyone who served, not just those who were in Korea. If they do that, I might be able to afford to go to school. But in the meantime—

He let that hang for a few seconds, and then mused, Maybe if I could move in with you and Shannon, I’d be able to go to the U of Buffalo. But I don’t know how I’d pay for books and tuition.

Shannon was Mack’s step-mother, though she was barely older than Mack himself. He knew that there’d be hell to pay if James let his son move in with them. There was a period of silence so long that Mack thought maybe the old man had suffered some kind of medical catastrophe.

Finally, he heard a deep and meaningful sigh. Where the hell do you plan to live if you spend all my money on some damned off-cast boat?

I’ll live on the boat. There’s a full galley, with a stove and refrigerator, and everything. There’s a berthing compartment and head, too. I can live on there for nothing.

Nothing, my ass! You’ll need to buy fuel, won’t you? And where’ll you tie-up? You can’t dock a boat for free, you know. And you’ll probably want to eat, too. Where’s all that coming from?

I’m telling you, there’s Spanish treasure lying all over the place down here. The first one who gets down there with a scuba tank can just gather it up, like picking cherries off a cherry tree.

That’s unlikely. If it were that easy, someone would already be doing it.

But that’s just it. This whole scuba thing is brand new. I’ll be the first one out there using it.

And if it’s as easy as you seem to think, how long will be before every Tom, Dick, and Harry is out there picking up all this treasure? It isn’t an infinite supply, you know. And how are you going to know where the shipwrecks are?

I have that covered, Mack insisted. He was off-script at this point, simply saying whatever popped into his head. There’s a sponge diver who’ll show me where to dive.

Immediately realizing how unrealistic that sounded, he added, All he wants is five percent of what I find. In reality, he hadn’t even talked with his sponge-diving friend, but it seemed reasonable enough. After all, he had taken Mack out to where he’d found the coins.

This all sounds like a goddamned pipedream, the old man grumbled. And then he said, But if you are sure of this, I can make you a loan. You’ll have to pay it back, you understand, with interest, too.

That’ll be no problem, Mack said, still absorbing his shock.

How much do you need?

Mack hadn’t expected this, so he hadn’t done the arithmetic. Six thousand will do it, he said, with his fingers crossed.

I’ll hold title on that boat for collateral, the old man said. And if you don’t pay me back, I’ll sell it right out from under you.

Mack camped out that night in a school yard for colored kids, where there were outhouses next to the rusty playground swings. The white schools had indoor plumbing, but the doors would be locked, so the colored school was his best option. It didn’t bother him any. He’d gotten to know many colored guys in the Navy, and they always got along okay. But that wasn’t something he’d ever tell the old man, who believed that negroes were inferior creatures.

The next morning, he picked up a check for six thousand dollars from the Western Union office in Orlando. A wide-eyed teller at the First State Bank counted out the money and asked for the third time, "Are you sure you want all that in cash? That’s a lot of money."

Before leaving the bank, Mack counted out $1,500 and zipped it into chest pocket on his leather motorcycle jacket. The remaining $4,500 went into a different pocket. At the surplus yard, he stepped aboard the Navy gray tugboat for the first time. As he looked around, he saw clear signs of neglect—as you would expect on a surplus vessel—but no conspicuous signs of damage or abuse.

The enlisted man who approached wore tropical whites, and Mack checked his insignia. He was a Storekeeper First Class—a man who’d put in a lot of years in the Navy supply corps, and he probably could recite several thousand Federal Stock Numbers off the top of his head for commonly used items. But it was very unlikely that he knew much about boats, even though he was high enough in rank to have the authority to negotiate the sale.

Mack introduced himself, not mentioning that he was a Navy enlisted man two significant notches below the rank of the storekeeper. What can you tell me about this boat? he asked.

She’s a real good solid boat—originally used at the Bremerton ship yard in Puget Sound. They hauled her down to Mayport, but then with all the cutbacks after Korea, there was nobody to man her. Hasn’t been used in a year.

Is it in running condition?

"Oh, you bet! Navy takes good care of its boats. And she’s a steal at five thousand."

Can we start the engine? I gotta hear it run before I can pay that kind of money for a boat, he told the storekeeper.

It says right here that it runs, the storekeeper answered.

Yeah, but I have to hear it for myself.

After some more discussion, the storekeeper reluctantly agreed to let him start the engine if that’s what it was going to take to close the sale. Mack knew next to nothing about running a diesel engine, but he’d once hitched a ride in a semi-truck, and the driver explained how you had to pre-heat the glow-plugs or the engine wouldn’t start. So, when he stood at the helm in the pilothouse, he scanned the controls in search of a switch for the glow-plugs. He spotted a toggle next to the stainless-steel button that he hoped was the starter switch.

