Adventures of a Sea Hunter_ In Search of Famous Shipwrecks - James P. Delgado [97]
CONCLUSION
WHAT’S NEXT?
What’s next? It’s a big ocean full of wrecks, and as I write this, The Sea Hunters team is planning to return to Chile to dive on the flagship of the Chilean Navy, Esmeralda, sunk in combat during the War of the Pacific in 1879. That war, between Chile and Peru, was a bloody struggle largely forgotten by the English-speaking world. It is not forgotten in South America. The captain of Esmeralda, Arturo Prat, is buried in a place of honor on Valparaiso’s harbor front, and his name lives on many buildings and streets. Prat died when his wooden warship was rammed by the Peruvian ironclad monitor Huascar. He leapt from the decks of his sinking ship onto the prow of Huascar to inspire his men to follow him and try to take the Peruvian ship. Instead, he was shot down and died, sword in hand, a hero honored by both sides. Esmeralda’s wooden hulk is still intact and holds the bones of many of her dead sailors more than a century after the battle.
We will also journey to the coast of Vietnam to explore the history-rich waters off the ancient city of Hoi An. Located at the silted mouth of a river, Hoi An was a port of the seafaring Cham empire. The Cham, an Indo-Asiatic people, were traders who built magnificent cities of brick, which rivaled nearby Angkor Wat, up the rivers in the heart of Southeast Asia. The Cham empire ultimately fell in the late fifteenth century as a result of warfare with the people of Angkor and the rising power of the Da Viet people of the North, but Hoi An lived on. In the sixteenth century, Hoi An served as Vietnam’s major port. Centuries later, trade shifted to a nearby bay just off the port city of Danang.
As a result of the centuries of trade, storms and warfare, the waters off Hoi An and Danang are filled with shipwrecks. Medieval wrecks laden with trade goods—mostly pottery—have been discovered by fishermen. Unfortunately, some of the wrecks have been salvaged and their artifacts sold to feed the voracious international antiquities market. Our trip to Vietnam has more than one purpose. We will work on the wrecks of Hoi An to find a suitable site for scientific excavation so that its contents and story can form the basis of a new maritime museum there. Operated by the Vietnamese, the new museum, we hope, will become a centre for Vietnamese archeologists to work to study and recover their country’s rich underwater heritage, and not let it be taken away and sold. Our partner in this new venture is George Belcher, the discoverer of the U.S. brig Somers, who has created the Asia Maritime Foundation to fund the museum and the training of Vietnamese archeologists.
Then we’re off to the coast of Normandy, where, in June 1944, the greatest amphibious invasion in the history of warfare breached the walls of Hitler’s Fortress Europa on D-Day. Colleagues from the U.S. Navy and Texas A&M University’s Institute of Nautical Archeology have surveyed the wrecks of D-Day’s Omaha beach, site of the American landings. We’ll go there to complete the survey at Juno beach, where Canadian troops poured ashore under heavy fire on “the longest day.” Earlier surveys have found sunken ships, landing craft and tanks just offshore, and we expect to find even more—fallen warriors who never made it to the beach sixty years ago, in a battle that literally changed the face of history. All the more significant is the fact that in the waters of the English Channel, those remnants of battle lie exactly where they fell, on a raw submerged landscape of war that is very different from the manicured lawns, memorials and museums that commemorate D-Day ashore.
In the years to come, there will be many more adventures and many more