After checking for morays and other creatures that punish divers for rude intrusions into their living rooms, I forced my head and shoulder into the declivity. On a whim, I turned off the light, held my breath, and let my eyes adjust. In the next thirty seconds, well before our team had finished sinking the first core, I learned, without a shadow of a doubt, the true nature of the mysterious underwater columns of Nan Madol.
What convinced me so quickly were the cracks of blue light that appeared as soon as the silt had settled in front of my face mask. I was looking straight through the densest portion of the column. If it was basalt, I would have seen a black impenetrable mass of rock with coral growth at the edges. Instead, I was seeing streaks of blue light, overlapping in places. I was seeing through the column. One simply cannot see light through volcanic rock. By metaphorically sticking my head into the horse’s mouth (not to count the teeth, but to take a picture), I had proved to my satisfaction the natural derivation of the columns. They were what the skeptics had suggested: natural coral formations.
Moments later, John and I swam by Larry and his team laboring with the probe. Our Micronesian trainees were busily absorbed in pounding a metal shaft through the column. These men, non-divers a week ago, were performing like they had been doing it all their lives.
Reaching the surface after the dive and mandatory bodysurf through the entrance channel, we regrouped to discuss our findings. The mystery of the columns had unlocked itself far quicker than we would have guessed. Larry Nordby, probe still in hand, tank on, sitting on rocks in shallow water, announced, “Coral! That stuff isn’t coral-covered basalt, it’s coral-covered coral.” I agreed, telling him about my experiment with the light in the crevice.
The columns at Nan Madol aren’t manmade, but their location defies easy explanation. Earlier in the week, John Brooks and Jim Bradford had found and photographed similar-looking coral features at a location far from Nan Madol. We knew from that experience that column formations occurred naturally in the area, but weren’t sure if that’s what the features were at the archeological site. Now that we had determined they were indeed coral, it was still intriguing that two of the comparatively rare features should just happen to line up with the entrance channel to one of the greatest marvels of prehistoric architecture in the Pacific.
Nan Madol is no less intriguing than ever, simply a little better understood. Archeologists are still making progress mapping the complex and seem to be closer to providing explanations for many of the most compelling questions about the site: why, how, and where from? A similar architectural tradition exists in the island of Kosrae and seems to have preceded Nan Madol but is located in downtown Leluh (the island’s principal village). This makes it more accessible yet visually harder to appreciate.
Our group was rightly proud of their accomplishment. They had cleared up a standing controversy on their first dives. We now knew that the columns were not man-made, but they are uniquely located. We wondered if they might be unintentional artifacts of human activity. Perhaps the building of the walls of Nan Madol caused brackish water to vent from inside the complex over a particular point where they stimulated abnormal coral growth. Regardless, our colleagues now understood that there was nothing a bit mystical about taking their archeological and historic preservation training underwater. No one would be selling them a bill of goods about their submerged heritage sites being incomprehensible and useless without the expertise of salvors—entrepreneurs who would be glad to harvest antiquities for them, and maybe even give them a percentage of what they already owned in payment.
Teddy John and Berlin Sigrah from Kosrae pointed out that the earliest human activity in the Carolines often seemed to involve gravitating toward megalithic architecture and some extraordinary feats of engineering. They reminded me of the clearing I had stood in with Vince Blaiyok in Palau studying the huge piece of Yap money. There is an apparent affinity for peoples of this part of Micronesia for large-scale construction that involves movement of massive, worked stone objects over many miles of ocean.
It was clear that these were the right men to be in charge of cultural resources on their islands. One successful dive was followed by hours of discussion about the nature and behavior of their ancestors. Soon there was even some heated debate. As Nordby helped me load one of the boats, he whispered out of the side of his mouth, “Betel nuts be damned, these guys are archeologists all right, they can’t agree on anything.”
My sons returned with a load of papayas purloined from the surrounding jungle, and the younger six-year-old was anxious to show me a technique he had been taught by his Micronesian hosts for starting fire with hibiscus wood. His brother was too intrigued with the sketching done by Margaret Pepin-Donat, one of the Park Service team, to pay any mind to his sibling. Teddy John meanwhile bubbled with pride over the day’s accomplishments. He was ready to finish in Pohnpei and take the team on to his home island of Kosrae to complete their training.
On the two-hour trip back to town I was the only casualty. I suffered a mild black eye from a stray flying fish that didn’t quite clear our boat on his winged leap. We met up with Murphy and Bradford at the dock where they had returned from an even further haul down-island. They, and several Micronesian trainees, had been mapping in a remote harbor where oral and written history indicated the CSS Shenandoah had burned some Yankee whalers. This Confederate raider successfully terrorized the Pacific from the South Seas to Alaska. It was particularly notorious, however, for carrying the raiding not only to the end of the war but past it. Communications being what they were at the time, the raiders didn’t know and, when told, refused to believe, that the Confederacy had surrendered at Appomatox.
In short, our team had been successful. They had located and mapped one and possibly part of another whaler that had been burned to the waterline. Teddy and the contingent from Pohnpei were ecstatic. They had indeed geometrically increased their knowledge of their island’s submerged resource base with the day’s work. After a day of breaking down equipment, we were off for Kosrae.