He flipped the toggle, just as the truck driver had done, and heard a buzzing sound. After ten seconds, he pressed the starter button. The big old six-cylinder engine rattled to life, and for several minutes Mack listened to its clatter. The storekeeper followed along when Mack went down to the engine room, which was generally clean, but a loose connector in a lubricant line was dripping oil on the exhaust header, creating a cloud of blue smoke.

Oh man, you hear the way that sounds? Mack asked with an expression of deep concern.

The storekeeper shrugged. What about it?

What about it? Mack rhetorically echoed. Don’t you hear all that clattering?

He knew perfectly well that that’s the way diesel engines sound.

So? There was uncertainty in the storekeeper’s voice.

There’s gotta be something really wrong for it to sound like that!

The storekeeper hesitated. They told me that it was in good running condition.

Yeah. But just listen to it. If your car sounded like that, would you trust it to get you across town?

I only know what they tell me.

Back in the pilothouse, Mack shut down the engine and gave the storekeeper a dispirited shrug. I just don’t know. I mean, what if I have to replace that engine? That’ll probably cost a grand! Shaking his head slowly, deep in thought, he finally said, I’ll tell you what. If you’ll take four grand in cash, I’ll take my chances on that engine.

The storekeeper looked at the deck and growled, No chance. I can’t go that low. $4,750 is my rock bottom price.

Mack unzipped his jacket and pulled out the fat roll of hundred-dollar bills. All I have is $4,500. If you’ll take that, I’ll take the boat.

Trying his best not to stare at the roll of cash, the storekeeper shook his head sadly. Well, you’ll have to get her out of here today. This old tub’s been taking up dock space way too long.

The deal was made, and James McGuire Jr. became Captain James McGuire. He cajoled the storekeeper into helping him roll his motorcycle down the gangplank onto the deck of the tugboat, where he lashed it to a stanchion. The storekeeper told him where the nearest fuel dock was, and then helped cast off the lines. On the way to the fuel dock, Captain McGuire considered what he should name his new acquisition.

There was a new movie out, starring a stunning blonde actress named Marilyn Monroe, who Mack thought was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.

"Miss Marilyn," he said to himself. He repeated it, and it still sounded good.

As he approached the fuel dock, he pulled the throttle back to idle and quickly realized that he was going way too fast. The 40,000 lb. weight of the boat meant that there was a lot of inertia behind his three-knot speed—a lot of inertia. The attendant on the dock, who had started walking out to help with the lines, suddenly started backing away from the eminent collision. Mack threw the gearbox into reverse and pushed the throttle forward.

The engine let out a mighty roar, and a cloud of black smoke poured from the exhaust stack. The gap between the boat and the dock continued to diminish at an alarming rate. But just before the impact, the boat slowed almost to a stop. The starboard bow gently nudged against the dock as Mack frantically pulled back the throttle and cut the engine.

Had me scared for a second there, the attendant commented.

Mack admitted, She’s a bit larger than I’m used to.

The truth was that the boats used in EOD work were mostly rubber inflatables with ten-horse Johnson outboards. Sure, he knew his way around boats, but he’d never attempted to handle anything close to the size of this one.

While the attendant pumped No. 2 diesel into the boat, Mack asked him where he could get navigation charts that would get him safely back to Key West. The attendant pointed him toward a chandlery adjacent to the moorage. It cost nearly $140 to fill the two fuel tanks—over 700 gallons. He hoped that would be enough to get him to Key West. He had no idea how much fuel the boat would use.

Is there someplace I can tie-up for the night? he asked the attendant, who pointed to a vacant space adjacent to the fuel dock.

Nobody’s gonna say nothing if you tie up there. Guy who leases that slip had to pull his boat out for maintenance. She’ll be on the hard for at least another month.

Mack carefully idled over to the vacant dock, where he tied-up. Since there was an outlet, he connected to shore power. No sense running the generator if he didn’t have to. Besides, he didn’t yet know if it even worked.

The man at the chandlery was helpful and appeared to be fairly knowledgeable. It’ll be about 390 nautical miles to Key West. If you can cruise at eight knots, you’ll be about 48 hours underway. Probably gonna burn four or five gallons an hour, so figure about— He paused to calculate. Somewhere around 240 gallons ought to get you there.

After dropping his roll of charts in Miss Marilyn’s pilothouse, Mack hitched a ride to the nearest Piggly Wiggly store, where he bought two large boxes full of groceries and supplies. In the check-out line he struck up a conversation with an old man who offered to give Mack a ride back down to the pier. Good thing, too, because he’d have had to make two trips if he had to pack it down there on foot.

