Round of face and body, Vince is razor sharp of mind. Like many natives of this archipelago, humble clothing, quiet demeanor, and stumbling use of English as a second language belie a sophisticated intelligence. Walter and Thomas, also employees of the Belau Historic Preservation Office, have found detached pieces of other rocks hewn from the old quarry and returned them to the earth after examining them.
As we left the clearing and made our way down a steep talus of loose rock interwoven with vines, I could hear the voices of children from the boat. They were my children. It was a weekend; although our recording work didn’t stop, I allowed myself the privilege of taking the family along when the excursions were to places I expected they would enjoy. Barb had returned from a climb to see the Yap coin and was playing with our youngest, the two-year-old, in the shallows. His four-year-old brother dangled his legs over the side of the boat as he absorbed some nameless wisdom from a Belauan man, who spoke to him in a low, intent voice while pointing toward the water.
I came to learn during several trips to Micronesia that having my family along, if anything, facilitated SCRU breaking the ice with the native peoples of each island. Belauans, Kosraens, and Guamanians seemed to warm up to outsiders more quickly if there was family along. Perhaps it was because we were showing some vulnerability and trust in putting our children into the equation.
There was no strategy or design in my bringing family, just practical concerns for long periods of separation from growing children. But in this particular huge venture with the Navy, it proved very important. Months earlier there had been some altercations between Belauans and Navy personnel, unrelated to our operation. These incidents had resulted in seriously injured sailors (SEALs, actually) and Belauans. I was warned not to bring family by some of our Navy contacts. I replied that, from what I knew of Micronesians, if it wasn’t safe for my kids, it really wasn’t safe for anybody and we should go elsewhere. As it turned out, the Belauans were terrific hosts to our entire contingent for the full three months of our operation.
I found it hard to live fast enough in Belau. There only six weeks, during the heart of a ten-week project to assess submerged cultural resources, the richness of the natural and human history of the area had me dazed. We were emphasizing the larger World War II sites in the harbor, mainly due to the nature of Seamark, the financial support system that enabled SCRU to be here.
As marvelous as it was in some respects, it could also be constraining. The World War II sites were certainly worthy of attention, but it frustrated us being tied to cumbersome surface-supplied protocols. The Navy needed to emphasize helmet diving on this project to meet training goals. The hard-hat divers required a large surface platform, and the necessity of dragging heavy hoses on the bottom was inappropriate for sites where delicate coral growth or ship fabric could be damaged. Although we couldn’t move the bulk of the operation far from the large harbor area, we were able to make many exploratory forays to distant parts of the islands with small contingents of volunteers or with family on weekends, such as the one on this day.
The “Pelew Islands,” as they were once called, were first brought into contact with the modern world through the occurrence of a shipwreck. In 1783, Captain Henry Wilson wrecked the British East India Company packet Antelope on the western reef off of Babelthaup. The story of the wreck and the subsequent treatment of the survivors by the natives of Belau is a classic in the lore of the South Seas. It involves a sea captain, a native prince and kings, disaster at sea, and their eventual triumphant return to England.
More significant for the anthropologists and social historians is what happened to the cultural history of the archipelago as a result of the infusion of European weapons into a society in which a balance of power was all that ensured a shaky peace. It was as if an alien space-ship from some futuristic society had crashed in the Soviet Union at the height of the McCarthy era in the United States. A Belauan arms race of unprecedented magnitude ensued after the wreck of the Antelope.
Shipwrecks and survival, warfare and reprisal—these seem to be recurring themes in Belauan history: Captain Wilson facing his captors in the 1700s and then the successive waves of European domination in the Pacific, culminating in the conversion of all of Micronesia to a battlefield in World War II.
Most of the sunken wrecks we documented in Belau were “Marus,” the Japanese name for a “pretty” or merchant ship—these were fitted with gun mounts fore and aft. The majority of warships, as in the case of Operation Hailstorm at Truk Lagoon, were able to flee before the American air strikes. The Marus were capable of contributing to a coordinated antiaircraft defense in a convoy or slugging it out with a surordinated antiaircraft defense in a convoy or slugging it out with a surfaced submarine, but during a concerted air strike like Operation Desecrate in 1944, their armament was largely ornamental. American Avengers bombed and torpedoed them while P40s strafed them on the run. The beautiful Rock Islands and the turquoise-colored water surrounding them and Malakal Harbor turned into an inferno of black smoke, oily water, and sinking ships.
Barb and I and Dave Orak, another Belauan who worked for the Historic Preservation Office, descended through a shimmering cloud of snapper, which parted at our approach, enveloped us briefly, then suddenly disappeared. This wreck had wispy stands of black coral, which looked anything but black in its natural state. We had no authority or desire to remove any, but I cleaned a couple inches of the fuzzy covering of one strand with my knife to let Barb admire the hard ebony core.
A bright-colored lion fish moved lazily in front of us. Many eons of evolution taught it not to waste energy rushing from threats. Its array of imposing barbs could cause severe pain, and worse if one’s body is particularly reactive to the toxin. It was smaller but the same species as the individual that a couple years later would give one of our divers something to reflect upon for the rest of his life. We passed a Navy diver holding one end of a measuring tape, while gingerly avoiding contact with the deceptively beautiful animal.
