 So your job is to make sure I don't go beyond the mark here because I go off camera then, okay? So I'd like to thank John for having me back again. There was actually a talk on Civil War subs in there also alligator This is my fifth book third one that's appropriate to discuss here and to start off I want to apologize for the stunning visuals you won't be seeing the gods of technology wiped out a week's worth of work last night The entire dry fried so even my artwork I couldn't stay up to midnight and recreate it But happily I will not be holding the book up and walking around We'll diagram what needs to be diagrammed and hopefully it's all up here The story you're about to hear begins with an ending namely the end of the Crimean War and just to put it in context This takes place in the mid 1850s Well, it is as familiar in England and France as our civil war is to us Most Americans don't know that much about the Crimean War part of it is fought in the Baltics Most of it is fought down in the Black Sea Ostensibly it starts because the Turks are denying the Russians access to religious sites. That's a trumped up charge It's just part of the great game The Russians are trying to push their way south as they always have and gain access to wider vices if you will the war Takes place the biggest battle of course is the siege of Sevastopol. It is a year-long battle It's not really a siege because the Russians can always leave if they want to it is actually an accidental siege The Russians have been beaten in the southern part of the Crimean Peninsula and we're treated north through Sevastopol Ready to get off the Crimean Peninsula and defend the Isthmus Then the French and British and Turks the allies that we'll call them decide to stop it in trench and the Russians Oh, I guess they're gonna think we're gonna defend the city. So they rushed back and defend Sevastopol It is a 355 day battle 230 men are killed in the space of those 12 months when the Russians finally leave after a key fort falls What has still been left standing by them bombardment and there are millions and millions of shells laying everywhere is burned by them the town is totally wiped out of 15,000 homes 60 are inhabitable of a 70,000 population before the war 6,000 are left. There are only two industries left in town picking up the bones of dead cavalry horses to sell them back to the British for fertilizer and picking up our Iron you'll often from exploded shells sometimes from unexploded shells Usually once every five or six days someone is killed by an exploding shell There are places you cannot walk in the town of Sevastopol because it is literally carpeted with shells On the harbor of Sevastopol whoops that probably won't be the last time I do that The harbor of Sevastopol and this is why it was such a key feature is about four miles long And Chenea River comes in here. It is defended by hordes of forts and Is a major major base for the Russian Navy the Black Sea Fleet? It's four miles long a mile across and fairly shallow. It's only 60 feet. It's very deepest It is home to the not just the headquarters, but also in this section here the Karabell Naya dry docks There are six slips in these dry docks three times as many as in the Brooklyn Navy aren't in this period It is ultra modern the Russians have spent hordes of money on this port. It is a military base There's not a civilian town This is why the British want to wipe it off the face of the map if they can wipe this out and forbid the Russians from rebuilding Basically, the Russian will have no viable defensive port or offense support to go against the Turks in the Black Sea the Russians Decide that their Achilles heel is not the Allied armies out this way, but The threat of the Allied fleet coming in with their heavy guns and reaching the town and the back of the lines The forts here they feel can hold them off, but if the ships pull their way in they have big problems When they decide they're going to actually defend the town the Black Sea fleet numbers about 60 ships It is everything from about a dozen modern paddle wheel steamers gunboats like Missouri was some of iron most of wood But there's a lot of aging ships there too 74s 90s 120 gunships of the line These are the beautiful ones you see in the paintings, but they're old news at this point So there's our I guess Prince Constantine's in charge of the defense He says look we're gonna sacrifice the ships strip the guns bring the crews ashore And he takes about a dozen ships and sinks them in a block line here and sinks another dozen in a block line here The morning the French and British decide to go attack the town with their fleet They notice the Russians all lined up in a line of battle with their sails lowered and not even firing any cannon and then one by one the ships go down and sink and All they see are mass sticking up above the water Unbeknownst to them the currents in about four or five months will totally open the channel But they don't know that only the Russians do but they can still see this mass and it works They bombard the outer forts, but they can't get through so this trick which cost the Russians about two dozen ships actually works quite well As the siege goes on and there's nothing for the Navy to do only the petal wheel steamers dash out now And then to make life hell for the French and British behind the lines They are basically anchored the cruiser center shore with their artillery. They form 18 different naval brigades 70% of them will be dead by the time the siege is over This is a lot like World War one when this all realizes that by capturing one or two key forts down here They can no longer defend the town the entire army and Navy are evacuated on the causeway to the North Shore They don't actually leave this is where they set out the rest of the war Firing back at the French and British who never tried to cross the causeway again The czar orders every single ship in the harbor scuttled all the merchant men and every single warship The petal wheel steamers which are the latest in high-tech at that time are going to make a dash for it But bad weather keeps them import so they are sunk also now. This is a meditated thing This is planned. They're not just pull the plug on the ship and let it sink The czar realizes salvaging technology and skill is to the point where he can get his ships back So what he's doing is putting them on deposit somewhere where it's a major inconvenience for the enemy to take them The wooden ships he figures he's going to lose those they're aging anyway And there's more problems with those we'll talk about in a minute But with all the iron ships and every steam engine they're coated with a protective covering so that nothing will rot on the bottom When the ships are scuttled it's a odd to count these the counts go anywhere from about 90 ships over a hundred It was devilishly tough to get an idea of accuracy the French use one set of numbers The Russians another when you can find their records the British something totally different The number 95 is pretty close to that they scatter not just here They cluster here and here and all over the bay It is literally covered with almost a hundred ships on the bottom with masks sticking up now and then when you see a Pictures of Asphalt Harbor it looks like oh nothing much is going on Do you see one little lone stick here here there and everywhere? The Russians actually make very very detailed maps of the entire Harbor They don't give those the French and British of course who after the war offered to come in and salvage all those ships There's a wonderful cartoon that appeared in punch showing a British sailor Fishing with his his Creel and his rod and he turns over his shoulder and says was buddy. Oh