He spent the afternoon and evening going over the boat. He found a toolbox in the engine room and tightened that leaky oil line. Then he set out to learn as much as he could about the mechanical systems onboard. When he tested the marine band VHF radio, he used his Navy call sign, safely assuming that nobody would challenge him. He was quite pleased—and relieved—to find the communications equipment functional.

The boat was meant to be operated by two men. That was going to be a problem. He’d already experienced the challenge of getting it docked and tied-up, but the real question was whether he’d be able to keep track of the engine’s essential functions while manning the helm. Even going to the head would be a problem while underway, although there was a tie-strap for the ship’s wheel. That would let him step away from the helm for a minute or two, and that would just have to do.

After dark, he sat in the galley with charts spread over the table, plotting his course. If he could make a hundred nautical miles in a fourteen-hour day, it would be a four-day cruise to Key West. He had five days leave remaining. He’d be within sight of land the whole time, so unless a storm came up, navigation wouldn’t be an issue. From his EOD experience, he knew where to find the Navy weather forecasts on the radio. It was not yet hurricane season, and there currently were no storms being tracked. But he had to trust that things would stay that way.

Early the next morning, Captain McGuire took Miss Marilyn out to sea, and made the trip without difficulty, arriving at Key West Bight at sunset on the fourth day.  A hand-painted sign pointed to the transient dock, where Mack found a space big enough for his boat. With some amateurish maneuvering, he managed to get tied-up without damaging the dock or any of the boats around him.

He spent all of the next day trying to find a place where he could moor the boat and set up his salvage business. At two dollars a day, he couldn’t afford to stay at the transient dock for very long. But finding a more affordable moorage turned out to be a tougher problem than he’d anticipated. After a week of asking around, a shrimp fisherman suggested he take a look at Big Coppitt Key.

"A few years back, someone got the idea that rich people would pay big money for places to tie-up their yachts, so he dug canals and platted about thirty lots adjacent to them. He figured he could get about five thousand bucks for each lot, because of the boat moorage. But the rich people never showed up. Now you could probably pick up a lot for five hundred."

This wasn’t the first too good to be true real estate deal Mack had heard of, so as he rode his motorcycle to Big Coppitt Key, he wasn’t optimistic. He turned north off the Overseas Highway and followed the road past a flooded quarry, one of several where a concrete company had excavated limestone for as long as anyone could remember. It was probably the industrial nature of the key that had kept the rich people away.

Near the northwest corner of the small island, Mack came to the canals that the fisherman had described.  Where the developer had envisioned rows of fifty-thousand-dollar mansions, Mack found most of the lots occupied by house trailers. He rode slowly up and down each road, trying to find a place where he could get a glimpse of the canals and determine if they were wide enough and deep enough for his boat. At the end of the northern-most canal, he found public access and a rudimentary boat ramp.

From what he could see, the canal would accommodate his boat, providing he could find a piece of property that was affordable and for sale.  Half way up Del Mar Boulevard, Mack found a real estate sign next to a windowless wooden garage or shop building. The scorched siding on one side of the building, together with blackened patch of ground next to it showed where a trailer house had recently burned. Maybe that was why the place was for sale.

He copied down the address and phone number for the Key West real estate agent, and went back to his motorcycle. At the real estate office on Flagler Avenue, Mack glanced at his notes and asked to see Mel Wallace. He was surprised when the lady at the counter said that she was Mel Wallace.

My name is actually Melissa, but if I put that on my signs, nobody would ever call. A lot of people don’t think a woman can be a businessman. You aren’t one of them, are you?

He quickly said, No. I’m fine with it, uh, Mel.

Okay then. What can I do for you?

There’s a place on Big Coppitt Key…

Del Mar Boulevard, Mel finished for him.

That’s the one. What are the details on it?

They’re asking $750. I think it’s a steal. The lot measures 100 feet wide and 75 feet deep. The building has a concrete floor, water and sewer, and it’s wired for electricity—120 and 240.

What do you know about the canal? How deep is it.

It’s twelve to eighteen feet deep all the way. That seawall goes down to limestone bedrock at fourteen feet.

What’s the biggest boat people bring in there?

There’s a good-sized fishing boat that goes in and out pretty often. I’d say it’s about a 34-footer.

I have a 45-footer. Deep draft—almost six feet. I think I’d like to take her up there and see if I get stuck.

From everything I know, it should be okay, but honestly, I don’t know that anyone’s ever taken a boat that size into the canal.

