The Ghost of Shipwrecks Future (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine April 2002

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The Ghost of Shipwrecks Future (Cont.)

I THREW UP SEVEN TIMES during the surface interval, launching coffee and half-digested donuts over the Diversion's port railing and onto this grave site of my clan. Diving squeezes the softer internal organs in unnatural ways, and I've found that even the best dive may be followed by a good puke.

"You're dunkin' those donuts, pal!" the Jersey boys heckled. Divers were crowding in and out of the water. A man staggered up the back ladder, holding a mesh bag. "Whadjaget?" someone asked. The bag disgorged an object, flat and brown, roughly triangular. We all gathered around and examined the trophy, which turned out to be a...stone.

"I thought it was a hinge," the embarrassed treasure hunter muttered, turning bright red. "He's got a rock!" one of his friends cackled. "Good job, a rock!" Over on the other boat, a diver popped up and scrambled on board. "Ooohhh," someone on our boat muttered. "He's got a big bag." We pressed against the rail to watch, but tradition demanded that we scorn the other crew, and no one called across to concede curiosity.

Watching the scene on the Diversion, I realized that whatever the legal or ethical protests, this sort of trophy diving was something larger than my own family's history. By traditions dating back thousands of years, wrecks are the property of whoever can first find and salvage them. "Salvage has been around since things have been lost," Robert Ballard, the discoverer of the Titanic, told me. "If they dropped a coin, they went down to pick it up." As far back as ancient Rhodes, the right to salvage wrecks was detailed in legal codes that rewarded divers for going deep. "The concept of preserving underwater cultural heritage is wonderful," Ballard continued, but the UNESCO convention could "throw out the baby with the bathwater" by severely curtailing serious exploration. "Porthole divers," as he derides them, can't reach deepwater sites—yet. But cheap robotic submersibles are already sold in dive magazines; it won't be long, Ballard warns, before "some asshole" clips off a piece of the Titanic. He still believes, however, that, with a few famous exceptions, only those wrecks over a thousand years old—not a hundred—should be protected for their rare archaeological heritage.

The Mohawk, of course, cannot qualify for legal caresses from anyone. Lying in the public domain, it isn't old enough to be covered by the UNESCO convention (although, within my lifetime, it will be). With every rivet detailed in existing blueprints, it holds no historic value. Resting within sight of the Jersey Shore, it has no meaning for ocean explorers. Filled with auto parts and luggage, it has no value for treasure hunters. It has no advocates, except for me, and even I wasn't sure how I felt.

George Bass, the 69-year-old father of marine archaeology himself, told me he'd long ago reconciled himself to the slightly gruesome mixture of souvenir diving and personal tragedy. Bass lost a distant relative on the S.S. Atlantic, which foundered in Long Island Sound in 1846, but he said it never bothered him that divers had picked the wreck over and brought up the ship's bell. "I always wanted to go see it," he admitted. So it was for me and the Mohawk.

Travis Nagiewicz pushed me into the water again, and I sank down toward the wreck to say a final farewell. This time I'd brought something along with me in the pocket of my dive vest, and it seemed to drag me down toward the ship like a magnet. The familiar scrap of girders and steel plates emerged from the gloom below me; a wall of steel stuck up from the mud, a section of the graceless hull. When I neared the turnaround point on my air supply, I floated quietly for a moment more, and in the darkness a last tall shape loomed: I thought I could make out a bit of the ship's bridge, 15 feet high, and beyond it a section of the bow still thrusting forward toward Havana. I pushed my fingers through the sand, thinking I might come across some of the old silver teaspoons that Mohawk passenger had left behind.

The water pushed back and forth, and I reached into my vest pocket and looked around for other divers—I didn't want to get ribbed about this later. Then I slipped the tile back into the silt, letting the currents cover it over for good.

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