Adventures of a Sea Hunter: In Search of Famous Shipwrecks Read online

  Adventures of a Sea Hunter: In Search of Famous Shipwrecks

  James Delgado

  Clive Cussler

  From Publishers Weekly

  More than a million ships have gone lost or missing in the seas, and going down in "the museum of the deep" to find famous shipwrecks is a risky yet profitable business, sometimes challenging the limits of human endurance. Delgado, a marine archeologist and a member of the Sea Hunter TV retrieval team, presents a chronicle of distinguished wreckage, addressing the wrecks’ histories, the scope of the undersea explorations to locate them, the joy of discovery and the thrill of bringing artifacts to the surface. There are some very significant finds here: the supply ship Isabella, lost in 1830; the Pearl Harbor wreckage of USS Arizona and USS Utah; the flotilla of ships destroyed by an atomic bomb at the Bikini atoll; the massive ruin of the "unsinkable" Titanic; the Russian ship carrying Catherine the Great’s jewels, which sank off Finland in 1771; and others. Fans of the National Geographic International TV series will attest to Delgado’s expert care of the ship artifacts as they’re studied, mapped, tagged, photographed and raised to the surface, where they are treated to stop the ravages of time. This sea adventurer’s inside look will excite thrill seekers, inform novices and educate all readers about the importance of preserving the sea’s historic past against poachers and souvenir hunters.

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  Product Description

  Leading archaeologist and consummate storyteller James Delgado takes readers on a rollicking deep-sea dive into his highly unusual life's work: locating and exploring the world's most famous shipwrecks. Colorful characters, near misses, and the thrill of standing — or floating — in history's footprints make for a highly entertaining look at the fascinating history and glittering bounty beneath the waves. Included are accounts of Pearl Harbor, the Titanic, and Bikini Atoll, site of the world's first nuclear tests.

  James Delgado, Foreword by Clive Cussler

  Adventures of a Sea Hunter: In Search of Famous Shipwrecks

  DEDICATION

  This is for my mother, who had to tolerate human bones and stone tools in her bathtub as I learned about the past as a teenage archeologist. And for making her cry as a middle-aged archeologist who dives in dangerous places because, as she points out, I’ll always be her little boy.

  This is also for Ann, who keeps the home fires burning while juggling a career and an often missing-in-action archeologist.

  And last, for Beau, my faithful feline companion during many an evening’s writing marathon. It’s not the same without him.

  His stories were what frightened people worst of all. Dreadful stories they were — about hanging, and walking the plank, and storms at sea, and the Dry Tortugas, and wild deeds and places on the Spanish Main.

  ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, TREASURE ISLAND

  FOREWORD

  BY CLIVE CUSSLER

  Ships and their crews have been sailing off into oblivion since the dawn of recorded history. Through the millennia, more than a million ships have sunk or gone missing, along with untold numbers of their crews. A million ships is an impressive statistic not believed by most landsmen. Yet, to call the seven seas a vast cemetery is an understatement.

  During the ages, storms have wreaked havoc on entire fleets, some consisting of more than a thousand ships, that were torn apart and hurled to the bottom. The first tragedy may have taken place when one of our Cro-Magnon ancestors happily discovered he could float on water atop a log, at least until he fell off and drowned. From that time forward, huge ships, small boats and men have vanished in an unending surge beneath the waves into dark watery depths that have yet to resurrect their dead.

  Except for divers holding their breath and diving in shallow water, shipwrecks seemed as impossible to reach and touch as a rock on the moon. Finally, less than two hundred years ago, divers in hard hats, breathing air pumped down from the surface, started working on the sea bottom and riverbeds. At long last, the sea begrudging began to give up her secrets.

  Treasure and salvage came into their own. Salvage became a thriving enterprise, while treasure hunting was about as hit or miss as buying stocks in a bear market. Suddenly, shipwrecks in shallower waters became accessible. The boom was on, and shipwrecks were discovered and studied in a prodigious number of projects. Soon, modern technology enabled the salvage of wrecks thousands of feet deep beneath the sea’s surface.

