Submerged: Adventures of America's Most Elite Underwater Archeology Team

by Daniel Lenihan

  “Ah, that’s protocol, ever since this bugger porpoised one time, they’ve been nervous Nellies.” I was sorry I had asked.

  Located sixty-five miles west of Key West, the park boundaries contain a combined terrestrial surface area of forty acres, roughly a twentieth the size of Central Park in Manhattan. Several small keys are nestled amid one hundred square miles of coral reefs, sand flats, shoals, and open ocean. The keys have no fresh water (hence the “Dry”) and no arable soil. They are composed of sand and coral rubble covering little in the way of bedrock suitable for supporting large structures. Though scarcely meriting pinpoints on a map of the United States, the diminutive islets have been the focus of extraordinary attention by European newcomers to the Americas.

  Soon after their discovery, the Tortugas became home to pirates and wreckers and were prominently located on most charts of the New World. Even before it was clear that the Florida Peninsula was not an island, navigators were advised explicitly on contemporary charts of the whereabouts and nature of the tiny landforms that were both natural hazard and haven.

  By the end of the nineteenth century, the Tortugas’s shifting sands were made to bear the weight of Fort Jefferson, arguably the largest masonry structure in the Western hemisphere. They attracted the attention of John James Audubon for their remarkable population of birds and served as a prison for Dr. Samuel Mudd and other convicted “conspirators” in the Lincoln assassination.

  Due to their proximity, the Tortugas have always played a special role in America’s traditionally volatile relationship with Cuba. This was the case before, during, and after the Spanish American War. They were the last place the USS Maine anchored before its fateful trip to Havana Harbor in 1898. During the 1960s they were reportedly a secret staging ground for the Bay of Pigs invasion and a listening station for the CIA during the Cuban missile crisis.

  Given their dramatic history and strategic location, it is curious that the name “Tortugas” still rings only a faint bell in the minds of most Americans, if they’ve heard of them at all. Whether on land or underwater, the relics of human dramas that were played out in this unique place over the course of half a millennium are everywhere evident.

  The natural ship trap formed by the atoll-like configuration of islands became the scene of more than 250 marine disasters from the early 1600s through the twentieth century. The mostly buried remains of Spanish galleons lie a stone’s throw from the hulks of iron-hulled clippers and 1800s-era barges used to carry construction materials for the fort. An international heritage is protected on the submerged lands of this park.

  In May 1974 (having safely arrived via backward engine seaplane), I was in the role of NPS observer on a project under the field direction of Larry Murphy, who was still working for the state of Florida as Sonny Cockrell’s assistant.

  It was difficult to fairly assess the project when for seven days of my ten-day stay, we were buffeted by gale-force winds. I could tell immediately, however, that the project was being run on a shoestring. Although legitimate, well-funded underwater archeology was being successfully conducted by Americans on classical sites in the Mediterranean, archeologists such as George Fischer, Cal Cummings, and Sonny Cockrell were having a difficult time getting their agencies to seriously fund such work in the United States.

  Commercial treasure hunters were making flashy discoveries that attracted media. Even organizations I had respected in the past, such as National Geographic, were celebrating the destruction of this aspect of the nation’s resource base while they waxed sanctimonious on natural resource protection. Gold pendants, silver ingots, and pirate booty simply made more appealing stories than “Gov Archeocrats work on Protection and Preservation of Priceless Public Resources.”

  As the windy days wore on, the island grew smaller and smaller. We found ourselves imprisoned by the weather while bursting with the desire to explore. Eventually cabin fever had driven us to a point that we were prone to less than judicious behavior. When the wind died down one night Larry and I headed off at 1 A.M. on diver propulsion vehicles to see if there were any large sharks swimming in the entrance channel, a type of reasoning that has helped screen gene pools from time immemorial. During this escapade, I almost smashed my scooter headlight into the cascabel of an eighteenth-century cannon. At 2 A.M. we were setting buoys and taking measurements. The remarkable abundance of historic shipwrecks had conspired to make our early-morning joy ride into a working dive.

  The next day or, more accurately, after sleeping the rest of the night of the same day, I recall seeing through painfully hung-over eyes, the red marker buoy we had left on the site. It was visible from one of the fort’s casemates near our living quarters. We had found a shipwreck on a lark when nature had precluded serious survey. A marvelous site that we couldn’t dive because the wind was up to gale force again. Eventually, the buoy blew away, we lost the coordinates blearily taken with compasses from the fort and never located the site again. I sometimes think it was a phantom site that reveals itself only to suicidal fools.

  Thus far, this nation’s record in caring for our own or other people’s history in our waters, particularly in Florida, is less than enviable. Admittedly, Larry and I did nothing this particular day to improve that record—but, in truth, fools aren’t as serious a threat to our maritime past as are greed and politicians. Bomb-crater-like holes are interspersed throughout huge areas of the shallows fringing the Florida straits. They were dug by modern harvesters of antiquities using propwash deflectors in search of Spanish gold and other precious booty. The entire force of the search vessels’ engines is directed toward the artifact-bearing sediments, completely destroying contextual associations but leaving gold and silver essentially unharmed.