Jim bring the net I've hooked another 74 because there are so many ships down there You could literally walk across the bay on these ships now the British offer again for an awful lot of money To quote-unquote clear the Harbor their idea of clearing the Harbor is stripping the ships of anything valuable And by the way taking it back to England and then blasting them a little bit They want Sevastopol to stay clogged up for years They want the ships just to rot so you can't use the port and it is so clogged right now that when I introduced John Gowan in a moment he reconns the the bay it takes him about an hour in a boat to go only a mile Because he can't thread his way between the ships safely enough and that's with guides So they've got basically an entire black sea fleet and a lot of merchant men sitting on the bottom there Turns out there's also a lot of valuable salvage down there too Well the the Russian Duke Constantine of course he has a nice little comeback when the British offered to salvage it He's quoted as saying I would not hire a British engineer to pull a rusty nail from a rotten plank Because of course it's their fault the ships are down there So he says to his ambassador in the US stokel find me John Gowan now for those of you who are here for the Missouri Talk, you know a little bit about John Gowan and then our John told you a little bit more about him He's from Lynn, Massachusetts. He's totally self-taught. We don't know what he he doesn't have much of an education formally We think he went to about third grade in Lynn. He starts off with his buddy Thomas Wells in the wine business He's an importer exporter in the coastal trade up out of Boston and at some point He just decides to start reading books about salvage in 1849 He goes on his first dive if you will and they go up off the coast of Canada and bring up treasure from a wreck Sell it and Boston things like that make enough money to invest in new diving suits and come out with their own diving suit The world famous his words not mine Wells and Gowan submarine armor That's the name for the drive diving just the time is submarine armor and they sell a number of these what's more in probably an underhanded Backdoor Yankee deal Secretary of State taps him on the shoulder to go raise Missouri now John was right that Missouri went down to eight and a half years In those eight and a half years from 43 1850 the British have tried every single thing They can to get the ship out of Gibraltar Bay and they can't do it because it's an iron wheel paddle steamer Think of ferrous wheels 28 feet Diameter rotting on the bottom It's a mass of metal that is fused the axle the wheels and the engines into one massive piece that weighs about 50 tons And the British is blasting it ineffectually Again Gowan sits there thinks about it a little bit goes over with 24 gigantic underwater bombs if you will torpedoes And uses only half of them because Gowan knows how to attack the wheels at the hubs Believe it or not the British are working the way in taking a top-down approach Gowan also realizes that the key to getting Missouri out is by attacking her keel Break that spine and the ship will fall apart He pulls off what the British couldn't do in eight and a half years in about five months time And if you want to read some chest dumping fly waving, you know a rhetoric in the newspaper It's great stuff when he comes home because not only are we proud of him We're proud that he did this to the British who of course for years have been saying we have the most professional divers If we can't do it, you can't do it Gowan's opinion expressed much later in time Of course about the British was that they are wonderful engineers He would hire nobody else except a British engineer when it came to tackling a known project in a known way But if you're doing something new, they're worthless Stokell actually finds Gowan down in the Caribbean. He's only been doing salvage. Uh, it's about 1856 now He did salvage work off the coast and on the Great Lakes for about a year Got tired of that evidently or didn't make ends meet and he's believe it or not down mining bird guano Which is a hyper Wonderful phosphate fertilizer that actually is almost certain several wars with us the guano wars, believe it or not And he finds him down in the Caribbean and basically says Got a couple months the czar would like to talk to you so he goes, you know to russia And prepares a plan the russian's giving him some paperwork ahead of time the maps where the ships are and things like that And he goes to sabastopol and he spends about a month diving on different ships taking a look at all that Comes back to the czar and prince constantine who's his main contact and says I can do this You know and here's my bid his bid oddly enough is higher than the french and british ones because a lot of companies are trying for this job It's very lucrative the czar with that opinion of you know expressed by constantine about pulling a rotten Rusty nail of rotten plank says you're my man. I want john gowan to do it gowan comes home again in a a very impressive Logistics feat in four months time. He prepares the entire expedition. He doesn't go to boston though He goes to philadelphia probably because philadelphia has a lot more industry right there along the Delaware than we did And gowan has some heavy-duty stuff that he's devised now to back up. There is a an old technique of raising ships Called raising by lumps a lump is a skin and even where means a block or a brick And it's a squarish or a harbor lighter if you will just a utility vessel And the british would ring lumps if you will around a sunken anchor small ship things like that with derricks on board And then the idea was it would all raise at the same time and the ship would hopefully come up The problem is raising by lumps takes incredible timing and balance because if one lump pulls too much Everything goes to hell in a handbasket real fast. So raising by lumps was already sort of disused practice Gowan figures a way to raise by lumps on a massive scale and beat the balance problem in philadelphia And this is why he needs the heavy industry He has caissons built that are 50 feet square 13 feet high Out of solid one or two foot Bulk's of timber that run the entire length It's reinforced with iron and the entire bottom half where he knows it's going to be sitting in the water Is kyanized treated with a new then new technique of using copper to Impregnate the woods that will be eaten by worms in that he has steam apparatus up on top here and a 20 ton collar That goes through the bottom like this through that He has chains that go down the chains. He designs are 300 pounds per link They're the largest chains in the world at this time. They are forged again in philadelphia He has four of these things made in the space of four months from january to april of 1857 They're all dismantled and put aboard two ships and the yankee exposition for savastopol heads off Now gowan knowing the scale of this has already sent ahead a team of 20 men to believe it or not Start building a yankee seaport his men are going to be there for a number of years He knows that savastopol has been flattened. They basically have to build a village on the beach He leaves on june 3rd arrived savastopol about a month later takes about 40 days to get there Followed by about 10 days later by the first ship with one case on You'll hear the phrase in this presentation a lot breakings and burstings if a company used to fail in the last last century 19th century They would say that it had burst or gone up Well burstings and breakings is something that golem will face again and again and again And yet he will solve every one of them the first bursting of breaking he