He did not dream of the lions, but instead of a vast school of porpoises that stretched for eight or ten miles and it was in the time of their mating that they would leap high into the air, and return to the same hole they had made in the water when they had leaped.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY, The Old Man and the Sea
WHEN ART invited me to help him with the salvage, that ended my doubts about what I would do in life. It was not an auspicious beginning, cleaning up the mess of a terrible hurricane, but I loved the sea and felt good about it, as if it were home.
Art was a big, good-natured Irishman from New Jersey with reddish-blond hair who smiled easily and could make friends in a minute. Originally a deep-sea diver for the U.S. Navy who came down to help lay the freshwater pipeline to Key West, he had got gold fever and devoted his life to the quest for sunken treasure. Most people who dream of finding gold wake up in the morning and contentedly go back to work. Almost anyone who tries to live this dream soon finds that his life has become a nightmare. Only the most fortunate few actually find sunken treasure, and Art was one of these.
Historians tell us that Spanish galleons made 17,000 Atlantic crossings between A.D. 1500 and 1820. That’s a longer time than the United States is old. During that time, they say, the Spanish shipped at least $22 billion in gold and silver bars back home through the Florida Straits. If only 5 percent failed to make it back, at least $1 billion in treasure went down. Although a lot of that treasure has been found, enough is still on the ocean floor to make a lot of people very rich.
Art was not rich, but he lived well and kept the IRS sniffing around him all his life. In 1948, he discovered part of the Spanish treasure fleet of 1733, one of Spain’s annual “plate” fleets of twenty-one galleons with $68 million in treasure. It had run afoul of a hurricane in the Florida Keys. Art found hundreds of silver coins (“pieces of eight”), gold doubloons, and exquisite pieces of jewelry, including several gold rings, silver hearts and pendants, crosses and religious medals, and many other items. The dean of treasure divers, Art lavished his expertise on anyone who shared his dream, including Mel Fisher, who later found the Atocha. Art displayed his finds in his museum, which was built of coral like a Spanish castle at Treasure Harbor on Plantation Key.
Art had a contagious enthusiasm about treasure diving and, like all adventurers, a sharp eye for the dramatic. An expert on the Spanish explorations of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, he liked telling stories about the people he had come to know through his research, especially when he could use the actual artifacts involved. One evening after dinner at the museum, he launched into one of his tales of incredible derring-do, of pirate gold and dueling. As Art reached the climax of his story, he got a certain look on his face that I had noticed before, the look of someone rolling the dice with everything on the line. He rose dramatically from the table and walked over to a steel treasure chest against the wall. With a big brass key, he opened the chest and removed two exquisitely crafted dueling pistols. He held them for a moment in his big hands, feeling their heft.
“It’s true, Ricardo. Here,” he said, thrusting one of the pistols at me. That was not my name—Ricardo—but he liked the sound of it, I guess, and always called me that. He grinned. “They fought to the death with these.”
Though Art was obsessed with sunken treasure—gold and silver especially—he was convinced that it was cursed. And so am I. There was no other explanation, he said, for the danger and hardship that hung over every attempt to find it.
Art traced the curse to Atahualpa, god-king or emperor of the Incas in Peru. The year was 1532. Invited to the Spanish camp, the king was captured along with thousands of his men. The men were slaughtered. When Atahualpa realized what Francisco Pizarro wanted—gold and silver—the emperor promised a king’s ransom if he were released. He would fill the large room he was in halfway to the roof, he said, once with gold and twice with silver. Pizarro agreed. The word went out and the precious metal came in. But the Spaniards murdered Atahualpa anyway, strangling him to death, and the struggling Incan empire never recovered.
Art was cool, but I didn’t realize how cool till I went on my first treasure diving expedition with him. In 1961 aboard the El Amigo (“The Friend”), a 136-foot exnavy minesweeper that had been converted into a treasure-diving ship, we were headed for the treasure ship Genovese, a fifty-four-gun Spanish frigate that sank in 1730 on Banner Reef, a section of San Pedro Bank some seventy miles southwest of Jamaica. The Genovese carried three million pesos in gold and silver, including many ten-foot strips of silver, pieces of eight that hadn’t yet been cut or stamped.
When tourists visited Art’s museum, some of them said they wanted to go on his next expedition. He would write down their names and addresses and tell them that if he got enough interest, he’d be in touch. Twenty-one thrill seekers wanted to go with him on this expedition, including Burt Webber, who later led an expedition that found the Concepción. Art charged $1,000 each to go with him. He promised his subscribers eight weeks in the Caribbean searching for sunken treasure. We could come back rich, he told them; we could also come back with nothing but a few memories. Art was the only one who was paid. He received $1,000 and half of whatever was found. I was to get a fourth of Art’s share, and the subscribers would divide the rest among themselves.
Art chartered the El Amigo from Lenny Lawson Shaw, a tough old seadog with red hair and a red face who looked like a firecracker ready to go off. And with reason. Captain Shaw was a wanted man in Cuba. He apparently had smuggled guns to both sides during the early days of the Cuban Revolution, so everyone was after him. The captain and his son Mike, his first mate, had only one reason for taking this charter into such dangerous waters: money.
