Adventures of a Sea Hunter_ In Search of Famous Shipwrecks - James P. Delgado [3]
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.