SEEK AND YOU WILL FIND

A few miles south of where I live on Amelia Island, BAE Systems, on Hecksher Drive in Jacksonville, has made a business of fitting out ships. Located on the St. John’s River, it has easy access to the Atlantic Ocean through Mayport. On May 26, 1987, the Nicor Navigator, owned and operated by the Columbus-America Discovery Group, slipped its moorings and headed out to test its crane and winch which was essential for towing the Remote Operated Vehicle (ROV) it was using to locate the site of the S.S. Central America, which had sunk in a hurricane on September 12, 1857. The equipment failed, and they had to return to Jacksonville for repairs. On May 31, they departed Atlantic Marine a second time for the test site. Once again they had problems and had to return. On June 5, for the third time in ten days, a river pilot took them out from BAE Systems to the ocean.

Gary Kinder in his bestseller Ship of Gold In The Deep Blue Sea, tells the enthralling story of the loss of the Central America, and its eventual discovery in 8,000 feet of water 160 miles off Cape Henry, Norfolk, Virginia, by a group of scientists and investors headed by Tommy Thompson of Columbus, Ohio. Tommy worked in 1976 for Mel Fisher who, for seven years, tried to find the Spanish treasure ship Nuestra Senor de Atocha, which sank off the Florida Keys in a hurricane in 1622. The Atocha carried 901 silver bars, 15 tons of ingot copper, 250,000 newly minted silver coins and 161 pieces of gold bullion, plus other rare artifacts, and jewelry. Mel Fisher did not find and recover the treasure until 1987.

Tommy went on to work for the Battelle Memorial Institute which engaged in research for government and private industry. His interest was in deep-ocean mining. While water covered seventy percent of the world’s surface, there had been little research done in deep water due to the hazardous environment and the lack of technology. Tommy set his goal on developing the technology to make deep-ocean research and recovery possible. In 1984, he selected the finding and recovery of the Central America as the ideal project to work on. He gathered together a group of venture capitalists who invested in the project which promised a 10,000 percent return.

The Central America was carrying gold and gold miners returning from the California goldfields. The ship picked up the cargo and passengers after they had transited across the Panama isthmus. The gold shipment was documented at up to $1.6 million in 1857 prices. Probably the passengers carried an equal amount in addition to the manifest. There was also an official secret shipment designed to shore up the faltering economy of New York. It was estimated at six hundred fifty-pound bar boxes, or another thirty thousand pounds of gold.

The potential investors grilled Tommy Thompson on the feasibility of the enterprise. Before they invested their capital they wanted to know the probability of being able to locate the wreck, overcome the legal issues, and secure the gold. Tommy said that it was sixty percent. Many experts they approached said that it couldn’t be done. There were too many variables and challenges to locating and recovering at such a depth. Government agencies had spent multi-millions trying to do it to recover submarines, and had limited success. There was a lot of skepticism, and Tommy himself was honest enough to admit his own agnosticism, but he was convinced that the project was possible, despite the risks involved.

Gary Kinder expressed Tommy’s attitude, “Don’t know if we can find the ship. Think we can, but don’t know. Don’t know what the site will be like. Think we do, but don’t know. Don’t know if we have the technology to recover the gold. Think we have, but don’t know. We do know the ship sank, that it carried at least three tons of gold, that it rests in about eight thousand feet of water, that no one else has recovered the treasure. And I think I can put together a project to do what no one else has done before: find the remains of a three-hundred-foot, wooden-hulled ship in a stretch of ocean bigger than the state of Rhode Island and go down to the bottom and pluck the treasure from the debris with a robot. Don’t know if we can keep the treasure. Think we can, but don’t know. Don’t know how to market the treasure. We’ll figure that out.”

I count nine “don’t knows” in that paragraph! What faith is required to undertake such a project, and to risk investing thousands of dollars in it? There is no certainty here. There is no proof that this will be successful. Yet many people invested their time and money in it because there was the possibility of gain and glory.

Agnostics will say that they cannot believe in God or Christ because they don’t know if he really exists, or they are not sure that Jesus Christ was divine. Yet Tommy Thompson decided to pursue what he didn’t know until he did know, and he could be sure. I want to pursue the buried treasure of faith to see how we can be sure that it exists and that we can discover it for ourselves.

The Bible says: “Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.” (Hebrews 11:1)

Tommy could not see the Central America, but he was sure going to try and find it. We cannot see God in a physically, scientifically-verifiable form, but faith is the willingness to seek until we find.

Tommy did not find the Central America in 1987. The following year he acquired a new ship which he sailed up the St. John’s River in Jacksonville, to Green Cove Springs, where it was transformed into the Arctic Discoverer. All winter he and his research team had been examining the sonar records for the fourteen hundred square miles searched in 1987. They identified an image which strongly resembled what they were looking for and determined that they would explore that target. More investors had to be attracted to finance this next stage of the project. The original investors kicked in another $1.5 million and new investors added another million dollars.

