The Shipwreck Hunter

by David L. Mearns

  Normally when I go to sea it is to some distant point in a vast and endless ocean with no landmarks to reference the eye. The only way to know where you are in the world is by the lines of latitude and longitude that appear on a navigation display: a type of digital reality. However, when I rose at daybreak that morning I knew exactly where I was, as I’d been dreaming about this location for the past fifteen years. I don’t normally get emotional about places. Al Hallaniyah was a ruggedly beautiful place: the way the pristine blue waters contrasted with the buff-coloured cliffs carved and striated by various mineralogies was especially striking. I’d seen many other beautiful places in the world. The difference was that I had never wanted to come to a place more than here. Part of it was because of wanting to complete unfinished business and prove doubters wrong. But mainly I wanted to see and feel it for myself. That was what drove me to make sure that my experience of the island was more than just a virtual one based on viewing someone else’s photographs.

  By 8 a.m., Dave and Bruno’s teams were already working in the water and on the island, and the side-scan sonar was being deployed to begin the geophysical survey of the bay searching for possible wreckage in shallow-water gullies seaward of the wreck site. At the time, we were still working on the premise that the second of the two Sodré shipwrecks might have sunk in the deeper waters of the bay. If this was the case, we hoped to detect buried iron objects using a sophisticated caesium magnetometer, or with a side-scan sonar in the unexpected event that wreckage was exposed on the surface. By mid-morning, the first important question was answered. The stone cannon balls that littered the gullies were still there, remarkably in almost exactly the same positions they had been in 1998.

  Our concern about the cannon balls was because Al Hallaniyah was experiencing a mini-transformation in the form of a $100 million infrastructure project intended to turn it from one of the most remote inhabited islands in the world to a tourist destination. The project included construction of a new harbour on the western end of the island and a modern tarmacked road through the mountainous interior to the beach located a few hundred metres from the wreck site. The construction was well under way when we arrived, and we could hear and feel the explosions of dynamite blasting a path for the road while we dived. The plans also included a car park at the beach (we later used it for football matches against the ship’s crew), which would be completed the following year. This meant that Ghubbat ar Rahib Bay, once accessible only by an arduous boat trip from the mainland, could now be reached by car.

  This modernization completely changed the risk profile for the wreck site. Anyone living on the island, or visiting it, could now drive down and then make the five-minute swim from the beach to where the artefacts were lying in a mere two to six metres of water. Scuba gear wasn’t even necessary, as the cannon balls could be seen from the surface and easily reached by someone free-diving with a snorkel. For the past few years boats like the Saman Explorer had brought tourist divers to the bay, mainly to dive on the Winchester. How long would it take before they found the wreck site and began disturbing the artefacts, or worse, removing them as souvenirs? Although recovering artefacts wasn’t part of our plan for this phase of the project, that position had to be re-evaluated now that we could see a clear risk to the site.

  As project director, with overall responsibility for the expedition, I had the luxury of shuttling between the three different teams to oversee their operations and the discoveries each was making. I sped around the bay in a Zodiac, helping Bruno map and excavate potential burial sites in the morning, when the temperatures were still bearable, and diving with team member Peter Holt in the afternoon to investigate sonar and magnetometer targets detected during the survey. So little was known about the bay that our work had a tangible feeling of exploration about it. We mapped the seabed, discovered an unknown steamboat associated with the Winchester, and found two ancient stone anchors that harked back to an earlier era of foreign visitors to the island. The work was physical, exhilarating and enormous fun. Even though most of us had volunteered our time to be part of the expedition, we all felt as though it was an extraordinary adventure holiday we would gladly have paid to be part of.

  As a reconnaissance survey our objective was to collect data and information needed to plan for a future full excavation of the site if it was warranted and approved by the MHC. The increased risk profile meant that a full excavation was now more than likely. I had brought a hydraulically powered water dredge, which Dave and his team used to make some trial excavations to get a feel for the quantity and type of artefacts that were buried in the gullies and the amount of rock and sand covering them. Other than the stone cannon balls, ceramic sherds and more lead-covered iron shot like we had found in 1998, I wasn’t expecting that anything else remarkable would be uncovered given the superficial nature of these excavations. I was completely unprepared therefore when Dave came up to me at lunch on only our second day on site to tell me that Jessica Berry, one of our keenest archaeological divers, had found a ship’s bell lodged under a large boulder in little more than four metres of water.

  To say I was gobsmacked would be an understatement. The fact that a bell had survived in the turbulent waters of the gullies for more than 500 years (one of the gullies was so rough we named it Washing Machine Gully) was truly incredible. According to Jess, it appeared to be in reasonable condition given its age and where it was found. She had taken a couple of pictures, which showed the intact bell mouth facing outward from its position under the boulder. Had it really been there since the day the ship sank? Why had the Portuguese been unable to recover such a valuable object when they had clearly been intent on salvaging anything of value from the wrecks? And if the ship’s bell had been missed, what else had been left behind? Finally, would the bell have any writing on it to help us identity the shipwrecks?

