Testament

by David Gibbins

  Always at this place they would be working against the weather, even at the height of summer with the forecast showing calm seas for weeks ahead. At such a shallow depth, so close inshore, a blip in the forecast, a single day of westerlies strong enough to churn up the seabed in the cove, could have a disastrous effect on the excavation, disrupting the datum points and equipment left on site and sweeping away any artifacts left exposed. Shallow-water excavation had many benefits, but it came with increased risk of exposure to the elements, precisely the factors that had caused so many shallow wrecks in the first place and dispersed wreck material that had not become quickly buried in protective sediment.

  Jack finned slowly over the edge of the site. Two of the four stone anchors they had discovered were still there, crude triangular slabs of igneous rock weighing an estimated quarter of a ton each, with holes in one corner for the rope and in the other two for double-ended sharpened stakes to hold the anchor to the seabed. The IMU geologists had taken a thin section and sourced the rock to the volcanic Lipari Islands to the north of Sicily, a region under Punic control where the Carthaginians were known to have quarried stone for their anchors. Seeing one of these anchors poking through the shingle on that first dive three months ago had been a huge excitement for Jack; they were a shape unchanged since the Bronze Age, and put the wreck well back in the first millenium BC, before Admiralty-style wooden anchors with lead stocks came into common use.

  They had found one of those too, a lead bar a meter and a half long with a rectangular hole for the anchor shank in the center, the wood having perished long ago. That had tightened the date, and stoked Jack’s excitement even further. The earliest lead-stocked anchors from datable wrecks in the Mediterranean were from the first part of the sixth century BC, at the time when the western Phoenicians, the people the Romans called Punic, were the dominant power in the Mediterranean. Any Phoenician captain worth his salt would have wanted the latest anchor technology, and the presence of both types in the wreck suggested a date very soon after their inception.

  For Jack this opened up an extraordinary historical possibility, a porthole into one of the most famous episodes in maritime exploration. The sixth century BC was the most likely date for the voyages of the Carthaginians Hanno and Himilco. That was the reason why he had been reading the surviving account of Hanno’s voyage down the west coast of Africa during his flight to Freetown the previous week. Himilco’s voyage was known only through a brief reference by the Roman historian Pliny more than five centuries later, but the possibility that he had gone north and reached the Cassiterides, the fabled Tin Isles, had tantalized historians ever since. Jack had hardly dared think that this might be a wreck from Himilco’s expedition, and he would let the archaeology speak for itself. Hanno and Himilco were explorers, to be sure, but they were also driven by the Phoenician passion for trade, and the discovery of a wreck filled with the kind of goods that the British in Cornwall might have traded for their tin made the possibility too compelling to put aside.

  He saw the lead anchor stock now, cushioned between sandbags on the seabed, and sank down to look at the symbols cast on one side. They were a Phoenician letter B, an early type with an angular form, and a small bucranium, a shape like bull’s horns. Jack was certain that they were apotropaic, to ward off misfortune, a common function of symbols on later Greek and Roman anchors, in this case the B perhaps referring to the Phoenician god Ba’al Hammon and the bucranium to the sacred bull’s-horn shape seen in the mountain peak to the east of Carthage. If so, they had failed in their purpose, but seeing them did made Jack ponder the nature of the wrecking.

  The anchors they had found were in the bow, facing the shore. He knew this because the other end of the wreck contained pottery and small finds, indicating the crew’s living area, a stern deckhouse where they would have cooked and taken shelter. The absence of anchors in the stern suggested that those must have been lost in an attempt to hold the ship against a westerly wind, the most likely cause of the wrecking. Unlike the steamship, therefore, which had been blown into the cove sideways and sunk beam-on, the Phoenician ship had gone down facing the shore. Jack had stood on the headland trying to put himself in the mind of the captain, imagining the sea as he had seen it during that winter storm. Laying out the anchors astern, knowing they would drag, might not have been an act of desperation but that of a skilled navigator, one who had sounded the seabed and knew there was no hope of holding in the sand but that he might at least prevent the ship from going in beam-on, allowing her the small chance of being thrown intact onto the beach.

  What the captain could not have known about was what Jack saw during the storm, the sucking undertow down the beach that followed each huge wave as it crashed in, momentarily exposing the seabed at low tide almost as far out as the wreck site. In such extreme conditions, with the anchors still holding her bow-on to the shore, the ship might actually have been grounded rather than sunk, driven hard into the seabed while the next towering wave built up behind her. In that instant, with shore only a stone’s throw away, the captain must have known that they were doomed, that there would be no time to hack away the anchor ropes and hope for the best. The next wave would have inundated the ship, smashing away the mast and rigging and breaking the bodies of any men still aboard even before they were thrown on to the rocks.

  It would have been a terrifying end, following hours of fear clinging to the ship as it was driven ashore, lashed by spray and lurching sickeningly in the swell as the anchors dragged remorselessly. But like those who had gone down in Clan Macpherson off West Africa, like so many who were buried along the clifftops and sand dunes of this coast, the Phoenicians were men of the sea who would have known the fate that might lie in store for them, that no manner of apotropaic sign or pleading to the gods was going to help them when the storm waters were raging and all hope was lost.

