Kathy Abbass didn’t start out focused on shipwrecks or flooded archaeological sites. “My particular career path was not traditional,” she said, an understatement. She was an Air Force brat who grew up all over the world and landed at Southern Illinois University. While still in college, she married into “Arab royalty,” the son of a former Iraqi ambassador to the United Nations who was teaching at the university after a coup. She majored in anthropology, figuring she would end up in the Middle East and find work at a museum in Beirut or Baghdad. One of her teachers, the influential archaeologist W. W. Taylor, told his class that there was no room for women in archaeology. “Today, of course, he’d be brought up on charges,” Abbass said dryly. She learned early to persevere without encouragement.
Abbass didn’t know port from starboard when she pursued a fellowship at Harvard; she wanted to figure out how early horses and cattle and pigs were transported to the Americas from Europe. She imitated the professor, a British marine archaeologist who wore a monocle: “‘My dear, that’s one of the most important topics that has ever been addressed.’” (The effort! The mechanics! The colonial mind-set!) Wondering how pigs and horses got to America led her, naturally, to ships, which she turned out to have an aptitude for. She left a tenured teaching job at an all-black university in Virginia, took scuba and sailing lessons, and went to work for a ship surveyor in Newport. “I ran away to sea,” she said cheerfully. “I was the first woman in the country to do marine surveying. I’d go into yards where I was set to inspect something and they’d show me the stereo system. I’d say, ‘Open the bilge. I want to see the engine.’” Her grounding in the working mechanics of ships is an advantage that she still wields.
Abbass and her husband divorced amicably (no children, and she kept her married name, which means God, and also grim, in Arabic). She ran the Museum of Yachting in Newport for a year, then found herself unemployed—too senior for entry-level jobs, not senior enough for the big-time positions, and “not this dewy-eyed little thing that’s going to do what I was told.” She had her own goals. She knew she wanted to work on water.
One day, Abbass joined an archaeologist from the Naval War College on a trip to Lake George, where sport divers had discovered a submerged warship from the French and Indian War, a type of boat called a radeau. The crew had permission from New York State to investigate as long as an archaeologist supervised their work. But when their archaeologist took off after a day, Abbass leapt into the breach, choreographing the excavation of the oldest warship project in North America.
Abbass was commuting regularly from Newport to Lake George by slow bus to study the radeau when the state archaeologist of Rhode Island suggested she do that kind of work for her own state. Rhode Island had tons of wrecks. The state archaeologist was responsible for the preservation of Rhode Island’s heritage, but though much of that heritage was on or under the water, he had no staff and no expertise in this field. According to Abbass, “They didn’t even have an inventory of what was here in the state. They didn’t know what had been lost, what might be found, except for the occasional bits and pieces.” The Rhode Island Marine Archaeology Project was born in 1992, at Abbass’s kitchen table. “That’s the first thing we did, the inventory,” a database that continued to grow. She trained volunteers to document the marine history of the state and to help survey its underwater sites. She and her colleagues offered museum workers, sailors, teenagers, retired people—almost anyone—courses in history, diving, excavating, and conservation. Many of her students went on to graduate school in the field. RIMAP also provided field experience for the graduates of programs in maritime history and marine archaeology. Most, she had found, “don’t know beans about boats.” She wanted to foster a public that understood and appreciated the significance of the historic ships in the sunken fleet, and she also wanted to train a cadre of archaeologists who knew firsthand what they were excavating.
In the beginning, Abbass supported herself and covered her lab fees by working as a cleaning lady in some of the beautiful houses of Newport, the houses that I watched out the window as we puttered around in the old van. The “fairly wealthy women” whose homes she scrubbed “knew I was building this nonprofit. You’d think they’d give you a tip or a little donation. But no. I still run into women who say, ‘You were the best, I miss you. I can’t get anyone who cleans as good as you.’”
Hold on. This archaeologist was telling me she was a great cleaning lady? Exactly. Abbass said, “I think if you’re good at something, you’re usually good at other things as well.”