  The dead in the depths of the sea have no tombstones, no grave markers, nothing to identify their remains that quickly cease to exist. There is an eerie feeling about diving on a shipwreck. You can sense the presence of the crew that died with the ship. A wizened old diver once said that swimming through a shipwreck was like walking through a haunted house.

  The last to come on the underwater scene were the marine archeologists. These are about as strange and diverse people as you could ever hope to meet. They seldom become wealthy, and their main claim to fame is in their reports on shipwreck explorations, surveys and artifact removal for conservation and study. Some publish books on their expeditions, some teach, while many work in the commercial end, surveying for government or private corporations that develop properties along waterfronts which might contain history. Not until an accredited archeologist declares the site free of historical artifacts can they begin construction.

  Nautical archeologists fight like the furies to preserve a wreck and keep it out of the hands of salvers, treasure hunters and sport divers who are out to pillage shipwrecks of historic significance. Mostly they win, but often they lose the battle to protect a wreck from looters. Their biggest problem is money. Few state, local and federal government agencies have the funding to preserve shipwrecks, so the archeologists squeak by on shoestring budgets from one project to the next.

  One who has made a difference is Jim Delgado, a man whose dedication and hard-earned efforts have made a contribution to the field of nautical archeology that cannot be equaled. Of all the archeologists I’ve known in my years of chasing after historical shipwrecks, he is one of the few who has his feet on the ground and knows more about lost ships than the Congressional Library and Lloyd’s of London wrapped up together. His exploits beneath the sea have become legendary.

  I’m honored and privileged to call him a friend.

  INTRODUCTION

  THE GREAT MUSEUM OF THE SEA

  For the last thirteen years, I have shared my passion for the past with the public through books and newspaper articles, as a television “talking head” and host, and as a museum director. After I learned how to dive and embarked on a career with the U.S. National Park Service, I traveled the United States, and then the world, in search of shipwrecks. Not all of them were famous, but in the last few decades, the wrecks I’ve been privileged to see and explore have included some notable ones. But what really keeps me fired up with a passion for the past are the connections to everyday people like you and me. Often, it’s an unidentified wreck or the mute evidence of a life forever interrupted that moves me, and grounds the scientist in the firm reality of the human condition. Recently, I’ve enjoyed a new set of adventures “in search of famous shipwrecks,” thanks to John Davis, producer of the National Geographic International television series The Sea Hunters. Working with John, together with co-host and famous novelist, raconteur and shipwreck hunter Clive Cussler, master diver Mike Fletcher, his diving son Warren and a great crew behind the camera, is a wonderful experience. We’ve made dives on many of history’s legendary ships, from Titanic to lost warships and fabled fleets like the one K
ublai Khan sent to conquer Japan in 1274. It’s great fun to work with Clive, whose passion is wrecks, particularly finding them when no one else can. With his blessing, we’ve joined the extended National Underwater and Marine Agency (NUMA) family that he founded, working in the field as more of his “sea hunters” scouting the world’s waters for shipwrecks.

  In those seven seas, we’ve encountered history and the stories of the people who make history. Part of the record of humanity’s achievements, its triumphs and tragedies, rests out of sight on the seabed: the greatest museum of all lies at the bottom of the sea. My desire to see and touch the past and share it with others continues thanks to the friends and colleagues who have joined me on the ongoing quest. What I’ve learned along the way from these shipwrecks, both the unknown and the famous, is that they all have tales to tell. Sometimes their broken bones tell me who they are and how they died. Sometimes the story of their birth, their careers and the personalities who sailed in them also come to light, resurrected from the darkness of the deep or the back rooms of an archive. Nearly every time I dive, I am reminded of archeologist Howard Carter’s famous comment at the door to Tutankhamen’s tomb. No one had passed that threshold in thousands of years. Carter opened a small hole and held up a light as he peered into the darkness of millennia, now briefly illuminated again. “What do you see?” he was asked. “Wonderful things,” he answered.

