Our film opens in the colourful port town of St. George in Bermuda. We climb aboard the small motor boat carrying the expedition leader, Mike McDowell, to a large research ship anchored in the bay. Though Mike is Australian, the research vessel is Russian. Sitting on deck are two deep-sea submersibles with a stunning array of high-tech cameras, lights, and robotics – relics of the glory days of Soviet science, when the government funnelled huge amounts of money into research and technology in order to advance their ambitions in the two last great frontiers: outer space and the deep ocean. Today, funding for science is minimal, and the crew must look to wealthy Western entrepreneurs for financial help through joint projects.
We meet the small band of adventurers and investors working together on the Keldysh. Here is Don Walsh, famous as the former US Navy diver who reached the bottom of the world’s deepest ocean trench. There, the controversial marine archaeologist, Jim Sinclair, disregarding the academic world’s contempt of treasure hunts. And, of all things, a lawyer who will accompanying the men to the ocean floor and protect their interests there. Also on board is a marine engineer named Curt Newport, whose story takes us back to the unlikely origins of the treasure hunt.
FLASHBACK to 21 July 1961, the day when astronaut Virgil “Gus” Grissom became just the second American in outer space. Grissom achieved his sub-orbital flight in a Mercury capsule called Liberty Bell 7, the flight lasting 15 minutes and 37 seconds. He reached an altitude of 118 miles (190 km), experienced 5 seconds of weightlessness, and landed 302 miles (486 km) from Cape Canaveral in the waters of the Bermuda triangle.
At this point, the notorious triangle curse reared its ugly head. During recovery, the explosive hatch on Liberty Bell 7 blew unexpectedly. Grissom escaped as the capsule flooded with sea water and began to sink, threatening to drag the recovery helicopter down with it. The pilot was obliged to abandon the aircraft, and the capsule plummeted three miles to the ocean floor. Grissom was rescued, but his luck failed him later in the decade; he died in the Apollo 1 fire in January 1967. Dramatic NASA archive footage exists of these events.
Enter Curt Newport – a man obsessed with the idea of locating and raising Liberty Bell 7. Recently, against all odds, he succeeded. Trawling the sea bed with sonar equipment, he correctly determined which of the dozens of observable “shadows” might represent the NASA capsule. The story of this quest is well documented in a film by the Discovery Channel.
After the Liberty Bell was successfully raised, Curt Newport turned his attention to another of the sonar shadows that had shown promise but had eventually been dismissed at the time because it showed the characteristics of a wooden wreck. In the waters of the Bermuda triangle, there is every chance that “wooden wreck” could mean treasure.
This is our starting point for the expedition – a handful of men and women possessing a coordinate obtained as a by-product of the hunt for Virgil Grissom’s space capsule. Could Curt Newport have a second run of good luck?
Our film follows the expedition as it happens, sailing into the Sargasso Sea with no certainty of what awaits below, taking our chances with the adventurers and capturing their moods and reactions. The Russian scientists try their best to ignore these distractions as they take their mud samples from the ocean floor. Current measurements and new life forms are far more interesting to them than a goose chase for gold.
The submersibles are deployed with our cameras on board as they make their long descent to the sea bed. We capture the moment of discovery and excitement which runs through the ship when two Russian words reach the surface via the gurgled static of the hydrophone: “old” and “coins”. At this point the lawyer intervenes – he wants us to stop filming. There is to be no use or record the phrase “Spanish galleon” – recently the Spanish government laid claim to all sunken warships from Spain’s colonial era.
The wreck turns out to be neither Spanish nor a galleon. Its cargo is still intact, a cause of considerable astonishment. And we see Spanish silver and Portuguese gold being brought to the surface after centuries in the total darkness of the ocean floor. As it is carried off, the Russian scientists gather round with tweezers to pluck off the deep-sea life forms.
This is a rich-textured story with many layers, some comic, some serious, but always exciting. We combine adventure, science and history to create a most unorthodox and entertaining film.