has is that the second ship Which has three casons doesn't show up until the end of august He now only has about two months before the weather starts to close in and his men have barely finished assembling the first case on So that's the first glitch in the plan. They didn't stop and think through how long it was going to take when you're outside of a Factory city to put four of these together. What's more three have arrived so terribly late The russians are a little concerned because by the end of 1857 not a single ship has come up at all And gowan is you know supposedly the best thing since slice bread What has happened is that gowan has started blasting some of the old ships of the line Now one reason he's willing to destroy those and the russians don't care about it is that The rest of the world never believed this but the russians always knew it was true The black sea and especially savastopol harbor is infested with shipworms to rato nevalis The russians used to complain that no ship in the black sea fleet lasted more than 15 years And the rest of the world, of course, that's because you use rotten wood and you know, you're not good at this And your ships are terrible while gowan actually took a piece of wood from one of the ships when he did his recon Back to st. Petersburg and made sure the russians saw what he's working with Shipworms start their life as very very tiny little critters called villagers You can't even see them and they float along in the current until they find a piece of wood It doesn't matter what flavor it is. They just love it and they'll bore in That little hole will be there for the rest of the life of that piece of wood Whether it's a piling or ship's timber and it looks totally innocent Almost like powder post beetle holes ahead of a pin But once inside when the velager begins feasting and becomes a trade-on of alice He can grow over a foot long and the channels get as big as a pencil or your little finger And they seem to have an uncanny ability never to hit another tunnel And never to again puncture the outside of the wood So you can look at a piece of wood like this and say, ah, that looks good and sound You can probably kick it in half because the pictures that gowan showed you look this up online It's just honeycomb You couldn't put any more of these little candles in there. The ships are rotten So the russians said go ahead and blast them. We'll supply all the powder. That's the russians first mistake Because blasting these ships where the timbers are so rotted is like putting dynamite in a bowl of pudding It blows the pudding the smithereens, but everything to either side is just like you feel something Now that he's going through five Thousand pounds of powder on one ship and it's not done And the russians are watching the dollar signs or ruble signs mount mount mount because they're promising all this powder And they said you're forbidden to start a second ship. Do you finish one of these at least? So he ends the year working on about A dozen ships or so and waiting for his guys to assemble those caissons The weather finally clears about February or March and his men immediately go down and start building caissons and just give you an idea of the scale of this operation He brings 150 americans with him House builders, ships joiners, ships cockers, mechanics, motormen, you name it, they're over there Boat builders anything from the Yankee seaport. He has a complete machine shop Everything you can think of he also has 150 naked divers before you get an image in your mind That just means they're not in submarine armor. All right. It's cold in these waters And he has hired three to five thousand russian laborers chelarex to do the grunt work The only time they get to stop is when they know they're going to blow something up in the harbor because it's wonderful To watch the guys are a water, you know But otherwise there's 5000 russians working for this guy for a couple co-packs a day if you will Conditions for gowans men are very very difficult The waters in the bay the current is very sluggish and what's more in the holds of the ship where they're working Not only is it dark it is constantly cold and they can't see what they're doing Their hands are constantly cut up by the muscles that have formed on every side of the ship So in the evening they have to dress their hands with with suet and mutton and wrap them and hope they heal up by morning There are a few sharks here and there that they get a little too friendly quote unquote And as if that weren't bad enough when the day of work is done They're assaulted in their sleep by millions of fleas One yankee said I think the only thing I fear is that they realize their power and unite and drag me out of bed This was a legacy of the thousands and thousands of soldiers that it's been a year there for goodness sakes So gowan and his men finally get the caissons built And the way the caissons are supposed to work the thinking is sound up to a point He's got four caissons and they are going to be ranged Two on each side of a ship and the chains will come down through the center to the sunken ship So that's a water surface here All right, the idea is that they'll support the ship originally gowan says well Let's just go through some of the gun ports and see if they'll support that Chains rip right up through the center of the things gowan says, okay We'll cut a hole in the oral optic the lowest one down and we'll reinforce with an iron collar Well, the chain just brought the iron collar up too So now he realizes the only way to do this is to bottom sling these things which are sinking in the mud So he has to have his uh, his iron workers make two foot square two inch thick iron plates They're drags basically and he has his men position those beside a ship and then from a lighter on the surface a steam lighter They'll drag it out 10 15 feet and slowly dredge a channel of the keel Then his men will take a 30 foot long needle About two inches thick and put it underneath the ship to the eye of the needle as tight as stout rope That rope then goes to a lighter chain and to a heavy chain and slowly at 300 pounds per length chain Is passed into the ship and tightened up All the ships begin lifting at once now the way gowan fix this ability problem supposedly is that these are floodable So the chain is tightened and the ships the caissons are flooded down to within two feet of the surface and now your surface of water Is here when it gets that low they make sure the chains are tightened and they pump out the caissons Gowan calculated that between the steam engines of the hydraulic ram on the surface pulling the chain and the buoyancy of those Four caissons. He has 4,800 tons of lifting power The biggest ship in the harbor is about 5,000 tons. He figures this is going to be a done deal. The problem is Gowan has placed anchors To hold these things in place The anchors let go constantly he has steam ships stationed on either end here Chuffing as hard as they can to keep these in place and still the anchors let go and the steam ships are dragged back So what happens then is This is a situation you end up getting He says all I can see are masts. I can't raise the ship above the water level He realizes that he's made a miscalculation and he's going to have to redesign these caissons in the course of 1858 Though however, he does manage to bring up about 15 ships some of the lighter ships a couple hundred tons things like that Now gowan, of course, he's he's a self promoter. You have to be at this point in history There's really no pr agents or things like that and he doesn't actually lie to the american public He says I've raised 15 vessels Let the american public think that means 120 gun, you know line of