Kathy Abbass would have quit underwater archaeology ten years ago and “taken a job selling insurance in Illinois or something”—except that she figured out what happened to Cook’s Endeavour, and that, as she promised to elaborate for me later, was “the career maker.”
Abbass maneuvered the van into a parking place in a historic neighborhood of Newport and I waited with Diva while she ducked into the print shop. “What’s up?” I asked the dog, and Diva scratched herself with a hind leg. She had been twice rescued, once by Abbass’s friend after the death of her owner, and again when Abbass’s friend died. “It takes them about a year to realize their owner isn’t coming back,” Abbass told me. Diva looked unperturbed now; her future as a mascot to underwater archaeology was secure.
Abbass emerged with a man wheeling a dolly laden with boxes of brochures, which he loaded into the back of the van. “Now, this is for our series on Revolutionary War sites in the state,” Abbass explained. “Our office generates a lot of gray literature. You know what gray literature is, right? Research, reports, even books that aren’t commercially published.” RIMAP’s gray literature includes a five-volume history of Rhode Island during the Revolution that Abbass had written.
On the back of the flyer about Revolutionary War hospitals, RIMAP was described as a volunteer organization that trained members to do fieldwork and invited them to participate in historical research. “Want a thrill?” was the way she put it to me. “You can be the person who found it, handled it, archived it!” She had not been too shy to add on the back of the flyer: “RIMAP needs: An artifact conservation, storage, and display facility that is easily accessible to the public.”
“I’ll show you the old Revolutionary War hospital at Hammersmith Farm,” Abbass said, and we embarked on a tour that reminded me of others I have taken with archaeologists, vivid with history (the colonial house where a Revolutionary War spy lived; Doris Duke’s mansion), but also full of ghosts—archaeologists can’t help pointing out where history had been demolished. Abbass’s tour included the phantom eighteenth-century piers, torn up by urban renewal projects. “Marine archaeology also takes place on land,” she pointed out.
The old Revolutionary War hospital at Hammersmith Farm is now occupied by farmers who breed obscure livestock strains for Tufts University and the Campbell’s Soup heiress. In the groomed countryside, the farm had some mess and mud to it, with goats, possibly the rare breed called Tennessee Fainting Goats, milling around.
Touring Hammersmith gave me a glimpse of Abbass’s social life. She told me about someone named “Yusha,” who lived elsewhere on the Hammersmith property, Yusha being the nickname for Hugh Auchincloss III, a former diplomat whose step-siblings included Gore Vidal and Jackie Onassis. “You gauge your closeness by whether you can call them by their pet names,” Abbass said, laughing. Did I know the reception for Jackie and JFK’s wedding took place here? Abbass went to the occasional dinner party at the “cottages” of Newport—“Yes, I have makeup and nice clothes”—and pictures of her in a velvet vest holding a cocktail have appeared in the society pages. “I’m their trained monkey,” she joked, adding that none of the Old Guard has money anymore; she meant relatively, compared to the assets of venture capitalists; they all had heaps more than she did.
“Cultural chameleon” is how one archaeologist I met had described herself, but the phrase fit them all, none more than Abbass. She was an expert in material culture,
someone who could assess the worth and fitness of a yacht, who laughed at the McMansion among the great homes—“You can tell the difference, right?”—but who chose to live with few possessions herself and traveled in a failing van through patrician neighborhoods where she had been both cleaning lady and dinner guest.
The member of the Old Guard of Newport with the most invested in Abbass’s archaeology institute is Commodore Henry H. Anderson, Jr., known as Harry, the former director of the New York Yacht Club and a patron of sailing and sailing education. In his nineties, never married, he was considered an eligible bachelor in Newport. He had introduced Abbass to potential donors and sometimes squired her around town, and it was his seed money that got her to London to figure out what happened to the Endeavour.
THE STORIES HAD persisted for years, that Cook’s Endeavour had been retired after its famous voyage and rechristened La Liberté. While delivering whale oil to the colonies, it was said, she ran aground in Newport. Pieces of La Liberté’s timber, scavenged and identified as pieces of the Endeavour, were displayed in the Newport Historical Society and also in the Australian National Maritime Museum, where the Endeavour’s stern post is a major icon, “even though it’s this old, worm-eaten crummy piece of wood.”
