Adventures of a Sea Hunter: In Search of Famous Shipwrecks

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 Kublai 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.

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.