While Clive was creating his vision of southwest living in Paradise Valley, Barbara made it clear the Telluride house would be hers alone. Clive hired a local contractor to build the two-story log home. Clive laughs, “If Barbara saw me talking to the builder, she would want to know what we were talking about. I always told her we were discussing the plumbing, wiring or a structural problem.” Teri describes the house as, “Colorado rustic. My mother wanted the house to be cozy, a place where our family could gather together, enjoy ourselves, and relax.”
In spite of Barbara’s vigilance, Clive managed to slip in one piece of Cussler creativity. After a visit to the studio of a local wood carver who fashions logs into bears, eagles, and other wildlife, Clive envisioned transforming a utilitarian support column in the living room into a totem pole. While Clive researched totem poles, the sculptor traveled to the Northwest, selected a suitable red spruce log, had it shipped to Colorado and set upon it with his chisels and rasps. Dayna remembers when the carving was installed. “It was 1993, the first Christmas our family spent at the house. Dad put out a bunch of cans filled with different color paints and an assortment of brushes. Everybody had the best time painting the totem pole.”
Although he was producing a string of bestsellers - between 1984 and 1992, Simon & Schuster published five Dirk Pitt adventures: Deep Six, Cyclops, Treasure, Dragon, and Sahara - Clive was becoming disenchanted with his publisher. After turning in the manuscript for his next book, Inca Gold, Clive contacted Paul McCarthy, a senior editor at Pocket Books. McCarthy, whose responsibilities included publishing Clive’s paperbacks, remembers the call. “Clive told me, ‘Simon & Schuster is not publishing my books, they’re simply printing them. I need a real editor to work on Inca Gold. How about you?’”
Initially thinking Clive might simply be blowing off steam, McCarthy soon realized he had a legitimate reason for being angry. “For the record,” McCarthy says, “Michael Korda was Clive’s editor. In all honesty, Korda was doing little, if any actual editing of Clive’s manuscripts. S&S saw Clive as a bestselling, money-making machine. Millions of Clive’s fans are out there, breathlessly waiting for the next Dirk Pitt novel. They will buy anything with Clive Cussler’s name on the cover so it would be silly to spend time and energy on a sure thing. This has never been the way Clive operates. I ran Clive’s idea past my boss, who thought it was an excellent idea.”
Clive and McCarthy’s relationship dated back to the days when McCarthy had worked at Doubleday Dell. “I sent Clive a manuscript and asked him for a quote. He immediately responded, and I know his blurb on the book’s cover boosted sales significantly. Editing his hardcover books was a wonderful extenuation of both our friendship and professional relationship.”
McCarthy continues, “Clive is the perfect author to work with. He doesn’t let his ego get in the way of his writing. Even though his work never requires a great deal of editing, he demands the final manuscript has to be the best possible product. Clive and I both know his books were better after we got done with them.”
Clive, in Denver, and McCarthy, in New York, began working on Inca Gold in the fall of 1993. “This was before the internet,” McCarthy explains. “We talked on the phone and used snail mail.” During one of their conversations, McCarthy asked Clive how long it had been since he visited New York. When Clive told him it had been some time, McCarthy was shocked. “Here’s this guy,” McCarthy says, “making S&S millions, and they won’t even bring him to New York.”
McCarthy arranged to have Clive and Barbara flown to New York and put them up at a five-star hotel. He personally escorted them on a whirlwind tour of the city, and he scheduled meetings with Simon & Schuster’s sales, promotional, and production departments. “I wanted the employees to meet the real Clive Cussler,” McCarthy says. “The man behind the name and photograph on the cover of all those bestsellers. It was also important to show Clive how much we appreciated him and what he meant to the company.”
Published in May of 1994, Inca Gold spent fourteen weeks on the Times list, at one point reaching number two. After three months of negotiations, Peter Lampack and Simon & Schuster agreed to a record-breaking $14 million deal for Clive’s next two books. HarperCollins, Clive’s British publisher, offered $17.5 million, but Clive and his agent, discounting the value of the overseas rights, decided the difference between the bids would not warrant ending their relationship with Simon & Schuster.
Inca Gold features the same blending of fact and fiction that has made Clive’s books so popular. While Pitt battles a gang of smugglers who deal in stolen antiquities, the plot references Pre-Columbian civilizations, ancient legends, Sir Francis Drake, Spanish galleons, Francisco Pizarro, Elizabeth I, and an uncharted underground river flowing beneath a Mexican desert.
