Writer Stephen Crane had to wait three months in the port city of Jacksonville, Florida to sign onto the S. S. Commodore as a working seaman at $20 a month.
By the grace of good fortune—and good technology—it took me only a week to get on that same ship. But the conditions under which we both “boarded” the Commodore were striking in their differences—not the least of which is the fact he walked on the ship when it was still above water. Nonetheless, as I was to find, there were some commonalties.
Crane went aboard as a journalist for a New York newspaper syndicate to cover the civil war in Cuba that would soon lead to the Spanish-American War. The Commodore, a 123-foot long, sea-going “steam tug”, was carrying guns and ammunition to the Cubans who were rebelling against the Spanish government and the sugar fiefdom run by its wealthy and repressive Dons. With limited travel expenses and strange politics, Crane had to be creative about how he got there.
While his later reporting from Cuba was highlighted by the coverage of events like the charge on San Juan Hill, it was the accidental sinking of the Commodore on Jan. 2, 1897, and the subsequent night and day the young writer spent aboard a tiny wooden dinghy in the Atlantic, that left an indelible mark on American literature.
From that ordeal came “The Open Boat,” a barely fictionalized version of his experience in the form of a short story. It marked the beginning of the literary genre of “Naturalism”— the emergence of man-against-uncaring-nature themes at the turn of the new century. If there was any question about the raw validity of the experience, the subtitle for the story was: “A Tale Intended To Be After The Fact. Being The Experience Of Four Men Sunk From The Steamer Commodore.” In the story, Crane described himself in the third person as “the Correspondent.”
Coral & Stephen Crane
I went “aboard” the Commodore as a correspondent for a national news magazine to report on the discovery of the shipwreck, and attempts to salvage artifacts from it. Instead of merely interviewing the divers when they came ashore, I thought it might be neat to replicate at least some of the adventurous spirit that first launched Crane on his own journey by diving on the wreck site.
The waters of this part of east central Florida were well known for unpredictable underwater cross-currents, poor visibility and a healthy population of sharks. The guys I would be diving with would be armed with bang sticks and spear guns. I was armed only with an obscure and highly impractical sense of romanticism, born in some dusty, undergraduate classroom long ago and nurtured carefully ever since.
While waiting to book passage on the wood and steel steamship, Crane hung out with a fascinating young woman in the backwater port of Jacksonville. At 25, he was already well-known for “The Red Badge of Courage” and “Maggie, a Girl of the Streets”. Both novels were acclaimed for their gutsy realism, a tone that set Crane decidedly apart from the Victorian moralists of his day. It was probably not surprising that Cora Taylor, the young women with whom he spent most of his time, was a character out of one of his own works. Determinedly forthright and ambitious, Cora Taylor ran “Hotel de Dream”, a popular brothel catering to rich folks like Florida railroad baron Henry Flagler. Perhaps she was the prototype for Maggie herself.
When Crane died just three years after his experience on the Commodore —from a lingering illness exacerbated by his time in the cold Florida winter waters— he left Taylor everything he had. Which wasn’t much. For working writers, some things never seem to change. I identified easily with healthy chunks of Crane’s predicament: Bright, non-traditional and striking women have always fascinated me, and writing has certainly kept me, if not poor, then of modest means.
If Crane was intrigued by Ms. Taylor’s charms, he was less than appreciative of Jacksonville during his stay-over: “The town,” wrote Crane in one of his letters, “looks like soiled pasteboard that some lunatic babies have been playing with.” I felt those same babies had been charting the pell-mell sprawl that was fast-consuming much of Florida today. Chalk up another one for symmetry. So, it was with great anticipation that I approached the chance to visit the Commodore. In a state surging full-speed into the future, it was also an opportunity to journey backwards to an event where real-life romance —passion, courage, chaos and all—still could be found. 