  I had to see it for myself. We ate lunch quickly, zoomed over to the wreck site and followed Jess to where she had made her miraculous discovery. The sight of the bell was even more unbelievable than Jess’s close-up photo had indicated, because it was so openly exposed you didn’t have to look hard to see it. I wanted to check its condition so I reached my hand into a gap under the boulder to feel how much of the bell was still there. It was fractured across near the crown, but other than that both sides were present and basically intact. Whatever else we uncovered during the rest of our time on site, we had an absolute trophy of an artefact that justified resurrecting the project. It was also more than fitting that Jess had made the discovery because she was one of the project sponsors, having paid for travel costs through her not-for-profit Maritime Archaeology Sea Trust (MAST).

  While the bell was the highlight, every aspect of the expedition greatly exceeded my expectations. Ayyoub Al-Busaidi, MHC’s supervisor of underwater archaeology, was equally excited to have a significant project upon which to develop his programme. The MHC agreed with our recommendation that all artefacts lying at or close to the surface should be recovered, which we did at the end of the second week after buying every single cleaning bucket we could find in Mirbat to hold them. Most of the sixty-nine recovered artefacts were cannon balls, including twenty-six large ones all carved with the letters VS. Another important artefact was a matched pair of heavy bronze sheave wheels. Everything we saw and recovered was entirely consistent with a European ship from the early sixteenth century.

  We could not say for certain whether the wreckage was from the Sao Pedro or the Esmeralda, or from either for that matter, as such a definitive determination required extensive scientific and archaeological analysis. However, the indications were very positive. For one thing, we could find no historical evidence of any other Portuguese ship from the early sixteenth century sinking in this location. And in Dave Parham, I now had a respected academic archaeologist – arguably the most active in the UK over the past decade – who shared my confidence. Finally, we had Jess’s bell, which a careful examination on land showed to have a raised inscription
possibly containing some characters or numbers. A crust of corrosion made it impossible to determine exactly what was written there, but I could see enough to suggest that it might contain an important clue.

  A full excavation of the interconnected gullies where wreck material was believed to exist was going to be a very big job. Our estimate was that a minimum of 950 cubic metres of sand and countless boulders – some weighing as much as a small car – would have to be shifted off site to reach the artefacts that had worked their way down to the level of bedrock as wave after wave of pulsating water rushed over the site. There was also the large concretion to break down, which because of its size (40m3) could not be removed as a coherent whole. We’d need a more powerful excavation system than the small water dredge we’d used for the trial excavations and a bigger team of trained archaeological divers, including some professional divers to safely shift the huge volumes of rock out of the gullies. The expedition would also need to be longer: twenty-two days on site compared with ten the previous time. All of this dictated that for the next expedition, in the immortal words of Roy Scheider’s Captain Brody in Jaws, we were going to need a bigger boat.

  The MHC’s first suggestion of a suitable boat was an interesting one, and it got everyone on my team a bit excited. It wasn’t a boat actually: it was a ship, and a very big one at that. In fact it was a super yacht. The Fulk Al Salamah was one of two super yachts used by Sultan Qaboos and the royal family. At the time I inspected her tied up alongside in the harbour in Muscat’s Old Town, she was being used as a support vessel for the sultan’s newest yacht, Al Said. The Fulk was an older yacht, built in 1987, and was soon to be replaced by a new support vessel of the same name. She was plenty big at 136 metres and 10,800 tons, and she was equipped with all the small boats, diving equipment and cranes we would need. We could have made her work for the expedition and she would have served as a very comfortable floating hotel. In truth, however, she wasn’t ideal, so I wasn’t too disappointed when the MHC reported that she wasn’t available because of a scheduling conflict, but that they had another ship lined up.

  The RNO Al Munassir was nothing like the Fulk: there were no carpeted staterooms, no fine china and crystal glasses, and no luxurious lounges. She was a basic 64-metre utilitarian landing craft, with one small mess for eating and one bunkroom where all eighteen of us would sleep in triple bunk beds. But in every other way she was absolutely perfect for the job. She had a shallow draft so could get in close to the wreck site, and virtually the entire length of the ship was one long working deck. This was going to be a dirty, messy job with up to thirty dives being made each day, so every inch of deck space would be needed for the staging of diving equipment and the cleaning and recording of recovered artefacts.

  After months of planning, the expedition was scheduled to start in mid April 2014 with mobilisation of the Al Munassir at the Said Bin Sultan naval base north-west of Muscat. National Geographic had agreed to sponsor me for a second year, and the MHC significantly increased their involvement, with more divers participating and extra funding to buy equipment they could use on future projects. This capacity building, in the form of training the MHC divers and equipping them to conduct underwater archaeology projects around the country, was a secondary but important part of our mission for the MHC. We also made sure that the entire project was being conducted in full compliance with the UNESCO Convention for the Protection of Underwater Cultural Heritage. Although Oman was not a signatory to the 2001 convention, which established specific rules such as prohibiting the trade in artefacts, we mutually agreed that adherence to it would be a cornerstone of our project.

