Submerged: Adventures of America's Most Elite Underwater Archeology Team

by Daniel Lenihan

  Formally declared a permanent entity in 1980, SCRU evolved from a five-year pilot project called the National Reservoir Inundation Study (NRIS) that began in 1975 in the Southwest. The program was born within the Park Service and heavily influenced by the agency’s philosophy regarding archeological remains: They are non-renewable public resources and should be removed from where they lay with only the strongest of justifications. Because of the inherent dangers in our profession and the intense pressure exerted on shipwrecks from commercial treasure-hunting interests, our efforts evolved into a crusade—one that came to involve serious risk and unexpected rewards.

  During the span of years that SCRU has operated, peace was declared in Vietnam, war declared in the Gulf, AIDS came, the Cold War went, bombs killed smartly, and we all became worried about computer viruses. This is a retrospective on a special group of people who kept focused on the preservation of a little piece of the world during these turbulent times. It is also a personal story—after a quarter century at the helm of the organization our destinies became intertwined.

  The SCRU team still dives today although at the turn of the millennium it became the Submerged Resources Center—leaving us to mourn the loss of one of the finest acronyms in government. Happily, that is all we have to mourn. At this writing, the team has never suffered a serious diving-related injury. This is a record of which we are proud but which we know could change any moment. Although the exploits of this team often equaled those of people involved in extreme diving, climbing, and caving, the driving force was not conquest, or “because it is there.” I can relate to such motives personally but not in my role as head of SCRU.

  Rather this is a recollection of adventures, triumphs, failures, and close calls of a tightly bonded group of divers in the context of a serious research program. The scientific, historic preservation, and public service goals were as real as the danger that attended them.

  Because we were expected to work on short notice in the full range of diving environments present in the National Park System (including deep, cold, and under ceilings in caves and shipwrecks), I felt compelled to select personnel that had not only the credentials of archeologists, illustrators, or photographers but people who were exceptionally good divers. They had to be ready on short notice to shed lightweight diving “skins” appropriate to the warm, clear waters of Florida to board a plane and confront an entirely different set of challenges.

  They might rendezvous with their bulky dry suits, heavy double cylinders, and deep/under ceiling dive gear that had been air-freighted to places like Alaska, Lake Superior, or Crater Lake. They might leave sea-level diving one day at Cape Cod and arrive two days later to dive in risky high-altitude environments such as Yellowstone Lake at an elevation of 8,000 feet. There, the danger of bends escalated, and the water dropped to almost freezing within fifty feet of the surface.

  Then, to add to the unique calling of this group, there was the dual nature of their mission as ranger/archeologists. When they completed a research diving task off the coast of California, they might have to rush back to a reservoir in the desert Southwest where their special skills were needed to help execute the difficult recovery of a victim of drowning. Such events forced them to switch psychological gears as quickly and definitively as they switched diving equipment. They were expected to behave as archeologists in ranger uniforms in the presence of other researchers and to serve as rangers, who happened to also be archeologists, when the mission turned to one of rescue or law enforcement rather than research.

  But why all the fuss about historic preservation? What of the romantic lure of treasure? What is underwater archeology? Is there a difference between harvesting antiquities for profit and doing it for science? Are old shipwrecks and prehistoric artifacts going to rot away down there if we don’t get them up for people to enjoy? To understand SCRU, it will be necessary to answer these questions. As we recount the team’s adventures over the course of this book, the answers should become clear.

  Perhaps it would be most useful to begin with the observation that neither I nor any other member of SCRU was born a preservationist. I decided to stop being a schoolteacher and go to graduate school in anthropology at Florida State not because of a scholarly lust for knowledge or commitment to protection of archeological sites. Rather, it was because I thought I might eventually find a job in which someone would actually pay me to dive a lot and to look for old treasures underwater.

