By Adam Goodheart
In the decentralized, contentious world of shipwreck hunting, it is rare for everyone-archaeologists, commercial salvors, and government regulators-to get together and attempt to reconcile their differences of opinion. But that's exactly what they try to do one late-summer weekend in Newport, R.I., at a conference sponsored by Roger Williams University Law School.
It doesn't start off on a very promising note. One of the sessions the first morning is a speech by Anne Giesecke, a former congressional staffer who drafted the 1987 Abandoned Shipwreck Act (a federal law to protect shallow-water sites along America's coasts) and who now supports the UNESCO effort. "I've never run across an issue that generates the emotionalism that shipwrecks do," she says wryly. "They evoke an intensity that even pandas don't." Giesecke soon proves her own point by launching into a direct attack on commercial salvors: "What's the big rush to discover all this stuff, anyway? There's a growing consensus that shipwrecks, like historic buildings or other sites, shouldn't belong to individuals. They're part of a heritage that belongs to all of us and has to get special treatment. What it's really about for these salvors is protecting a lifestyle, and the government has no moral or legal responsibility to protect a lifestyle. ... The 6 or 12 people who are forming these companies will find something else to do. It's not all that sad."
At the luncheon after Giesecke's speech, I wind up sitting at a table with Greg Stemm-who is back in America on a hiatus from the Cambridge expedition-along with some other salvors and private salvage attorneys. Conversation quickly turns to their current projects. The man across the table from me is involved in recovering a Yukon Gold Rush vessel from deep water off Alaska. The woman on my left, a lawyer, represents an "adventure tourism" entrepreneur who is selling dives to the Titanic in a rented Russian submersible. The visits will begin later this year, she tells me; several dozen people have already signed up, at a cost of $35,500 apiece.
Given the political tenor of our table, then, it's a bit of a surprise when Giesecke - a blonde, sharp-featured woman with an air of brisk self-confidence-walks over and pulls up a chair next to Stemm. There's a brief, awkward pause after he greets her. It's clear she knows exactly what's coming. "Anne," Stemm begins, "before you start making these statements in public, you ought to check to make sure they're factually correct. It's not about protecting our lifestyle; it's about you trying to legislate us out of existence."
"Well, you've got to prove that you deserve to exist, then," Giesecke replies.
"Why do we need your permission to make a living? That's called communism, Anne."
"In America, we don't sell our public resources, whether it's the Grand Canyon or the Indian ruins at Chaco Canyon. I don't see why we have to go out and get these shipwrecks in the first place."
Before long, the luncheon group breaks up, and Stemm and Giesecke go their separate ways. Their conversation, though, is one that's apt to continue for a long time. During the remainder of the weekend in Newport, I hear countless variations on the same arguments, the same divisions.
During a break in the conference proceedings late one afternoon, I wander down into the colonial part of town, near the harbor thronged with pleasure boats. On Thames Street, a cobblestoned little thoroughfare now lined with the kinds of retail stores that move in wherever middle-class Americans take their summer vacations, my eye is caught by something unusual in the window of one shop. "Sunken Treasures," the placard reads, and below it, in familiar white-on-black, are the skull and crossbones of the pirate ensign. Inside, I find the typical merchandise of a souvenir stand: racks of postcards, fake-scrimshaw key rings, beaded bracelets. But toward the back, beneath a hanging array of T-shirts reading "Rhode Island Co-ed Naked Volleyball," I find something else: a glass display case full of coins. Some are mounted on rings and pendants, some are nestled in see-through envelopes, and each one comes with a printed certificate attesting that it was found on a shipwreck.
I bend over the case and peer in. There are copper pieces, thin as fingernails, from an East Indiaman sunk in the English Channel, and big chunks of silver, thick as butter pats, from colonial Spanish wrecks in the Gulf of Mexico. I can make out designs of crosses, the eroded faces of hook-nosed Bourbon kings, and on one of the big pieces of eight, the ancient coat of arms of the Spanish empire: two pillars with a ribbon wound around them. Those pillars stood for the Pillars of Hercules, and I remember the story that Spain's motto-inscribed on the ribbon-used to be "Ne Plus Ultra," meaning that the country stood at the utmost margin of the world. After the discovery of America, that motto was changed to simply "Plus Ultra" and took on a new meaning: ever farther.
The young shop assistant comes over and opens the sliding glass door, carefully fishing out the coin so that I can take a closer look. She drops it into my cupped hand; it is surprisingly heavy, and the silver is freckled with slight porosity, as though it had spent a very long time at the mercy of salt and sand. But as I turn it over and try again to read the timeworn inscription, it seems an artifact of no other century so much as our own.
Epilogue
A couple of weeks after my return home from Gibraltar, I get an e-mail from Greg Stemm. After investigating a few more wrecks that turned out to be 20th-century, he says, the crew of the Seahawk has found something more promising-an older ship, with cannons. His message includes several attached files of pictures taken by the ROV, and as I click them one by one, images from the deep Mediterranean fill my computer screen: corroded black guns lying half buried in sediment, like rotten logs in an otherworldly swamp. There's no way to tell yet if this is the Cambridge; the expedition will keep looking at other sites before returning to study it more closely. A few days later, another e-mail arrives, with pictures from another wreck. This time, they show dozens of ancienamphoraeas, with big silver eels nesting among them: probably the contents of a Phoenician ship, Stemm tells me, perhaps the oldest deep-water wreck ever found. And the search, he says, will continue.