Postscript
The work we conducted at Isle Royale and the USS Arizona and reconnaissance work in Micronesia were the subject of a one-hour PBS documentary (BBC/WCET) entitled “Shipwrecks, Science, Salvage or Scrap,” produced by Derek Towers. This was #8 in what was probably the best series on underwater archeology ever produced. Older hands at the BBC, like Bruce Norman, Ray Sutcliff, and Derek, with some very talented young lions like Russ, represented what to me has always seemed a 1980s golden age in BBC underwater film-making. Discovery Channel bought the series eventually and showed it for two years running. Our segment, the most popular in the series, eventually aired to a cumulative audience estimated by the BBC at more than a billion people worldwide.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
ISABELLA
I listened intently. Crouched in a sandy depression full of old ship timber, a mangy sort of kelp, and torn swatches of fishnet waving in the current, I could hear it. The brown-green water of the Columbia River swirling over the bar, bouncing off of incoming tides, playing havoc with predictability of any kind, and humming a tune all the while. It reminded me of the wind whistling through the subway tunnels in New York City before you actually hear the train coming.
Sure, we had tide tables and were trying to make our dives correspond to slack periods. On the Columbia Bar, however, where the river separating the states of Washington and Oregon meets the Pacific Ocean, the current seemed to largely ignore any rules of order imposed by man. Slack tide there meant the current simply changed direction and dropped in velocity enough to coax us in, when prudence suggested otherwise.
The dive boat with our support crew was thirty-five feet above us, anchored on a fore-and-aft moor. This meant the boat would remain stationary, whereas it would dramatically shift location if allowed to pendulum on a single-point moor. But this arrangement had problems of its own. When we surfaced, the current forced incoming divers against the water-entry step with crushing force.
We’d chosen this fixed-platform approach because we were using an experimental instrument to map the remains of a very important old wooden sailing ship. The instrument is called a SHARPS, Sonic Highly Accurate Range Positioning System. To use this tool required placing and retrieving sonar transducers (about the size and shape of a flashlight) on the bottom during each tidal window. Because they were “hardlined,” wired back to the boat, we couldn’t allow the vessel to swing around, twisting up cables at the whim of the river.
I listened to the river because I found the sound to be my best clue for when we should round up our divers and get on board before we were dealing with current velocities that were simply imprudent. As Larry Nordby continued to draw in the murky glow of an underwater lamp held by Jim Delgado, I scurried about, checking the transducers for the SHARPS. I popped up the line every few minutes to ensure my ears hadn’t deceived me. At no time did I dare release my grip on sturdy pieces of wreckage or the heavy guidelines we had installed running down to and along the bottom. About ten feet up the descent line is where I could best feel, as well as hear, the full force of the current.
With all this effort we were trying to confirm whether or not we were diving on the remains of one of the oldest shipwrecks on America’s west coast. There had been exploration and even the wrecking of a Spanish “Manila galleon” in California waters as early as the sixteenth century. But, with the exception of small Indian craft, there had been minimal organized maritime activity until the Hudson Bay fur trade, two hundred years later. We believed we were diving on the mortal remains of the Isabella, which sank in 1830 carrying a full hold of trade wares for Fort Vancouver.
Jim Thomson, Park Service Northwest Region Archeologist, had asked us to investigate the site. In addition to Delgado and Thomson we had a third “Jim” with us: Jim White had contributed his boat and local diving knowledge to the project. Thomson had called SCRU in to help the director of the Columbia River Maritime Museum in Astoria, Oregon. The site would have great historical significance if confirmed to be Isabella, and we had a mandate to help state and local agencies on National Historic Landmark-quality sites.
Suddenly I could tell the river’s mood was changing. I pulled myself hand over hand back down the line to Delgado and Nordby . Engrossed in their documentation, they had no clue that the river was picking up faster than the tide tables predicted. I gave them firm “Up now!” signs and moved on to find Mike Monteith. Mike was commanding officer of the Cape Disappointment Coast Guard Station located near Ilwaco, Washington, only scant minutes away by boat. He was a seasoned diver and knew the river well. I wasn’t surprised to see he had sensed the pickup in current and had already plucked one of the transducers. Hands full, he nodded to me, indicating he was heading for the nearest of the remaining two instruments. I turned and headed for the farthest, deployed perhaps twenty yards away.
The instrument is a story in itself. It was developed by the Wilcox brothers, the same siblings who brought the world ultrasound as a prenatal examination device. These “ducers” actually work on the same principle. Sound waves move through seawater much as they do the fluid of the womb, although the comparison seemed a bit strained to me at the moment.
The speed of sound in water is a known, so the time it takes to get from point to point can be measured in order to provide distance. Three of these ducers on the bottom could be used to reference a fourth, which we called the “mouse,” in the hand of a diver. As the diver moved from point to point on the wreck, holding the mouse up to objects of significance and tracing the outline of the hull, an electronic matching image would be generated on the computer screen in the boat cabin. Accurate to within a few centimeters, this device could send back reams of data which let one post-process the shape of ship structure and location of artifacts in x-y-z coordinates—that is, not only where they would be located on a planimetric, or bird’s-eye map, but also their height above bottom.
