Adventures of a Sea Hunter (4 page)

On one of these dives, I nearly become part of the wreck. Working in the darkness to map the wreck, Larry and I are signaled by Dan to get back to the line. The current has picked up slightly ahead of schedule, and we’ve got to surface. As we slowly work our way up the line, the current hits hard, and we have to hold on with both hands to fight the current to reach the boats. I’m the last one up. Exhausted, I stand on the ladder at the stern of Jim White’s boat. Forgetting my training, I pull off my mask and spit out my regulator. Instead of climbing up or handing up my weight belt or tank, I reach down and pull off my fins, one at a time. I fumble the last fin. As I reach out to catch it, the weight of my gear pulls me off the ladder and back into the water.

A side-scan sonar image showing
Isabella.
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/Columbia River Maritime Museum.

I fall fast and hit the bottom. Without my mask, I can’t see very well, but it looks like I’ve landed next to the wreck. The strong current is rolling me along the bottom, and I can’t reach my regulator, which has twisted and is now behind me. With the desperate strength people sometimes find in these situations, I push off the bottom with my legs and kick for the surface, my lungs burning. My outstretched hands hit the bottom of the boat, and I claw and scratch my way along the fiberglass hull to get out from under it. But the weight of my tank and belt drags me back down into the water. I hit the bottom again and start rolling. My mouth opens convulsively, and I take in a breath of cold water and gag. I’m going to die, I realize, and I’m really angry. Like most accidents,
this one is a combination of a foolish move and a deceptively dangerous dive site. My eyes are wide open, but my vision is narrowing, and I know that I’m about to black out.

Finally, my dive training kicks in. I reach down and tug at the clasp of my weight belt. It falls free. Then I reach up to my buoyancy compensator to pull the lanyard that activates a co
₂
cartridge. I start to float off the river bed and remember not to hold my breath or I’ll burst my lungs as I rocket to the surface. When my head rises out of the water, I reach up and try to draw in a breath, choking with the water I’ve inhaled. Hands grab me and pull me into a Zodiac—I’ve rolled and drifted a few hundred yards away from where I fell in. I lie on the bottom of the inflatable, coughing up the muddy water from my lungs. Shaky, dripping and miserable, I climb onto the deck of Jim White’s boat, wipe my face, and ask, “Well, did I die like a man?” Dan makes sure I’m okay and debriefs me to ensure I learned from my mistake, and then we’re back at work at the next slack tide.

When everything is all done, we have a beautiful plan of the wreck, drawn by Larry, that confirms this is indeed
Isabella.
The size and construction closely match the known characteristics of the ill-fated brig. The location is exactly where the ship’s log placed the efforts to save the stranded vessel, off what is still known as San Island inside the Columbia’s mouth. And the remains on the bottom show a determined salvage effort, from the open cargo ports to the hacked-off rigging fittings. But the real indicator, in the end, is that single, crudely hacked hole in the side.

On return dives to
Isabella
in 1994, Mike Montieth and Jerry Ostermiller, the director of the Columbia River Maritime Museum, discovered that more of the wreck had been exposed by shifting sand. So ten years after the first dives, I returned to Astoria with a team of divers from the Underwater Archaeological Society of British Columbia. With more of the hull exposed, we could see that the brig had literally unzipped along its keel, splitting in two as the bow and stern broke apart in the flying surf that battered
Isabella.
I also found the ship’s rudder post, torn free and broken, the thick fastenings for the rudder shattered by the force of the ship’s stern hitting the bar. We had hoped to find some of the brig’s fur-trade cargo, as the Hudson’s Bay Company archives showed that not everything had been recovered from the wreck in 1830. But the hull was empty of artifacts, and the only tale this shattered wreck could tell was the sad one of just how she had died.