  Vandals? Illegal activities? No, for the most part the damage has been done by state-sanctioned treasure-salvage operations. A thin green line, the jurisdictional boundary of the national park, is all that protects the undersea historical treasures of the Tortugas from the fate of the rest of Florida’s maritime heritage.

  The wind rattled the shutters while we poured over the limited data that the group had been able to collect. I was becoming convinced that shipwrecks could be even more important archeological sites than I had originally suspected. Besides being the repository of many antiquities in a superior state of preservation than those found on land, their context is archeologically unique. A wreck site, studied properly, can offer a snapshot of a particular culture at a given moment in history—the time of the wreck event. Unless another wreck lies on top of it, the site is not “contaminated” with materials from other periods that in most terrestrial contexts would have to be painfully separated through stratigraphic analysis. In undisturbed sites, mundane artifacts that show the lifeways of the common seaman, rarely included in historical records, are subject only to the corrosive effects of seawater. They are less accessible to the more devastating effects of men.

  Beyond their role as archeological objects, I was increasingly intrigued with shipwrecks as places. The context of working in a park was daily reminding us that shipwrecks are not just repositories of artifacts but special pleasuring grounds to be visited and enjoyed. For one dramatic site in the Tortugas, “The Windjammer,” we eventually made a plastic underwater guide map for the use of visiting divers.

  Fort Jefferson speaks eloquently about its colorful history to those who will listen. When Larry and I weren’t clawing at the walls or making midnight attempts to dive, we walked the moat wall or clacked hollowly about the casemates at night. It was easy to dwell on the many historical vignettes that transpired therein. In places like this our separation from the past seems tenuous, just one dimension away.

  The strategic usefulness of such a major fortress sixty five miles out in the Gulf is often questioned. Why couldn’t an enemy fleet sail around it? Why did the American military establishment decide to defend forty acres of property with an enormous multimillion-brick edifice in the first place? Records suggest the rationa
le that the naval force that controlled the Tortugas effectively controlled trade throughout the Gulf of Mexico. More importantly, in time of war it was critical to deny any enemy maritime power access to the ideal staging area for a blockading fleet.

  Larry felt the superior range afforded by the huge Rodman, smooth-bore cannons on the parapet were thought by military planners to be capable of keeping an attacking naval force at bay. Wooden ships weren’t big enough to carry ordnance with sufficient range to threaten the fort. In fact, a shot was never fired by an enemy at this mother of all forts. Is that a sign of failure or success? Was the investment of billions of dollars in ICBMs that still sit in their silos failure or success?

  The fort (all sixteen to twenty million bricks’ worth by various estimates) was constructed primarily through the use of slave labor. Even during the Civil War, until the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, the Union Army used slaves to construct the edifice to help suppress the confederacy and its secessionist and racist policies. While battles raged all through 1862, at places like Manassas, Shiloh, and Antietam, the Union Army was contracting with slaveowners to snap the whip over the backs of slaves at Fort Jefferson. Their “wages” went to the owners.

  As we continued researching the history of the area, we found that the first natural color photographs from an underwater environment ever published came from the Tortugas. In 1927, National Geographic magazine published eight “autochromes” taken by Dr. W. H. Longley and Charles Martin, from the Geographic’s photographic laboratories.

  The prize finds that helped Larry and me deal with our own frustrations about weather, logistics, and funding, however, came from moldy copies of official reports we discovered in a dank, windowless chamber of the fort. They were the monthly reports to the director of the Service from one of the “custodians,” as park superintendents were then called.

  About the time America entered into World War II, the National Park Service had placed Robert Budlong as custodian of the fort and 75,000 acres of reefs and shallows that comprise the Tortugas. He brought with him both the protection ethic of the NPS and his own special flair for composing the requisite monthly reports to the agency’s director.

  In 1942, Superintendent Budlong dutifully reported on life at the fort: the heat, humidity, and mosquitoes “so large that when you swatted them you could hear their bones crack.” With the advent of World War II, the fort was in the middle of the German U-boat mayhem for the first six months of 1942. Navy fliers dropped newspapers to Budlong and his wife and made practice bombing runs at the islets.

  In his August 1943 missive to the director, Budlong happily reported that the sooty tern population had increased greatly over the year before. “The air is thick with them—this is especially noticeable when the immediate vicinity is bombed or machine-gunned by some passing plane.” He also related, in his inimitable style, a run-in with poaching logic—something in which Murphy and I were particularly interested. Budlong had apparently begun a dialogue with the local eggers, who argued that their long-standing tradition of nest raiding indeed had conservation merit. Budlong reported in his August 1943 letter to the director:

  The devotees of the theories of the Second School of Thought agree that the birds will lay one egg, and that if the first one is taken from the nest the birds will lay a second one. Now, note carefully the difference: if you take the first egg, the birds will lay the second, and thereby live to lay more eggs another year; but if the first egg isn’t taken the birds won’t lay that second one, and the egg continues to grow and grow inside the parent bird until, swollen beyond recognition, it can’t lay the egg no matter how anxious it may be to lay it, and the bird dies. Or else it finally actually bursts, when of course it dies anyhow. And then where is your bird colony? Just a lot of males flying around in a bewildered manner and not doing any good. But I have spent hours watching for birds bursting in air, and I have watched in vain. I have made very careful autopsies of dead birds during two seasons, and am greatly relieved to report that no birds were found that died of egg-strangulation either.