  Our plans were shaping up very well, and the only minor problem we faced was that a Portuguese archaeologist seemed to have made it his mission in life to aggressively criticize our project and make baseless claims about my role as its director. Alexandre Monteiro, a doctoral student at Nova University in Lisbon, made his first attack on a widely used public forum for underwater archaeology. He described our 2013 expedition as an example of ‘bad archaeology’ and made false claims about our discoveries, stating that we had found ‘almost zilch, some stone shots, a fragment of a ship bell’ and that we had ‘no datable objects, just smoke and mirrors’. It was an extraordinarily prejudicial attack that would have been easier to accept if it had been made in ignorance. But Monteiro had somehow got hold of a copy of one of our reports, so he should have known that the ship’s bell was virtually whole, not just a fragment, and that the thirty-seven stone shot we had recovered was actually a large number given that these were from the surface only. He also seemed to miss, either by design or pure carelessness, the significance of the bronze sheaves, pointing to a European ship of an early age.

  Monteiro liked to present himself as being in the know, but what he didn’t know was that we were making progress deciphering the inscription on the ship’s bell, and that it would make a mockery of his claim that we had no datable objects. I had taken the bell to the Warwick Measurement Group at Warwick University to see if their industrial CT scanner could reveal what was written behind the layers of corrosion. Dr Jay Warnett performed the analysis, which took several three-hour runs in the CT scanner with different orientations of the bell to get the clearest image of what was written. After the first run, he emailed me to say he could clearly see the number 8. The next day, using a different scanning strategy, he revealed a 9 to the left of the 8. He tried one more scan and thought he could make out a 4 to the left of the 9, although it was less clear than the first two numbers.

  One of the most common things written on ship’s bells are dates: generally the date when the ship was made or launched. We only had a partial date, but the final X-ray image indicated that it was ‘498’, which if confirmed would suggest a date for the ship as 1498, which fitted with the Sodré squadron leaving for India in 1502. It was a stunning use of state-of-the-art technology. The images would also be of immense value to the conservator to guide her hand in carefully lifting away the centuries of corrosion that covered the inscription. Ironically, one of Monteiro’s central criticisms against me was that I was scientifically unqualified to lead this project. This was just the first of many opportunities to prove him wrong.

  The three-day transit from the naval base to Al Hallaniyah gave us plenty of time to run through the excavation plan with the whole team, including Al Munassir’s crew. In contrast with the gentle pace of the 2013 reconnaissance survey, I had to establish a demanding schedule to make the most of our time on site and to best utilise the large team of divers I had available. Initially this came as a shock to some of my Omani colleagues, and tensions resulted. Omanis are beautiful, friendly people. Anyone who has spent time in their fascinating country will tell you the same thing. Our work cultures were very different, however, and I needed them to understand why I had to insist that every minute we had in the field was spent productively collecting data. Many months had gone into the planning of every last logistical detail, and we only had one chance to get it right. Once we arrived at the island we were on our own, with no cell phone coverage, no medical assistance and no means outside of what was available on the ship to correct problems.

  My worst fear was an incident with either of the two rigid inflatable boats (RIBs) we’d be using to shuttle divers from the Al Munassir over to the wreck site and other crew to different parts of the bay. We were totally reliant on these workhorse boats for all our transportation. Lose one and we could kiss goodbye to half of what we wanted to achieve. Lose both and the project was over. I didn’t have to wait long for that fear to be realized. On the very first trip over to the wreck site, whilst carrying three of our most experienced divers and a full load of scaffolding pipe and dive gear, a nervous crewman judged the entrance to the gullies all wrong and ran the boat hard aground on the exact same rocks where the SÃo Pedro had wrecked. Fortunately the divers saw what was about to happen and bailed from the boat before it hit the rocks. With the engine killed, the boat swung sideway
s to the onrushing waves and was promptly swamped.

  It was frankly a quite disastrous start, which could have been worse but for the quick thinking of the divers. By the time I made it to the island in the second RIB, the team had already unloaded all the scaffolding pipes and were bailing out the boat. Its propeller was destroyed, but thankfully the hull and floats were fine other than some gouges in the fibreglass. In the end the incident cost us a day of lost time, as the only way to get the heavy scaffolding pipes out to the wreck site was to float them using a system of jury-rigged water bottles that Peter Holt devised. In the overall scheme of things we were lucky nobody was injured or that the boat wasn’t permanently damaged. But we needed to use the accident to impress upon people the inherent dangers and to make some changes in how the boats would be operated thereafter.

  While the RIB and the scaffolding pipes were being tended to, the next big crucial moment for the project was taking place in the sky above the deck of Al Munassir. The MHC had hired a large diesel-powered air compressor, which would be used to drive the multiple airlifts needed to conduct the excavation operations. Compared with the small water dredge we used in 2013, the switch to the large airlift system was almost an industrial scale step-up in our capability to excavate the gullies. To make the system work, however, the one-ton compressor had to be placed as close as possible to the wreck site, and the only thing that could carry it to this location was a heavy-lift helicopter provided by the Royal Omani Air Force. The entire excavation plan relied on having the compressor in exactly the right spot on the beach, where I was waiting to receive it, and from where I could see that the helicopter was struggling to maintain its position over the anchored ship. As the helicopter was waved off from the lift and headed back to its base in Salalah, I wondered whether I had just witnessed the end of the project before it even started.