The Ghost of Shipwrecks Future (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine April 2002

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The Ghost of Shipwrecks Future (Cont.)

HE WAS MY FATHER'S eldest brother, William D. Symmes, a student at Williams College traveling with his geology professor and five classmates. They were scheduled to catch a plane from Havana to the Yucatán for an inspection of Mayan ruins. In the small world of families and acquaintances, January 24, 1935, was a black tragedy. A Massachusetts newspaper headlined a group photo of the six Williams passengers, taken right before they sailed: "JUST THREE RETURN ALIVE."

Time dissolves grief, just as rust undoes the strongest steel, and while the Mohawk slowly broke apart on the ocean floor, a few pieces of its history began to surface again. A chunk of that forgotten past fell into my hands last summer—and then dropped hard onto my big toe, before skittering across the floor and lodging under a sofa. The item in question was a modest ceramic tile, thick, hexagonal, sharp-edged, about the size of an Oreo, that fell unexpectedly from an envelope stuffed with documents about the Mohawk. I'd requested the paperwork from Steve Nagiewicz, executive director of the Explorers Club in New York, a group as famous for its annual dinner (where else can you dine on tarantula tempura with astronauts?) as for the grand scientific expeditions of its members. But Nagiewicz's interest in the Mohawk was personal, too—it lies just offshore from his New Jersey home. He runs a weekend dive-charter business, and like most Jersey divers, he knows the wreck well. Over the years he's brought up plates and a few tiles, and it was one of the latter that he slipped into the envelope. Recovering the cream-colored tablet from under the couch, I steeled myself for any number of reactions: sorrow at encountering this touchstone from a tragedy, perhaps anger that this fragment had been rousted from a grave.

I wouldn't have been the first to be outraged at the desecration of a lost ship. Ever since the early 1960s, when wildcat treasure hunters like the late Mel Fisher first pulled gold off Spanish galleons in the Florida Keys and marine archaeologists like George Bass of Texas A&M first sent frogmen down to Byzantine merchant ships in the Mediterranean, the rivalry between scholars and salvagers has deepened. Commercial salvagers, gold seekers, and souvenir hunters argue that they are rescuing value from the encroaching sea, that anything not removed will eventually be lost for good. Archaeologists counter that salvagers are disturbing vital cultural resources, like pot thieves defiling Anasazi ruins. Governments claim sunken warships as their patrimony. Insurance companies claim a share of lost treasure. Family members claim that wrecks should be left as undisturbed graves. The result has never been as simple as "finders-keepers," nor as absolute as the legal rulings of dry-footed legislators. But as wreck diving increases, the calls for regulation grow louder: California allows only permitted archaeologists to remove objects from the 1,600 wrecks in its waters, and Wisconsin arrested a diver in 1998 for taking a porthole. In Britain, a group called Wreck Respect is agitating to ban all souvenir diving, everywhere. Last July, Paris-based UNESCO—the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization—promulgated a new international convention defining any shipwreck older than 100 years as a "cultural deposit" and the "patrimony of mankind," subject to restrictions including a total ban on amateur salvage. Lacking any enforcement mechanism, the new policy is toothless. Most wrecks lie in the shallow waters claimed by sovereign nations, and most maritime powers, including the United States, have refused to sign, claiming the convention contradicts existing laws of the sea.

Emotions are another matter. Turning the tile over in my fingers, I felt vaguely disappointed: It was cold, lifeless, a little bit ugly. The humble reality was that it probably came from the wall of a washroom or the floor of the galley. It wasn't the time capsule I'd hoped for, and it carried no messages from the past. Within days I had called Nagiewicz and arranged for a deeper immersion.

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