McGuire took a deep breath. Only one way to find out. What he didn’t say was that if he did manage to get up to that seawall, he intended to tie up. He was already past the ten-day limit at the transient dock, and the harbormaster was starting to complain.

The trick to getting his motorcycle aboard the tugboat without help was to hit the ramp with a little bit of speed, to keep the bike going in a straight line across the twelve-inch-wide boarding plank. Then he had to jam on the brakes before running off the other side of the boat into the water. He held his breath, aimed the bike and cranked the throttle. Three seconds later, he skidded to a stop with the front tire against the portside bulwark.

Ninety minutes after that, Miss Marilyn approached the Del Mar canal. McGuire pulled the throttle to idle speed and crept forward. Suddenly it felt like he was driving the Queen Mary. At the entry to the canal, he had to make a sharp left turn, and the channel width gave him no margin for error. On his first try, he found himself unable to make the turn, so he cranked the wheel the other way and reversed his thrust. When the bow was in the center of the channel, he shifted into forward and eased ahead.

Once past that narrow spot, the canal widened out and Mack was able to relax. He brought the boat alongside the seawall and shut down the engine. He spent the night there, and in the morning, rode his motorcycle back to the base. With only a few days left on his enlistment, nobody objected when he asked for early liberty to visit Mel Wallace.

Do you think they’d take $500 for it? he asked.

All I can do is ask, she answered.

After a quick phone call, Mel said, They’ll let you have it for $600, but that’s as low as they’ll go.

Mack extracted his roll of cash and peeled off six bills.

Don’t you want to look in the building before you buy it? Mel asked.

Well, okay. Can we do it now?

They went back to Del Mar Boulevard in Mel’s 1953 Bel Air hardtop. As they approached the property, Miss Marilyn came into view.

"What’s this?"

Well, I told you I was going to see if she’d fit in the canal.

"It’s huge!"

Yeah, Mack agreed. Let’s take a look in that shop.

Key West, September 20, 1954

On the day of his discharge, Mack’s buddies threw a big party for him at the gin mill called Sloppy Joe’s. It was a raucous party that included a dozen girls on loan from a brothel on Rose Lane, one of whom landed in Mack’s lap. Over the course of the next three hours, he became roaring drunk and decided that he was in love with the girl, whose name—he was pretty sure—was Marci.

In an act of uncharacteristic recklessness, Mack hopped on his bike and waved for Marci to get on behind him, and then he roared up Highway 1 to Big Coppitt Key. He set out to give Marci a tour of his boat, but the tour stopped when they got to the berthing compartment.

The next morning, Mack was sipping a cup of very strong coffee when Marci walked into the galley, fresh from the shower, wearing nothing but the ribbon in her hair. And with that, in the light of day and stone sober, Mack knew that, yes, he was in love with Marci, so he asked her to marry him. And then they went back to the berthing compartment.

Later, Mack gave his fiancé the rest of the tour of his boat before taking her back to town. He dropped Marci at her boarding house and went off looking for a justice of the peace. While he was gone, Marci packed everything she owned into the trunk of the faded Model A coupe that her dad gave her two years before, when she announced that she was leaving the family home in Missouri to sing in a Miami nightclub. She was a pretty good singer, but the band that hired her was awful. The gig didn’t last a month, and then Marci was unemployed, broke, and a thousand miles from home. So, she did what she could do.

She hadn’t started the Model A’s engine since arriving in Key West way back in January, so the battery was stone dead and Mack had to push the old car to get the engine started. After a fifteen-minute stop at the courthouse—thirteen spent filling out forms and two minutes for the wedding ceremony—Mr. and Mrs. McGuire embarked on their eleven-mile drive to Big Coppitt Key, Marci driving the Model A and Mack following on the motorcycle.

He’d been out of the Navy for 24 hours. He had a tugboat, six-hundred ninety-one dollars, a new wife, and no idea how to make a living as a salvage diver. One thing he had going for him was the pile of scuba gear that somehow disappeared from the Navy base and appeared at Mack’s discharge party. Some of his friends had delivered it and stacked it behind Mack’s shop while he and Marci were getting married. After a thirty-minute honeymoon back onboard Miss Marilyn, Mack rode back to Key West to get some ideas from his old friend, the sponge diver.

The next day, with his apprentice deckhand, Mack threaded his way around that narrow bend and back out to open water. From there he returned to the site where the sponge diver had found the coins. He had four full tanks of air—at least he assumed they were full. His friends wouldn’t steal empty tanks. Would they?