The first night out, Art and I were in the wheelhouse. Captain Shaw, who was at the wheel, said that his former partner had cheated him out of his part of the pay on a previous expedition and he (the captain) had tracked him to Alaska. He stared straight ahead. It was a dark night, clouds obscuring the sky, the smell of rain in the air.
Art glanced at me—I was sitting behind them—and winked. Then Art said to the captain, “Am I supposed to ask what happened?”
The captain sucked on his lower lip and gave Art a dead-fish look. “I broke every bone in his body,” he said.
The next day, a storm rolled in. I was assigned to the crow’s nest to keep a lookout. We could see that we were very close to Cape San Antonio, the westernmost point of Cuba. As the sun came up I could see four boats heading for us. Fishing boats, I wondered? I studied them through my binoculars. No, I decided, not fishing. Too many people. I counted them. There were twelve men on each boat. As the boats came closer, I could see the men more clearly. They all had M-1 rifles. I called out my sighting below and everyone lined the rail. By now I could see also that the four boats bearing down on us had .30 caliber air-cooled machine guns. The sea was rough, and the crow’s nest I was in was swinging wildly from side to side as our exminesweeper pitched and rolled. I couldn’t have climbed down if I’d wanted to. Then I noticed that all my shipmates had gone below. “That’s strange,” I thought.
Suddenly, they were back on deck again.
With weapons!
No one was supposed to bring weapons on board, but all of them had. As it turned out, Art and I were the only ones who were unarmed.
But that problem paled beside the one confronting us now. We were about to go to war with a fleet of Cuban boats that outnumbered us four to one and outgunned us ten to one. And with me in the crow’s nest! I wanted to climb down. To hide. Anything! But that was impossible. The sea was raging, and the mast was whipping crazily from side to side; I hung on for dear life to keep from being flung off into the sea.
This was a good time, I thought, to be friendly. I waved and grinned at the oncoming boats. Several minutes dragged by, an eternity. Then abruptly they waved back. “Wonderful,” I thought. They were not mad at us after all. Had I saved us? I scanned the boat below. I was looking for Art. I wanted to tell him. Where was he? Then I spotted him. He was at the stern. What’s he doing, anyway? I stared intently. He was waving at the gunboats with one hand and holding up the end of a flag with the other. The flag? Was it the American flag? I looked more closely. No. Cubans were not fond of Americans. Art was showing them the Panamanian flag!
Suddenly, all four of the Cuban gunboats turned and headed for shore. Exactly why they headed back, we never discovered. Perhaps the sea was too rough for them. Maybe they thought we were more heavily armed than we were. Or they might have turned back because of my friendly waving. But I doubt all that. I think instead it was because of what Art did, showing them that though we were an ex–U.S. Navy ship, we were of Panamanian registry.
That expedition ended in disaster, the subscribers turning on Art in a mutiny that I unwittingly touched off. But it sealed the friendship between Art and me because I made it up to him.
We had been out a while and had found some things, but not the silver we were looking for. We found historical artifacts, mainly: pewter mugs, spoons, and bronze crosses. Art was a master at reading artifacts. He read artifacts of a shipwreck the way a detective reads a murder scene. From his research, he already knew everything there was to know about the ship, including the route, the cargo, and everyone aboard, the number of cannons carried and whether they were of bronze or iron. He had dug up all the known facts about how and when the ship had sunk, which told him about the tides and prevailing winds. He also knew or could shrewdly guess what other divers had already found. When we found mugs and plates and a rat-tailed spoon, this told him where the galley was. And when we found a pile of big rocks, Art knew that they originally came from Spain and were used as ship ballast. Now, resting as they did on the ocean floor, he could tell where the center of the ship was when it went down. We found a brass button, which marked the officer’s quarters, because in those days only officers wore brass buttons like that. We also found burlap bags of cocoa beans. Like everything else, they were encrusted with coral and preserved deep under the sand. But like the large coils of rope we also found, when we tried to swim them to the surface, they turned to powder. We found ivory combs, crosses, flintlock pistols, and clay pots, which told us where the cargo hold had been and confirmed that the ship was indeed heading back to Spain.
Any moment, it seemed, we might find the silver and become instant millionaires.
Unless Art and I had already found it and weren’t telling the others.
That’s what Captain Shaw apparently thought. Shaw, who was as crudely persuasive as a .44 caliber pistol, told his son Mike and the subscribers that Art and I were cheating them.
We weren’t, of course, but people believe what they want to believe. And when treasure is involved, they believe the worst.
You don’t have to be a mind reader on a small boat to know what others are thinking. In a thousand ways, the subscribers let Art and me know that they didn’t trust us, that they were watching us, and that they did not intend to be cheated.
On the day of the mutiny, Art and I had been out in one of the dinghies all morning, and the carburetor of the 25-horsepower kicker was acting up. I looked in the tool kit for a small screwdriver, but it wasn’t there. We rowed back to the El Amigo, and I went below for another one. On my return, Shaw intercepted me, motioning with a toss of his head for me to come over.