Otto Orzech reported that one of his men saw a book extruding from the silt in a room aft of the ship’s bridge. I recruited Barb to hold a video light for me and drafted her into the project for a few dives—everyone else was spread among three other tasks and I needed her as a diver this day, not a mom.
I was hoping Otto could come along, but he was working with Toni Carrell and Jim Bradford topside, where they monitored a large surface-supplied, hard-hat diving operation on another ship. But Otto’s directions were good. We soon found the compartment he described, the mound of silt, and what appeared to be the outline of a book beneath it. I settled down in a kneeling position on the deck after making sure my knees wouldn’t land on something fragile. Then I hand fanned the silt away enough to get a good sense of the size and state of preservation of the book. With extended forefingers I carefully tested to see if it could take the burden of its own weight if lifted. It seemed sturdy enough, so I moved the volume carefully several feet out from the room into the open, where there was ambient light and the silt hadn’t been disturbed.
Barb held the video light as Dave Orak videotaped the book, and I took several still photographs. As we found it partially open, I made the decision to open it the rest of the way and film the actual printed characters. It held up well to our disturbance, and I decided to leave it on deck, but covered with canvas, until the next day. My command of Japanese is approximately the same as my Chinese and Phoenician, so I resolved to find a Japanese tourist to help interpret the find. The book was in astounding condition, considering that it had lain under salt water and silt for forty-four years.
The next day I assigned Toni to lead a team in removing one of the loose pages, then return the book to its original resting place and rebury it with silt. The point here was to remove what was diagnostic and could be preserved and leave the remainder in a stable environment until the Belau preservation office could find funding to excavate and fully conserve it. She did an excellent job of recovery
and brought the page unscathed to the surface clamped between two pieces of Plexiglas. Japanese tourists, plentiful on the island, interpreted the characters, revealing that we had discovered a complete operating manual for a Japanese transport from 1944.
Somehow, the document put a face on the crew of this vessel that wasn’t there before. They had their day-to-day problems with machinery, and they had manuals to cope with it. Revelation? No, but somehow the mundane things that come from the underwater world of ships and men provide a connection beyond the intellectual. That artifact, literally a page out of history, joined the records of our survey in the museum at Koror, the capital of the republic.
Belau, or Palau, as it is known so much better to the generation that fought in World War II, left an indelible mark on the SCRU team. Belau has a marine environment second to none in the world, where there was a wealth of history underwater and where we perfected our dealings with the military. The relationship we started with the Navy at Pearl Harbor, had enabled us here to field over 250 men and women to solidify Project Seamark as an institution. After the work in Belau, Seamark became the foundation for projects ranging over half the globe. It resulted in tens of thousands of logged dives where underwater historic preservation goals were pursued by the Navy in what one admiral characterized as “the best real-world dive training ever.”
Several days after returning to Santa Fe from our Belauan adventures, I had the pleasure of receiving our first correspondence from a head of state. I tacked an appreciative letter from the President of the Republic of Belau on the office bulletin board. Two weeks later, in a very different mood, I tacked under the letter a newspaper article about his death by suicide. The island state had two presidents in its short history, both of whom left office at the behest of a bullet: in the first case at the hands of an assassin and, in the second, by his own hand.
I recall the sad looks on the field-hardened faces of my team members when they read that article. As in most cases, they bond with the people they work closely with—the Belauans had been especially gracious toward them. We were rooting for these folks and hated to see them suffer a setback. There were more to come, and the people of that beautiful archipelago are still trying to sort out a national identity from a confusing and turbulent past.
Seamark was the springboard for a very different but equally compelling expedition that same spring in the Hawaiian Islands. On the Kalaupapa Peninsula of Molokai is a facility dedicated to treating Hansen’s disease, better known as leprosy. Because this complex was begun by Father Damien in the nineteenth century and was known far and wide for its early efforts at treatment of the disease, it had been designated Kalaupapa National Historical Park in 1980.
“They made a park out of a leper colony?” It seemed an innocuous enough question, but Pacific Area Archeologist Gary Somers blanched at its utterance. I quickly learned from the folks at the Pacific Area Office that it was one of the more politically incorrect statements I have ever made, which, considering my natural affinity for faux pas, was truly remarkable. I had made the comment a year earlier when stopping off in Molokai on a flight back from the Big Island to scout out potential for underwater archeology.
The trip via small prop plane along the coast of Molokai to the Kalaupapa Peninsula was magnificent, skirting some of the tallest sea cliffs in the world. Gary met me with a four-wheel-drive truck at the dirt landing strip and whisked me off to a dorm, where we could outfit ourselves for hiking. After checking out the crater, we planned to spend the night on Molokai before getting a flight back to Oahu the next day.
The object of our interest was Kauhako Crater, a volcanic feature which was dramatically obvious from the air, but much less so when approaching it on foot through the thick jungle foliage. Gary had done archeological surveys all around the crater and discovered many rich remnants of early Hawaiian culture. I found out the next day that this was no mean feat on Gary’s part. The place was covered with Christmas berry, an exotic vegetation that was not as benign as the name implied—as one made thorny contact with the omnipresent shrub, it tended to flay you alive.
