Clive Cussler; Craig Dirgo by The Sea Hunters II

Walker graciously offered the Coast Guard’s assistance, and he arrived at the site on a fifty-five-foot buoy tender. The crane used to lift buoys was activated, and the cannon was raised into the sun for the first time in more than two hundred years and lowered onto the deck. From the site, it was then carried to the Coast Guard base in Port O’Connor and immersed in shallow water for temporary preservation until it could be transported, along with the cannonball, to Texas A&M University for conservation.
    James Jobling of the conservation lab eventually identified what turned out to be a British navy twenty-four-pounder carronade and dated it from the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century. Several months later, Jobling called and said that he and A&M had never received the check for $3,000, the cost of preserving the cannon. I checked with Wayne Gronquist, who assured me that the elite of Port O‘Connor would take care of it. Another three months and Jobling had yet to be paid, so I sent him a check. My next call was to Steve Hoyt at the Texas Historical Commission. Even though the state had jurisdiction regarding the final placement of the cannon, I politely asked that it go anywhere but Port O’Connor, since all had run and hid when it came time to pay the bill. The last I heard, it was still in the conservation lab.
     
    MISSED AGAIN.
    But not entirely.
    When the legendary pirate Jean Laffite was ordered out of Galveston in 1821, he engaged in a few piratical operations that angered not only the Americans but the British as well. Combined naval units of both countries chased him down the coast of Texas, pressing him hard. Reaching Cavallo Pass, his fleet of pirate ships was chased by five British frigates and several American armed sloops. His band of pirates was in a desperate situation. Throwing caution to the wind, during a violent storm he ordered his fleet to run over the bar at the entrance to the Pass, into the inner channel. With fortitude and luck, Laffite made it into Matagorda Bay with all his ships intact. The British frigates tried to follow him in, but two grounded and were lost.
    Laffite, so the story goes, having achieved a short reprieve, divided up the booty among his pirate crews, burned his ships, and vanished. Rumors put him in South Carolina, where he married Emma Mortimer of Charleston, who knew him as successful merchant Jean Lafflin. After several years in the South, he and his wife moved to St. Louis, where it is said he manufactured gunpowder. On his deathbed he confessed to his wife that he was Jean Laffite the pirate, and was buried in Alton, Illinois, sometime in 1854.
    Target 2, where the flintlock firearms were found, and Target 4, the wreck that produced the British cannon, intrigued everyone. Could these be the lost British frigates? There is little doubt that both were early warships. Future research and excavations by Texas archaeologists may well identify them.
    That left us Target 8.
    This was the most elusive, engaging, and enticing anomaly of them all. She gave a large magnetic signature of 560 gammas, which is consistent with a shipwreck with three to five tons of ferrous metal on board. Ralph conducted four underwater surveys with the handheld proton magnetometer. Each pass put the magnetic mass in the same area. The site was then probed with a twenty-six-foot jet probe. After several tries, the probe became lodged in something under the sand and was abandoned.
    The location is also in the approximate latitude of L’Aimable and buried far deeper than the other wrecks Ralph found, a sure indication of an old vessel that has every potential of coming from the seventeenth century. She remains the most promising of all and the most obstinate to reach. Uncovering her for identification would take a major excavation effort.
    As they say, so near, yet so far.
     
    DISCOVERING KING TUT’S tomb was scooping ice cream compared to the hunt for La Salle’s flagship L’Aimable.