In fourteen feet of water, he released the anchor and let out forty feet of chain. Shifting into reverse, Mack revved the engine to set the anchor, and in the process accidentally learned his first lesson about treasure hunting. He put on his gear and went over the stern into the crystal-clear water, where he found that the wheel-wash from setting the anchor had blown a layer of sand from over the wreck site. Scattered everywhere were bits of pottery, silverware, plates, a few silver coins, and a bronze cannon. He worked the site for two days, until all of his scuba tanks were empty and Marci was bored nearly to death.

Jimmy, where’s the radio? she asked after his first dive. She showed no interest in the pile of artifacts he had brought up.

It’s mounted on the overhead, above the helm. Why?

I want to listen to some music. There’s nothing to do on this boat while you’re swimming.

Oh. I don’t have that kind of radio. The one in the pilothouse is for communication.

You mean it can’t play music?

I’ll buy you a new Philco radio before we go out again, Mack finally promised.

When they got back to Big Coppitt Key, Mack loaded the scuba tanks and all of the treasure he had recovered into Marci’s Model A. He again had to push-start it, so he added a new battery to his growing shopping list. In town, he went to see the sponge diver and find out how to convert salvaged treasure into spendable money. That led him to a pawn shop out on Palm Avenue, where the old man introduced him to the reality of the salvage business.

Okay. Everything you have here is contraband. You can tell the State of Florida about it, and they’ll identify everything of value and declare it to be property of the state. Then you can take whatever’s left to a state-approved museum and see if they’ll buy anything, which they won’t, because it’s just like a ton of stuff they already have.

Mack sputtered, But that’s not fair! How can the state just take everything? I’m the one who did all the work to recover it.

I’m not saying it’s fair. I’m just saying that’s the way it is.

Well, how the hell am I supposed to make any money? Mack demanded.

Black market, of course. I thought that’s why you were here. You sell everything to me, and I get it into stores on the mainland where this stuff can get sold into private collections. That’s the only place it has any value.

Okay, so how much is all this worth?

The pawn broker spent half an hour studying Mack’s haul, frequently referring to catalogs he kept under the counter, and finally announced that it came to a total of $480.

That sounds good, Mack said. You can have it all.

Not so fast. That’s $480 at the other end—the retail end. I will get half that amount when I sell it on the mainland. And I have to make money too. What I can give you is twenty percent. Ninety-six dollars.

Ninety-six dollars, Mack grumbled. I worked for two days rounding this stuff up

That’s the price. Take it or leave it.

I guess I’ll take it, then.

As he folded the money into his pocket, Mack asked, Is there any value to a cannon barrel. It looks like it’s made of bronze.

The pawn broker’s face lit up. Oh, now there’s something people will buy. A bronze cannon can bring as much as two grand—that’s four hundred for you. You know where there is one?

Yeah, if I can figure out how to get it out of the water. I don’t even know how much the damned thing weighs.

Could be half a ton, depending what kind it is. You need a good deck-mounted crane.

Where can I get something like that?

The man dug around in a drawer under the counter and pulled out a dirty, creased business card for Marty’s Marine Fabrication. If Marty doesn’t have it, he’ll make it.

Hey, do you have a decent radio in here—something that’ll work on six volts?

I have some car radios. They aren’t new, but they work good. One of them came out of a Cadillac.

How much is that one?

I’ll sell it to you for ten bucks—and I’ll throw in an aerial for it, no charge.

With eighty-six dollars and the Cadillac radio, Mack drove to Marty’s Marine Fabrication.

How much you want to lift? Marty asked.

I guess maybe half a ton.

So, you need a one-ton hoist. You always double what you think you’re gonna need.

Okay, so what do you have?

"I don’t have anything like that on hand right now. I do have a five-ton crane that I can make a deal on. You’ll have to put new seals in the main cylinder and the hand pump, though. But once you do that, she’ll work hard for you. I can let you have that for a hundred bucks."

I’ll can give you seventy-five. It’s all I have.

You’re killing me. I can’t sell it for that.

What do you have that I can buy for seventy-five dollars?

Nothing. Look, you seem like a nice kid. I’m gonna let you have that five-ton crane. But next time you need something, you come back here, and I’ll give you a deal—just don’t try to jew me down when I quote a price.

To carry the crane in the Model A, they had to stand it up in the trunk, with the arm reaching forward over the roof, held in place by ropes tied to the bumpers at all four corners. With his remaining eleven dollars, he put some gas in the car and bought the seals and hydraulic fluid that the crane needed. He never did get the battery for the old Ford, but when he was clearing out the trunk for the crane, he ran across the starter crank, so at least he didn’t have to push-start the damned thing.

Back at the boat, his first task was to install the Cadillac radio in the galley. Marci tuned-in an AM station from Key West and leaned back in her chair. She ran her fingers through her strawberry blond hair and closed her eyes. She propped her feet on another chair, with her bare legs in plain view.