battleships If you look at his listing which is in the book of uh, that he kept very careful track of what he raised. These are things like dredges, uh Floating dry docks small cutters things like that. He brought up 15 vessels. Let's say not 15 ships of the line So nonetheless, he designs redesigns things that year ends. He's got 15 Ships quote-unquote and to wind the season up at the end of summer. He goes after an iron clad No, I'm sorry an iron gunboat the dunaj or denu and it's a fiasco But again, he works around it. The problem with one of these ships is that They can't get their chains in the right spot to lift it all the weight here is in the middle of the ship On a sailing ship a wooden ship the weight's pretty evenly distributed This is the first time someone's had to deal with all the weight of a ship Basically being here in the center and because they can't get their chains Because of the size of the caissons close enough they start to bring the dunaj up and she breaks the surface The stern breaks there and the bow breaks there. They snap the ship in half And gowan is like, okay. Don't anybody write home about this. We're gonna figure out what to do what he does I actually learned a new use for an old term. He basically cuts the ship in half and he puddles or makes a Dam, if you will an either end of the ship So now he has two ship halves and he can raise those independently and he says it floats like a duck They drag it off and they start to just dismantle it at the dock side So he winds up the season with a bit of a success after a big failure and only bring up small ships But he has brought up a number of ships in this year over the course of that winter When his men can't actually do anything they are feverishly trying to plan what to do about the caissons that are not working He realizes that bringing them up from the center was a sound idea as far as solving the lump problem and getting balanced But he can't do anything about he can't just put more anchors down there It just rips out of the bottom all the time. He redesigns caissons. This takes all of 1858 The reason it takes so long is he's not in philadelphia anymore So vastapole is a desert. There is nothing there. His industry of salvaging ships is the third thing you can do in Sevastopol Beyond the artillery shells and the you know dead horses He has to contract with a firm in England oddly enough to make even bigger chains that are massive about double the weight double the size With very little play between the links and the british try and talk him out of this because now I know what i'm doing Do what I say because the other chains also keep snapping all the time because the weight of the ships Makes giant chains. He also redesigns his old caissons and his two new ones built The problem is I said Sevastopol is a desert He has to have the russians fell trees in poland that are long enough And thick enough to be sent down the rivers and then hand sawed in pits in Sevastopol There is no sawmill in russia at this point in time. They can handle something like that He's also supersized things the new caissons Are 100 feet as opposed to 50 and they're 22 feet high These ones are also compartmentalized. You can flood each chamber separately the chain Also goes over the end this way now originally or initially you would think okay That's just going to cause a balance problem as soon as he takes a drag on this this thing's going to do that This is where gallons genius comes in by flooding this stern chamber He balances the pull on this chain So he can sink the entire case on as far as he wants to again within a couple feet of the water If it's a light ship it will just raise it a heavier ship He has to just balance it so that it stays level and if he wants to at the very end When it's almost all the way out of the water say he has a couple extra feet He can pump these dry pump more water in the stern and it will actually lift the ship even further Once the ship is on the surface they can clear the mud off pump it out take it away By the way, this is the only approach was going to work with all those worm ridden ships A number of his competitors tried to get him to use something newer making fun Amp for using raising by lumps because it was outdated and things like that But the problem was one or two of his competitors tried these things They realized they weren't going to work For instance, you can't pump these ships out by just plugging up the portholes while they sit on the bottom Because the wormholes are so bad it basically is like sucking water in as fast as the pump is dragging it out Through a thousands of little straws They said okay, we'll put airbags remember the Missouri taught down his death on airbags because all they do is go Pop pop pop they never work But someone said okay put them inside the ships will inflate them Well as soon as the pressure hit those wooden walls pop they pop the ships popped it didn't work at all This is really the only approach that seems like it's going to work Gowan, we believe I believe finished his two new caissons at the very tail end of 58 because He managed to raise one single ship the Krim or Crimea Krim is important because she's blocking access to three other iron Pedal wheel steamers the Veseraebi of the grommet sets in Odessa And that's important because gowan has until the 1st of november to get them out of the water And none of them are out of the water at that point in time and the russians are charging him 500 rubles per week per ship That's 9500 bucks in modern money every single week those ships aren't raised So with winter closing in he rushes and raises the Krim It's very innocently listed at the end of the year in the newspapers and that and certainly what's different about this ship Why they work well in the december in freezing cold weather to get the Krim out of the way Well for one it stops the meter running on at least one ship and then in february of 59 when it's still freezing out there Up pop the other three ships in rapid succession So he's not losing money on that anymore The money he's losing of course is dwarfed by the money they're making even before the three Case-ons that he's missing in 57 show up gowan had said I could make $3,000 a day for 300 days just bringing up salvage The some materials on the ships the fittings are so Valuable though what the british and french didn't take it's just there for the salvaging also the russians for instance Sank one ship that bears on full of copper plating for the bottom of hulls and the new right where it was He raises that and makes a couple million right off the bat They dumped about 40 different brass howitzers over the side of that causeway when they escaped Those are worth about 10,000 a piece in modern money So they're racking up money like crazy. The whole expedition supposedly cost only about two and a half million dollars His investors have made this over 10 12 20 times. So there's nobody back in philadelphia complaining But gowan is worried about getting ships up Uh in the spring in february march and april he brings up the three ships And this clears the way to start raising the larger ships throughout 1859 Gowan finally has both caissons ready the krim comes up. He uses them on all the other ships And as you start to edge into 1860 He's already brought up 15 fairly heavy ships and there are two left in the harbor These are the signature characteristics ships that the world has identified as the vastapole One is the kulevchi kulevchi is a large frigate Multi deck and she's about 4,500 tons. She sits in the middle of the harbor and the reason she's iconic is It's her mass you can see no matter what else gowan clears there She sits in the middle of the bay waiting for somebody to get her