  Superintendent Budlong considered the poachers’ arguments and after due deliberation rejected them. The guilty individuals were put on warning of dire consequences should he apprehend them poaching eggs. He in fact made it known that “in the Dry Tortugas if you must eat eggs, fry them, boil them, or make them into an omelet or a cake, but don’t poach ’em.” Poaching abated dramatically during his tenure.

  In many respects, things hadn’t changed much in the Tortugas since Budlong’s reign. One still had to rely on mechanical clocks or battery-driven wristwatches to tell time. One of the two generators ran too fast, the other too slow, so most of the government-issue, analog electric clocks sat in boxes. In the age of satellite navigation and radio transmissions to probes at the other end of the solar system, it was hard to finish most five-minute telephone conversations from the fort without the line going dead.

  As for poachers, they still played a role in the Tortugas, but they tend to avoid the birds and turtle-crawls in favor of the underwater world—they knew the park couldn’t keep a ranger behind every coral head. Too often, rangers found the mutilated carapaces of lobsters where they have been killed by poachers who simply rip the prized tail off the living animal, leaving it to an agonizing death.

  But we were learning that the most endangered species of all in Florida waters were the shipwrecks. Just as the poachers had a stake in egging, treasure hunters have a stake in historic shipwrecks. The same thinking regarding cultural resources on public lands that happened to be dry would never be entertained.

  Salvors play well on the old admiralty law concept of “imminent peril.” The logic runs something like this: The wrecks aren’t doing anybody any good out “there,” and they will all soon be gone due to the pummeling of wind and wave. Hence, why not let adventurous entrepreneurs go find them and bring their sunken treasures back to the light of day where everybody can enjoy them? For their troubles the salvors should be rewarded with a lion’s share of the artifacts.

  Actually, shipwrecks tend to reach a chemical equilibrium with corrosive forces in the ocean by the time they become historic and are only in imminent peril from the incredibly destructive search processes that attend treasure hunting. Larry and I mused whether any salvor had proffered the notion that if you remove one artifact, another will grow in its place—but if not, the site will eventually burst from internal pressure. As underwater archeologists, we had, in the spirit of Mr. Budlong, performed autopsies on many shipwrecks and could attest that we had never seen one that strangled on its own artifacts. It is also an undisputed fact that no one has yet succeeded in mating the surviving members of an archeological site in a museum and bred new ones.

  The seeds of this antiquity-harvesting logic, transparent though it should be, find fertile soil in the miasma of state legislatures, some of which happily barter away history as long as the state can get a 25 percent split of the spoils. Thus, the protectors of the people’s interest shrewdly hold out for 25 percent of that which is already owned 100 percent by the public. The fact that they had to create an expensive bureaucracy to facilitate giving our maritime heritage away to the highest bidder is apparently overlooked in the accounting process. So, too, is the fact that once in the hands of salvors they are off limits to recreational divers.

  So, the wind blew, and finally the skies cleared for a few days, and I got to make a few dives during daylight hours before leaving. Cliff Green, captain of the NPS boat that ferried staff and supplies from Key West to the fort, befriended us. Crusty in 1974, he would be crustier when we returned two decades later in 1994 but he was always a real key to any success we enjoyed in that park.

  Cliff took us to the few historic shipwrecks of which the park or state knew the location. We swam over patches of coral reef and turtle grass through which poked the remnants of old sailing ships—sea fans waving from their perch on deck cannon, piles of swivel guns scarcely hidden by stands of Elkhor
n coral. We confirmed firsthand what we knew from the archives: The bottom out there held a vast storehouse in knowledge and beauty. Walking about the fort, listening to the waves crash on the moat, chatting for hours with Larry, and mulling over the hundred square miles of underwater park that was being rifled at will by treasure hunters helped me form a resolve.

  It had become apparent that the antiquities market was well-funded. It had deep pockets, sharp lawyers, and a certain edge in the public eye. It could come off like folksy mom-and-pop enterprises being bullied by government bureaucracies. In fact, this was occasionally the truth. Some state governments actually were bullying down-home locals who had found antiquities. And they were doing it simply for a take of the profit rather than any enlightened sense of how history should be cared for. However, this was rare; most treasure firms weren’t financed by sunburned, leather-skinned men of the sea, but fat-cat investors seeing it as a lark—they’d have something to discuss over cappuccino if they scored or a tax break if, as was usually the case, they lost their investment.

  Realists had already told me that it was impossible to fight these big-money interests, that the American public was too shortsighted to ever protect history under the sea. Maybe, but now I knew that one of the answers might be in the National Park Service. It was the only agency that nurtured Robert Budlongs, that was small and traditional and preservation-oriented enough to take real risks and might suffer idealists such as Larry Murphy and Dan Lenihan. Yes, we were going to return to the Dry Tortugas someday, but I swore it wouldn’t be with a rubber boat and token funding. Larry swore with me.