I would be diving with Don Serbousek, the dive shop owner who first stumbled across the wreck a few years earlier without knowing it was the Commodore. Serbousek’s attraction to the wreck was easy to understand: Like most shipwrecks, it was swarming with fish, and Serbousek and his buddies enjoyed spearfishing. Serbousek kept the wreck’s location a secret, not because he knew of its historic value, but because he simply didn’t want other divers to fish it out. Today, navigational coordinates will put them within hundreds of feet of the wreck. But what leads them directly to the site is the congregation of larger grouper, snapper and other fish. Waters at this latitude are much cooler, and the Gulf Stream farther offshore than along the southern peninsula and the Keys.
Much of the offshore seabottom here is sand with the occasional low ridge of coral or rubble. Wrecks—whether accidentally sunk, or set down purposely to serve as artificial reefs —perform much the same function as reef systems farther south. They act as habitat, offering a secure and durable place to alight for sponges, worms, shellfish, even a few hardy species of coral. Smaller fish follow the invertebrates, and larger predators follow them. Pretty soon, you have a self-contained food chain—a virtual oasis of life, if you will— on a vast subsurface desert floor.
But the fact the wreck existed didn’t identify it as the Commodore since nothing had been found with the ship’s name on it. Indeed, it took some sleuthing by a professor of English at Jacksonville University, Elizabeth Friedmann, to put a name on it. Friedmann was writing a biography of Crane’s sweetheart Cora, whom she also found to be a fascinating and accomplished woman. During her research, Friedmann re-read archival accounts of the Commodore’s sinking, and then went back and studied “The Open Boat” more carefully. When first researching the story, I talked to Friedmann on the phone to better understand how she pieced the information together. She told me she was an avid sport diver herself, and was attuned to the fact that if the ship had sunk, it would likely still be there on the bottom somewhere. “Where else would it go?” she said.
As for its general location, Crane had written in “The Open Boat” of finally sighting a lighthouse from the small dinghy after the Commodore had sunk: “…this time his eyes chanced on a small still thing on the edge of the swaying horizon. It was precisely like the point of a pin. It took an anxious eye to find a lighthouse so tiny.” The men knew the small thing on the edge of the swaying horizon was the lighthouse marking the Mosquito Inlet. 
Like the Commodore, the “Mosquito Inlet” hadn’t gone anywhere, either. Indeed, it had been named so because it was once inside an entire northeastern Florida county that was also called “Mosquito.” Modern public relations spinmeisters in Florida would recoil at the idea of naming places for real-world constraints—especially unpleasant ones—but early explorers were far more honest: When the Spanish cruised this wild coast of sand and and driftwood and mangrove in the 16th century, they mapped it as “Los Mosquitos.”
(It was not unlike what they had seen and experienced on the low Atlantic shore of Central America, a portion of which today remains the “Miskito Coast” of Nicaragua.) Although Mosquito County had been renamed “Orange” in 1845 for its citrus groves, no one got around to changing the name of the inlet until the Florida land boom of the 1920’s. Dipping into its bag of worn but safe symbols, locals intent on luring yankee tourists and land buyers to Florida renamed the cut and the light “Ponce de Leon”. Despite its name change, the old brick light station remained—at 175 feet— the tallest lighthouse in all of Florida.
If the Commodore sunk 12 miles offshore the Ponce light, as Crane reported, that at least gave Friedmann a place to start. Daytona and New Smyrna Beach are both near that inlet, so Friedmann begin to chat up local dive shop owners to see if there was any knowledge of a century-old wreck at least ten or so miles offshore. Since she knew the Commodore was loaded with munitions, she also used that as a way of describing the wreck site.
Commodore, afloat
The English professor was referred to Serbousek as the guy who would know, if anyone did. Serbousek was not only a veteran diver, he was a collector who had salvaged old wrecks for the fun of it. Even better, he had a decided fascination for unearthing the past: He once recovered much of the skeleton of an extinct giant ground sloth, Megatherium, which had its own room in a local natural history museum. Serbousek acknowledged he had been spearfishing a wreck of the era Friedmann described. In between spearing, he would poke about the site and, in doing so, found clump after clump of heavily corroded bullets and what had once been boxes of rifles.