But in 1998, while Abbass was trying to identify the fleet of British transports in the harbor, she got a letter from two Australian amateur historians who believed that the ship had been misidentified. Those alleged pieces of the Endeavour displayed in the museums, they thought, really came from another of Cook’s ships. Along with the letter, the Australians had enclosed an article they’d written, ending with a sentence that had tantalized Abbass: “It said, ‘Nobody knows what happened to the Endeavour, but she was carrying troops out of London under the name Lord Sandwich in the 1779 edition of Lloyds Register, and she drops out after that.’” As it happened, one of the ships in Abbass’s Revolutionary War fleet was named the Lord Sandwich. “It didn’t take a rocket scientist to say, ‘Aha!’” she said. The Lord Sandwich was already an important historic vessel; if it had also been the Endeavour, there was a world-famous wreck submerged in Newport’s waters.
A friend in Whitby, England, where Cook’s ships had been built, gave Abbass a plane ticket to London, and a friendly historian who had dived with Abbass and knew about her research offered her a couch to sleep on, around the corner from the Public Record Office.* In the course of one scholar’s dream week, Abbass turned Harry Anderson’s five-hundred-dollar donation into photocopies that traced the history of a collier (a ship that hauls coal) named Earl of Pembroke, chosen and outfitted by James Cook and Joseph Banks for their history-making first voyage circumnavigating the globe, and renamed HM Bark Endeavour. This bark, or small sailing ship, became the first Western vessel to sight New Zealand and the eastern coast of Australia; once back in England, the ship was sold and rechristened the Lord Sandwich. Her next owner offered her services to aid the British in the war overseas, and after undergoing repairs, the Lord Sandwich transported Hessian mercenaries to Rhode Island, then hung around the Newport Harbor to serve as a prison ship for captured colonists. When the French fleet sailed in to aid the revolutionaries, the British ordered their own ships, including the Lord Sandwich, sunk, to block the French from the harbor and to keep the ships from falling into French hands.
“I found the documents that disproved one story and showed another. That’s the career maker,” Abbass said with satisfaction. Now came the suspenseful part: Is the Lord Sandwich ex-Endeavour still submerged beneath the silt of Newport Harbor? Is anything left of it? Will RIMAP be able to prove it? Will there be anything to display? If so, will a stream of international tourists come to Rhode Island? Abbass threw her plan to retire to Illinois overboard. She will never retire now.
She loved the fact that Cook was a farmer’s son from Yorkshire, England; like her, he came up through the hawespipe (in nautical slang, “from the deep nothing to the top of the heap”). He was “the nobody who explored and mapped and discovered more than anyone in the history of the world! He’s a really big deal,” she told me. “And he was killed and eaten in Hawaii, which makes him even more glamorous,” she says.
“He was eaten?” I asked.
She answered in a stage whisper. “Shhh! We don’t say that very loud, but that’s probably what happened to him!*
“I keep saying to the Newport tourism people, ‘Yeah, the mansions are here, all these wonderful eighteenth-century homes, but there are better, bigger mansions elsewhere in the country. What Newport has that nobody else in the world has is this boat stuff associated with James Cook. There’s no place else in the world!” Abbass just has to persuade Americans, and particularly Rhode Islanders, that this international figure should mean something to them, too. She is formidable in her passion, a scholar with a marketing plan. Perhaps she can track down Johnny Depp and persuade him to make a movie about Cook?
Our tour of Newport ended down by Fort Adams on the waterfront, where cones had blocked off a parking area on the promontory. “I’m with the archaeology crew,” she said to the guards, and the cones were promptly moved with a wave for our van. We pulled right up to the harbor, splendid even on a gray day. Abbass pointed out Goat Island, once a place where pirates were hanged and buried; a Hyatt now stood on their remains. Imagine a rectangle from Goat Island to just above the Claiborne Pell Bridge and east toward the shore; that was the two-square-mile portion of the harbor where the Revolutionary War fleet was sunk.