Some seven years later, we passed the information about the whalers to archeologists from the University of Hawaii. In association with the Pohnpei preservation office, they continued surveying the area of our find and located and documented the remaining whalers.
Kosrae
In Kosrae, we kept the momentum achieved in Pohnpei and at times surpassed it. The Micronesian officials had been trained to the point that they could seriously concentrate on performing tasks beyond simply surviving underwater. We trained them in our trilateration techniques and had them take the lead in mapping and photo-documenting a cluster of World War II wrecks in Lelu Harbor.
One need not search for too long in Lelu Harbor for traces of the war. Teddy John easily found the Sunsang Maru, a Japanese armed transport in sixty feet of water that was taken out by American carrier-based bombers as they began their relentless sweep through the Carolines in 1943. The visibility was not much better than ten feet horizontally, but these conditions served well as a training site for our newly trained Micronesian dive team.
While part of the group set about mapping and videotaping the transport, others ventured out into the gloom with Teddy and me on search patterns to relocate other sites Teddy and his associates had stumbled upon since our 1981 visit. Utilizing search-line and compass patterns, we soon located another transport and a landing craft. Within two more days, we had a road map of white lines which could be followed from various points on the Sunsang Maru to the new sites—a silent testimony to the daily peril the Japanese lived under from U.S. air power as the war progressed. Included in the collection of World War II relics on the harbor murky bottom are two planes, reportedly casualties after the American occupation.
Although few Americans have ever heard of Kosrae, a 1959 film entitled Up Periscope, with James Garner took place there. Up Periscope centers on a commando raid from a submarine on a radio facility, remains of which are still on the island. The island
was bypassed by the Allies in terms of any serious amphibious landing, but the raids on the radio tower and the constant harassment from air strikes that accounts for the wreckage in the harbor kept the Japanese guessing.
In the midst of searching various harbors and coves of the island, Teddy took us to a site that was truly mind-boggling. At one spot, which shall be left unnamed, was the remarkable remains of an early whaler. In stark contrast to the remnants of twentieth-century warfare this was a low-profile spread of fired bricks, copper sheathing, and cast iron try-pots. They are the unmistakable imprint of a wooden sailing ship engaged in the whaling trade. While half of the Santa Fe team worked with the Micronesians on documenting the larger World War II sites, the rest concentrated on the newly discovered whaler, which was an archeological gem.
The hull of the unknown whaler, although burned to the waterline, carried ballast and an entire complement of period artifacts. A rendering pot for whale blubber dominated the bow section, and keel pins from the stern deadrise marked the end of the after-part of the vessel. We realized that what we had first taken to be coiled hawser of some sort was actually a pile of iron hoops for making whale casks. They had melted from the fire, which apparently sank the ship into a shape that resembled coils of rope.
Besides kiln bricks, animal bones, and wood, there were many brass fittings, some imprinted with the English “broad arrow.” Did this ship in an earlier life have some connection with the British Admiralty? Why British naval markings on an obviously nonmilitary vessel? The historical records seemed to make a poor match—none of the known whaler losses at Kosrae fit the location and type of what we had found. When considered in concert with our finds at places like Biscayne, the ubiquitous broad arrows bring home the omnipresent nature of the former British Empire, upon which “the sun never set.” Indeed, the evening we first found the whaler I recall watching the sun fall into the sea while pondering my realization that it was probably just then rising over the site of the HMS Fowey in Florida.
Among all the mystery and fascinating vestiges of the past that lay in the ever-present gloom of the harbors lurked a very different type of presence that had me more than a little bit concerned. Lion fish are common in this part of the Pacific, and they are known to inflict very serious wounds with their venomous spines. Usually, they are only a minor consideration because they are not aggressive. Also, they’re highly visible and—as they swim imperiously about, never rushing, secure that their armament allows them to be contemptuous of the larger members of the food chain—they are easily avoided.
It was different on this wreck. The fish were unusually abundant, large, and hard to see in the silty water. My divers were running tape measures, drawing on slates, and generally doing things that took a lot of concentration. The slow-moving fish were curious, wanting to explore the areas disturbed by the mapping team.
At one point Jim Bradford looked up in time to see his partner, Joe Canepa, holding the dumb end of the measuring tape while Jim recorded distances, in a most precarious situation. He was floating head down and motionless, to avoid disturbing the silt—oblivious to the huge lion fish swimming between his legs. Jim did nothing to startle Joe into a reflexive movement that might have caused him to impale himself on the vicious spines. Instead, he slowly swam into Joe’s range of vision, motioned him to freeze with a fist-extended gesture we heed religiously, and pointed to the source of danger. Keeping his torso motionless, Joe craned his neck to watch the large swimming pincushion pass with maddening slowness, its jagged, venomous spikes mere centimeters from the vital area where Joe’s legs joined. Joe then relaxed his rigid form, released a large column of bubbles from his lungs, and backed off to collect himself before continuing the dive.