“Yes?” I said, glancing at my watch. Art was waiting.
“You remember our little talk, don’t you,” he said, “the first night out?”
I was in no mood for games. “What are you getting at, captain?”
He sucked on his lower lip. “You remember what happened to a partner of mine who double-crossed me, don’t you?”
“You broke every bone in his body,” I said. “Yes, I remember.”
Shaw smiled. “I didn’t tell you the good part.”
I glanced impatiently at my watch. “OK, what was the good part?”
“The good part is that I did it without killing him. And I hope he lives forever.”
Later, at a general meeting on the stern of the boat, I noticed that Mike, the captain’s son, had edged uncomfortably close to me, the sheath of his knife unsnapped. I remember thinking very clearly, If this is not important, why am I noticing it? Was something about to happen? Was he warning me? Or was I as paranoid as everyone else?
Nothing happened, and maybe nothing would have happened. But I gave him a hard look and edged away.
I can understand the subscribers’ feelings. The lure of sunken treasure is everything that people say about it. They had hired the best in the business to lead them, and so far the only thing they had discovered was a truism: Work at sea is hard work. Certainly, if hard work and hardship meant anything, they deserved to find the silver. The food was worse than mediocre. There was no shower except the rain. The weather was unbelievably hot, the air so thin that breathing had become an act of will. Our drinking water, stored in large, black bladders up on deck, tasted like rubber.
Though Art never promised anyone we would find treasure, the pressure was intense to find something that would make it all seem worthwhile. Art and I didn’t talk about it, but I think we both wanted to prove ourselves to the others, and the quickest way to do that was to find the silver.
Art, his brother-in-law, Bob Soto of Grand Cayman, and I were going back and forth in the dinghy over a 100-yard-square grid. Art steered, and Bob and I took turns bent down with a black hood over our heads, looking through a glass bottom. The glass bottom is actually a Plexiglas plate covering a one-foot-square hole amidship. Looking through it, I could clearly see the bottom of Banner Reef twenty or twenty-five feet below. If something looked interesting, I tossed over a buoy to mark the spot. The buoy is bright red and has a fifty-foot line attached to a lead sinker. Later, we went back to the buoys and I dove down to check them out. If I thought I had found something worth investigating, I tied the line of the buoy to it. Sometimes, when I spotted something interesting, I would free-dive down and check it on the spot, and swimming up again, I could see Art’s face through the glass bottom, grinning at me from ear to ear.
What do you look for on the bottom? Anything unusual. That could be a mound of sand, a pothole, anything sticking up, but especially straight lines. There are no natural straight lines at sea, so when I spotted one I tossed over a buoy. Craters indicate that something has disturbed the bottom; so do mounds. The only way you can find out for sure is to dig.
The El Amigo had edged up to within hailing distance of Art and me. When I went down to check out one of the buoys, I saw several long strips on the bottom. They were six feet long, maybe longer, and encrusted by coral like white stucco. Ocean currents cover things up one moment, expose them the next. These strips—or what I could see of them—were sticking out in a bundle and looked very interesting. I swam up to the surface. The subscribers, their faces gray with fatigue, noticed that I had swum up earlier than usual. They lined the rail, suspiciously watching every move I made. How I wanted to prove them wrong!
“What do you need?” Art asked.
I took my mouthpiece out. “The hatchet.”
Art nodded and handed me the hatchet. The subscribers grumbled and became restive.
I dove down with the hatchet and found the long strips again. Probably metal. I drew back and chopped. It clanged. Yes, it was metal. I looked more closely and could hardly believe my eyes. It had the dull-shiny and soft, wonderfully lustrous sheen of silver. This was it! We had found the Genovese’s silver!
I chopped several more places to make sure, chipping off a chunk of it. This was it! We had found it! I pushed off the bottom and a moment later broke the surface.
They yelled from the ship, “Find anything?”
I spat out my mouthpiece. “Silver!” I yelled, thrusting my arm skyward like an Olympic champion.
The cry went around the ship like a cheer. “We found it! We’re rich!” Exhausted divers were jumping up and down, hugging each other, and some even jumped over the side in their joy.
Art looked skeptical. “What have you got?”
I handed him my sample.
He looked at it, frowning. “Steel,” he said with disgust, then tossed it carelessly into the water.
“But Art—”
“Steel,” he spat out, shaking his head.
As Art and I went on to the next buoy, the celebration continued aboard the El Amigo. They thought they were rich.
Hours later, when Art, Bob, and I returned, they couldn’t believe it when Art told them that I had been mistaken. There were harsh words, accusations, threats.
Art was tired. It had been a long day. He was emotionally drained. We were all gathered at the stern. They were getting nasty. Angrily, he challenged them, “If you want someone else to lead this expedition, damn it, go to it. That was not silver, it was steel.” Then he added wearily, “As for myself, I’m going to lie down in my cabin.” He pushed his way through the circle of men.
