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
I have dived on many ships in the past two and a half decades. They include the Civil War gunboat USS
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
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
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 States 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
