Adventures of a Sea Hunter (2 page)

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 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.

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 and the danger of the Columbia’s entrance, courtesy of the Coast Guard and the commander of the “Cape D” station, Lieutenant Commander Mike Montieth. Our team, assembled
by the National Park Service (
NPS
), has come here to the graveyard of the Pacific to dive on a recently discovered wreck that may just be the earliest one yet found on this coast, the Hudson’s Bay Company (
HBC
) supply ship
Isabella
, lost on the Columbia bar in 1830. Montieth, who has already visited the wreck, has arranged this no-holds barred introduction to the Columbia so that we might better understand the dynamic and violent environment in which we are about to dive. As we ride the roller-coaster seas off Cape Disappointment, the team gains a new perspective on the predicament of Captain William Ryan and
Isabella’s
crew more than 150 years ago.

The Hudson’s Bay Company supply ship
Isabella
had survived a long and hard six-month voyage from London’s docks to the “North West Coast,” marked by rough seas, a stormy passage around Cape Horn that had damaged the ship and a mutinous carpenter whom Captain William Ryan had clapped in irons for several weeks. Scanning his chart, Ryan squinted at the coast. For over a day, they had maneuvered off Columbia’s bar, searching for the channel and a safe entrance. Now, in the predawn darkness, Ryan saw a point of land that he was certain had to be Cape Disappointment. Turning to first mate William Eales, he gave the order to head into the channel.

Now, the end of the voyage was in sight. Ryan’s orders were to slowly work
Isabella
up the Columbia River for no miles to Fort Vancouver, the Pacific coast headquarters of the Hudson’s Bay Company. There, he would discharge his cargo of trade goods and take on bundles of valuable fur, gathered by trappers and traders, for the return trip to England.

But as
Isabella
sailed across the bar, Ryan immediately realized that he had made a mistake. The sea surged and rolled over the shallows, picking up the ship and hurtling it towards a patch of broken water. They were not in the channel, but on the bar itself. Then
Isabella
hit hard at the stern. “She’s not answering the helm,” shouted the mate.
Looking over the stern, Ryan saw broken pieces of the rudder swirling in the sea. Without her steering, the ship swung wildly. Waves crashed over the side and filled the deck with masses of water. As each wave rolled over the ship,
Isabella
pounded hard on the sand. Ryan had to act quickly, or the ship would be lost. Using the sails to catch the wind and steer off the bar was his only chance. But first, the crew had to lighten the ship. Pinned by her heavy cargo,
Isabella
was slowly sinking into the sand as the waves washed around the hull.

The men set to work, heaving overboard piles of lumber stacked on the deck. With axes, they smashed open the heavy water casks to empty them. Then, laboring in the surging surf, they dumped 30 tons of cargo and stores into the sea, but still
Isabella
would not budge. As the sun climbed into the sky, Ryan saw that they were stuck fast and pounding hard, and that water was flooding into the hold. He later explained to his superiors that as “there appeared little prospect of saving her and being surrounded by heavy breakers fearing she would drive on shore into them when it would be impossible to save ourselves,” he gave the order to abandon ship. Grabbing what they could, the crew piled into the ship’s two boats and dropped into the sea. “Pull! Pull for your lives!” the mate roared as the boats climbed one breaker, then another, and
Isabella
disappeared behind them in the towering waves.