  No matter how many times I dive, how many shipwrecks I see, the awe, the excitement, the thrill of discovery, are always there. I, too, see wonderful things. And as an archeologist, educator and museum director, I bring back to the surface what I have seen. I bring back photographs, images, impressions, stories and, occasionally, items — artifacts — to share with others. I only raise an artifact after I or my colleagues have studied it on the bottom, mapped it, photographed it and learned how the piece fits into the puzzle that is the wreck as a whole. I raise artifacts that have the power to tell a story and place them in the laboratory for treatment, where the ravages of the sea and time are halted or reversed, so that they can go on display in public museums. There, artifacts — the “real thing” of history, history that people can see with their own eyes — make the past come alive.

  I have had the privilege of diving on wrecks around the world and bringing their stories back from the ocean’s floor. From 1982 to 1991, as a member of a U.S. National Park Service team called the Submerged Cultural Resources Unit, I dived with a group of men and women committed to preserving shipwrecks and telling their stories. They included iron-hulled sailing ships swept onto Florida reefs by hurricanes, ocean steamers strewn along rocky shores on both coasts of the Americas, wooden-hulled schooners sunk in the Great Lakes and warships on the bottom of the Pacific. We mapped, photographed, researched, studied and then shared what we learned with the public through museum displays, books and magazine articles, television screens and newspapers. Since leaving government service thirteen years ago to become the director of a maritime museum, I have continued to dive and study wrecks. Now, thanks to The Sea Hunters show and its television audience of forty million people around the world, I have an even greater ability to share these exciting discoveries.

  James Delgado in the water examining the Civil War-era submarine Sub Marine Explorer. Marc Pike

  I have dived on many ships in the past two and a half decades. They include the Civil War gunboat USS Pickett in North Carolina, the Revolutionary War transport HMS Betsy (sunk at the Battle of Yorktown in 1788), the steamship Winfield Scott (lost off the California coast during the gold rush) and the aircraft carrier Saratoga (swamped and partly crushed in a 1946 atomic test at Bikini Atoll). I have dived in the freezing waters of the Arctic to study the wreck of Maud, the last command of polar explorer Roald Amundsen. There are many others, and you are about to share those adventures in the pages that follow.

  Sadly, in those same years, I have also seen serious damage done to wrecks by thoughtless souvenir seekers and treasure hunters. In Mexico, while studying the wreck of the brig Somers—the only ship in the U.S. Navy to suffer a mutiny and whose story inspired Melville to write Billy Budd—I discovered that souvenir hunters had ripped into the ship’s stern, taking some of the small arms, swords and the ship’s chronometer. We never got them back. They either crumbled into dust without treatment, or were treated and sold on the black market. This happens too often. I also have watched countless auctions of artifacts from shipwrecks, raised by treasure hunters and sold off to the highest bidder, usually not museums, as most museums will not participate in activities that turn archeological relics into commodities for sale. Our role is to encourage understanding and appreciation of the past, of other cultures and of who we are. We work to encourage science and knowledge. Wrenching a porthole off a wreck or digging into a ballast pile on the bottom to take a copper spike home is as wrong as systematically mining a wreck of its artifacts and then selling them off with some hype, often abetted by the media.

  A few years ago, I went on a trip to Bermuda, a graveyard of lost ships and home to one of the world’s great maritime museums. In a souvenir shop, I saw a brick with a maker’s stamp from San Francisco. I had only seen that stamp once before, in the ballast of a mid-nineteenth century wreck in the North Pacific that I was still trying to identify. I asked where the brick came from. “A shipwreck off the coast,” I was told. Did they know what ship? Where had it come from? How old was it? How had this brick from far-off San Francisco reached the Caribbean? Where had the wrecked ship gone in her travels? The shopkeeper didn’t know. A local diver had pulled it off the bottom a long time ago, and others had followed to strip the wreck clean. The souvenir shop, and others like it, had been selling bits and pieces of the wreck to tourists for years. This was an opportunity lost, a story never told. The divers, the shops, the buyers who wanted a “piece of the past,” had scattered the pieces of the puzzle all over the globe, and now the puzzle will never be assembled to reveal the whole picture.