The subscribers elected Burt Webber to lead them. He was at least the most enthusiastic of the subscribers. The first thing they wanted to do was to check for themselves what I had found, so they came to me.
“Sure,” I said with a shrug. “But it was only steel.”
“You said it was silver,” Shaw charged.
Mike chimed in: “Yeah!”
“I thought it was silver,” I said lamely, “but—”
“But what?” Shaw had a mouth like a shark’s. They all crowded around me, twenty sweaty men who thought their fortunes had just been stolen from them.
It occurred to me that they hadn’t already tossed me over because they thought I might lead them to the silver.
“Not silver, huh?” Shaw said. His eyes were squinty. He sucked his lower lip a moment, apparently in deep thought. “And how do you know that?”
That made me mad. I exploded, “How do I know? I know because it’s so. And it’s so because Art said it was so.”
“Art said it was so,” Shaw mocked me. They all laughed. It was uncanny how they had suddenly become the expert divers.
“We want to see for ourselves,” Burt Webber said. “Come on.” He took me by the arm, and the others crowded around. “Show us where it was.” Everybody but Art squeezed into the two little dinghies, and we went back to where I thought the spot was. It was getting dark. We couldn’t find the buoy.
“What’s the matter?” Shaw demanded. “Didn’t you tie the buoy to the metal strips?”
“Of course I did.”
He looked at me with skepticism. “And what kind of knot did you use?”
I didn’t like this kind of questioning. “A bowline,” I snapped. “What kind would you use?”
He rubbed his chin. “A bowline? And it pulled loose?” He looked around at the others as if this clinched his case.
“I don’t know what happened to it,” I said. “All I know is I can’t find it now.”
I knew he didn’t believe me—none of them did. Early the next morning, we went out again and searched all day in vain. Back on the El Amigo, it was very tense. Nobody spoke to Art or me. And suddenly I realized that we hadn’t found the buoy, because it wasn’t there. How I could have forgotten, I don’t know, but I recalled now that when Art said my sample was steel, I went down and released the buoy. It was automatic. But it was also not the right time to say anything about it, so I let it ride.
We were near the Cayman Islands, and when we pulled in at Georgetown, the mutineers offered to let us off. Art took them up on it. “Come on,” he said to me. But I shook my head. I felt responsible for what had happened and decided to stay with his equipment—several boxes of dive gear, the air lift, and two compressors and air lines—and the artifacts.
“Stop blaming yourself, Ricardo,” Art said. Then he told me I ought to fly home with him. “Anything could happen aboard the El Amigo,” he said, shaking his head miserably. “Some of those guys are not very happy.”
As it turned out, I was right to have stayed with the ship. I think my staying convinced the subscribers that they might have been wrong about us. When we docked in Miami two weeks later, they helped me carry Art’s equipment ashore and lock it up.
We returned to the museum, and life went on. By now, working shoulder to shoulder with the most famous treasure diver in the world, the lure and luster of his fabulous artifacts always around us, I had caught gold fever, too. It wasn’t as bad as Art’s, but it was just as real. I could think of nothing else.
How much the precious metal itself was worth, the meltdown value, I don’t know. But whatever it was, the value as artifacts was greater still, not percentages greater but magnitudes greater. Some of the things that Art found, and that I found, too, may have been priceless. Tourists from all over the world came to see and touch these treasures, to relive the history and feel those magic times. Because I worked there, I could come and go as I liked. And I did. I gazed in wonder at those pieces that spanned the centuries, living beyond their own time, beyond the dreams that had created them, precious artifacts that had popped up suddenly into a totally different world. I knew every piece in that museum, and I knew how Art McKee had recovered them.
Though there is money in diving for sunken treasure and there is no greater thrill than finding it, treasure diving is an uncertain life, and the work is as hard as it is frustrating. There are no street addresses neatly lined up on the ocean floor. The sea is forever moving; the winds shift, and so does the sand below. To hold fast in one spot at sea, you set your anchors, four and five at a time. And when the tide changes or the winds shift, you set them again. Lines break, cables snap, pumps wear out. And they must all be fixed. Immediately. Treasure diving is an endless emergency. Though nothing can tarnish the thrill of striking sunken treasure, I never worked so hard and for so little in all my life.
I was about to get married at the time, or so I thought, and it was obvious that I would need a regular job and a regular paycheck, so Art spoke about me to his old friend Captain William B. Gray of the Miami Seaquarium. He hired me on the spot as a diver.
But I always kept in close touch with Art McKee, occasionally going on treasure-diving expeditions with him. Later, when I became Flipper’s trainer, what intrigued Art most, as I knew it would, was the prospect of using dolphins to find sunken treasure. Every time he came to town from his castle on Plantation Key, we talked about it. Once he came by to see me at the Seaquarium and we strolled out on the dock at Flipper’s Lake, the saltwater lake where the TV films were shot. I noticed Kathy in the lake, swimming effortlessly and watching me.
Art was talking: “The important thing, Ricardo, is to use your dolphins for something really worthwhile.”
I knew what he was getting at, but this was a litany that we enjoyed playing out. “Oh? Like what?”