Friedmann wondered what other cargo ship of that age would be carrying munitions like this. She studied some of the ocean-worn bullets and guns Serbousek had brought back. Then she asked the diver if he could actually see the lighthouse from the wreck site. Yea, he replied, but from way out there it looks like a little pin on the horizon.
I track down Serbousek, and drive over for a visit so we can plan a dive on the Commodore. Serbousek, tall, balding, soft-spoken, runs a combination dive shop and television repair service in Ormond Beach, not far from where Crane and his Open Boat mates washed ashore in 1897.
The business, “Diving Don’s TV and Dive Shop” looks more like something you used to routinely see in the Keys. A gigantic rusted anchor from some long-forgotten Spanish galleon is perpetually at rest in front of the shop. Inside, the place looks like a page out of True magazine, circa 1958. Fossils are everywhere, a bone of a mastodon, the giant tooth of an extinct shark, Carcharodon, even fossilized alligator scutes. Besides the fossils, there’s also a bunch of transistors and TV repair things lying about, and in the middle of the store, a saltwater aquarium with a single occupant, a living spotted cowry as big around as my wrist.
Serbousek, who has a slightly absent-minded air, seems more like somebody’s high school math teacher than the adventurer he is. But I remember once meeting treasure hunter Mel Fisher in the Keys. Fisher had a similar lost-in-space composure, a curious disposition that represents only a fragment of the person inside. Later, when I dive with Serbousek, the math teacher façade fades and the confident explorer emerges.
Underwater map of wreck site
Since the Commodore was carrying few valuables, the reward for its salvage today is in the satisfaction of making a rare find linked to an important event in literary history. I like to think the divers are helping to write the final page of Crane’s brilliant short story, an act that Crane, the rogue adventurer, would have appreciated.
Yet, since there is no motherlode expected, as with Fisher’s Atocha, the small band of divers pay their own way, including sharing in gas expenses for the dive boat. Like Serbousek, they are all employed full time elsewhere and can dive only on their days off. During a half year’s worth of salvage work, they have recovered a dozen rifles, hundreds of lead bullets, countless pieces of brass and copper hardware, and a human foot bone. But, since there were over 14 tons of guns, munitions and medicine aboard, they have barely scratched the surface. While much of the cargo has been lost to sea-driven decay, or simply washed away, a great deal is still expected to be found as the men dig farther into the sandy bottom under the hull of the ship.
There were originally 27 men aboard the Commodore and most fled to full-sized lifeboats, except for seven who drowned during the sinking, and Crane, Capt. Edward Murphy, the ship’s cook, and oiler Billie Higgins, who were left only with a tiny ten-foot-long dinghy. As the last men to leave the ship, the dinghy, used to ferry supplies to and from the ship when it was in port, was all that was left for them.
The ship floundered because it had been leaking badly, and its pumps were unable to handle all the water that begin to pour in. After the sinking of the Commodore, newspapers—caught up in the spirited yellow journalism of the day—reported the ship was likely sabotaged by Cuban seamen loyal to Spain. On Jan. 4, 1897, Crane’s own newspaper, The New York Press, claimed “A traitor in Spanish pay was the cause of the (ship’s) leak.” Yet, the Commodore had been jinxed from the start, accidently crashing into shoals in the St. Johns River as it left the port of Jacksonville, grounding twice before it ever entered the Atlantic. Poor navigation caused the collisions, opening the ship’s hull to leaks.
Normally, steam-powered bilge pumps would handle a certain amount of incoming seawater, but they were said to be disabled. Were they sabotaged, or simply the result of poor maintenance? One of the heavily-corroded pumps has already been recovered, Serbousek told me, and the salvers hope to clean it by electrolysis and restore it, and in doing so, to be able to tell if it was intentionally damaged or not. 
