Walt and I then bade fond farewell to the fisherman and drove to Baton Rouge to search for the famous Confederate ironclad Arkansas, which is covered in more detail in a later chapter of the book.

This was truly a sublime shoestring operation. If nothing else it proved that you can accomplish a lot if the commitment is there. The biggest expense of the entire project was the airfare. One thought to remember, if something is still missing after the passage of time ninety percent of the time it is because nobody has looked for it.

Also, unavoidably, time buries all memory of the location.

To embark on a search for a lost shipwreck, an Indian mound, gold bars, silver coins, or porcelain chamberpots, you don't need the backing of the government or a university. You don't need a truckload of expensive equipment. You don't need a million-dollar inheritance.

All it really takes is dedication, perseverance, and a grip on your imagination, so you don't get carried away on a wild-goose chase.

Some artifacts can never be found. Some were never lost to begin with, some were figments of somebody's imagination, and all too many are not anywhere near where they are supposed to be.

The Mississippi side-paddle riverboat Sultana is a prime example.

She was a luxurious boat that carried passengers from New Orleans to St. Louis. Shortly after the Civil War, a greedy Union officer, receiving $22 a head from the shipping company for every military passenger, crammed 2,400 troops aboard. Many of them were badly treated prisoners recently released from the infamous Confederate prison camp Andersonville and heading home to their families. The Sultana also carried eighty paying passengers and forty mules. A photograph taken of her when fully loaded has an eerie look about it.

All the shadowy figures clustered on the roof and crowding the decks, including the mules, look like phantom wraiths.

About fifteen miles above Memphis, Tennessee, at 2 A.M. on April 27, 1865, a boiler on Sultana exploded and turned her into a holocaust before she sank in a cloud of steam and smoke. At least 1,800 died, and perhaps as many as 2,100. The disaster still ranks as the worst marine tragedy in American history.

In the sunnner of 1982, Walt Schob and I worked with Memphis attorney Jerry Potter, the leading expert on the disaster and author of the book The Sultana Tragedy. Using the gradiometer, we ran search lines over several sites north of the city on dry land because the Mississippi River has considerably altered its course since 1865.

Potter recalled that Mark Twain once wrote "that someday a farmer would Turn up a piece of the old Sultana with his plow and be much surprised."

Twain was very prophetic. The burned-out hulk of Sultana was eventually discovered within fifty yards of the position I had reckoned, two miles from the present banks of the Mississippi, twenty-one feet deep under a farmer's soybean field in Arkansas.