  Mark Twain wrote in Tom Sawyer, “There comes a time in every rightly constructed boy’s life when he has a raging desire to go somewhere and dig for hidden treasure.” I certainly am not immune to that desire.

  Even as a child growing up on the Lower East Side of New York City in the 1950s, I was fascinated by stories of sunken ships of gold under the ominous tidal swirls of the East River. When I first ventured beneath the water’s surface in the late 1960s, I found my hands attracted like magnets to anything old and mysterious, regardless of value.

  I found old bottles in the Virgin Islands and War of 1812 cannon-balls in the Patuxtent River off my backyard in Maryland. Even my Labrador retriever was an inveterate artifact hunter in those days. He once showed up on the porch, sopping wet and muddy from a foray along the riverbank, clutching an old bayonet in his mouth. It must have been dropped by a British soldier on his way to torch Washington, D.C., during the War of 1812.

  When I arrived in 1970 at Florida State to study anthropology, I spent my weekends exploring water-filled sinkholes and river bottoms, often diving alone and with an ethic regarding artifacts only slightly more sophisticated. By that time, I had come to believe the mastodon bones and projectile points I regularly stumbled across in my dives should be part of our collective heritage and not pilfered—so what was wrong with grabbing up these treasures and taking them to a museum or university? I would be greeted as a hero! Not exactly.

  In one of the thousands of “sinks” in the limestone Swiss cheese that comprises the Florida karst, I saw a particularly interesting display of archeological stratigraphy. Groundwater mixes with surface water in the “River Sinks” area of Tallahassee, producing the classic case of a river moving under the earth, then bobbing to the surface briefly, before dropping away again. I descended eighty feet into a large, cavernous opening of a sinkhole that was the siphon end of a spring-siphon system.

  On this crisp autumn day, the water in River Sink was clear with a dark green tinge, so I was startled all the more by a contrasting flash of bright yellow off to my right. Yellow is one of the first colors of the spectrum to filter out as water gets deeper; eighty feet from the surface it is nonexistent in ambient light. But I was carrying an artificial spectrum in the form of a dive lamp, and its beam had chanced across something metallic yellow.

  Moving closer to investigate, my nitrogen-laden mind sluggishly sorted out the identity of the mysterious feature. It was a newspaper vending machine, upside down in the silt. A few feet away and further downslope was another and not far from that one, yet another. The Star Trek sense of discovery that accompanied me on these lonely dives in backwoods sinkholes was momentarily shaken.

  I noticed between the angle iron legs of the first box of soggy Tallahassee Democrats another man-made feature. Perhaps an old pail, it was barely extruding from the organic silt that had begun to settle on the boxes. Obviously it had been here longer than the newsstands.

  I reached down to give it a tug, and my hands told me what my eyes hadn’t: this wasn’t an old pail, it was an old ceramic pot. In fact it was a very old ceramic pot. Back in the anthropology lab at FSU, the ceramic wizards declared it “Wakulla check-stamped,” a local type of prehistoric pottery. It had been sitting there for two millennia until it was unceremoniously joined by the Tallahassee Democrat dispenser, several soft drink bottles, and a can of Busch Bavarian beer.

  The geological and human processes that occasioned the creation of such artifactual assemblages were the source of considerable interest to me. The newspaper vending ma
chines were there because sinkholes are excellent places to quickly and quietly dispose of things you don’t want found. The upsurge of diving in the area was causing certain inconveniences to the region’s criminally inclined, and not just vending machine vandals. Leon County sheriff’s deputies, alerted by sport divers, were pulling stolen cars and occasional bullet-ridden human bodies from some of the more popular sinkholes.

  The angle of repose of sediment in a sinkhole could create bizarre associations of modern-day felons and thousand-year-old victims. In some places, the human remains were dating to mind-boggling ages of ten thousand years ago. And it wasn’t a few nondescript slivers of long bone or a possible carpal that were the prizes waiting to be found. Warm Mineral Springs in Florida produced a human cranium with brain material in it predating the rise of Egypt.