up He manages to raise her up and drag her off No problem, and now he's going after the most famous ship in the harbor the most infamous This is the vladimir vladimir is an iron paddle wheel steamer And she's one of those ones that gave nightmares to the french and british Because she had a knack of sneaking up in the middle of the night to some unseen bay What you can't tell from a map when she zoom in is the entire edge of the shoreline in savastopol bay Is just covered with little inlets like fingers that stick up And it was nothing unusual for the french and british troops to wake up in the morning take a peek It's like oh my god There's the vladimir and she would lob some mortar shells get up steam and go away A couple of times she also broke through their supposed blockade and shelled positions and went out raiding and capturing other ships Before the british and french could get steam up or get underway So they they don't they want the vladimir to like rot in place doesn't matter It was english built They just don't want the vladimir to come up the russians want the vladimir back in a big way They would like to get all their fleet back but the vladimir especially oddly enough gowan doesn't write much about vladimir He manages to bring her up in the spring of 1860 And the world assumes at that point that this is a done deal. There's the kulevchi. There's the vladimir, you know Huzzah and actually the uh English medalist taylor strikes a medal that shows the kulevchi I suppose although it's as big as 120 gunship He obviously didn't visit with gowan's caissons spewing water raising her in the middle of the harbor And there's the military barracks in the background everything and he puts on there quite hopefully 1857 8 9 and 60 done deal And I actually have seen a picture of that gowan had it made into a lapel pin That he kept for the rest of his life and passed on to his kids his great-grandson showed her to me However gowan knows the job's not quite done There are still a number of ships down there He's got probably about 15 ships left on the bottom some of them major ships major warships He expects to raise them because one of his men writes home that things are moving so slowly We spent four months trying to get chains under one of these ships The problem is now it's been a number of years since the battle and like Missouri and uh at Gibraltar The currents have slowly rocked the ships and settled them into the bottom and the mud is like glue The mud at first it seems a good thing because where the mud covered the ships the worms couldn't get to them Well now they're so deep That's why it took four months to dredge channels and thread chains under these last few ships And then when he tries to raise them he finds out that in clearing them It's open season for the worms the worms are coming to devour them even more So when he tries to raise these ships even the big chains and all the caissons just cut right up through them He has no choice but to blast so for most of 1860 after kulevchi and the new Vladimir come up. He just blast and blast and blast but again He has the same putting in dynamite problem. The ships are reluctant. They're resistant to this They don't want to be blown apart. Finally as it comes into the spring of 1861 Gowan realizes I have a deadline coming. He is supposed to have the harbor cleared by contract by 1st of april 1862 Spring comes and gowan has only seven merchantmen left Three are stuck up way at the eastern end where nobody goes. Anyway, they were just taking their scuttle Four in a tiny little appendage to the bay called careening bay where they would take ships to tip over and clean their bottoms They're not a hazard of navigation whatsoever Knowing the deadline is coming the port officials forbid him to work on these ships until april 2nd Gowan of course complains of the czar because he just by the terms of the contract forefooted all his equipment And was not going to get paid one ruble Gowan goes and complains that and there's a lot of back and forth wheeling and dealing He approaches the czar. He talks to do constant he tries to get the navy to understand and they basically all stonewall him Finally, they pay him for a couple of the ships he raised years ago And then tell the czar he's been paid. Don't worry about it And when gowan approaches the czar the czar says this man I've known my whole life my minister so-and-so has assured me that you were paid who might have believed you a foreigner or this man No one ever gave the czar any numbers. He's not supposed to deal with business stuff The bottom line of the entire multi-year salvage operation is he is never paid by the russians for raising the entire black sea fleet He had brought up 22 ships intact Blown apart and salvaged and removed 39 others and left about 16 on the bottom to rot So by ship count it is the largest salvage operation in the history of the world Now gowan is not paid and This went into the courts until 1875 It actually became a matter of state uh secretary of state fish got involved at one point But as gowan is getting older doing other things the russians are dying or not caring anymore They never really get any money to him at all his great grandson when I when he read the book actually said I wonder if there's a suit there for us somewhere With putin if you would pay up at this point in time The question then of course is how high did this go who who cheated whom? Is it the local military governor admiral gregory budekoff? Is it duke konstantine or is it the czar himself? The answer is all the above What the world doesn't know is The crimian war cost the russians not just in lives. It cost them a lot of money They're refurbishing as fast as they can because they expect to go to war not only in europe They expect to come into our civil war on the side of the north Against the french and the british and the southerners and this almost happened a couple times That's a whole other topic They basically don't have two rules to rub together and from the get-go the instructions, which again, there's no copy that survives Tastily or whatever were to to make sure that you didn't spend any more money You had to this is why the russians begin to freak when they realize that they're going through money like crazy on gunpowder in the beginning At one point the russians offered to build gowan a small steam lighter if you a little 30 foot thing And they quote him an enormous price like 20 000 dollars and gowan's like no no no no no no problem Don't worry about it. He goes away and builds it for about one thousand dollars Has his own yankee shipwrights build it right there in a little seaport and when the russian officer see i think what's that? Well, that's the ship we wanted to build. Oh, what did it cost you thousand? Oh, oh, okay. Okay. They were going to line them in pockets with it, too at one point when he sells a ship He's not paid for it and he goes in complaints to constantine and constantly orders the navy to pay for it Which they refuse to do until again it goes to the czar He's paid for the ship But then the next few ships he sells to the russians they deduct the money that he got for the first ship And it goes into the pockets of the russians The the government is in such bad shape that whenever they really feared war in the mid 1860s Someone had said if it comes to war the government will be embarrassed in even maintaining its normal operations There just was no money because while the russians are also not investing in sabastopol This is something that really disturbed the people that hung around And the navy that had been their their queen of bases if you will but it is destroyed Even those beautiful caribbeania docks the british made sure to destroy those They