Like an approaching car suddenly swerving into your lane, then correcting itself, some of the most serious brushes with serious injury and death come with no fanfare. A momentary shot of adrenaline, a distraction from the car radio for a few seconds, and a muttered curse—as if nothing really eventful has happened at all. With Joe, there had been no Jaws-like beating of drums, no rush of a predator; he would probably see the same fish many more times during the day and pay it no heed. Just a curious critter uncomfortably close that might have made him unequivocally dead.
Kosrae was still as magical as on our earlier visit. I was delighted to share this part of the world with my compatriots and family. We visited the site of Bully Hayes’s ship and found it had changed little in twelve years. The outer reefs still teemed with fish and dropped off into deep blue depths where we could see giant groupers and sharks going about their predatory business a hundred feet below us. Air Micronesia now flew directly to the island. There were some paved roads and, we understood, satellite TV, although we never saw any. But Kosrae was luckily still not the Riviera.
We stayed at some of the best accommodations on the island, but even these were still quite humble by most U.S. standards. The hotel had a primitive charm, like everything else on this island. Our room even had an air conditioner. Unfortunately, the electricity was so tenuous that the machine surged all night. The constant revving and surging of the motor made us turn it off as a nuisance. We read by flashlights because the AC light bulbs were constantly dimming and flashing like Christmas lights. The boys played a game of leaving the outside walkway dark and flicking the lights on to startle the rats.
But, for the few inconveniences, the island was coming along reasonably well to our way of thinking. We couldn’t pretend to understand what “progress” meant to the native Kosraen, but the trap of losing one’s heritage to the pressing demands of the present didn’t seem to be an issue there. They had a strong preservation office built by Teddy John that was growing in size and prestige and they lived in a society that still had a sense of the past as being the foundation of the present.
Majuro
Teddy joined us as we left the island for the last part of our sweep, this time to the Republic of the Marshall Islands. SCRU had been here before, of course, but Bikini and Kwajalein were worlds unto themselves. We were headed for Majuro, which held the civilian capital of the Marshalls, and was the center for the workings of real Micronesian people, not military constructs.
Majuro is still heavily marked with the residues of war. We were hosted in Majuro by Dirk Spenneman, a professional archeologist from Australia working for the Marshall Islands government. His training was primarily on land sites, but he understood perfectly the importance of underwater resources for island nations. Surprisingly, this is not always the case with traditional land archeologists.
Majuro, like Bikini and Kwajalein, and unlike Pohnpei and Kosrae, is an atoll. Many miles long, it is extremely narrow. In many places you can throw a baseball the width of Majuro. On one side of the road it would fall in the protected lagoon and on the other, head to dark blue depths.
Beyond seeing the importance of the underwater sites, Spenneman had produced some excellent archeological treatises on aviation sites in the Republic, some of them underwater. He showed us the remains of a B-24, which we photographed and about which we heard an amazing oral history from Carmen Bigler, the Marshallese woman who was the Republic’s historic preservation officer. Her family had tried to help the American crew of the plane, but they were captured by the Japanese, who occupied the island, and all were executed. These war sites were as intimately a part of these people’s heritage as any prehistoric artifact, just a bit more recent. It reminded me of the story of Ralph Reyes, the superintendent of War in the Pacific NHP in Guam. The war was not so distant that he had forgotten the day his brother was beheaded by the Japanese.
Perhaps the most interesting site we explored and documented on Guam was not so much poignant as simply bizarre. We call it the Ejit Truck Dump. It is just that, a place where, like oddly shaped coral heads, antique vehicles emerge from the white sand bottom in forty to sixty feet of water.
As the entire team swam by tow trucks, ambulances, cars, and general-purpose truck bodies, we felt
we were in one of the strangest places we had ever seen. The vehicles were mainly of Japanese manufacture and had the headlights, shape, and general ambience of a prewar time warp. Nothing modern is on the bottom, just World War II rolling stock.
Nordby, who said nothing surprises him anymore after so many years with SCRU, just tied off to one truck on his way by and started running out #18 line. I wrote on my slate, “What are you doing?”
He wrote back, “Laying baseline.”
“What for?”
“Aren’t we going to map these suckers.”
“Guess so.”
“That’s what for.” He handed me back my slate, and we all resumed swimming to the next vehicle.
By the time we were back on shore, the team, with no prompting by me, had photographed and sketched about a third of the site. When we showed the results of our recon swim to Teddy and Dirk, I responded to the amazement in their faces. “What can I say? These guys are animals, mapping machines. Don’t leave any women around, that’s the only other thing that obsesses them.” Teddy stamped his feet as he laughed. I believe that if I have ever seen anyone “in his glory,” it was Teddy on this trip.
A few days later we said our goodbyes to Teddy. He headed back on the milk run to Kosrae, and we made our way back to Pearl Harbor.
As predicted, at the turn of the millennium, we have yet to return to Micronesia. The press of the huge survey mission in the parks and nationally significant sites in state and foreign waters combined with limited personnel have kept it high on our wish list, yet under the cut line of priorities. But we hope the effects of our last big sweep through the chain will hold, and the seeds of preservation we planted with Teddy and his colleagues will germinate and take root.
Submerged: Adventures of America's Most Elite Underwater Archeology Team Page 28