“Like training your dolphins to find gold.” He looked at me, and I felt the old magic, the flash of daring in his eyes and the guttural lust in the way he said “gold.” It was like all the gold the Spanish had ever lost at sea was rightfully his, and all we had to do now was stake the claim. “With that sonar of theirs,” he said, “dolphins are natural treasure finders. It’s true! They could be better than any electronic instrument we could build. Think of the work we could save. And the time. You might be wondering if it would pay. Would it pay? Ricardo, we could be millionaires.” He looked at me with fiercely squinted eyes and hissed, “Millionaires!”
Kathy was watching me. I knew she was eager to show off. Actually, she hadn’t been fed and was ready to do a trick for a chunk of fish. I said, “You ask if I could train a dolphin to find gold. Art, that’s simple! Give me your watch. That’s gold, isn’t it?”
“My Rolex!” His right hand went to his watch protectively, and he shook his head. “This watch is solid gold.”
“Good!” I said, grabbing his big hand. He protested with a grin but let me pull the gold watch off. “You want to know if I can train a dolphin to find gold?” I wound up like a baseball pitcher.
“Oh, no!” Art moaned. “That watch keeps perfect time.”
I let it fly. The watch went up, a rainbow, and came plummeting down with a splash. I held Kathy up with a signal to “stay” till the watch had time to sink to the bottom, then, as she watched me eagerly, I gave her the “fetch” signal, arm thrust out, and shouted, “Gold!” Kathy streaked across the water seventy-five feet away. She dove. Art looked at me quizzically. “You yelled, ‘gold!’ What was that about?”
“Art,” I said with mock exasperation, “I have to tell her what I want her to find.”
He looked at me skeptically. Kathy popped to the surface and came racing back to the dock with the watch in her mouth.
I bent down and removed it from Kathy’s mouth and patted her on the head. She wanted a fish, but I didn’t have one, and she squealed with indignation. I whipped out a handkerchief and dried off the watch, using big movements like a magician showing that there’s nothing up his sleeve, and presented it to Art with a flourish. “Does that answer your question?”
Art made a sour face and held the watch out in front of him for a moment. He looked at the second hand to make sure it was still going. Then he put the watch on with great deliberation. “That’s not exactly what I had in mind.” He sighed. Then, frowning in thought, he started to walk off. He stopped and turned to me solemnly. “You know, Ricardo,” he said, pointing at me, “if God hadn’t meant for us to find that sunken treasure, why did He put dolphins in the sea? Ever think of that?”
A few years later, on our last treasure-diving trip together, something happened that was to transform my life.
We were in the northwesternmost part of the Bahamian Out Islands looking for the fabled Maravillas—the Nuestra Senora de las Maravillas. This ill-fated treasure ship collided with another galleon during a storm that struck the Little Bahama Banks in 1665. These shallow banks, ranging from twenty to fifty feet deep, border the Gulf Stream. They’re forty miles from the nearest land, Grand Bahama Island, about fifty miles due east of Stuart, Florida. One moment the water is a couple of thousand feet deep, a dark blue river moving 3½ knots north, and the next moment you’ve run up on a bank covered by barely twenty feet of water. The Maravillas went down at the edge of the Banks with 650 passengers and crew, all but 45 of whom drowned. One of the survivors, a priest, told of his fellow clergymen charging 200 pesos to hear confessions. When the ship ran aground, according to the survivors’ reports, the priests went over the side to save their skins, but because their pockets were so filled with gold and silver, they sank and never came up again. The ship’s cargo included four million pesos in gold. The bars were cast in the size and shape of Hershey bars. There was also several million dollars’ worth of silver and emeralds. Most of it is still there.
Art McKee was at the helm of the MV Falcon, a forty-two-foot pleasure boat equipped with diving gear. It was the tippiest boat we had ever used. Top heavy. There was too much diving and salvage gear on deck and it was badly placed: compressors, an airlift, hoses and tanks, lead weights, fins and wet suits, everything. Clouds were building, and Art anchored the Falcon in twenty-five feet of water. We had a crew of six, including two U.S. Navy divers. While Art stayed with the Falcon, two of the navy men and I took the small Boston Whaler and crisscrossed in a grid, looking for certain holes in the bottom that would mark the wreck. While one of us steered, the other two were pulled through the water on the end of a line, feet hooked in bowlines. We were near the Falcon, and I could see Art, his hair now quite white, watching hopefully as ever. Suddenly, the two navy men let out a blood-curdling shriek.
“Shark!”
It’s a cry that freezes the blood.
I stopped the dinghy and looked back. The water was alive with fins. They sliced the water all around the navy men, slashing, diving. I ran to the stern and pulled the men aboard. They clambered into the boat, out of breath and scared witless. But something was wrong here, I thought. I put on my face plate and stuck my head in the water.
They weren’t sharks; they were dolphins! As far as the eye could see in every direction—spotted dolphins! They’re like bottlenose dolphins, but their bodies are covered with spots. With a yell of delight, I leaped into the water with them. And the dolphins didn’t swim away!