You’re the best, Jimmy!

Forty-five minutes later, he went to work on the crane. The tools that he’d found on Miss Marilyn were hardly adequate for the job, but somehow, he managed to get the new seals installed. The crane seemed to work all right, but Mack had no way to mount it on the deck of his boat. For that, he went up the street to the store cleverly named Big Coppitt Key Market, and used the pay phone to call an old friend back on the Navy base.

The next day, the friend showed up with a Navy service truck that had a portable welding rig on the back. He backed up next to the seawall and dragged his cables out so that he could weld the crane to the deck near the stern of Miss Marilyn. He even brought along a can of Navy gray paint so that Mack could finish the job.

About the time they were finishing, Marci appeared on deck with a couple of cold beers.

Thought you boys might be thirsty.

Hey, aren’t you—

This is my wife, Mack interrupted. Marci.

The welder took the beer and chugged about half of it in his first gulp.

Big Coppitt Key, 1955

Mack recovered the cannon, and two others. But every time he had something to sell, he had something else that he needed to buy.  As hard as he tried to hang on to the six-hundred ninety-one dollars left from what he’d borrowed from his old man, Mack had to dip into it a few dollars at a time for food, fuel, and things he had never even knew existed, like Kotex and a mystifying array of lotions that soon occupied every horizontal surface in the head.

At the first of each month, he dutifully sent $100 to the old man, toward his $6,000 debt. That lasted exactly three months. The fourth month, he sent a letter explaining that he’d had some unexpected expenses and would make a double payment the next month. The unexpected expenses had to do with Marci’s visit to the doctor, who had confirmed her pregnancy.

Since going out on the boat made her throw up, Mack was forced to buy Marci a little travel trailer that he parked next to the shop, which by then was filled with all sorts of things salvaged from the sea, alongside the roads, in the scrap yard, or anyplace else Mack could find something that he might need some day. Even though he bought a brand-new Sylvania clock-radio for the trailer, Marci complained about being bored whenever Mack went out on the boat.

By the time James McGuire III was born, Mack had given up any hope of repaying the old man’s loan. He rationalized that the old man never expected to be repaid, so it didn’t really matter—it was only his pride that had compelled him to make payments in the first place, and in his current financial condition, he couldn’t afford pride.

When Marci left, she took the Model A, the radio, her clothes, and all of that bottled stuff from the bathroom. She left a note saying that the lady next door was taking care of the baby. Mack was crushed, because he really had loved Marci, and he’d tried his best to keep her happy. It was just that she wanted something that he couldn’t provide, and he didn’t have any idea what it was.

The lady next door was a middle-aged spinster named Trudy Parker. She came to love little Jay-Jay, as he was called, and raised him as the child she would never have. Mack never saw or heard from Marci again, and settled into an informal relationship with Trudy. Whatever money Mack might otherwise have used to repay the loan from his old man went instead to Trudy to support his son.

The little trailer and shop building on Del Mar Boulevard remained Mack’s home base for his salvage business. Whenever he was there, he played the role of father to Jay Jay, and while he never felt any particular affection toward Trudy, he always appreciated what she did for his son.

Except for that one day in February, 1958, James McGuire’s legacy as a salvage diver would have been no different from that of hundreds of other treasure hunters who never managed to hit the big score. At times, he had been tantalizingly close, including a week in the mid-1960s that he spent on the site where Mel Fisher later made a fortune recovering treasure from the Spanish ship Nuestra Señora de Atocha.

The big difference between Mel Fisher and James McGuire is that Mack never had backers—people who would put up the money needed to conduct large scale search and recovery operations. In the underwater salvage business, these wealthy patrons were never, ever called investors. When a person makes an investment, there is a legal expectation of financial return. But for backers, there is no such expectation. Fisher always had backers. Mack didn’t.

Scraping along, always managing to find just enough booty to keep fuel in the boat and food on the table, Mack followed all of the leads gleaned from many nights in the taverns and bars up and down the Florida Keys. He had a succession of deck hands, but never any long-term partnerships. Then, in the autumn of 1957, Gene Bancroft approached Mack with an intriguing proposal.

She wasn’t, strictly speaking, a blockade runner, Bancroft explained. "The Georgiana was built to be an armed cruiser for the Confederacy but got sunk on her maiden voyage in March, 1863. I know where the wreck is—right offshore outside Charleston Harbor, in twenty-five feet of water."

Is that general knowledge?

"No. I imagine other people know that there’s a wreck there, but I doubt that anybody else knows that it’s Georgiana."

And how do you know that?

