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There’s not much to see in Venice: fishermen, boat dealers and part suppliers, a couple of miles of boat docks. We wondered why a huge parking lot was filled with acres of pickup trucks. Our answer came when a Bell Long Ranger helicopter approached, hovered, and settled to the ground. It was emblazoned with the company name, Petroleum Helicopter, Inc. A small army of offshore oil riggers poured to the ground. They had left their trucks parked when they were ferried out for their rig rotation.
We checked into a motel, the only motel at the time. The oil field workers must have had some rather exciting parties, judging from the damage to the place. I have always been amused recalling the Plexiglas sign screwed into the wall above the television. It said:
NO BATTERY CHARGING OR DUCK CLEANING ALLOWED IN ROOM.
My shoestring expedition was off to a good start.
Our saving grace was a terrific little restaurant called Tom’s that was in the town of Buras. Tom’s specialty was Gulf oysters, and after shucking them, he’d pile them outside the restaurant. Back then the mound was nearly as high as the restaurant’s peaked roof. I still recall with fondness the chili-vinegar sauce his mama made. Nothing ever enhanced an oyster like that sauce. I was so impressed that when Dirk Pitt was chasing villains through the delta in the book Deep Six, I had him stop to eat at Tom’s.
We chartered a small fifteen-foot aluminum skiff from a local Cajun fisherman named John who lived in a mobile home near the river with his wife and tribe of kids. John treated Walt and me with great suspicion the first day and never said a word during the search. He was kind enough, though, to provide me with a lawn chair, so I could sit holding the gradiometer’s recorder in my lap with my ankle in a cast propped up on the gunwale, sticking over the bow like a battering ram.
The second day, John opened up a little. By the third day, he had opened the floodgates of his personality and begun to regale us with a string of Cajun jokes and stories. I wish I could remember them. Some were semi-jolly.
As we cruised up and down the Mississippi, trailing the gradiometer astern, I watched the needle on the recorder’s dial and listened to the sound recorder for any potential ferrous anomaly. With John in the stem of the skiff, steering, Walt sat in the middle, eyeing the shore with his rangefinder and keeping us in relatively straight lines until we neared the shore and he could guide John by eye.
The first day of the expedition, we concentrated on Manassas. The Civil War charts of the river were routinely matched to scale with modem charts and showed me that the east and west banks had not changed much over a hundred and twenty years. Only the bend on the east side in front of Fort St. Philip had filled in for a distance of fifty yards or more. I was quite sure Manassas had gone down near the west bank, because not only was it reported that the abandoned and burning ironclad had drifted past the mortar fleet, causing great concern, but Admiral Porter had tried to put a hawser on the vessel and save it as a curiosity. Unfortunately, at just that moment, there had been an internal explosion and Manassas had sunk into the river.
Walt, John, and I began our runs from the east bank and worked across the river to the west from Venice to the bend below Fort Jackson. I way overextended the search grid, because I wasn’t going to take any chances of missing Manassas. As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve found that old contemporary reports are not necessarily the gospel truth.
The hours dragged by as we slowly approached the west bank, dodging big ocean cargo ships coming and going to New Orleans. This part of the river was devoid of any shipwrecks. I failed to receive more than the occasional one- or two-gamma reading, suggesting that we were passing over nothing larger than a steel drum or anchor. We were pretty discouraged as we made our final run, brushing the edge of the little rock jetty that ran along the west bank below the levee.
Abruptly, halfway into the last lane about a quarter of a mile above Boothville-Venice High School, the recorder screamed and the needle went off the dial, as we crossed over a massive anomaly. The hit was not in the river, but alongside and beneath part of the levee. Normally under a foot of water, the area between the jetty and levee was dry because the river was low this time of year. This enabled Walt to jump from the boat and walk the gradiometer sensor along the base of the levee as I received a prolonged reading on the recorder.
Obviously, we couldn’t say with certainty this was Manassas. The fact that this was the only massive target in the approximate area where she was recorded to have sunk was all we had going for us. I marked the site on my chart, noting the landmarks on the other side of the levee, and called it a day.
The next morning, we headed across the river and began our search of the water just off Fort St. Philip for the Confederate ironclad Louisiana. She was a monstrous ship, one of the largest the South built. She was 264 feet long with a beam of 62 feet. Her construction had not been completed before the battle, and she was towed down from New Orleans and moored to the bank slightly above Fort St. Philip as a floating battery. If her engines had been functional, the battle might have taken a different turn. But she could contribute little in keeping the Union fleet from ru
After the battle, the Confederates set her on fire. Her mooring lines burned, and she began to drift downriver a short distance before being ripped apart by a massive blast when she was opposite the fort. We found a gigantic anomaly in the first hour of the search: no great feat, since I had studied a sketch of the exploding ironclad, showing a mushroom cloud of smoke erupting from the top of her casemate, done by Alfred Waud, the famous Civil War artist for Harper’s Weekly. The sketch put her directly off Fort St. Philip. She lies quite deep under the present shoreline in front of Fort St. Philip in a swampy area off the river. Her massive bulk contributed to the buildup of silt at the bend where she originally went down. Chris Goodwin, an archaeologist with an office in New Orleans, conducted an extensive survey over the site and, I believe, actually cored down to her wreck.
The third day, we searched the river for two other boats that went down in the battle: the Confederate gunboat Governor Moore and the Union gunboat Varuna—fittingly sunk by the Governor Moore. Moore has the distinction of having fired through her own bow after ramming Varuna, because her forward gun would have hurled its shot over the Union boat if she’d fired through her own port. Both ships went ashore within a hundred yards of each other.
We struck a large target to the south on the east bank around where Varuna ran aground to keep her from sinking, then continued upriver and found Governor Moore. She was easy to identify, because part of her, including the top of her boilers, was protruding from the water along the bank. The local boys often dive off of her boiler.
Walt and I had accomplished all we could. After bidding John farewell, we reluctantly departed our ritzy accommodations and headed for Baton Rouge, where we discovered the final resting place of the Confederate ironclad Arkansas.
I hope I’m forgiven for not spotting our targets with transits, as a true professional archaeologist would. By simply marking the wreck sites on charts with nearby landmarks, however, we’ve made it possible for anyone who follows our trail to have little trouble relocating the targets.
Total cost of the expedition?