Shipwrecked!: Introduction–Chapter One

“Before there were farmers or shepherds,” wrote George Bass, the world’s first marine archaeologist, “there were seafarers. Before people could make pottery or work metals, before they even lived in houses, they could cross expanses of open water.”

At the same time, seafaring is one of the most dangerous endeavors. Some three million shipwrecks lie on the ocean floor, and along with them, much of human history hides beneath the waves.

On the ocean floor, relics of civilizations that have long since disappeared lie, awaiting discovery.

Unlike land sites, where the invaluable evidence of past cultures and people are often covered over or mingled with the relics of succeeding eras, an ancient shipwreck is a pristine historic time capsule.

Not that long ago, most fascinating wrecks lay beyond our reach. But amazing advances in underwater discovery and excavation technology have made the finding and recovery of even the most seemingly inaccessible wrecks more possible than previously thought.

At the heart of this book is another vital saga of its own, the story of how shipwreck excavations advanced from the “seek and grab” plunder techniques of the earliest salvagers to the precise and orderly science-driven excavations, leading to greater underwater discoveries and the emergence of one of the newest, most dynamic, and most rewarding of all the sciences—marine archaeology.

Divers harvesting sponges on the ocean floor using only a hollow reed to breathe through remained a prime industry on the Greek islands.

So successful, in fact, that after six months of grueling and dangerous work, the decks of two vessels were so filled with drying sponges that there was little room left to move about.

This was one of the main shipping routes between the eastern and western Mediterranean, and it was also an extremely dangerous body of water, filled with shoals, sandbars, and suddenly shifting currents.

Driven off course, the captain sought shelter next to a rocky, barren, almost totally uninhabited small island that in ancient times had been called both Aeigilia and Cerigotto, but which now was called Antikythera.

Despite the storm and the treacherous waters, Kontos, a skilled mariner, managed to guide his two boats to shelter in Antikythera’s only harbor, a small cove on its northern coast called Potamos.

As he glanced briefly at the magnificently crafted statues of gods, kings, and warriors and colored-glass bowls and cups, Kontos had no way of knowing he was gazing upon the largest hoard of Greek treasure that had ever been found.

It was customary for those who completed a profitable sponge-diving expedition to spend weeks, even months, celebrating their success.

The Greek government had made a public announcement calling for a concerted effort to locate and retrieve the artifacts of the ancient world so that they could be put on display.

The government placed a Greek Navy ship at their disposal along with all the equipment needed to haul heavy objects such as statues from the seabed.

Because the wreck was located so far down on the ocean floor and because the diving equipment of the day was still so primitive, they could dive down only twice a day and remain on the bottom for no more than five minutes.

Added to their difficulties was the fact that it became immediately obvious that the Mykali was far too large for their purpose. As powerful as the cumbersome vessel was, it was not the easiest ship to steer, which made it dangerous to operate in such a windy site so close to shore.

On November 27, the Mykali returned to its homeport near Athens and was replaced by the smaller, more maneuverable steam schooner Syros, which hurried to the wreck site in time for the divers to resume work on December 4, 1900.

Despite the fact that the winds never stopped blowing and the seas kept continuously churning, the earliest dives yielded rich rewards, including two small marble statues, an exquisite bronze head (thought at first to be that of a boxer but later determined to be that of a philosopher), and fragment after fragment of bronze marble statues.

Curators at the National Archaeological Museum of Athens, where all the recovered items were taken, were also captivated by the many delicate objects that Kontos and his men were able to salvage intact.

No wonder that Angeliki Simosi, the director of the Hellenic Ephorate of Underwater Antiquities, exclaimed, “The ship that sank at Antikythera was not merely a cargo ship. It was essentially a floating museum.”

When it was completed, the ends of the ropes that surrounded a boulder were then attached to the Mykali, which, using its full power, steamed so that once in open waters, the ropes attached to the boulder could be cut away and the boulder allowed to descend harmlessly into one of the several deepwater chasms.

If the ropes snapped while the Mykali was steaming out to sea, the shock might capsize the vessel, sturdy as it was.

Among the Greek officials who gathered at the wreck site to observe the progress was Minister Spyridon Stais, the man who commissioned Kontos and his crew to conduct the excavation.

One can also only imagine the feelings elicited by the realization that several other priceless statues had been deliberately sent to a watery grave.

One diver died from the bends, two others had become permanently disabled, and the rest involved in the grueling enterprise were exhausted.

It had been an extraordinary endeavor, beginning with the discovery of the oldest shipwreck ever found and evolving into the first deliberate excavation of a shipwreck, work that was the prelude to what would become a brand-new science known as marine archaeology.

Unlike what would become the very essence of marine archaeology, none of the archaeologists at Antikythera dove down themselves to the wreck to survey the scene firsthand or record the exact location of the ship, its artifacts, and the possible locations of other buried objects.

It was perhaps the haphazard approach to cataloging that allowed one of the most impressive artifacts to sit unnoticed—first in an open courtyard and then in a remote corner of the museum.

By 2008, these researchers had collectively identified the purpose of the device, succeeded in translating 95 percent of the ancient inscriptions upon it, and had built a replica of the mechanism so advanced that no other device of comparable technological sophistication would appear anywhere in the world for at least another one thousand years after it was created.

But there is one thing archaeologists, scientists, historians, and even casual observers agree on: the astonishing gearwork is far more technologically sophisticated than anyone had expected from an artifact of this time.

Then, in 2014, a much more ambitious expedition headed by Brendan Foley of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and director Angeliki Simosi was armed with the most advanced underwater discovery equipment yet developed, including a new diving suit that allowed them to dive to unprecedented depths and to stay on the ocean floor for longer than had been once imagined.

Beginning with the 2014 expedition, DNA began to play an important role in understanding the origins of artifacts other than human remains. In the ceramics discovered, residues preserved within them for thousands of years held DNA.

Reluctantly, Foley, Simosi, and their teams concluded that the cost of extracting these statues would be prohibitive.

Many of the world’s first shipwreck discoveries were made by people who practiced one of the oldest of all professions—sponge diving. As humble a product as it was, sponges were extremely important to those who bought them and profitable to those who harvested them. This was because of the wide variety of their uses.

Then in the 1980s, most of the sponges in parts of the Mediterranean and the Aegean Sea became infected with pollution. The final blow came with the development of synthetic sponges.

The excavations of the Antikythera shipwreck, in 1900, marked the beginnings of underwater excavations carried out in what is regarded as a technologically primitive manner. Ironically, the 2014 excavations that took place in a return to the site introduced the world to one of the most sophisticated pieces of underwater exploration and recovery equipment ever developed.

The Exosuit—inspired by the space suit but with hard casing—allows divers to descend one thousand feet and to remain under the sea for up to fifty hours.

Made of aluminum alloy, and, depending on its configuration, weighing between five hundred and six hundred pounds, the Exosuit is pressurized in such a manner that a wearer does not have to go through the long process of decompression when returning to the surface.

Because that’s an area too deep for scuba diving and not deep enough to justify the expense of using a submersible, the Exosuit presents the first practical solution to exploring in many of the ocean’s least-studied places.