"I was scuba diving off the Isle of Palms a couple of years ago with an old fishing buddy. He took me out to the shipwreck, to look for fish. Down inside the shipwreck I saw a shape that didn’t look natural, so I picked it up. I took it home and cleaned it up, and it turned out to be a clay beer bottle from Glasgow, Scotland.

"When I went to sell the bottle, an artifact expert told me that it dated back to the 1860s. Then he told me that a lot of the Civil War blockade runners came from Glasgow. I did some research about blockade running, and that’s how I learned about the Georgiana. I went back to the Isle of Palms and made two more dives on the wreck, and I’m convinced that it is actually the Georgiana."

Mack wasn’t impressed. That’s interesting, but I don’t see any money in salvaging Civil War era beer bottles.

The thing is, at the time, the Brits were unofficially supporting the Confederacy, hoping that the Rebs could cause the collapse of the U.S. government, so that England could step into the vacuum and reclaim the colonies. They were still fighting the American Revolution. They made a habit of sending aid to the Rebs whenever they had the opportunity—and the transport of a newly built ship was most certainly just such an opportunity. For years after the end of the war, there were rumors that there was a load of gold onboard.

If there was, there certainly ought to be documentation somewhere, Mack said.

"Not necessarily. At the time of the sinking, the Confederacy was reeling from the disaster at Antietam. A lot of people in the South started thinking it was all over, so record-keeping became kind of haphazard. Even if any official records did once exist, most everything got burned during the last months of the war."

Yeah, but if the wreck is in shallow water close to shore, wouldn’t they have salvaged it right after it sunk?

"You’re right about it being in a place where salvage might have been easy, and the captain of the Union ship that sank Georgiana saw that too. He didn’t want any Confederates salvaging weapons or ammo from the wreck, so he burned it. A bunch of gunpowder blew up and put an end to any ideas of salvage. Besides that, the Confederacy was desperately short of manpower. Every able-bodied man was being pulled into the army. There was nobody left to work a shipwreck."

"Sure, but if there was a cargo of gold onboard, they’d surely have found someone to salvage it."

"Not if they didn’t know it was there. Look, communication between Britain and the Confederacy was really difficult. Everything had to be smuggled past the Federal’s blockade. Even if the Brits did send advance notice of the shipment, it’s quite possible that it never got through. The Rebs probably never had any idea what was aboard the Georgiana."

Okay then, how is it that nobody in the last hundred years has ever followed-up on the rumor of treasure onboard?

"Well, one reason is that before the end of the war, another blockade runner, a sidewheel steamer named Mary Bowers, ran aground on the wreckage of Georgiana and sank on top of it. That would complicate any ideas of recovery, and besides that, nobody ever had any proof that there was actually any gold onboard to begin with."

"So why should we spend a bunch of time and money searching for something that probably doesn’t even exist?"

In answer, Gene pulled a folded piece of paper from his pocket. It was a photocopy of a letter, and from the style of handwriting, it appeared to be very old.

"This was written by a crewman who survived the sinking, soon after the end of the ‘Late War of Northern Aggression,’ as he called it. He says that he helped carry four wooden boxes onto Georgiana before she sailed. The boxes were small, about half the size of an apple box, but so heavy that it took two men to carry each one. They were placed in the captain’s cabin. Now, that sounds to me a whole lot like gold."

Mack shrugged. How did you get this letter? How do you know it’s real? And how many people have seen it before you?

"The letter has been in a trunk in the attic of an old house in Bloomingdale—a little spot on the map in the northern part of Chatham County. The house had been in the same family since the 1850s, and somehow survived Sherman’s March to the Sea. Then a year ago the last descendant died and left everything to the county historical society. A volunteer at the historical society found the letter while cataloging everything from the house. But it was just one of hundreds found in the trunk."

"How did you hear about it?"

The volunteer who found it is someone I’ve gone to over the years when I need help researching historical records. When she spotted this, she figured I’d be interested, so she made this copy and sent it to me. As far as I know, nobody else knows about it.

For the first time in the entire conversation, Mack saw that there might actually be something to what Gene was so excited about. Okay, so why are you telling me about it?

I heard about you. We sell things to the same people. They say you can be trusted. I’m not set up for this kind of a job. You are.

What’s your experience in salvage diving? Mack asked.

Well, like I said before, I’m a diver. I do scuba instruction for a dive shop in Savannah. I have a pontoon barge that I use to take people out for open-water dives. But I’ve never done any salvage diving.

Then how is it that you have things to sell to collectors?

My hobby. A couple of years ago, I picked up an old army surplus mine detector. I go around to the battlefields and find metal things with the mine detector. After I got this letter, I remembered the shipwreck and put two and two together, so I asked around. Your name came up, and here we are.