sent ships in and sunk them and blew things apart and they're they're trashed Everyone expected them to refurbish sabastopol They don't they actually invest in odessa And nikolayev up on the the rivers to the north and those become their major naval bases for the next couple of decades If you will so they just write off sabastopol Oddly enough of all the ships that galon rays the russians end up writing most of them off, too So one wonders if you're going to write the bay off anyway and the port Why bother to clear it the british plan would have worked as well let them rot But they wanted probably just to thumb their nose at the english and raise the ships So galon is never paid but just as just as this story began with an ending It sort of ends with the beginning one of the things that john galon does when he's over there on his free time Because his men always got sundays off and when he wasn't actually diving he was free to go explore the siege had been So horrific that while the russians had one graveyard on the north shore that grew enormously over time The british and french had basically had regimental cemeteries 168 cemeteries ring the entire southern side of sabastopol and most people don't know where they are Well, what galon does is he goes out and equates himself with where they're all at because as english and french tourists I don't mean to make light of that They're mostly family members trying to find out where their son was killed and you know where his grave is They know to go to john galon He'll play local tour guide and he and his wife actually adopt one or two individual graves His wife especially to refurbish and try and get things to grow He experiments with hundreds of different kinds of trees to find out what's going to survive in that harsh climate And beyond that galon also goes to some of the more major cemeteries Where the walls have been knocked down by wandering cattle or people have vandalized stuff and on his own dime He refurbishes those Now this not only impresses the russians even though they're fallen enemies It impresses the french and british and the turks and the rest of the world People who weren't even part of the war are impressed and while the russians cheat him out of every ruble he was owed Galon leaves the vastapole with more of those gaudy bejeweled 19th century metals and crowns silver snuff boxes diamonds galore from queens and kings and dukes everywhere He's a household word at this point for his humanitarian efforts And because he managed to pull off the engineering feat. He's also acknowledged now as a world famous engineer Now one thing I didn't mention at the beginning was he's also called colonel john galon now Who somehow seems to have been in the u.s. Army? This was partly intentional. Remember the savastopol was a military base in 1857 So when you go there you have to have some sort of rank to impress the locals galon has never been in the military But pennsylvania and philadelphia are so behind this expedition They make him an honest to god colonel in the pennsylvania state militia And I do wish I had this picture because I found a picture of the full regalia It's got the bichorn hat with more ostrich feathers than any one bird ever wore Kid gloves up to here Epileps you know that just go and braids everywhere and it's just a gorgeous thing and a number of his Next in rank became lower ranking officers all dandies And of course one with cynical newspaper said this is sure to impress the braves of savastopol Who of course have just survived the siege and lost the war? But it's important because the russian navy which runs the place will not respect them Even men who were in the navy petitioned the secretary of the navy at that time to where it was called a navy pin Basically a badge you got but you had had permission to wear it and going to this foreign country They all got permission because as soon as the russians knew okay, you really were in the navy Don't really care too much what your rank was but if you did this i'll talk to you And from the flip side we have a letter from another fellow another yanky who went over there And his sister said in the newspaper when she posted his letter John left the party early because you know how he hates to be second to anybody But the russians wouldn't talk to him because he had never been in the military and never in the navy So he becomes when he is a he is a colonel legitimately in the pennsylvania militia And then at the end of his signature sometimes he would put us so people would know where he's from Well after the war when the brits are more familiar with the way things work over here They assumed that us was short for usa must be us army So all of a sudden he became a military colonel of engineers in the army And you still find references to him as an engineer in the civil war which he wasn't He stayed over there after 1862 and Did a little investing in oil fields and that ran a couple lines of freighters for the russians putting some Rail lines things like that and we have i have wonder if that's how the russians think he was getting paid If he could make money from oil and that Gowan comes back here periodically to lin massachusetts and did a couple projects here and there His entire career and i won't go into detail here because the entire life's like 40 pages of the book Each chapter could be a new book for goodness sakes. The guy is interesting The thing i found Very rewarding about john gowan is I mean back up You can refer to the name daniel borsten america's most famous historian Borsten said that the best ideas the most promising things the most rewarding undertakings occur on what he calls The fertile verges where two totally different things meet whether it's city and country High and low doesn't matter well gowan works on one of those fertile verges and where gowan works Is between old ideas and new ideas remember the airbags that everyone said these are the greatest things in slicebred Let's use them how often today people run after technology just because it's new think of the lines outside an iphone store Or an apple store when something is coming out. It doesn't matter if it works better or not It's new i got to have it the world wanted airbags even though popping was the only noise they made Gowan on the other hand would look at an old idea And whereas today we use the word innovate to make something new Back in the day when he was using the word innovate we would sometimes use the word renovate It meant to make something new Again Not just make something new period so his whole idea well the anchor thing finally, you know Flummoxed him up there with the first case on the whole idea of supersizing something like that And solving the balance problem and raising by lumps the sheer genius And then having multi Compartmented case-ons to solve the problem of raising those ships without dragging yourself down again stroke a genius everything He does for the rest of his life is in that same vein Unfortunately the world is so interested in you know flashing new things then just as they are now that a lot of times His ideas aren't taken up One of his most promising was to actually rig the entire levy system along the mississippi with telegraph lines That would send a constant current that way if the levy was broken by a flood and the line went down They identified where the break was like that and go repair it It wasn't a bad idea He had a number of plans for raising ships up over bars at the mouths of rivers to get them in and it was It was a heavy investment at first, but it meant you'd have to dredge the channel every couple of years We ended up dredging all the time another time an English major English warship went down off ireland in the 1870s And