Clive’s fascination with historical artifacts began during the evenings he spent reading at the Alhambra library while his parents were grocery shopping. “Lafitte, Henry Morgan, Black Beard, and Captain Kid,” Clive says. “I read everything I could get my hands on. Pirates, sailing ships, cryptic maps leading to buried treasure, you can’t beat that! I dreamed of going to a desert island and trying to find a chest full of gold coins.”
Clive’s imagination was further energized during his excursions with Dick Klein in the Southern California deserts, and later, by the extensive research required when writing Raise the Titanic! Now, a bestselling author, Clive had the resources to turn his childhood fantasy into reality. “Threading the needle through investigation and study is my true love,” Clive says. “I’ve often said that if my wife threw me out of the house, I’d take a cot and sleeping bag and move into the basement of a library. Nothing can match the intrigue and rapture of knowing you have pinpointed the location of the lost artifact and thus found the answer to a mystery thought unsolvable through the dust of centuries.”
In 1977, Clive read Diving for Treasure by Peter Throckmorton, recognized as “the father of marine archeology.” In his book, Throckmorton included a brief reference to English “wreck hunter” Sidney Wignall’s claim he had discovered what was almost certainly the sunken remains of the USS Bonhomme Richard, a ship commanded by John Paul Jones during the Revolutionary War.
“When I heard Wignall was barnstorming around the United States trying to raise money to finance an expedition to search for the Bonhomme Richard,” Clive says, “I had my British publishers track him down.”
After several meetings, the two men hammered out an agreement. Wignall would share his data and organize the search, and Clive would provide the $60,000 needed to fund the expedition.
Clive soon discovered the wreck hunter’s credentials might be reliable, but his organizational skills were abysmal. “Wignall chartered a decrepit World War II British minesweeper to serve as the expedition’s survey craft,” Clive recalls. “She was called the Keltic Lord, but certainly didn’t look like one. The British crew were decent fellows, but operated in slow motion. No wreck had even been identified yet, but Wignall had two tons of diving equipment loaded aboard, including a decompression tank.”
During August of 1978, the team gathered in Bridlington, a seaside resort on the North Sea located a few miles south of Flamborough Head. In addition to Clive’s family - Barbara, Dirk, Dayna, Teri and her husband, Robert Toft - a trio of underwater search experts had been recruited for the expedition. Marty Klein owns Klein Associates, a leading company in the development and application of side scan sonar. Garry Kozak, an employee of Klein’s, was responsible for the operation of the sonar. Retired U.S. Air Force test pilot, Walter Schob, who had helped recover Henry VIII’s flagship, the Mary Rose, volunteered to dive on the wreck if they found the Bonhomme Richard.
Plagued by poor weather, assorted mishaps, and bad luck, the search quickly turned into a fiasco. Clive’s frustration came to a head one morning when the dingy transporting the team members staying on shore came alongside the Keltic Lord. A crew member helped everybody aboard. Everybody, except Clive. “I was left ignored a
nd forgotten on the leaky ferryboat in a rainstorm in a four-foot sea clutching a briefcase containing my research material, charts of the search area, assorted camera equipment, and a sack of cookies pressed on me by my wife.”
After struggling over the railing, Clive arrived in the galley, soaking wet, only to discover all hands enjoying a hot cup of coffee. Adding to Clive’s displeasure, no one gave him so much as a glance. “It was then I introduced my hand routine,” Clive says, “a move that has proved beneficial over the years in dealing with mutinous boat crews and dive teams. Raising my right hand in the air, I told them no matter what happened, a typhoon, tidal wave, fire, we strike an iceberg, or we’re torpedoed by the crew of a U-boat who forgot to surrender, you save this hand. One of the crew grabbed the bait. ‘What’s so special about your hand?’ I looked him right in the eye and said, ‘Because this is the hand that writes the checks.’ The point was made, and from then on, I received the proper respect due my wallet.”
“That first expedition,” Clive concedes, “was an unqualified disaster.” Wignall’s Bonhomme Richard turned out to be a freighter sunk by a German submarine during World War I, and when the bills were calculated, Clive’s tab had ballooned to $80,000. A diver brought up a copper faucet salvaged from the freighter’s sink, one of the few artifacts Clive displays in his office. “You don’t find that many $80,000 bathroom faucets.”