What’s your proposal?

Partners. Fifty-Fifty on expenses and profits. Nothing the government needs to know about.

The decision to make the salvage attempt in January was based on the theory that it would be best to do it when no sport divers would be around. The plan was for Mack to take Miss Marilyn up to Savannah. There he’d pick up Gene and his gear, and then they’d proceed to the wreck site.

All of that had gone according to plan. They decided to take Gene’s pontoon boat in tow, because once they anchored Miss Marilyn, it would be a lot easier to move around the wreck site using the smaller boat rather than having to move the much larger mother ship.

Right off, Mack saw the very identifiable framework for one of the sidewheels from Mary Bower. That tended to confirm that they were in the right place, as Gene had concluded. The problem was that the wreckage of the sidewheeler obscured most of what remained of Georgiana.

The old letter said that the boxes presumed to be carrying gold were in the captain’s cabin. Typically, the captain’s cabin would be located near the bridge on any vessel. On ships of that era, the bridge was about one-quarter to one-third of the ship’s length back from the bow. Georgiana was 205 feet long, so the bridge would have been 50 to 70 feet from the bow. If they could find something to pinpoint the location of Georgiana’s bow, they would have a better idea where to dig into the wreckage pile.

This was a difficult search. Most of the pieces of wreckage of Mary Bower were very heavy and were cemented in place by sea growth. Working around the perimeter of the wrecks, they looked for anything that could be associated with the bow of a Civil War era cruiser. It seemed to Mack that anchor chain or anchors would be pretty good indicators.

Three different times, they moved Miss Marilyn so that they could attempt to wheel-wash the sand off the wreckage at promising locations. Despite that, they never found an anchor or chain. Mack speculated that the Georgiana’s captain might have jettisoned the anchors while trying to outrun the Union gunboats.

Mack had spent six days and over 250 gallons of fuel just getting to the wreck site, so he was determined to find anything to offset some of their costs, even if they didn’t find any gold. There were some iron cannons on the sidewheeler, but Civil War cannons weren’t worth much. Nevertheless, they lifted them from the wreck, along with a bunch of bowls, plates, and cups from the galley of one of the ships. Perhaps the most valuable artifact they’d found was a Navy revolver.

After several days on the wreck, they were running low on fresh food, and more importantly, beer. So, Gene took his boat into Charleston Harbor to get supplies, while Mack stayed aboard Miss Marilyn and spent his time refilling scuba tanks and making minor repairs. Gene was gone most of the day. In fact, it was almost dark when Mack spotted the lights on the approaching pontoon boat.

The guy at the marina thought I must be crazy, coming out here this time of year.

I’m not sure I disagree with him, Mack said. We need to do something different.

You have an idea?

"Let’s assume that the Georgiana was heading toward the harbor entrance when she went down. That means that the bow would have been pointed south. So, if we work from that assumption, we’ll know where to dig."

We can give it a try. It can’t be any worse that what we’ve been doing, Gene said.

With Miss Marilyn positioned with her stern over the target area, they used the crane to lift pieces of wreckage off the pile. Most of what they lifted was junk, but a couple of brass portholes would bring in a few bucks. As they expanded the size of their excavation, they wound up burrowing under the sidewheeler’s boiler, which was far too heavy to move.

After nine days on the wreck, Mack had to make a decision. He estimated the total value of everything they’d recovered to be worth maybe a thousand dollars—two hundred for them. They were losing money and it was time to call it off. Gene might have argued for staying around, but the weather had changed, and the temperature had dropped by about twenty degrees. At night it was getting down near freezing.

Wassaw Sound, February 5, 1958

All of that explains how it happened that Miss Marilyn was anchored off the coast of Little Tybee Island with a parachute wrapped around her drive shaft and propeller. Mack shook his fist at the sky, cursing the Air Force or whoever had dropped whatever it was that had disabled his boat.

Maybe it was that new artificial moon, he speculated. Just a few days before, the United States had successfully orbited its first satellite, Explorer I; and maybe the Jupiter C launch vehicle had returned to earth—did they come down by parachute? Whatever it was, it had pulverized Gene’s boat and sent up a splash that must have gone fifty feet in the air.

Mack shined the spotlight across the dark water, looking for any clue that might tell him what had happened. But aside from the front part of the pontoon boat’s deck, which was still tethered by its tow line, there were only floating bits of debris. It would be light in a couple of hours. Then he could go down and see what had happened. What a shitty way to start the day.

It was 3:00 on a Sunday morning, and he had expected by this time to be tied up at Gene’s dock near the mouth of