I swam past the ascent line, just as Jim and Larry finished their preparations to take the ride up. They knew the drill. Slates and lights secured by clips to metal D-rings on their vests, they pulled any dangling straps in tight and gave one sharp kick up from the relatively calm bottom. The current did the rest; with their arms looped over the line, it slid them toward the surface—their only concern was to exhale fast enough to release the rapidly expanding air in their lungs.
I gave them a moment to regroup on the surface, arranged my burden of transducers and wires for the ride, then followed. On the surface I found Larry pinned to the swim platform of the larger boat at chest level. Monteith was already out of the water and helping the surface crew free Nordby from the river. They augmented Larry’s own strength, by pushing him away from the wooden step and upwards, until his waist reached the edge. From there, it was easy. People bend at the waist, not at the rib cage.
Larry was past the danger point. I positioned myself so that I could, on signal, let go of the line from which I flapped like a flag in a stiff breeze. I would be slamming into the platform next. I watched Larry being pulled to his knees, his regulator still in his mouth and his fins on, in the event he should slip back overboard. Next they pulled him over the transom and dumped him on the deck safely inside the gunnels. They motioned me to release the safety line so I could follow through the same ordeal.
As I flew toward the platform of the main boat, I took in with a sideways glance that Jim Delgado had been helped up the ladder of the small double-ender, Montieth’s personal boat, which was rafted off to the cabin cruiser, owned by a helpful volunteer diver named Jim White. Delgado was standing out of the water with, I was alarmed to note, his fins off and his regulator dangling free. I didn’t have the energy to yell a warning to him but resolved I would give him a talking-to once we were all back on board. Jim was a valuable new adjunct member of the team who had been helping from afar with maritime history and archeology issues, but he was also the least experienced diver.
It’s always instructive how fast things can go to hell in diving.
Also, how relatively mundane a near-death experience can be when there is little time to anticipate it, or savor its closeness afterwards. Once adrenaline stops pumping, you go to work, get embroiled in the hassles of the day, and forget about it. In the next five minutes we experienced an event like that on the Columbia. It happened so fast, was over so quickly with no serious consequences, that we hardly talked about it a few hours later—although many years afterwards we still discuss it over beer.
As I was being extricated, I heard a splash next to me and an exclamation from one of the Coast Guardsmen. Exhausted from climbing onto my own platform, I couldn’t tell what the commotion was about except that the fellow helping me said, “Somebody fell in.”
By the time I disengaged myself from my equipment and sat up on the deck to take stock of things, I could see Jim Delgado staring at me from inside Monteiths’s double-ender. All his equipment was now off, and he was pale, looking at me with glazed eyes. What happened to him was simple, quick, and horrifying, at least in retrospect.
He had slipped off the ladder of the small boat, without his fins, into what had probably built to a three-knot current and almost drowned. His heavy weight belt took him thirty feet to the bottom, where he managed to release it, fill his buoyancy compensator, and lunge back for the surface. If he had gotten the regulator back into his mouth and taken a deep breath of compressed air during that time, the wild ascent might well have killed him. His instinct, in extremis , would have been to hold madly to that breath of life-giving air, which could have easily ruptured his lung, causing an embolism.
As it was, he hit the bottom of the boat and clawed at the hull as he was dragged along by the current. Jim Thomson, working with the surface crew, heard Delgado scratching the boat below his feet. With the aid of a strong “Coastie,” he grabbed him just as he popped to the surface at the bow. They managed to pull him back in, shaken but unhurt. Jim now was the subject of a “close-call” war story and not a corpse. Within fifteen minutes he was cracking jokes about the incident. How close had he really come? I don’t really know, but I suspect very. I can’t help but think back to the death of Keith Muckelroy in conditions much more benign; falling over in four feet of still water with a similar assortment of gear.
We confirmed the ship to be the Isabella. A number of characteristics of the ship hypothesized in our research design would provide proof-positive identity if they were present. We found them all, including a sawn hole in the hull remains which fit the story of its salvage in historic times. The work on the Isabella represented an important extension of our work to National Historic Landmark-quality sites in state waters that were not associated with parks or Trust Territories. We turned information and artifacts over to the Columbia River Maritime Museum, and Jim Delgado published the results of the work in several journals.
Although we had known Jim since he joined us looking for the Manila galleon San Agustín at Point Reyes in 1982, this was the first time he officially participated in a SCRU operation. He worked for the Chief Historian in Washington, D.C., and provided a valuable source of assistance both in the archives and in the field for many more years. He was also in an excellent location to help with the increasing workload that was developing at the time in the area of shipwreck-protection legislation and in the growing initiative to extend our protection over wrecks of importance to American heritage in foreign waters.
In some ways he reminded me of that other young man, so full of promise to the discipline, who only a few years earlier had met his demise in similar, but less dangerous circumstances. Jim was lucky, Keith wasn’t. It’s always hard for me to have to admit how large a role plain luck plays in this business.