I’d jumped into the water with wild dolphins before, but they had always disappeared. Not these dolphins, though. These dolphins didn’t seem to mind me. I popped to the surface and yelled, “Art! Look! Dolphins! My God, Art, the water is alive with dolphins! Hundreds! Look!”
Art nodded matter-of-factly. He had been studying the sky, which had suddenly darkened. A storm cell to the east was moving toward us, and we needed to head south, out of the way. The wind was whipping up sudsy whitecaps. The last place you want to be during a storm is exposed like this. “Let’s go!” he yelled down at me.
The dolphins were brushing past me in every direction. It was as if I were one of them and also as if I weren’t even there. “Look at this, Art!” I held my hands up as if to show that it wasn’t a trick, that it was real. “This is something wonderful, Art. I’ve never seen this before. Ha! Never! No kidding!”
Art clamped his teeth together. “And I’m not kidding you, Ricardo. Let’s get outta here!” He jerked a thumb at the sky. “See that?” I glanced at the sky, and Art revved the engine as if to go off without me.
Reluctantly, I climbed aboard. But the whole world had changed. From then on, I dreamed only of swimming freely with wild dolphins again.
For a while, I was puzzled about why there were so many dolphins, why they didn’t swim off when I jumped in with them. Looking back, I think I know. Like Indians following a herd of buffalo, they must have been feeding on a huge school of fish and were simply too busy to bother with me. Nevertheless, being with them and having them all around me and treating me as if I were one of them—that was an experience with no equal. Since then, several other divers have reported the same thing, the same spotted dolphins in the same place, who allowed people to swim with them freely.
We were heading back, catching the storm and indeed justifying Art’s decision to leave immediately, and Art, holding the wheel, yelled above the roar of the wind that he thought I must have flipped when I jumped into what they thought was a school of sharks. We laughed. As a trainer of dolphins, I have always thought that despite my feelings for them, they would have left me if they could, that if they weren’t held captive they would have had nothing to do with me. But these dolphins were different. They could have left—but didn’t. I couldn’t get over it. It was as if I had been one of them.
As often happens at sea, you can live almost in someone else’s back pocket and yet be in a totally different world. Speaking from his own world, Art yelled above the wind, framing each word with great precision, “Do you think, Ricardo, that you could really train a dolphin to find sunken treasure?”
He had asked me this before, many times, but each time it seemed to be a fresh, new question for him. We were pitching and rolling with the waves, both of us holding to the wheel, and I waited for a break in the howling wind before replying. Then I answered as I always did, yelling and cupping my hands to my mouth, “Big enough budget, Art, yes!” I nodded with certainty. “We could!” I let a beat or two go by. “Man on the moon”—I pointed upward to where the moon would be if we could see it—“train dolphins to find treasure”—and I pointed downward into the sea, nodding broadly.
Art nodded. The weather had been quite nasty, angry eight- to ten-foot seas, waves breaking over the bow, and galeforce winds, the sky a black-purple with low, scudding clouds. It was all we could do to keep the bow into the waves.
“Who knows!” I yelled, “but those dolphins out there might have been jumping for joy because they had just found the Maravillas!”
Art cocked his head and looked at me oddly, raising one brow. I didn’t often joke with him, and he didn’t know if I was kidding him or not.
If dolphins usually flee when they discover someone among them, how could I ever effectively study dolphins in the wild as I wanted to? Simply this: dolphins are attracted by certain music.
From early Greek times, legends have told us that dolphins are attracted by the music of the lyre, a kind of harp. The most famous legend, recounted in 400 B.C. by Herodotus, is about Anon, a Greek poet who lived a couple of centuries earlier. The poet had won an armload of gold prizes in a singing contest in Corinth and was returning by ship to his native Lesbos when the crew, which had got a glimpse of the gold, turned pirate and was about to make him walk the plank far at sea. He asked if he might play one last song on his lyre; the pirates consented. For his last show, the poet dressed in his finest robes and sang an orthian hymn, a shrill song to the gods, accompanying himself on the lyre. Whether the gods heard him or not, we can’t be sure, but a dolphin heard him. A few moments later, when Anon went over the side, the dolphin saved his life by keeping him afloat and pushing him to shore. Records show that Anon later gave thanks at the Temple at Taínaron for being saved by a dolphin.
It’s common for dolphins to help one another. That’s the way they’re brought up. If a dolphin is sick or injured, other dolphins help him stay at the surface of the water so that he can breathe. I have seen dolphins keep other dolphins at the surface of the water long after they have died. When baby dolphins are born (tail first so that they won’t drown), the mother dolphin and attending midwife dolphins push the baby to the surface for its first breath of air. It should not be strange that they would help humans the same way. Sailors have always told stories of dolphins saving drowning men by pushing them to shore.
But I never saw anything like that myself—except once.
Art McKee had brought his family out to see me and Susie at the Seaquarium. Kevin, Art’s son, was about five years old then and was wandering out on the dock to look for Flipper. Art and I were standing off to the side, Art facing Flipper’s Lake and keeping an eye on Kevin. I was facing Art. We were talking about something—probably gold—when all of a sudden, the unflappable Art McKee got a look of horror. I turned. Kevin had slipped and fallen in. But before any of us could move, Susie had pitched the child back onto the dock.