  It is those pictures, the connections that these wrecks have not just to the great sweep of history but to individual lives, to stories of people like you and me, that compel me to explore and investigate. My life has been defined by a quest to learn about the past and share it. This is the story of that quest, as related by the stories of the lost ships in the great museum of the sea.

  CHAPTER ONE

  GRAVEYARD OF THE PACIFIC

  OFF CAPE DISAPPOINTMENT, WASHINGTON

  The long, uninterrupted swells of the north Pacific gather momentum as they surge eastward across thousands of miles of open water to break, finally, on the shoals and rocks of the northern coast of the American continent. On that rough and savage shoreline is the mouth of the Columbia, the great and mighty river that divides Oregon and Washington.

  At the mouth of the Columbia, buttressed by the two small settlements of Astoria, Oregon, and Ilwaco, Washington, the river’s burden of silt and sand spreads out into the ocean, forming a massive “bar” at the entrance. The bulk of the bar catches the force of the open sea, and as a result the transition zone from ocean to river is a dangerous one that surprises unwary mariners — the area is a graveyard of ships drowned by the force of huge waves that surge over the bar’s shallows. More than two thousand vessels, from mighty square-riggers and freighters to hardworking fish boats, have been caught in the bar’s trap and lost, along with countless lives. And yet, because this bar is an obstacle that must be overcome to engage in trade on the Columbia, with its ports full of produce, wheat, lumber and fish, for more than two centuries seafarers have braved it and their chances to enter the great river of the west.

  Efforts to make the passage safer commenced in the mid-nineteenth century with the installation of a lighthouse at Cape Disappointment and continued with the construction of breakwaters and the marking of a channel through the shoals. But the power of nature can never be tamed, and the government’s money has perhaps more effectively been spent upholding the century-old traditions of the United Sta
tes Life-Saving Service and its successor, the U.S. Coast Guard. There is no rougher or more dangerous place to ply the trade of the lifesaver than here, at the mouth of the Columbia, a grim reality measured by the memorials to those who laid down their own lives so that others might survive, and by the fact that it is here that America’s lifesavers come to learn their trade at Cape Disappointment’s National Motor Lifeboat School. It is not for the faint of heart or the timid — the sea is a rough teacher, and the Columbia River bar, if you relax your guard, will kill you.

  All of these thoughts, and the lessons of history evident in the lists of lost ships and images of crushed, broken and mangled hulls, fill my head as the Coast Guard’s motor lifeboat pitches and rolls on the bar. The lifeboat lifts high on a wave, into the bright blue sky, before dropping into the trough of the next wave, so that all I see is the dark gray-green water towering high above, blocking out the sun. Then, as the boat turns, the water crashes down, swirling and thundering as it sweeps over the deck. Then, suddenly, it is gone, as the plucky lifeboat sheds the sea and gives itself a shake, just like a dog, and climbs the next wave. It is both terrifying and exhilarating. The skill of the Coast Guard coxswain and the fact that I’m dressed in a survival suit with a crash helmet on my head and am tied down to the deck by a harness that tethers me tightly so that even if I fall I will not be swept away, add to my confidence. My fellow archeologists share a shaky grin with me, savoring the risk while not acknowledging the fear in our eyes.

  The hours we spend in this lifeboat experiencing the waters of the bar are a lesson in the power of the sea and the danger of the Columbia’s entrance, courtesy of the Coast Guard and the commander of the “Cape D” station, Lieutenant Commander Mike Montieth. Our team, assembled by the National Park Service (NPS), has come here to the graveyard of the Pacific to dive on a recently discovered wreck that may just be the earliest one yet found on this coast, the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) supply ship Isabella, lost on the Columbia bar in 1830. Montieth, who has already visited the wreck, has arranged this no-holds barred introduction to the Columbia so that we might better understand the dynamic and violent environment in which we are about to dive. As we ride the roller-coaster seas off Cape Disappointment, the team gains a new perspective on the predicament of Captain William Ryan and Isabella’s crew more than 150 years ago.