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The Search
for the Guggenheim Treasure
By Christopher Solomon Loot
valued at $20 million lies off the coast of
Staten Island, and Ken Hayes is on the hunt for
the sunken silver bullion
Among the old-timers casting for stripers along
the Arthur Kill between Staten Island and New
Jersey talk tends to return to a few
well-thumbed topics. The most intriguing of
these is the tale of the silver ingot that once
snagged in the eel trident of the old Indian
fisherman named Blood. From there, conversation
invariably turns to the Lost Guggenheim
Treasure.
On the still, moonlit night of September 26,
1903, a tug urged the barge Harold out of what’s
today the South Street Seaport and south past
the Statue of Liberty. The Harold’s load that
night was nearly 7,700 silver-and-lead bars.
They were destined for the glowing Asarco
smelters of Perth Amboy, New Jersey. The silver,
and the smelters, belonged to the Guggenheim
family, which had made its fortune in mining and
smelting.
The cargo never arrived, at least in one batch.
Somewhere in the Arthur Kill tidal strait the
Harold tipped, sending most of the silver bars
to the bottom. The barge’s deckhands—“dumbest
skunks I ever had to do with,” the salvage
company’s owner later told the New York
Times—didn’t notice until docking at dawn. A
secret salvage effort recovered about 85 percent
of the bars, but that still left up to 1,400
“pigs” unfound. Today they could be worth $20
million.
One morning last fall, Ken Hayes set out to find
himself some sunken treasure—that is, if no one
got to Hayes, or to the treasure, first. Hayes
is president and founder of Aqua Survey, a
Flemington, N.J., company that usually grabs
sediment from the bottom of waterways for
clients like the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
In recent years Aqua Survey also has gained a
reputation for looking for less mundane things
someone has lost underwater: Spanish doubloons
off Key West. Fighter planes in the Bermuda
Triangle. UFOs off Catalina Island.
The Guggenheim silver is Hayes’ personal
obsession, however—which explains why Hayes was
a little antsy to get started. It was eight
o’clock in the morning at a boat launch at
Sewaren on the Jersey side, less than two miles
from the former Asarco smelters, and his three
boats were stuck in traffic on Interstate 278. A
documentary film crew burned the time taking
B-roll of Hayes walking toward the water,
looking pensive.
Finally the three boats arrived. The flotilla
motored out toward Story’s Flats, a promising
shallows where the channel bends like a
quotation mark. It was a fine day to be on the
water, even the Arthur Kill, which possesses a
certain rusting Ozymandian grandeur: On the
Jersey shore a beached ferry lay on its side,
its bones bleaching in the October sun. Beside
it the piers of the Hess tank farm were
cushioned with a Detroit of used tires. A
stained smokestack manufactured bright white
clouds and sent them off over Fresh Kills
Landfill.
As the boats positioned over their first target,
Hayes, a jocular 57 year-old whose white beard,
glasses and pebbled Clarkses give him the
appearance of a college engineering professor,
tried to temper expectations, including his own.
Like any self-respecting treasure hunter Hayes
had his own treasure map—created by sweeping the
area with a souped-up metal detector whose
software has been trained to ignore iron—but
there was no guarantee that the map’s 255 dots
were, well, treasure. “It could be aluminum
cans, it could be specialty alloy rims from
cars—you name it. Look, for years fishermen
didn’t bring litter bags,” said Hayes, who with
his employees has been surveying and
investigating targets since 2006, spending
several weeks annually on the quest.
A man motored up in a boat as white as a new
tennis shoe.
“Is it silver or gold you’re looking for?” he
called out.
“I’ll take either,” Hayes answered. The man said
he was a retired marine patrolman from the
1980s, and he and Hayes swapped rumors. Before
he left the retiree said, “You know, you better
be careful, you might bring up Jimmy Hoffa.”
Once the boat was anchored in place, Hayes took
what looked like an electrified pole-vault pole
and began to prod through a window-sized hole in
the deck. With this detector he prodded down
through the water, down through a century’s
worth of tidal muck and dioxins that the crew
had nicknamed “black mayonnaise.” Meanwhile,
inside the wheelhouse Mark Padover watched a
laptop screen for a spike in the readings. This
prodding continued for a long time. An observer
noted that hunting for sunken treasure is not as
swashbuckling in real life as when Johnny Depp
does it at the Cineplex. Hayes handed off the
pole to a crewmate and sat down on the deck. The
black-mayo-prodding went on.
“Contact!”
“When you hit it, it jumps!” Padover called out
from in front of the computer screen.
“Well, I guess we get Pete’s tool out and try to
bring it up,” Hayes says. To haul 75-pound bars
out from under 96 years' worth of muck,
machinist Pete Davis had designed an 11-foot
harpoon with a nasty-looking screw at one end
and a big drill at the other. (Davis’ harpoon
two years earlier, powered by a .38 Special, had
proven dramatic if ineffectual.)
“So if we latch onto a 900-pound piece of metal,
how do we detach from it?” someone asked. A
discussion involving hacksaws ensued.
“Let’s fish,” Hayes said, seeming a little
anxious for results.
Drilling commenced. The harpoon was winched up,
but with no silver bar attached. Hayes groaned
and lay back on the deck and pulled his ball cap
over his eyes. Everyone broke for lunch.
Now another boat appeared. The crew recognized
it. “When we were out in August they came out
and circled our boat for hours. They said they
were looking for the silver, too, and they asked
us if we wanted to collaborate,” Hayes said. The
boat now circled again, as if stalking, then
anchored a few hundred yards away and would
remain there all day, doing nothing.
Occasionally the documentary film crew would
film a man on the boat, and the man on the boat
would film the film crew filming him.
After lunch, somebody said, “Hey! There’s
someone on the shore.” And there was—on the
Staten Island side, dressed in black and armed
with binoculars. (An informant? A security
guard?) But when everybody looked his way, the
man in black ducked behind some bushes.
The promise of $20 million tends to foster this
kind of vaguely menacing behavior. When Hayes
first started looking for the silver, he said he
got several phone calls from parties who felt he
was horning in on a locals’ opportunity, and the
calls urged him to abandon his hunt. Once while
he was diving in Bonaire, off the South American
coast, his cell phone rang.
“Maybe you’ve seen ‘The Sopranos,’” the caller
said.
“No,” Hayes replied, “but I do like ‘Curb Your
Enthusiasm.’”
The day lengthened. The probing continued in new
spots, without success. “Well, we know where
it’s not,” he said. “Ten square feet at a time,
we’ll know where it’s not.”
The sun slumped low toward the old Asarco
smelters. It was time to give up for today.
But Hayes and company were hardly relinquishing
the quest. Over the winter they developed a
sampling device that can plunge deep in the
mayonnaise to collect a small flake of metal
from suspected silver bars, “much the same way a
surgeon would biopsy a tumor,” Hayes said.
Come spring, they’ll be out on the Arthur Kill,
poking and prodding at targets again. If the
tests say there’s silver down there, you can bet
they’ll be back soon, ready to haul it up. |