She did this—no doubt of that. But why she did it is the important question. To me it’s simple. She did it for the same reason you or I would have done it: to save the child.
When I was training the dolphins who played Flipper, musician friends of mine used to come by: Fred Neil, Joni Mitchell, David Crosby, and some of the Mamas and the Papas. I play the guitar a little myself, and Fred noticed that when a chord was played and sustained on the twelve-string guitar, the dolphins became very attentive. The sound seemed to soothe them. Any chord would do, but especially, he discovered, the D chord. The dolphins stuck their heads out of the water and listened attentively. Occasionally, they would also come over to the guitar and very gently rub the tips of their snouts along the vibrating strings.
The dolphins’ gentleness is what struck me as much as anything else. When they handled the props that were part of their repertoire of tricks—the hula hoops, the balls, and the hats that they were made to wear—the dolphins were quite rough, acting as if they held them in contempt. But when Fred played the twelve-string guitar, the dolphins approached the vibrating strings almost in reverence.
Did they want to feel the vibrations more closely? And if so, what did it mean to them? Or were they trying to play something for us?
Can dolphins compose music? Could we build a musical instrument for them? If so, we never learned what it was. The twelve-string guitar is not set up for the blunt snout of a dolphin.
Later, I talked with Doug Trumbull, a Hollywood director now but then a special-effects man for the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind. He had looked me up because he was interested in interspecies communication. Since my career had been devoted to dolphins and the problems of communicating with them, I was one of a number of people Doug was questioning about how we might relate to creatures intelligent but totally different from us. I didn’t know which movie he was working on then—I got the impression it was about an airplane—but when I saw Close Encounters, which is about man’s first contact with an alien intelligence, I realized what we had been talking about.
We were at my home in Coconut Grove, and I was telling him that I had thought I must be very clever to train dolphins so easily until it dawned on me that it wasn’t my brilliance, but theirs.
“If we were ever to communicate with dolphins,” I told him, “it probably wouldn’t be in a conventional language, but with something neutral, or something we had in common.”
“Like what?”
I shrugged. I had a guitar in my lap at the time, and I gave it a thrum. “Like music.” I smiled as if this idea had just occurred to me. “Why not?” Then I told him about the twelve-string guitar and the dolphins’ peculiar response to it.
Doug nodded. “And the music—how do you think it would go?”
No, I don’t remember what notes I suggested. But I did toss off three or four pure whole notes and didn’t think about it again until I saw the movie. His musical encounter with alien beings was beautifully done.
Since then, I have gone a step further. I have lowered special waterproof speakers into the ocean and played music to attract dolphins. Captain Joseph A. Maggio took me and my sound equipment out into the Bahamas aboard his seventy-foot Bahamian schooner William H. Albury, which he renamed Heritage of Miami. We found the sandbar near the wreck of the Maravillas where I first swam with spotted dolphins. I lowered the speakers and turned up the volume. The sound going through water is heard—no, you can feel it—for half a mile in all directions. I call it Liquid Music, and dolphins seem to love it. They come, they listen, and they stay.
Dolphins don’t like all music. They are repelled by hard rock and other raucous sounds. They like the classics, though. They like full orchestras playing Strauss waltzes, for instance, or live music with guitar, flute, clarinet, harmonica, African finger piano, and various bells, and Ravi Shankar and other East Indian musicians who use the sitar, which makes high-frequency pings like those of the dolphins.
Could music be our bridge to the dolphins? Why not? We live in a world of sight; they live in a world of sound. Compared with humans, dolphins are auditory geniuses, their aural capabilities light-years beyond ours.
The dolphin is sensitive to vibrations ranging from 200 to more than 150,000 cycles per second through water, their most acute hearing between 30,000 and 60,000 cycles per second. That’s a much higher range than we can hear. We hear from about 20 cycles a second to 20,000, most acutely around 3,000. What sounds are we talking about? If you play the bottom note on a piano, it vibrates about 27 times per second; the highest note on the piano, about 4,200.
Does that mean we’re cut off from the dolphin’s world of sound? No, we can pick up the full range of dolphin sounds with electronic equipment, then play it back at a slower speed. What we hear are very complicated sounds, rich patterns, sometimes two at once. And when dolphins are with one another, we hear the sounds going back and forth as if in conversation. The sounds themselves can be described roughly as blats, mews and yelps, wails and moans, whistles and pings, clicks, and even Bronx cheers. Some investigators have claimed that when they’ve slowed the dolphin sounds down, they can hear them imitating us: words, phrases, laughter. Unfortunately, this fascinating claim has resisted verification.
The interesting thing about the sounds that dolphins make is that they use them not only to communicate, but also as sonar (the word is an acronym for “SOund NAvigation and Ranging”). It’s also called echo-location. The dolphin shoots a beam of sound through the water, and when the echo bounces back, he can “see” what it hit.