In a sly political move, Abbass arranged for the symbolic “arrest” of those two square miles of the harbor, to claim its bounty on behalf of the state. “Salvage law is older [than preservation law]; it’s stronger and more established,” Abbass explained. The idea came from her colleague Kerry Lynch, who said, “Why are we bothering with preservation laws if salvers are the ones who have the goods?” Abbass ran with the idea, and RIMAP and the state’s attorney general went to federal court and won the right to claim all nonmotorized wooden vessels within that two-square-mile area on behalf of the state of Rhode Island. Because of their audacity and political maneuvering, the state of Rhode Island now holds custody and title to the Lord Sandwich ex-Endeavour and a few other frigates as well, and federal marshals can arrest anyone trying to disturb the wrecks.
Abbass’s crafty use of salvage law to make a claim on behalf of the state has been a model for other marine archaeologists. Her often-cited article, “A Marine Archaeologist Looks at Treasure Salvage,” begins in rip-roaring style: “Not all lawyers are toadies to wreck-raiders hell-bent on ripping glittering treasure from glamorous shipwrecks. Not all archaeologists are effete intellectual snobs determined to keep important historical sites closed to the public.”
The waters of Newport Harbor are brown, not blue like the Caribbean. A RIMAP diver recalled visibility so bad on one local dive that “we had to tie ourselves together.” Advances in technology, particularly in side-scan sonar, can produce wonderful pictures of the bottom; but, still, Abbass said, “A lot of the local geography looks just like shipwrecks.” What, I asked, could possibly be left from a wreck over two hundred years old? A pile of ballast stone that “stands proud” (appears upright), protecting planks and other ship debris under the silt. To the untrained eye, pictures of a ballast pile from a historic ship look like any other pile of rocks on the harbor floor; even to the trained eye, the piles can look ambiguous, and have to be investigated in the process archaeologists call “ground truthing.” “We spend a lot of time ground truthing,” Abbass said. And underneath the silt, wouldn’t the remains of wooden ships be rotted and useless by now? No, if undisturbed, the silt creates an environment free of oxygen, and the organic remains of wrecks won’t start disintegrating until they’re exposed to air.
“If you buy me lunch, when we go back I’ll show you textiles and leather and other things that came off these ships that are still here,” Abbass said. “There’s a lot more out there.” Until the 1960s, even archaeologists doubted that underwat
er excavations could yield information and artifacts worth the effort of collecting. Those doubts are gone, but conservation methods in use even a few years ago are already inadequate. This is another reason for Abbass to take her time excavating; the technology gets more sophisticated every year. Other archaeologists say the future is underwater; Kathy Abbass says the future is in materials science and conservation. Preserving what you find is the hardest part, and she’s tired of “hero/explorers who think finding a famous shipwreck is the point. That’s only five percent of it!”
So I bought her lunch. We settled in a booth at Bishop’s 4th Street Diner, an aging silver zeppelin on the rotary outside the naval base, grungy and stuffed with Betty Boop tchotchkes in the windows. The waitress greeted Abbass familiarly and promptly took her order: a hamburger, rare, and fries.
Abbass had trained several replacements for RIMAP, but could any of them work as hard as she did and live as frugally, on less than $1,000 a month? (This income included her Social Security check from ten years of teaching.) “It’s hard to ask people to do that who are young and want to raise a family. I keep telling my students, ‘You think you’re going to earn sixty thousand a year? Who told you that?’ Even thirty thousand. It’s not real. I had more disposable income when I was a graduate student!” Abbass is scathing about most graduate programs in archaeology and anthropology; she feels they “perpetrate frauds on a public that doesn’t understand there is very little chance for graduates to get a job.”
She pointed a french fry at me and drilled me with her sharp eyes.
“Now, it’s taken me six hours to get you to the point where you understand why it’s taking so long, but do you see? We did our first remote sensing, looking for the Revolutionary War fleet, in 1992 and 1993. That’s twenty years!
Lives in Ruins Page 11