  Rebecca dropped down again, pointing at the stern part of the wreck and swimming on her back toward it, looking at Jack. He gave an okay signal, and watched as she turned over and followed another huge jellyfish that had appeared overhead. He looked at where she had pointed, and felt a surge of anticipation. The project supervisor had seen his frustration the week before at having to leave his corner of the excavation incomplete when he had been called to Deep Explorer, and had left it sandbagged over for his return. He restrained himself from swimming straight for it, and continued to float slowly over the site, taking in everything that had been exposed while he had been away.

  Instead of being covered with a latticework of grid squares, the only fixed structures on the site were twenty red-topped metal stakes that acted as datum points for the sonic high-accuracy ranging and positioning system they used to map the wreck. The system had been refined by Jacob Lanowski, IMU’s resident computer genius, and meant that with a click of a sonic gun an excavator could record the exact position of any new find. The data went straight into the master plan, and combined with photogrammetry and sonar mapping meant that a detailed 3D rendition of the site with up-to-date finds was available for anyone who could log on to the project website. Above all, it meant that the huge amount of time that used to be spent measuring and recording finds by hand was no longer required, a factor of supreme importance at a site exposed to vagaries of the weather where rapid excavation was of the essence.

  Jack swam over the main area of the cargo hold, looking at the amphoras that had yet to be raised. The main type was for olive oil, a speciality product of the eastern coast of Tunisia to the south of Carthage; the few fish sauce and wine amphoras were probably for use by the crew. A number of the amphoras had been bound up by the excavators in protective wrap to cover inscriptions that had been found painted on the shoulders or bodies in pitch, most of them describing the contents or marking amphoras for export. One of the tents in the shore encampment was filled with buckets where broken sherds with inscriptions had been put to soak in fresh water prior to being taken to the conservation lab at IMU.

  H
e saw the area of the excavation where Costas had been working the week previously, the lead weight with his name tag and a sand-filled gin bottle still there where he had staked out his territory. On the phone yesterday Jack had reminded him of his comment during their dive on Clan Macpherson about finding a sherd from the Cornwall wreck that might have had an unusual inscription, and Costas had promised to go fishing in the finds buckets in the conservation tent when he arrived this afternoon so that they could have a closer look.

  Jack flashed through the other finds they had made, preparing himself for anything he might discover. One of the most amazing artifacts had been a small, thick-walled jar with a deep blue residue that the lab had quickly identified as dye from the murex shell, the famous “royal purple” from Tire that was a closely guarded Phoenician secret. It was a hint of the dyed textiles that the ship might also have been carrying, and a reminder of the close ties that the western Phoenicians retained with their Semitic homeland, with the peoples of the coast of ancient Canaan that extended from modern Syria and Lebanon to Israel. They had also found three distinctive Massaliot amphoras, made by the Greek settlers of modern Marseilles and containing high-grade wine, as well as a batch of beautiful black-glazed drinking cups from Corinth, showing that the Phoenicians were not above diversifying their cargos with goods acquired from their trade rivals.

  As if that were not enough, beneath the amphoras they had found piles of crushed galena, the lead sulphide used in the cupellation process to extract tin from ore, a material that would have been of huge value to the ancient miners of Cornwall. And to cap it all, a copper box in the stern contained two bronze steelyards and multiple sets of balance-pan weights, bronze with lead cores, as well as some of the earliest coins ever made, stamped lumps of electrum from the kingdom of Lydia in Asia Minor from about 590 BC. To Jack, all of this indicated a merchant captain not only well stocked and prepared for every type of transaction, a Phoenician through and through, but also one who was speculative, plumbing new markets before the demand for certain products had become established, something that had made him think again of Himilco and Hanno and the very dawn of Phoenician contact with the late Bronze Age peoples of Britain.

  He reached his own area of the excavation, about five meters along the port side from the stern of the ship, at a place from which all the amphoras had been removed. He released a small amount of air from his BC to make himself negatively buoyant, and carefully lifted away three small sandbags from where he had left them, covered with silt during the past days. To his right was one of the water dredges that served as their main excavation tool, powered by a pump on Seafire; the water was pumped down a hose into one end of a solid plastic tube two meters long that floated just above the seabed, creating a vacuum that sucked water and sediment in at that end and spewed it out at the other, beyond the edge of the excavation. He pulled it over, careful to keep the exhaust end pointing out of the site, and brought the nozzle close to the area of shingle that had been covered by the sandbags, wrapping his right arm around it and getting ready to waft with his left hand. He looked up, knowing that Rebecca would have been watching him, and made a whirling motion with his left hand. She made an okay signal, swam to the surface and signaled the boat. Seconds later, the dredge erupted into life, lurching and bucking until he got it under control. He glanced back, seeing the blur in the water at the exhaust end, and then turned back. It was as if he had never left, as if the past week and the dive on Clan Macpherson were a dream, part euphoric and part nightmare, something he had parceled in his mind along with all the other dives he and Costas had done over the years where they had pushed the envelope as far as it would go.