  No, I wasn’t greeted as a hero for bringing the pot to the FSU lab. I was given a corner of a table to document the find, a form to fill out, and a lecture on the inadvisability of moving artifacts from context, particularly if I intended to get my masters in anthropology from Florida State. I learned the hard way that one doesn’t remove artifacts without stringent controls nor bestow them as “gifts” on institutions not prepared to cope with them.

  The stern voice of Professor Percy, whose finger was pointed in my face, asserted that carefully documenting the precise location could have determined if this pot was a primary, intentional deposition, or a secondary wash-in from surface runoff. Samples of the surrounding sediment could have been dated and residues in the pot that I had conscientiously “cleaned” could have revealed the function of the pot. Careful, painstaking removal of the edges of the broken bottom of the ceramic vessel could have determined if the pot had been broken from some mundane use or ceremonially “killed” as a sacrifice. The nature of the silt on the pot as opposed to that covering the newspaper machines was important, and by the way, what was the date of the newspapers?

  “You’re kidding, the date of the newspapers?”

  “Ever consider that you had a tight control of how fast sedimentation occurs in River Sink with a dated, flat receptacle gathering silt like a laboratory experiment?”

  “No.”

  Even the different layers of sediment caught in curves of the pot could have been microscopically examined for pollen to reconstruct the prehistoric micro-environment and contribute to our understanding of regional climate changes over the past two thousand years. The list went on and on. In short, I had behaved like an idiot. I had removed a trinket that might have fetched a few bucks on the antiquity market—but archeologically, my moving it made it next to worthless for unraveling any mysteries of the human past.

  I would learn later that shipwrecks were even more powerful archeological sites. They were discrete collections of artifacts from particular cultures at a specific point in time. They offered a snapshot of the whole range of shipboard life. They told about trade, fishing, warfare, social stress, play, community life, personal hygiene, and even sexual preference. They did, that is, unless you fooled with them.

  Over the years working with the past in a park setting, I learned that we are diminished in a very real way when we lose a piece of the puzzle from its natural resting place. But relics tell us on more than one level about our roots—not only what we can intellectualize but what we can comprehend in a much deeper sense.

  The maritime and naval history of the United States is a compelling story as gleaned from a combination of the written record and archeology. But once the relics have been passed through the hands of the best technicians and displayed in the finest museums and once the historical records have been digested and passed through the heads of the finest historians, there is still an element of distance.

  But that distance disappears when one journeys to the depths. Playing one’s light over the twisted remains of hull, the encrusted muzzles of cannon, the gleam of bronze fasteners emerging from wooden beams, while hearing only the sound of air rushing into your lungs—that is a bridge to the past that can be found nowhere but in the natural museums under the sea.

  My conviction, which has emerged from thirty years of diving, is that shipwrecks and underwater caves are places where one can touch the past in the most special of ways. SCRU embodied the principle that respecting the past underwater is not a luxury—it’s a necessity.

  Our mission didn’t carry the urgency of a researcher creating a new vaccine or a cure for cancer or a successful experiment in creating cold fusion—one has to have perspective. But once the wars are fought and the crises of the moment addressed, we still have the human race trying to comprehend itself. We look to our roots, some in literature, some in the ground, some of the most dramatic on the bed of the sea. Our past is writ large there in shipwrecks, ancient projectile points, ceramic pots, and newspaper vending machines. These artifacts are part of our world, a shrinking world, the only world we’ve got.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE FLORIDA CAVES

  I there is one place that archeology and extreme diving, two signature elements of the Submerged Cultural Resources Unit, come together, it is in the Florida caves. Due to a fluke of geomorphology, the underwater caves that compose the Florida “karst” hold the potential for archeological and paleontological finds of great significance.

