THE SEA: Saga of the African Queen

Armed with shotguns and carrying provisions, two men stole aboard the 400-ft. hulk of the Liberian tanker African Queen as she lay stranded and shoal-torn ten miles off Ocean City, Md. It was March, and the sea pounded against the rusting hull of the ship, which had run aground three months before. With 200 ft. of her bow ripped away, the 13,800-ton African Queen had been officially abandoned by her owners; now watermen from Ocean City poked about the hulk, prying at loose fittings, taking everything movable that seemed salable. The two newcomers watched patiently until the others went ashore at nightfall. From that point on, no one was allowed on board the African Queen without their permission—and Lloyd Deir, 45, and Belden Little, 36, enforced the rule with their shotguns. Their purpose: to float the African Queen, claim her under maritime salvage laws and sell her as scrap for, they hoped, more than $1,000,000.

It was a job that even a big salvage firm had given up as too dangerous—and neither Deir nor Little was a professional salvage man. Both were from Holland, Va. and had been machinists with a heavy construction outfit. They heard of the wreck of the African Queen, decided to go after her, quit their jobs, brought in two more partners who put up money, and hired four helpers, who joined them later on the African Queen. Due mostly to the tremendous persistence and ingenuity of Lloyd Deir, they brought the African Queen to port—but only after six dramatic months of adventure at sea.

The Derelict. Starting out, the salvagers swung by ropes from the high-riding forward deckhouse to the after superstructure, examined the derelict, decided to pump sea water from the ship’s big tanks and replace it with enough compressed air to float the Queen. A diver went down, looked at the gaping holes in the starboard side; they ranged down as far as 46 ft. Lloyd Deir decided the team would need a prefabricated patch to cover the holes. It would have to be of three-eighths-inch steel, 20 ft. by 30 ft., weighing eleven tons. Deir and the others crouched on the deck, drew diagrams in chalk. “We all pitched in,” says Cook Henley Doughtie, “but you can’t really help Lloyd Deir. He’s the kind of guy that wants to do everything himself.”

The steel was ordered. Piece by piece, the men welded and bolted it into a single sheet, shaped it to fit the curve of the hull. Day after day, Deir, his face stubbled and grimy, his clothes soaked with oil, drove himself and the men unmercifully. Summer warmed the sea, the sun blistered their backs, and threats of heavy weather hung over them like a time bomb.

For nine weeks they worked, drilling bolt holes in the patch, lowering it with winches. The divers, fighting the heavy ebb and flow of the sea, fastened the patch with bolts, some of them a foot long. Once a shark flashed toward Diver Maurice Simmons. “I kept yanking on the diving line and saying to myself, ‘Oh, my God, won’t they ever pull me up?’ Then they started raising me, and all of a sudden the shark swam away. It took me about half a day before I could get up enough nerve to go back down again.” Deir himself was working below decks when his acetylene torch sparked an explosion. Sent ashore to a hospital, he turned up again in a few days, scabbed with black burns. Said he: “We got work to do, boys.”

The Homecoming. At last the patch was set. The men started up 22 pumps. One hour, two, three—and slowly, reluctantly, the African Queen began to stir. A tug hove to, ready to tow the Queen by the stern the no miles down to Norfolk. But the cripple’s rudder was stuck hard left. The sea tossed the Queen back against the shoal, and she shuddered. For two days they tried to budge the rudder. Finally they brought in a pair of twelve-ton hydraulic jacks—and the rudder moved.

In tow, the African Queen lurched, got groggily under way at two knots. The salvagers kept working the pumps. Aching, worn out, fearful of the approaching Hurricane Gracie, they kept at it day and night. Once Deir went to sleep on his feet, was guided to his grubby bunk as he mumbled over and over, “Got to get this ship in, that’s all that matters.”

Forty-two hours after the African Queen was freed from the shoal, the salvagers made out Virginia Beach in the distance. Six hours later the Queen entered Norfolk Harbor. It was well past midnight when four tugs pushed her into a shipyard berth, and families and friends waited on the docks in the eerie glare of floodlights. The men stumbled down the gangway. One fell sobbing into the arms of his wife. “Oh, God,” he cried, “we made it—but I could never do it again.”

It seemed extremely unlikely that Lloyd Deir and his men would realize as much money as they had hoped; professional salvage people figured that the African Queen might bring $200,000, or $300,000 at the most. But Deir and his companions had something else: the memory and pride of having endured and survived a saga of the sea.