By now, I was anxious to get “aboard” the wreck. But this was late December and the waters along this part of Florida, normally rough in winter, were made even more so by a strong wind blowing in from the north. Serbousek tells me that if the wind shifts abruptly and comes from the other direction, we’ll be afforded a brief lull that will allow us to dive. The water will still be churned with silt, but at least the seas will lay down for few hours. After we talked, I hopeful for a forecast that would give us a new southerly wind, and in two days, I got one.
Serbousek, who was also watching the weather, immediately called and told me to pack my dive gear and meet him at a coffee shop near the marina where they would launch their dive boat. It was New Year’s eve day. If we find the site right away, he said, we might have two or three hours before the winds pick back up again. We down our coffee, Serbousek asks the waitress to fill a thermos for the trip, and then we head across the street to the marina.
Here, I meet the other divers: Bob Wheeler, an old crony of Serbousek’s, Wheeler’s son Randy, a high school teacher, and Don Lucas, a building contractor. They’re all amicable folks, although only Randy seems to really appreciate how important the wreck really is. Bob Wheeler and Serbousek have been diving together for years, exploring uncharted shipwrecks off the central Florida coast back when diving gear was a lot less safe, and the outcome of any dive a lot less certain than it is today. In those days, Wheeler remembers, all they used were tanks and regulators—no gauges to tell them how much air was left, or buoyancy compensators to help them neutralize their trim underwater. Tanks then had “J” valves, with little wires attached. When you ran out of air, you simply pulled the wire and it released the reserve air, good for another few minutes that could be used for an ascent. Our dive boat today is Wheeler’s 23-foot sport fisherman, which is now in the water after he hauled it here by trailer earlier this morning.
Fully loaded, we cast off, Wheeler steering his boat expertly through a channel in the local estuary, and out through Ponce Inlet, passing the old brick “Misquito Light” just to our left as we go. Today, the stormy weather has clouded the skies, and a light rain soon begins to fall. By the time we are a only mile offshore, it is so gray with drizzle and clouds that I can no longer see the land. 
We bump along across a steady sheaf of building waves, Wheeler with one eye on the compass and the other on the navigational electronics. After an hour of this, we are near the wreck, identified by coordinates the divers routinely use to locate the site. But the data is not specific enough to put us precisely atop it. To do that, Wheeler turns on his fathometer, and its sonar gives us a rough bottom sketch made of thin green lines on a little screen. We slowly motor about the area, and at first, all seems flat. But, in another five minutes, the screen shows sharp points dramatically rising up, peaks that represent the highest profile of the wreck itself. I notice the depth of the wreck is 90 feet.
Lucas tosses an anchor over the side. We climb into our wet suits and gear, and then flop over the gunnels. The sea water is cold enough to momentarily take my breathe away as it seeps into my wet suit. Our strategy is to follow the anchor rope down, one by one, and from there, fin over to the wreck nearby.
This sounded good on the boat, but now that I am underwater I see there is far more sediment and plankton in the water than I had figured. I expected maybe 20 or 30 feet of visibility, but I can barely see beyond five or six feet. When I reach the bottom, I have no idea where the wreck is, so I simply sit there, waiting on the sandy bottom, 90 feet under the surface. Soon, Serbousek materializes from the murk, thumps me on the shoulder, motions a “let’s go” with his arm, and turns and fins away, with me trailing very closely behind.
Suddenly, I am atop the wreck itself before I even realize what it is. Its presence is signaled by a large rusted metal boiler, by far the largest remaining chunk of the old steamer. I drop down to the base of it, where there is less current, and the visibility improves. The metal that is left has become enveloped with a century’s worth of the sea—sponges, barnacles, corals. Spines of black and white sea urchins protrude from crevices. A school of Atlantic spadefish—which look like angelfish on steroids—undulate at the top of the boiler, riding the metronomic current swells back and forth in the water column.
I fin about 20 feet from the boiler, near where the gigantic prop is half buried. On earlier dives, the men have partially uncovered a six-by-eight foot section of the original planked wooden deck from under the sand, the largest piece yet found intact. I release all the air in my buoyancy vest so that I can kneel down on the deck, a place where Crane and his fellow shipmates scrambled about before abandoning ship.