Tragically, six months later, the Keltic Lord, with all hands, vanished without a trace in the North Sea during a raging winter storm.
Bowed, but not beaten, Clive made the decision to return to England during the summer of 1979, and resume the search for the Bonhomme Richard. While making preparations for the expedition, he contacted attorney Wayne Gronquist. A longtime environmental activist and preservationist, Gronquist, whose office was in Austin, Texas, had met Clive during his first expedition to find the Richard. Concerned Wignall might have outstanding liabilities from previous searches, Gronquist suggested Clive create a new entity and incorporate his search activities as a nonprofit foundation.
“Wayne,” Dirk Cussler says, “was the individual truly responsible for NUMA. He was an extremely nice, decent man of high integrity, with a great love of Texas history. Wayne’s exuberant sense of optimism would at times wear on Clive, but he always tried to do the best job possible.”
George Cofer, executive director of Austin’s Hill Country Conservancy, recalls searching for lost cannons from the 1836 battle at the Alamo. “Wayne Cronquist and Clive Cussler were convinced they could find the Alamo cannons. When the San Antonio River was lowered for repairs, Wayne would organize a search, and we’d go out in the middle of the river, up to our knees in mud. We didn’t find cannons, but we did find a few Saturday night specials.”
The foundation’s original trustees included Gronquist, who was named president; Peter Throckmorton; Dr. Don Walsh, a former naval officer who, along with Jacques Piccard, holds the record for the deepest dive in the bathyscaphe Trieste to 35,798 feet in the Marianas Trench; Admiral Bill Thompson, the navy’s chief of information, 1971-75; and legendary educator and scientist, Dr. Harold “Doc” Edgerton, founder and president of the United States Navy Memorial Foundation.
When it came time to name the entity, the trustees, obviously taking into consideration who was footing the bill, suggested The Clive Cussler Foundation. “Humble Herbert I ain’t,” Clive says, “but my ego isn’t quite that monstrous. I nixed the idea.” Their second choice, the National Underwater & Marine Agency (NUMA), won out, and the fictional NUMA, first appearing in Pacific Vortex, became the real NUMA, an organization “dedicated to preserving American marine heritage by locating and identifying lost ships of historic significance before they are gone forever.”
NUMA’s primary mission is discovery, not salvage. After a wreck is discovered, NUMA relinquishes all claims, trusting federal, state, or local governments, corporations, universities or historical organizations to raise the wreck or retrieve important artifacts. Clive is extremely proud of the organization’s record. “No member of NUMA has ever taken an artifact home from the historic wrecks. And items brought up from a wreck are turned over to the jurisdiction where it was found.”
In one example, artifacts including fittings, apothecary vessels, clay pipes, cannon fuses, and a ship’s bell were recovered from the wrecks of the Confederate raider Florida and the Union frigate Cumberland. NUMA entrusted them to the experts at the College of William and Mary for preservation, and the restored artifacts are now on display at the Hampton Roads Naval Museum in Norfolk, Virginia.
From the disappointing first expedition to locate the Bonhomme Richard, Clive had made contacts with many of the most respected individuals involved with underwater archeology. So he chose Eric Berryman, a marine historian, author, and former navy commander to organize the second expedition in 1979. The search flagship, Arvor III, was a major improvement over the ill-fated Keltic Lord. “She was a solid and comfortable boat,” Clive says, “under the command of Scot Jimmy Flett, a finer man I’ve never met. Our crew included Peter Throckmorton and Bill Shea, a magnetometer expert who worked at Brandeis University for many years in the school’s video department.”
Although the second expedition managed to cover more than ten times the area at half the cost of the first effort, the Bonhomme Richard once again refused to be found.
After two unsuccessful expeditions in the North Sea, Clive decided NUMA should concentrate on a search closer to home. The riddle surrounding the Confederate submarine H.L. Hunley was a natural fit for Clive - a Civil War buff with an affinity for shipwrecks. “The more I read about the Hunley, the more I was hooked. Here was a mystery with a thousand clues but no conclusive leads.”
