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| Craig and
I made other diving trips to the Infante, and as both our salvage careers separated
we stayed in touch. As he worked the San Pedro a year or so later, he called and
led me out to the ballast pile near Indian Key. We remained friends until I moved to West
Palm Beach in 1970. I was distressed to learn from his step-daughter in 1986 that he had
committed suicide. I will never understand a loss like that. The salvage community lost a
great shining star.
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| After my initial
work with Craig, Harry Wiseman and I were more zeroed in on what we wanted to do and how
we wanted to do it. By the end of 1960 we had a hookah rig that would allow us to remain
on the bottom all day long and an airlift for each of us that moved sand at an easy pace
to let us recover artifacts. And somewhere along the way we added a suction dredge for
those shallow water sites where an airlift would stick out of the water too far to be
effective. We soon began finding artifacts as well as coins. |
Divers Steve Singer and Bob Weller with 2 gold coins
they recovered from a Spanish galleon.
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| We were bock on
the El Infante, again working near the stern section, when I recovered one of the
nicest gold rings I have ever seen. It was a double-banded gold wedding ring. The inside
band was solid, and around the outside a second band of gold rosettes was crimped and
gold-soldered so that the inner band was visible. It had been flattened, crushed by
ballast stones, but it was all there. Bob Page, a friend of mine, and the salvage
community, lived in New York where a jeweler was able to restore the ring. It was one of
my prized possessions until it was stolen from a museum case in West Palm Beach where it
was on exhibit. Harry was also recovering some nice artifacts, including a section of gold
chain, bronze powder flask, and a bag of silver coins. Between the two large athwartship
timbers in the stern , separated by less than four inches, I spotted the edge of something
golden, snuggled in amongst the shells and sand that filled the void. It was about twelve
inches deep, and with a coat hanger I was able to maneuver this beautiful gold religious
medallion out of the pocket and safely in hand. It had the image of St. Anne on one side,
and St. Josep on the other. I still have the medallion today. |
| A typical log entry during
our diving summer on El Infante: |
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"July 2, 1961. Have been diving consecutive weekends for the past 6 weeks on the
Infante. Today, in company with Harry Wiseman, my sons Bobby and Rick, Jim Tull, and Moe
Wiseman on board Frogfoot. Lall Baines and Jay Ford, and two others from the Pratt &
Whitney Company, on board another boat. We located a large formation of coral, tar, and
cannon balls. Broke out of the formation approx. 25 cannon balls, and hoisted the
remainder aboard Frogfoot. While breaking up this formation on the bottom Harry found a
gold plated button, conical in shape, and with a fastener loop on the back. Later while
breaking up the formation we brought aboard the boat, another copper plated button,
identical to the other, was found, also a copper shoe buckle and two human joints with
parts of fossilized tendons still attached. A total of 34 cannon balls were found in this
formation. I took 50 feet of underwater movies, and on the way back to Lowes Marina we
stopped off at Rodriguez Key and I filmed another 30 feet of a Barracuda attacking a fish
we had strung out on a fishing line." |
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| Over the next few
years we escorted a number of our friends and family, including my three sons, to the
large ballast mound that lies so near the edge of the Gulf Stream, and they have all come
away with the same exhilaration, a Christmas-every-day kind of feeling that we have
experienced. The Infante has given Harry and me some great memories, of days when
the dream of salvaging a Spanish sunken galleon was realistic and alive--of the "good
ole days."
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The "SCOOPMEN", Ed and Harold Matthews also
built some of the best "mailboxes" or "blowers" for the salvagers on
Florida's "Treasure Coast."
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CANNON, Florida Keys.
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