Adventures of a Sea Hunter_ In Search of Famous Shipwrecks - James P. Delgado [2]
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