gowen said look let's build case-ons it'll take us a little while But I guarantee you will get it up British said no no we have the most professional divers same old song ship is still on the bottom off ireland That is pretty much all I'm going to talk about John Gowen two books is enough, okay I'm back to civil war after this for the next talk secret weapons and all that Can I answer any questions for you about John Gowen or the operation? At the beginning he was getting all this material for salvage which was quite And didn't that continue as they It tapers off because of course when they have nothing else to do remember for the first year They can't do anything until the other case ones get there and then they can't do anything major He I don't know if he's getting a paycheck I assume he was an investor in this company because it had some high rollers back in philadelphia Underwriting this thing and I'm sure a lot of the profits went home And they actually sent their corporate treasurer with him to savastopol to keep tabs on things Not that he was cheating just to make sure everything made it back And they they constantly the newspapers four or five times in the first couple years talk about the tens of thousands of pounds With the iron that they've taken back to england to sell as salvage So I I assume he makes money there Whenever he has to sell or forfeit all his equipment though the reports I had make it sound like that stuff belonged to him I think he had been promised that by the russians It was 355 thousand rubles was translated to 6.75 million dollars if he sold the gear Whether part of that was supposed to go to the stockholders I never found evidence For against that but he came out of there pretty much a broke man But because of the fame he had gotten he gets a lot of lucrative jobs after that And of course you can always hawk a bobble if he wants to and you know sell a medal He happened to enroll in our civil war No, he actually didn't he was under contract until 1862 Uh came back briefly to lin and they went back overseas after dropping off a lot of superdears Which no longer exists lin got a couple of cannons and things like that But he went back over to undertake other contractual salvage operations overseas. He just never took part in the war Oddly enough giving idea of how things get lost to history In an 1830 1930 book that was cataloging artifacts on display at the boston club Something which isn't there anymore it lists two russian naval cutlaces brought back by colonel gowan So I went tracking whatever happened to this. Oh, well there at the peabody sx museum Oh, okay. Well for one peabody sx doesn't put any emails online It took me about a year to find somebody I could contact and when it finally turns out is I described these things that we have no record of these And I talked to another person a year later and this person dredged up Photographs that purported to be russian or I mean the confederate artillery swords They're not they're john gowan's cutlaces because if you look closely what they are they are actually russian navy cutlaces They're french Infantry swords, which they're all issued which of course we patterned our swords after the cutlaces in the civil war So there's a great similarity, but when you zoom in you can see the wire wrapping It's quite obviously an 1830s french sword that's been misidentified someone at some point transcribed a number Cataloged it wrong didn't know what it was and a later museum curator said oh that looks like an artillery sword from You know the mississippi and gowan swords get lost the cannon probably got melded down somewhere You know in an iron drive in world war two He brought back a beautiful two-headed russian eagle From the bow spread of a ship with a figurehead and the last time anyone saw any part of that They said that they had someone had americanized it by lopping off one head So that probably got burned, you know Even his family knows very little about him I had occasion within the past year to actually meet and have dinner my wife and I with jacksy gowan The gowan's some of you may recognize his son constantine was born in russia comes back and becomes a concrete magnate out in Ohio His son i forget what he does because quite well He's the millionaire millionaire that millionaire playboy that skippers his ship the speedjacks around the globe in the 18th 1930s his son Nickname is jacksy based on speedjacks. It's really alexander gowan. It's jacksy is what he goes by so we had we had dinner And uh, it was disconcerting because he's a spitting image of his great grandfather It was like talking to the guy which is which is scary If you read the book by the way, don't look for a picture of gowan up front because the only picture I have Is a drawing based on a photo from when he's well advanced in middle age. He's got a little weight on He's very comfortable. He looks like a banker And yet the guy is very very dynamic their episodes in the book where he just does basically heroic things and In sharp contrast of most of our perceptions of 19th century people At his level. He just seems to be a really nice guy and you know very innovative Did you speak Russian? No, he did not speak russian Actually, nobody who went on the expedition that we know of speaks russian because that we didn't I say that There was one letter that a fellow wrote back saying to his friend Will you go down to someone's house bookshop on the corner of session sister street Buy me whatever russian dictionaries you could find so I can learn to talk to people And another time it said that a couple of the young ladies because remember they took their families over This is a multi-year thing. So they're one thing that's under the surface is they're schooling their kids They you know, they're running a daily life amidst all that shrapnel You know, I'm sure you cleared the yard and said johnny and janey do not go beyond that line But uh, they said that a couple of the ladies were trying to learn russian Another person commented that it was almost impossible to get orders because of course this attracted a lot of contractors Those 150 naked divers they were mostly greek sponge divers who could hold their breath for a lot longer But they had guys from all over the levant and the Mediterranean. So you could have six different languages on board this ship I'm sure a lot of things were like Hold your breath Because no one could understand anybody else, but somehow they got the job done You keep talking about philadelphia. We're talking about the shipyard. We're talking about uh shipbuilder companies All along philadelphia from the foundries a lot of them aren't there anymore But uh, again the book lists all the different places he had stuff made For one of it all the timber in the hinterlands behind philadelphia You've got iron foundries on a scale that can make 20 ton collars for the centers of those that can hue and form all those 50 foot long beams And stock them on board the ships So and that's where he mostly drew his 150 mechanics from some bostonians came with him But most of the guys came from philadelphia and new york oddly enough and i won't go into detail here It's in the book his competitor who tries to sneak in ahead of him and lie to the russians and say I'm here to you know salvage the ships and the russians see through that he's from boston So in fact, he's working against bostonians Well staging out of philadelphia But uh, those are the people that brought along the airbags and the pumps and all that and saying this you know Your chains aren't going to work and go improve them wrong Yes, sir Okay It just makes a lot of sense Blasting a hole Hanging onto the air hose for dear life if you want to read another salvage We're