The lesson of Crane’s literary naturalism was implicit: In man against nature conflicts, mere human muscle of the body or intellect of the mind is a conceit, an arrogance that can’t even begin to comprehend the power of nature. Most of all, the forces of nature were not evil, but simply uncaring, a view that also informs modern Existentialism. As Crane wrote: “It represented in a degree, to the correspondent, the serenity of nature amid the struggles of the individual–nature in the wind, and nature in the vision of men. She did not seem cruel to him, nor beneficent, nor treacherous, nor wise. But she was indifferent, flatly indifferent…”
Most of the wooden hull has already been lost to the turbulence of the sea and the appetite of wood-boring toredo worms. Cartoon images of intact ships under the ocean exist only in cartoons—or in theme parks. The only evidence of the size of the original ship is hinted by a small ridge several inches high of empty shells around the perimeter of what had once been the gunnels and hull. The shells, mostly snail-like gastropods of some sort, once attached themselves to the hull when it was still a hull. But when it disintegrated, their habitat disappeared, and so too did the animals that once lived inside the shells.
The longer I am on the bottom, the better I am able to see, as if focusing under the dim but sure light of a full moon back on land. Near what was the stern of the Commodore, one of the divers has uncovered a wooden crate from the sand. I fin over to take a look. There’s scant wood left, and the supplies inside are heavily corroded, and are now fused together in one large rectangular lump.
Serbousek is only a few feet away from the huge prop, and is exploring the bottom there by fanning the sand with rapid back and forth movements of his hand. Salvors who work such wrecks will use small rakes, larger hammers for chipping, and even, when needed, saws and crowbars. But most seem to rely on the more delicate ‘fanning’ method as the best way to scrutinize the tiny, often fragile, bits and pieces of maritime detritus. Although I am close enough to touch Serbousek’s tank, the storm of sediment created by his hand fanning has nearly fully consumed him in a brown cloud. When I try fanning the bottom myself, I create a similar predicament. Periodically, I stop and reach down into the small depression the fanning has created, and root around for something solid there. But when I find anything, I have to actually bring it up against my mask to see what it is. 
The bottom seems to be covered with old bullets, their brass cartridge and gunpowder fused together by corrosion into hand-sized clumps. Every time I scoop my hand through the sand and bring it to my mask, I come up with more such bullets. As one reporter for the Jacksonville Times-Union noted after the sinking: “Old Neptune has been supplied with enough arms and ammunition to blow up the island of Cuba.” Indeed, the manifest for the Commodore showed it was carrying 203,00 rifle cartridges, over 1,000 pounds of dynamite, and 40 “bundles” of Remington rolling block rifles.
As I move away from my underwater dust storm, I see the outline of the drive shaft, which runs from the bottom of the boiler to the stern. Looking up, I can make out a number of fish hovering over the artificial reef the wreck has created. Several dozen amberjacks, each the size of a small muscular torpedo, cruise by, and queen angelfish poke about in the wreck, their normally bright blues and gold muted to green by the plankton and the depth. Suddenly, the entire site is covered with thousands of tiny silversided anchovies. They undulate in unison, turning as one, and sometimes catching the scant surface light with their silvery bodies. When they do, they reflect it back, making them seem as if they are one great organic mirror, forming and reforming here atop this old literary icon on the bottom of the sea.
Near the edge of the school, at the limits of visibility, a large dark form with sharp and distinct fins appears, and— almost in the same instant— disappears back into the murk. I think of Crane sighting a large shark from their tiny boat by night: “There was a long, loud swishing astern of the boat, and a gleaming trail of phosphorescence, like blue flame, was furrowed on the black waters. It might have been made by a monstrous knife.” And then: “The correspondence saw an enormous fin speed like a shadow through the water, hurling the crystalline stray and leaving the long glowing tail.” Earlier, Serbousek had told me about the 12-foot tiger shark that has been seen around the wreck site during earlier dives.