  The process is pretty much the same in all these karst areas—karst being a type-name for this sort of geology taken from a plateau in Yugoslavia. Vegetation grows rampant in the soils of the Southeast, given the moist, warm climate. When leaves fall and vegetation dies, it piles thick on the limestone mantle and decays. When rainwater is added, a mild solution of carbonic acid results, which, given thousands, sometimes millions of years, eats away the porous sedimentary limestone base. Eventually water follows fractures and weak spots in the rocks and makes underground rivers, some quite near the surface. In most dry caves the solution is still trickling in or has ceased. In Florida where the water table is so shallow, the caves still have the solution in them.

  And sinkholes? Visualize a water-filled cave running thirty feet underground when the overlying weight causes it to collapse at a weak point. Voilà, sinkhole! The process is gradual but not so slow that sinkholes don’t still make headlines in Florida when roadways and houses suddenly disappear. Nothing like a dynamic landscape to keep one humble and, in my case, absolutely enthralled.

  Sea level changes during the last period in the Ice Age resulted in a Floridian peninsula much larger and different in climate than today. Human inhabitants of the region 10,000 years ago had exciting company—a time of big elephants, small horses, and saber-toothed cats. Owing to a drier and cooler climate, the attraction to the freshwater sources in the Florida springs was great. The water surface in the springs and sinkholes had dropped with the sea level, and the chances of falling in and drowning were increased. What was misfortune for late-Pleistocene megafauna and early man was a bonanza for scholars of the past; total freshwater immersion followed by siltation makes ideal conditions for preservation. A few archeologists had already realized that potential by the early 1970s, and startling finds had been made at Wakulla Springs, Warm Mineral Springs, and other karst features in Florida—more were soon to come.

  I had never seen a sinkhole before moving to Florida, and had but few times set foot inside a cave. The fact that mini-Carlsbad Caverns exist all over the state was unknown even to many who lived there. There are places where superhighways rushing people to Disney World are passing over sunken catacombs that would make any theme park seem trivial in comparison.

  Graduate school in anthropology at Florida State became what I did to sustain myself in the world of career expectations and practicalities. My evenings spent clambering down the sides of sinkholes with more than a hundred pounds of air cylinders and lights strapped to my body—that was what I lived for.

  It makes eminent sense that a young graduate student in anthropology with a penchant for underwater exploration might embrace cave diving to achieve scholarly re
cognition in archeology. A neat, elegant story perhaps—but it would be a lie. The truth is I would have pursued this passion for cave diving if early man had never been near Florida and elephants never fell into wet holes in the ground.

  It is hard for most to understand the draw of these water-filled mazes, particularly when the price their exploration exacted in human life came to be widely publicized. I had found a world of storybook magic; moon walking, star travel, the kingdom of the silent night—all were available a thirty- to ninety-minute drive from my graduate teaching assistant office in the Bellamy Building at Florida State. The only catch was that mistakes in this world carried capital punishment as their penalty. There were no in-betweens. You either did it right or became the subject of the grim, black humor of fellow cave divers.

  The problem with this form of diving, to put it simply, is that you can’t go up when things go wrong. And in underwater caves the number of things that can go wrong are many, and few of them are predictable without direct experience. Unfortunately, obtaining the experience is usually impractical, because caves are not conducive to incremental learning. Once you have entered the cave even a little ways, you are in over your head in more ways than one.

  Imagine stopping by the side of a fairly well-traveled road and seeing a beautiful patch of crystal-clear water surrounded by the tannic acid brown soup of the Suwannee. A sign says “Little River” and perhaps another, smaller sign warns of dangers in diving there. Then, consider that you learn from locals that cave divers have placed a half mile of permanent guideline in that cave and you are a diving instructor or experienced open-water diver from New Jersey. You are prudent, however, and decide that you will not tempt fate in a strange environment; you venture in only a hundred feet, not even as far as the beginning of the three thousand feet of line that has been laid in the cave’s passages. By 1975, twenty-five divers who made that reasonable decision died in Little River Spring.