We macheted our way through the hateful stuff until we gained access to the lip of the crater. I was pretty proud of the accomplishment until Gary informed me I had been following a “path;” we had just been tidying up our access trail with the machetes. It was hot under the low, thick canopy, and we were bleeding from numerous scratches from the thorny flora anywhere we didn’t have at least two layers of clothes protecting us.
Gary pointed out many vestiges of Hawaiian prehistory that ringed the crater’s top. The entire peninsula had seen an extraordinary amount of human activity for the past thousand years, with the crater being the possible focus of the activity, perhaps ceremonial. Gary wasn’t about to make a bunch of unfounded assertions about the obvious question—was the water-filled crater, so similar in form and appearance (if not geology) to the cenotes of Mexico, the focus of human sacrifice? Regardless of that tantalizing possibility, the archeological potential of the crater was great.
Some years earlier, hydrologists had dropped a weighted line in the hole and determined that it was extremely deep and that indications from crude water chemistry gave them reason to believe the depths of the crater were anaerobic. This was extremely compelling information.
Gary’s analysis of the archeology around the rim of the crater indicated a long period of occupation starting from very early in known Hawaiian prehistory. Organic materials don’t survive well over time in the soils of Hawaii, leaving huge gaps in our knowledge of the early inhabitants. Imagine if the native peoples who had played out their lives around the rim of this crater had deposited in the water, purposefully or unintentionally, the whole spectrum of mundane items used to subsist from day to day—in other words, a cross section of the material remains that comprise a foundation for archeologists to reconstruct prior cultures.
Assuming the water was anaerobic past a certain depth, containing no oxygen to support the myriad creatures that destroy organic remains, the potential was staggering. Then, we wondered, what if the muddy pea-soup appearance of the water from the surface was due only to algae and oxygen-dependent life forms; the water below the aerated surface level might be clear.
As we slipped and stumbled down the steep slope inside the crater toward the water surface, I was increasingly impressed with both the difficulty of access and the startling scientific potential of the place. Gary muttered between falls and curses that even though he figured “it’s impossible to ever dive the place, it’s worth your seeing it anyway.” As we reached a ledge of horizontal rock near the water surface and found a place several yards in width where we could walk without holding on to something, I already knew I would be coming back.
I told Gary that we had a motto in SCRU that went “show us a place that can’t be dived and we’ll show you a place that has no water.” I didn’t tell him that the motto was two minutes old. In 1988, Seamark gave me the wherewithal to back up the boast. I had returned with “big brother” in the form of the Navy and a squadron of CH46 twin-rotor Marine Corps helicopters out of Kaneohe. To provide the documentation punch, I talked Emory Kristof into bringing the same robots that had been so successful at Isle Royale—this time with Chris Nicholson, the young man who had invented the marvelous little machines.
The story of Kauhako Crater is one more of logistics, and nail-biting, nerve-wracking deployment of instruments through feats of courage by the military rather than diving. But it demonstrates as no other expedition, except perhaps one that would soon to occur in the Aleutians, the increase in SCRU’s effective domain, which came from partnering with the Navy.
Our research goal was simple—to find out what the conditions were in Kauhako crater for future diving operations. We knew the potential for archeological remains was great from Gary’s work, but did that brackish foul-looking lake of brown water at the bottom of that very steep crater really have the depth reported? Might it clear up several feet dow
n, allowing practical survey? Were there projections of rock that might hang up cultural material? Could we, without disturbing the native vegetation along the crater walls, access the place with heavy diving equipment. We had a week to find out.
The first CH46 arrived at the airstrip on the Kalaupapa Peninsula. A contingent of MDSU divers led by Dave McCampbell and Emory and I spent several hours discussing a strategy for getting Chris’s ROVs into the crater. They had circled it several times on the way in from Oahu and had some sense of what they were dealing with. They understood now why the Army and Air Force had opted out after their flyovers of the crater weeks before. They said they had the best machines for doing the job, but it was still going to be hairy. The skipper, a Vietnam vet with countless missions under his belt, said, “That, my friends, is a serious drop.” Their helicopters were capable of dropping into the hold of a moving ship at sea; although Kauhako wasn’t moving and probably hadn’t moved for several million years, it was a tight drop. Also there was a problem that we could never really grasp while looking up from the bottom or down from the rim—the drop was not straight. To access the water, the chopper would have to drop straight down most of the way, then back up twenty or thirty yards under jungle canopy, essentially flying under a ceiling! I knew what I thought of diving under ceilings, I could only imagine what it would be like to fly under one, then hover there, no less.
I pulled Emory aside, and we talked a bit. Both of us were tense about this. As important a step as this was to understanding Kauhako Crater, it wasn’t worth risking these men’s lives. But they were in the business, as we were, of assessing risks, so we just put it straight—“Fellas, if you don’t think this is reasonable, we don’t want you to feel pressured to do it.”
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