  Seconds later he had exposed what he had started to uncover last time, tapering expanses of polished white, his excitement mounting as first one, then the other was revealed. They were the ends of huge elephant tusks, lying flat and extending under the sediment. They were an extraordinary find, unquestionably the premium trade item of this cargo. But what was more incredible was their origin, revealed in the analysis of a sample Jack had taken the week before. Many archaeologists had assumed that the elephant ivory traded by the western Phoenicians came from their outposts on the Atlantic shore of Africa, acquired from native middlemen from sources far inland south of the Sahara. But the analysis had pointed to an East African origin, to modern-day Somalia or Ethiopia, the place known as Punt, where the ancient Egyptians had obtained their ivory. And there was something else, something Jack had wondered whether he had really seen on that last dive, but here it was again, as clear as could be. Both of the tusks had been inscribed with the alphabetic symbols for the letter H, twice over. Ancient Phoenician merchants were assiduous markers of their own trade goods, so there was nothing exceptional in that. It was the letters themselves that made Jack’s mind race. HH: Hanno and Himilco. Could it be?

  The tusks were one of the most sensational finds of the excavation, left in situ until his return and now ready for recovery and conservation. It was extraordinary for Jack to see them again, but what really set his pulse racing now was to imagine what might lie beneath. Elephant ivory, especially the prized East African variety, would have been enormously valuable, and would have been packed in dunnage in the safest place on the floor of the cargo hold, below the amphoras and immediately above the ship’s timbers. The tusks were resting on a gray-black layer, revealed now across the entire space beneath them as he wafted the sediment away. The color indicated anoxic conditions, suggesting that this layer had survived undisturbed below the cargo. If timbers existed on the site, this layer might be the first place to find them.

  He wafted again, and the water turned black, staining his fingers. That was an excellent sign, evidence of metal oxidization, exactly what he would expect from decayed iron nails and rivets. He wafted once more, waiting for the dredge to clear the water, and then he saw it. About fifteen centimeters below the tusk was the surface of a wooden strake, with another beside it, running precisely where they should be, parallel to the likely location of the keel. Another waft revealed a frame. Peering closely at the side of the first strake, he saw a stamped letter A, the crossbar sloped in early Phoenician style, clearly a shipwright’s mark. He put his palm on the wood, just as he had done half an hour earlier at the steamship wreck, feeling the same surge of excitement, the thrill of watching the sea give up her secrets. He could suddenly see the ship in his mind’s eye, wide-bellied, sturdy, with close-set frames, her shaped timbers carpentered together with pegged mortice-and-tenon joints, so well preserved that he could imagine her released from the sands and surging forward, square sail billowing and helmsman at the steering oar, a brilliant image of human endeavor from the time when Carthage and her mariners ruled the waves.

  He pushed back, easing the dredge out of the excavation, and looked up. Rebecca was there again, pointing excitedly into the hole, giving him the okay sign. He did the same, gave a thumbs-up to indicate that he was about to surface, and then made a whirling motion at the dredge again. She acknowledged his signal and rose to the surface, and seconds later the dredge stopped sucking. He had finished where he had left off a week before, done what he had needed to do; now it was the job of the excavation team to take up where he had left off. Jeremy and Costas would be at the camp by now, and he needed to be ready for what Jeremy had to say about the plaque from Clan Macpherson.

  He tied off the dredge, rose above the seabed and then looked up, seeing Rebecca spread-eagled on the surface above him, silhouetted by the sun, wreathed by bubbles from his exhaust. He felt a supreme sense of contentment. This had been one of the best dives of his life.

  9

  Two hours later, Jack sat outside the beach café finishing his Cornish pasty and tea, feeding the last morsels to the black-and-white collie from the local farm who had been his companion on many visits to the cove over the years. He got up, waved at the farmer’s wife who ran the café, and gave the dog a final stroke, then strode across the lane to the dunes and alon
g the track toward the church behind the headland. Just before the graveyard he veered right into the grassy compound behind the old dry-stone wall that served as the shore headquarters for the IMU project, protected from the prevailing westerlies by the steep rise of the promontory. Rebecca was at the entrance talking to several hikers on the coastal path who had stopped to look at the information board they had set up in the lane about the Phoenician wreck. He smiled at the walkers and nodded at her, knowing that she would join him as soon as she could.

  He waved at the group of local divers who had parked their van in the lane and were beginning to kit up for their dive. They were friends he had known for years, stalwarts of his team, and had been responsible for many exciting wreck discoveries. Over lunch he had talked with them about the logistical challenge of raising timbers from the wreck, and together with the project supervisor they had sketched out a plan that would see the hull exposed and all the timbers raised and safely back in the IMU conservation facility within two weeks. He glanced up at the sky, feeling the early-afternoon breeze on his face and seeing the clouds beginning to accumulate. Everything depended on the weather; for that they were as much in the lap of the gods as the ancient mariners had been. But he had the best possible people on the job, and he knew he could rely on them to make the right decisions and take the project forward, whatever the forces of nature chose to throw at them.