probably the greatest one in history by tonnage This is why specified by ship count read cox's navy cox was again like gowan a totally untrenched. He's a salvage dealer In 1919 the german high seas fleet is imprisoned at scapa flow. They're prisoners because remember it's a treaty It's not an armistice. It's not an end of the war thing. They've been prisoners for a year Somehow they coordinate despite being under british guards scuttling all those ships at once And the the british tried to shoot a couple and stopped them but cripes the whole fleet was down And they let out the contract who can raise these ships and cox gets the deal Now these are much bigger ships obviously than what were raised in savastopol bay But he adopts a similar approach and believe it or not. He has his men go down and again plug up the holes Strip off what they can get chains underneath. It was the same kind of work gowan did in this case though cox sprigged Floating platforms that were not meant to submerge only either side of the ship And then along the side close to the ship He had 20 men at giant levers with heavy chains and like on the count of three Everybody would pull and it was so stressful on their biceps each man could do only 20 pulls per day Before he had to go back and rest for a whole day He manages to raise the ships that way and the way he did it the same way gowan did you raise it as far as you can Then you push it towards shore like grounds And then cox would release the tension gowan would let the water out and everything would raise up again You basically hump the ship to shore like this. It's the same technique only Cox haven't never heard of john gowan because it would have saved his men an awful lot of pain in their arms I imagine they retired being able to literally drag their knuckles on the ground Now he was british just a british craft dealer Yeah, and he he made a profit on that because of all the metal in those ships where his gowan didn't When the suez canal was Played of sunships The guy named tom lions an american from anapolis Like captain was in china the whole operation And he had germans working for him. He had some americans And it was a company in new york an art chapter in scott salvage company And some people from one of us from world island walked the company And at least his wife came from tucca so i got to know them It's it's fascinating work, you know They did quite a job there And unfortunately, you know like my wife is my editor and uh, she was saying you know Is there no monument to gowan somewhere and i said there's not lin actually forgot totally about him A jacksy and i right now are trying to get linda at least put up a plaque somewhere. We know where he lived But I said he didn't build things He cleared things away You don't you know an empty an empty bay is not your monument. I mean it is but no one knows about it You know, but in effect. He's a salvage operator. There's no he doesn't build you can't point to a bridge He's actually buried in paris. He lived until 1795 He never came back to the us one of the few times he came back was he agreed to sell his family home in lin Which was not far off the common and if you're ever up there right now It's a paved lot because the only reason gowan decided to sell his home was he did not want to stand in the way of progress He's not a luddite. He likes progress and it makes sense a couple things he invested in there in the book You'll read he really were far ahead far thinking But general electric or what would become general electric wanted to put up one of the first electric power plans right there Off the common in lin and gowan said i won't stand in the way I'll sell my house and now it's just a paved lock because the ge plant pulled out years ago But there's a fire station next door that has a great wall what needs a plaque on it something for god's sake But it's interesting they focus on you know the fact that that ge developed a rocket engine in lin And they want to talk about the mills and the girls and all that and you give them this favorite sun and they're like No, not interested. It's been very very frustrating because to me it's something new and different. Oh my god towns would kill to have someone like this in their history books But no they like their museum the way it is. So okay better not pill battle Any other questions folks? It was safe if you were careful Picture picture of the divers in the bottom of your fish tank Okay, the big helmet and all that and the the supposedly waterproof but constantly leaky suit of rubber impregnated canvas heavy diving shoes that comes out about 1828 just as we discussed with Missouri for those of you here for that It's reasonably safe by this point in time Again, like with all modern divers and you mentioned in the guys in cox's navy also You got to be devilishly careful that nothing gets snagged because if the air hose gets snagged or cut your gear in trouble That is actually the only death they had it's a vessel in all those years a cutter came along and accidentally snagged One guy's line and dragged him to where his airline snapped and they couldn't even find the guy in time to bring him up Otherwise it's remarkable. No one was killed with all this going on but they're The number of deaths aren't all that high the thing that really dams these guys is they don't understand about the bends Yeah, and they're not going that deep which is good. So the vessel's only 60 feet deep So you can sit down there quite a while without worrying about it, but they're pushing 100 150 feet Occasionally and one of the more famous divers a naked diver who later discovered submarine armor John green john b green would do naked dives going down almost 200 feet Basically, you know, okay I think that's where the wreck is at and he would go down in the outer dark Which is scary because there's always stanchions and mass like this, you know But he would have memorized the layout of the ship and where people fought the chest of gold was And he'd feel his way with his few moments of air and shoot back up and say to support crew We've got to go this way a couple feet and we'll do it again He would do that again and again during the day and not realizing what's happening And he basically died in pretzel form in a hotel because it's sort of thinking build up over time and cramp and then let go Uh By the time this happens uh Sevastopol happens you coming into a second generation of divers So when they would complain about oh, I've had the cramps in my arm since you know that last dive or something I stayed down a long time What do you think's happening the old guys would mock them and say you younglings are such sissies Just drink a gallon of honey. That always works. It's like, you know, it doesn't But the suits again if you're professional and you're careful and conditions allow it's reasonably safe You know horrid accidents did happen, but it's the same in any industry as We had a customer ran a tanker up on the Nantucket shoulders So captain Goodwin from Moran Tawley and the Mark Chapman people went out independently And they both came up with the same to show how to do it So they were going to put a tongue alongside Fortin's howler To wash the sand out. Okay. Now they had a three-day window Then they were going to have another tug and they would take dynamite if they couldn't move it that way They were going to dynamite the midship house off the ship and the tug would be pulling out They take everything off in dynamite And the Coast Guard said well, what would you do if the uh, that didn't float the ship And they each said we'd start pumping cargo overboard And the Coast Guard almost died Finally nobody did anything the ship broke in half and all the cargo went to English Jesus