Artist's rendition of the ordeal from a French edition of the story
I grab the hose with my air pressure gauge on it, and check my remaining supply: Not much. I have just about enough time for a safety stop before I surface. In truth, I had hoped we might find the ship’s whistle today, but it was a needle in a haystack possibility. Crane had written poignantly of it: “If there was ever a voice of despair and death, it was in the voice of the whistle…a song of man’s end.”
I head for the anchor line, using my hands to slowly pull myself across the bottom since the current is now too strong to fin against The entire site has been churned into a dust storm by a new underwater surge, perhaps an advance warning of the impending southerly storm front back on the surface. Safely on the rope, I pull myself slowly up, hand over hand. I look back one last time and see the wreck of the Commodore fade back into a ghostly underwater haze. I make a safety stop at 20 feet to blow off nitrogen, and then break through the surface. Around me, the waves have begun to grow much larger, spitting white foam and crashing into each other, signaling the beginnings of the new weather front. Everywhere I look, it is all gray—the sea, the sky, even our own small boat. Crane, from his seat in the dinghy, experienced a similar reality, describing it as the “universal indifference…of the slate gray seas.”
As the four men from the Commodore finally came ashore in the rolling January breakers at Daytona Beach and were flung from the small boat, oiler Higgins—by far the strongest man aboard—was the only one to drown in the surf. For Crane, it reinforced the notion that even the toughest humans are no match for natural forces.
The man who helped create literary naturalism would only live another three years after his ordeal, dying at the age of 28 in Bedenweiler, Germany of a tubercular condition aggravated by the wintry day and night in the open boat. His sweetheart, Cora, was at his side.
While his short story emphasize the indifference of the natural world towards man, it also taught that bonding between humans can be strengthened by confronting that same angst together. Crane wrote: “When it came night, the white waves paced to and fro in the moonlight, and the wind brought the sound of the great sea’s voice to the men on shore, and they felt that they could then be interpreters.”
Soon, all the divers are back on the surface and safely in the boat. The sky, once a solid gray of cloud and vapor, has become darker and it is raining now, a hard pelting rain. There is a good natured camaraderie aboard among us, and a happy sharing of new artifacts recovered—including an encrusted Remington rifle. Weaver pulls anchor and we head ashore, crashing through the waves as we go. Because of the weather, there is no lighthouse to be seen sticking on the horizon like the point of a pin today, but there has been an immense thrill in the doing, in the confrontation of life by direct experience.
As we approach Ponce inlet I finally see the brick lighthouse and by now, it is far larger than a pin. One of the divers turns to me and asks what I will write of this day. I tell him it will be an account of diving the wreck, and maybe of re-learning Crane’s message of Naturalism. He shakes his head and smiles, but I can’t figure whether it’s a smile of approval or one of bemused skepticism.
I think of how the ship’s cook was quoted in a local newspaper after his rescue in the surf, and figure I could do worse: “These newspaper fellers have got spunk…even if they do tell such awful whoopers at times.”
A shark & me, from another dive (Courtesy Norbert Wu)
[POSTSCRIPT: After my story appeared in Newsweek, Serbousek, Friedmann and myself were invited to travel to New York City to be on the national Today Show. I declined, but the other two went on, continuing to tell the story of the Commodore to the nation. By 1998, Serbousek and the Ponce Inlet Lighthouse Association were granted an “Admiralty Arrest” for the wreck which gave them the exclusive right to salvage the site. Technical divers from the Cambrian Foundation were contracted to help salvage the Commodore and to record a detailed site plan of it. By 2001, the Ponce de Leon Lighthouse Preservation Society created an exhibit devoted to the wreck and its history.
The Commodore still rests under the sea, far enough offshore so that---if you were to be in an open boat over the site---the Mosquito Light would stick up like a point of a pin on the horizon. ]
We’ll start with me showing pretty pictures of springs, and gabbing about the rare natural history that brings them to life. Since I’m a writer by trade, I’ll look for ways other writers have been influenced by our springs here over time. And, I’ll talk about my own experiences in and outside of springs, and how I cam to cherish them.
