As soon as our anchor was down, he and Bob dis- 

 appeared eagerly over the side with the metal detector. 

 Sally and I followed them into the water and watched 

 from the surface as they scanned the rock pile with the in- 

 strument. About a quarter hour later I saw Ed pick up a 

 piece of the ballast stone, and he and Bob headed for the 

 ship. I swam back to the boarding ladder to meet them. 



Raising his face mask, Ed said, "There's something 

 peculiar about that wreck. I think the stones have a metallic 

 content. The detector goes crazy wherever I point it." 



He carried the piece of ballast aboard and he and Bob 

 examined it carefully. Sure enough, it contained a slight 

 sprinkling of a foreign substance which looked like zinc, 

 and it responded definitely to testing with the detector. 



"Well, there's a pretty how-do-you-do," said Ed, dis- 

 gusted. "How are you going to pick out silver when the 

 whole pile is jumping?" 



The detector was useless. There was nothing to do 

 but handle each piece of ballast separately in hopes that 

 a bar or two of the bullion might have been missed by 

 previous searchers. Ed and Bob spent the remainder of the 

 afternoon at this arduous task. 



They climbed wearily aboard just as the sun was sink- 

 ing, convinced that whatever silver bars may have lain 

 there in the past, the carcass was now picked clean. Fur- 

 thermore, Ed said he felt sure that on such a hard and 

 rocky bottom there was little chance that anything else 

 of interest would have survived the constant action of 

 the sea, which surged in and out of the cove with strength 

 even upon a calm day. There was one more chance. With 

 the aid of the magnetometer and the glass-bottomed boat 

 we might be able to locate the remainder of the wreck, 

 which must have been swept into the deeper water oflF- 

 shore. 



So after rigging the magnetometer behind Sea Diver 



The Bahama Islands 135 