During the Civil War, Union General Winfield Scott proposed a naval blockade surrounding the Confederate States to prevent them from receiving or shipping trade goods, supplies, and arms. The blockade was so effective - cotton exports were reduced by more than 95 percent - a wealthy southern businessman, Horace Lawson Hunley, financed the construction of a submarine. The “fish boat,” fabricated from an iron boiler, was forty-feet long and forty-two inches in diameter. Fitted with two conning towers, dive planes and a pair of crude snorkels, the H.L. Hunley carried a crew of eight. The captain, standing with his head in the forward conning tower, steered and navigated. Seven men, sitting on a wooden bench, turned a crank connected to the submarine’s propeller shaft.
Operating from a dock in Charleston Harbor, the boat proved more dangerous to its crews than the enemy - thirteen men died in training accidents, including the sub’s patron, Horace Hunley. General P.G.T. Beauregard, commander of the Confederate forces at Charleston, considered duty aboard the sub so perilous he wanted it scrapped, but the South was desperate.
Under the command of Lieutenant George E. Dixon, the H.L. Hunley sailed into combat on February 17, 1864, and managed to embed a charge in the hull of the USS Housatonic, a 200-foot steam and sail-powered sloop with a crew of 155. Reversing direction, the charge was detonated, sinking the Union ship and killing five of her crew. Although there were reports that a pre-arranged lantern signal was displayed by the Hunley, the submarine vanished.
The search for the Hunley began even before the war ended and there were countless tales of sightings, often embellished with “Nine Skeletons at the Wheel.” In the 1870s, showman P.T. Barnum offered $100,000 to anyone who could find the Hunley. As the years passed, the submarine was forgotten until the celebration of the centennial of the War Between the States. The chronicle of the Hunley and her brave crew was told in books, magazines, and on television. A group of students from a Charleston technical school presented the Charleston Museum with a full-size replica of the Hunley, based on the limited reference available at the time.
NUMA’s first expedition to find the Hunley set sail during the summer of 1980. The crew included old hands: Doc Edgerton, Peter Throckmorton, Bill Shea, Dirk Cussler, Walt Schob, Wayne Gronquist, and Admiral Bill Thompson. Also aboar
d: diver Dana Larson, archaeologist Dan Koski-Karell, psychic Karen Getsla, and an assortment of wives and girlfriends.
“Our first search for the Hunley,” Clive says, “was in many ways as botched as the original search for the Bonhomme Richard. We were headquartered in a rundown motel, the search boat was a scow, and our crew was much too large. It turned into more of a vacation than a serious search, and I wasn’t really surprised when we didn’t find the Hunley. I’ve always affectionately recalled this expectation as the Great Trauma of ‘80.”
A year later, Clive and NUMA were back in Charleston. “Walt Schob found a big, comfortable house on the beach at Isle of Palms,” Clive says. “I chartered a dependable vessel owned by Harold Stauber, a guy who knew the waters around Charleston like his own living room.” During the previous summer’s follies, the team had managed to eliminate a two-mile long grid close to the shore. NUMA was now going to concentrate its search near the area where the Housatonic was attacked.
Joining the team for the first time were Ralph Wilbanks and Rodney Warren, two underwater archaeologists connected with the South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology (SCIAA). Run by the University of South Carolina, the SCIAA regulates and issues the permits required for anyone looking to search for treasure or artifacts in South Carolina waters.
“Unlike the previous year,” Clive says. “The equipment ticked away without missing a beat, the weather cooperated with smooth seas, and the only injuries were sunburn, seasickness, and hangovers. Although we did not find the Hunley, we discovered five Confederate blockade runners and three Union ironclads.” During a post-search interview, Clive announced, “We don’t know where the Hunley is, but we know where it ain’t.”
NUMA would not return to Charleston until 1994. “I can’t really explain why,” Clive says. “Perhaps I’d developed a mental block or just wasn’t in the mood.” During the ensuing thirteen years, NUMA roamed the world searching for wrecks in other waters. The party atmosphere and fun-loving throngs of the early expeditions were replaced with a tight-knit group of professionals and dedicated amateurs. Successful surveys included the discovery of the Lexington, a steamboat that burned and sank in Long Island Sound in 1840, with the loss of 151 lives, and the Zavala, one of the small fleet belonging to the Republic of Texas navy. Run aground at Galveston Bay in 1842, the remains of the Zavala were discovered buried twelve feet under a parking lot.