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Barry Clifford Discovers Buried Treasure

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(page 7 of 8)

So Dethlefson went home to western New Hampshire to wait for Clifford's call. March ran into May. The weather off the Cape cleared. Dethlefson waited. May turned to June. "I hadn't been paid for the services I'd rendered, but Barry said that would be taken care of," Dethlefson said. "He was very reassuring. I finally was invited down to the project in mid-July. When I got there, there was a great deal of excitement. They threw a big lawn party. There were lots of pretty girls around. Barry was handing out T-shirts and caps with the company logo on them. It was a very festive atmosphere. I thought, 'Gee, this might be interesting.'"

But the serious scientist in Dethlefson also heard alarms going off in his head.

The chain of command, he shortly discovered, seemed vague and inconsistent at times. "The whole thing was thoroughly disorganized. They were a secretive, whispery group on the boat, and I found people countermanding my directions all the time. It was like being in charge of a bunch of precocious seventh-graders who were all trying to impress Big Daddy. By day we dove for the Whydah. By night, the crew went off the boat to bars in Orleans or Wellflett. I felt terribly -- I think the word is -- used. I mentioned my concerns to Barry, and he promised things would get better, but they never did. I finally blew up one day when Barry brought up artifacts from another ship called the White Squall, and I discovered there were reporters on the way out to the boat. I took off my scuba gear and swam to shore."

Dethlefson resigned from the project at the end of September 1983. He went back to New Hampshire and commenced writing his own book about the Whydah. He was disappointed that the project disintegrated beneath him, disappointed that a serious hunt for the Whydah had become, in his belief, a secondary activity for Maritime Underwater Surveys.

"The press thing is focal, central to the whole issue. The courting of the press, all the good-looking ladies, all the camp followers on board," he said. "The publicity got out of hand, the idea that we were blowing holes in the ocean floor and bringing up artifacts almost indiscriminately not cataloging, not following procedure...it was a show to impress investors." His voice lifted in irritation, then trailed off. I remembered what Clifford had said when I asked him why Dethlefson had left the Whydah project. "He's too old to do the type of work we are doing," Clifford said. "It was better for us both that he left."

It was a November afternoon almost exactly a year after he told the world he had found the Whydah, and Barry Clifford stood at the place where Guglielmo Marconi had dispatched Teddy Roosevelt's sober greeting across the Atlantic to King George. This time, however, Barry Clifford was on land, looking out at sea. The weather was still holding, and the day seemed full of extravagant promise. Only a few days before, Clifford had been informed by the state board that his permit to dig any more holes off Wellfleet had been temporarily lifted pending the replacement of Ted Dethlefson. In February 1984 the board would meet to decide whether or not to renew Clifford's permit to dig on the Whydah.

Dressed in khaki slacks, deck shoes, a light velour sweater and the omnipresent black ski cap, Barry was absorbed with a Sony video camera. He had many things on his mind that day, he said. His mood was subdued. Almost all day he had been lugging the camera around, not talking much, just taking moving pictures of the sea, of sand dunes, of the sky.