Bats do the same thing. Lazzaro Spallanzani, an eighteenth-century Italian scientist, first suspected something of the sort with bats. He noticed that they could maneuver quite handily in crowded spaces, even when blindfolded. He thought that they must have an unusual ability to hear. But he never got much beyond that. His colleagues laughed at his theory, calling it “Spallanzani’s bat problem.” But in 1899, a hundred years after Spallanzani’s death, electronic equipment was developed that verified what he suspected: the bat uses echoes from high-frequency sounds he produces himself.
In 1947, the same idea was suggested about dolphins by Arthur F. McBride, first curator of Marine Studios in St. Augustine. He noted that when dolphins were being caught, they would charge at seines with large meshes but not the ordinary small-mesh seines—even in dirty water.
Indeed, tests show that they can “see” with their sonar as well as we can with our eyes. In one set of tests, a dolphin named Alice could distinguish between two steel balls, one 2.25 inches in diameter, the other 2.5 inches. She did this blindfolded. People given the same task need their eyes—and calipers. Dr. Kenneth S. Norris, one of the most astute of marine-mammal watchers, says that when we truly understand the sounds of porpoises and their meanings, we’ll find that they have an incredibly refined capability of “seeing with sound,” even to the point of “forming sonic images” of their environment.
When I told Art that Susie could distinguish between gold and silver and other metals, I wasn’t kidding. I’ve tested dolphins, and they can assay metals. Other investigators have come to the same conclusion. Dr. Norris notes that dolphins can “hear the composition and texture” of things. Various metals and other materials reflect sonar waves differently, which means that dolphins, when they know what they’re expected to do, can almost invariably tell the difference between plastic and aluminum of the same size and thickness, between copper and steel, gold and silver.
The most astonishing insight into the world of the dolphin is that their high-frequency sounds don’t bounce off living things. The vibrations are so small, they go through flesh and blood, right through skin, muscle, and fat as if it were water. But the sounds reflect from air-containing cavities and bones, which means they would “see” one another, fish, or humans, as an X-ray machine would.
We keep putting quotation marks around “see” because we have no idea what sorts of images dolphins might create, if any. This is not just because they’re dolphins. We don’t really know about our fellow human beings, either. Or at least there’s no way to have direct evidence of what imagery anyone else creates, if any. This is because there’s no direct way for one person to compare mental processes with those of another person without becoming the other person. But if we can’t do it directly, we can try to do it indirectly, with language. We can describe our experiences and compare the description with the way others describe theirs, and while that’s not perfect, it’s as good as anyone can expect. Our contact with other minds, be they human or dolphin, is through words, which is why we’re all so interested in speaking the same language, whether theirs, ours, or something we make up.
The high-frequency sound of the dolphin has an interesting ethological ramification. If they can see through one another and presumably see the internal states of others firsthand, what’s the need for facial expressions, for example, to let others know how they feel? If others could read their internal state, there would be no point in hiding their feelings from others. Or pretending. They would be completely open. Transparent. They wouldn’t know how to be dishonest or to lie. Their faces—it wouldn’t matter what their faces were like, but they might as well be pleasant. It could be a mask that never changed. A smiling mask.
And that’s the way it is!
In fact, all the comparable muscles that other animals use in expressing feelings are in dolphins concentrated at their blowholes.
Besides their hearing, dolphins can also see quite well, both in and out of the water. They have a highly developed sense of touch, and they can taste things. Dolphins cannot smell, however. Though as a fetus, a dolphin has vestigial olfactory equipment, it withers away as the fetus develops, an echo of the atrophication of that sense during the dolphin’s evolution.
Most of our human talents are visual. If we were to make contact with alien beings, we would know it because we had seen them. Consider what you would think of someone who merely heard alien beings. Or felt them. To us a thing is real only if we can see it. When we see it, we can describe it in words, which we can write down, using the symbols of one language or another, including math, or we can draw pictures of the thing we’ve seen. When Voyager 2 took off for deep space on August 20, 1977, it did include gold-plated phonograph records of music as well as photos. But mainly it had a gold picture of what humans look like and the location of Earth in our solar system. Inspired by the late Carl Sagan of Cornell University, the message assumes that alien life-forms who might receive the message would respond visually as we would.
But what would happen if contact with alien beings were made by dolphins? That contact would almost certainly have to be in terms of sound.
Speculation beyond this point has got to be labeled science fantasy, but it seems reasonable that if sound is to dolphins what sight is to us, then if alien beings produced the right kind of sounds, dolphins would respond by being friendly. If, on the other hand, the alien beings made a sound like a school of mullet, who knows what dolphins might do? In the same way, if alien beings looked like artichokes to us, we might boil them and eat them with melted butter; if they looked human, we might be friendly—at least until we got to know them better.
If dolphins made contact with alien beings who made the right kind of sounds and if dolphins were enlightened enough to understand what was going on, they might very well treat the aliens the way they, the dolphins, would like to be treated themselves: with respect, kindness, patience, and love.
Indeed, they would treat the alien beings just as they have treated us.