On August 19, a tug pulled Arctic Discoverer from the dock in Green Cove Springs, and towed it to Jacksonville, where it continued to be refitted at a marina near the mouth of the St. John’s River for the next week. On August 28, the Arctic Discoverer traveled out of its dock through Mayport into the Atlantic. In September, they located the ship, whose remains covered an area of over ten acres.

On October 1, they discovered the treasure. “The bottom was carpeted with gold,” said Tommy. “Gold everywhere, like a garden. The more you looked, the more you saw gold growing out of everything, embedded in all the wood and beams. It was amazing, clear back in the far distance bars stacked on the bottom like brownies, bars stacked like loaves of bread, bars that appear to have slid into the corner of a room. Some of the bars formed a bridge, all gold bars spanning one area of treasure over here and another area over here, water underneath, and the decks collapsed through on both sides. Then there was a beam with coins stacked on it, just covered, couldn’t see the beam it had so many coins on it.”

“So many bricks lay tumbled upon another at myriad angles that the thirty-foot pile appeared to be the remnants of an old building just demolished. Except these were bricks of gold: bricks flat, bricks stacked, bricks upright, bricks cocked on top of other bricks. And coins single, coins stacked, coins once in stacks now collapsed into spreading piles.”

One of the largest bars of California gold was 754.95 oz., $14,045 value in 1857. Today in bullion value alone, it could be worth $250,000. James Lamb the coin expert from Christie’s said that it was “impossible to describe the significance, the potential monetary value, the general excitement of this find. All of these hitherto extraordinarily rare, desirable artifacts in perfect condition, in huge piles is just… it’s beyond my imagination.” The total value of the treasure is still undetermined.

It is impossible to completely determine the existence of God, the atoning efficacy of the Cross, the truth of the resurrection of Jesus and its effects on those who believe. Thomas, one of the original twelve disciples of Jesus, doubted until he could see the risen Jesus with his own eyes and touch him with his own hands. Yet Tommy Thompson and his investors, put aside their doubts and were willing to wager millions on being able to find gold. They were willing to take years to seek until they found what they were looking for. What does this say to us about how much we are willing to invest in seeking first the buried treasure of the eternal kingdom of heaven Jesus proclaimed?

The value, if it is real, of what St. Paul described as “the unsearchable riches of Christ”, must be worth all the effort, all the giving, all the questioning, all the exploring, all the praying, all the learning, all the serving, all the time, that is required. Not to seek it, and then to find out after death that it was there all the time for us to discover (“The word is near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart, that is, the word of faith we are proclaiming.”), would be a terrible omission, a lack of courage, and fill us with eternal regret.

Those who deny the existence of God, and the truth of Christ, persuade many that it is a foolish and unprofitable exercise to seek the certainty that faith brings. But that has always been the counsel of those who dismiss explorers and inventors as people who waste their time chasing up blind alleys. Settling for the immediate and the obvious has never satisfied the human spirit. There always have been those who have pushed the envelope, who have gone where no one has gone before. Years later posterity hails them as the true visionaries who made possible the advances in technology that created the environment in which our civilization has developed. Seeking for faith in Christ is no different from seeking for a truth, if it exists, that can change our world for good. The rewards are worth it: eternal life, heaven, forgiveness, empowerment by God’s Spirit, divine love and acceptance, hope, joy, human fulfillment, and ultimate justice, are a few of the treasures to be found.

Gary Kinder closes his remarkable account with these words: “They had proved the experts wrong. You could work on the bottom of the deep ocean, do intricate work carefully and heavy work delicately, and you didn’t have to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to do it. You just had to shed old ways of thinking and reexamine old assumptions and do it smart from the beginning. You had to keep diverging, even beyond the point where it all became difficult and confusing. That’s where Tommy lives, and he made those around him live there too, some for far longer than is comfortable for most people. Yet just on the other side of that juncture is where impossibility sometimes vanishes and the world can be seen in a new way. … Historic ship recovery was really an adventure in thinking, a way of looking at the world. Finding the treasure of the Central America was a goal, but it wasn’t the purpose. The purpose was to unveil the treasures of the deep ocean, to enhance our understanding of history, to advance marine archeology, to further science, to form new corporate cultures, to develop technology. Going after treasure was like plowing and planting a field. Tommy had broached the idea …back in 1985. ‘If you do that,’ he said, ‘all kinds of things can blossom.’”

These words can provide us with an analogy. The exercise of faith sometimes requires shedding old ways of thinking and re-examining old assumptions. Sometimes we have to get out of our comfort zones. Yet, when we get to the assurance of faith we find that impossibility vanishes, and the world can be seen in a new way. Faith is an adventure in thinking, a way of looking at the world. The purpose of following Christ, and seeing life through his eyes, is to unveil the treasures of, what C.S. Lewis called ‘deep heaven’, to enhance our understanding of reality, to advance the kingdom of God, and to further the work of Gospel. It is like going after buried treasure.