PART III
REACHING OUT
The SCRU Team expands its influence to U.S. Naval shipwrecks in foreign waters, the atomic bomb test ships of Bikini Atoll, and Confederate raiders and submarines, and sets a new standard for scientific shipwreck surveys of large areas in the Tortugas. The team returns to Pearl Harbor with a new mission, and passes the torch of leadership in 2001.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
PROJECT SEAMARK
In 1988, the growing relationship SCRU had with the U.S. Navy since our work in Pearl Harbor reached a zenith in scope and effect. The year before we had support from Navy diving commands in our underwater research operations in Guam, Cape Cod National Seashore, and the San Francisco area, including Alcatraz. In 1988 however, while we arranged for the East Coast Navy Mobile Diving and Salvage Unit (MDSU 2) to work on a problem salvaging ship remains from a landing slip at Ellis Island, we engaged in a series of far-flung projects in the Pacific with MDSU 1.
The Navy, realizing the benefits of deploying their reservists on real-world deployment problems as opposed to make-work tasks, was adding a great deal of clout to Park Service preservation endeavors. We had a classic symbiotic relationship going, with the key proponents on their side being two commanders: Otto Orzech of a Long Beach Reserve Unit and David McCampbell, the active duty head of MDSU 1 in Pearl Harbor. In 1988 two projects in the Pacific dramatically underscored how much Seamark helped SCRU extend its influence to remote places and demanding tasks we could never have accomplished on our own. One was the massive survey operation in Belau and the second an exploration of a water-filled crater in Molokai. Happily as SCRU became increasingly engaged in far-flung field assignments, many involving complicated interagency logistics, I was lucky enough to recruit a crackerjack new administrative assistant named Fran Day. Fran would become SCRU’s anchor to reality, the calm, competent voice on the other end of the phone in Santa Fe when things had gone to hell on some remote island.
It was a year when Americans would obsess over fires in Yellowstone National Park, we would be talking about movies like Mississippi Burning and Rain Man, and even shipwrecks would be making the news.
The Abandoned Shipwreck Act had finally been enacted. In short, the United States asserted title to historic shipwrecks in its territorial waters and simultaneously passed it to the states except in the case of national parks and Indian lands. This took most shipwrecks out of the realm of admiralty courts but left them where the least responsible state legislatures could still make fools of themselves by giving them away to commercial antiquity traffickers. The park service was cracking down on shipwreck vandalism, including a massive undercover operation at Channel Islands National Park. Skin Diver magazine ran shrill editorials warning sport divers that big government would be taking away all the wrecks and giving them to bureaucrats.
Some firms started looking abroad to pursue treasure hunting interests—I even had a long, rather thorny phone conversation with a fellow named John Erhlichman who, having run into some difficult times in his public life, was now “representing the interests of American investors” in a treasure-hunting scheme in Colombia. He was incredulous that I, as a civil servant, seemed unwilling to help in this endeavor and made thinly veiled threats to use his influence with the new administration to darken my future in civil service. I was even having problems with a park superintendent who seemed to be willing to dispose of a shipwreck in national park waters at Ellis Island because some political appointees in Interior told him it was a “done deal.” I pointed out to him perhaps with less discretion than the moment deserved that “this is an election year and all those blowhards in Interior are going to be gone in November anyway.” All in all, it was an excellent time to depart for the far Pacific.
The huge quartz monolith gleams with quiet power from beneath a dull surface patina. Scattered light filtering through the thick jungle canopy flickered over the pensive faces of my three companions as they gazed at a ring of stone dominating the center of the clearing. A hand-hewn lithic presence, it appeared to have not yet fully emerged from the island bedrock in some mysterious birthing process.
I turned my attention back to the camera and clicked the shutter; the built-in strobe flashed in a vain attempt to get enough light on the nine-foot diameter object to do it justice. In t
he midday Micronesian heat, the camera lens had fogged from the intense humidity, and I couldn’t find a piece of clothing dry enough to wipe it clean. “What you think, Don?” Belauans, for some reason, do not find it easy to say Dan. Either that, or they just prefer the sound of the other.
We were looking at a coin, a piece of “Yap money.” Many like it had been quarried from here in the Rock Islands of Belau (formerly Palau) in years past and transported through great trials and tribulations by oceangoing canoe to the island of Yap. In fact, the more trials and tribulations, the more the coin is worth. What did I think? Hell, it was the Pietà of currency is what I thought.
“Reminds me of Michelangelo,” I told him. “You know, one of those statues he never finished, emerging from the granite.” Vince smiled, and there was the sound of betel-nut juice being ejected through his front teeth expertly onto the forest mat beside him.
Vince Blaiyok was Palauan, or “Belauan,” as many natives of the new republic now prefer being called. He enjoyed showing me treasures like this on frequent detours we made during our boat transits between islands where our dive operations were in progress. A trilling exchange of syllables with the speedboat operator usually preceded a sharp turn through the mangroves and mushroom-shaped coral and limestone islets to another hidden wonder. This one was special to Vince because it was of Belau not of the outside world. Most of the heritage sites that we had been documenting on this expedition relate to World War II, not ancient Micronesian folkways. I had no way of knowing at the time, but this concentration on megalithic coins and structures would become much more dramatically apparent in our work in Micronesia several years later.
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