James Delgado examines the exposed bow of the British four-masted bark
Peter Iredale,
wrecked near the entrance to the Columbia River in October 1906. Unlike
Isabella,
whose wreck is shrouded in underwater darkness in the nearby river
, Iredale
is a visible victim of the “Graveyard of the Pacific.” © Dartyl Leniuk Photography

Yesterday, December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy—the United States was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan… The attack yesterday on the Hawaiian Islands has caused severe damage to American naval and military forces. Very many American lives have been lost… Always we will remember the character of the onslaught against us. No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory.” The indignant and stirring words of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt as he addressed Congress on December 8, 1941, ring through my mind as my plane crosses the United States. I’m on the way to Pearl Harbor to join a long-standing National Park Service survey of
USS
Arizona
and other ships that lie beneath the waters of that battlefield.

Being an archeologist thoroughly at home in the mid-nineteenth century, I am surprised by the realization that I’ve worked on more World War II wrecks than any other type of ship. That includes a decade of work for the National Park Service, studying and documenting World War II fortifications and battle sites. Recently, I have been posted to Washington, D.C., as the first maritime historian of the National Park Service, to head up a new program to inventory and assess the nation’s
maritime heritage, and the work included dozens of visits to preserved warships and museums.

I’ve already studied one shipwreck, the Civil War ironclad
USS
Monitor
, for historic landmark status. Now I’m on my way to Pearl Harbor to carry out a similar study of the battle-ravaged
Arizona
and the nearby
USS
Utah
, both sunk on December 7, 1941. Dan Lenihan and the Submerged Cultural Resources Unit of the National Park Service have invited me to join them to dive at the site of the first action in America’s war in the Pacific. Congress had passed a law making
Arizona
, still the responsibility of the Navy, a memorial to be jointly administered by the Navy and the National Park Service.

Most of the initial survey work on
Arizona
and
Utah
has been done, but I will dive with the team on both wrecks as part of the historic landmark study. I’ll also be participating in a side-scan sonar survey of the waters outside Pearl Harbor to search for a Japanese midget submarine that was sunk just before the attack commenced, a warning that was not heeded in time. The midget sub sank in deep water and has never been found.

Standing on the narrow concrete dock while a group of tourists slowly files into the
Arizona
Memorial, I look across the waters of Pearl Harbor’s Battleship Row. The battleships are gone, their places marked by white concrete quays that the U.S. Navy has kept painted for more than four decades. The names on the quays are those of the battleships that were moored to each on the morning of December 7, 1941:
USS
Nevada
,
USS
West Virginia
,
USS
Tennessee
,
USS
Oklahoma
and, directly in front of me,
USS
Arizona.
Unlike the other ships, which have only a painted name to mark their passing,
Arizona
rests in the water below me.

Around me is a group of other divers drawn from the ranks of the National Park Service and the U.S. Navy, all of us preparing our gear and suiting up to jump into the dark green waters of the harbor. The water is too warm for a wetsuit, but bare skin is no protection against barnacles and rusted steel, so I pull on a pair of Park Service dark green coveralls before strapping on my weight belt, tanks and gear.

A perspective view of
USS
Arizona, from the stern. Drowingby by Jerry L. Livingston, courtesy
USS
Arizona Memorial Association

After reading dozens of books and poring over files and interviews with men who fought here on that tragic day, I’m ready to explore a ship that precious few have been allowed to visit.
Arizona
is a war grave, and as many as nine hundred of her crew are interred within the crumbling steel of the battleship. This is sacred ground for Americans, and a potent symbol of a long and terrible war that, for the United States, began here. Only a handful of divers have been allowed to go beneath the surface and explore the ship.

The large American flag flying over the wreck
of Arizona
waves lightly in the warm breeze against a bright blue sky. I pause for a second, then turn back to my gear checks and final preparations. With my dive partner on one side, we stride together off the dock, splashing into the murky water and sinking 45 feet to the soft muddy bottom. We can’t see
more than a couple of yards ahead as we adjust our buoyancy. Floating gently over the mud, we swim slowly towards the wreck.

My subconscious registers the looming presence of the hulk before I realize that I see it. Perhaps it is the shadow of the wreck’s mass in the sun-struck water, masked by the silt, but there, suddenly darker and cooler. My heart starts to pound and my breath gets shallow for a second with superstitious fear. This is my first dive on a shipwreck with so many lost souls aboard. I flick on my light and the blue-green hull comes alive with marine life in bright reds, yellows and oranges, some of it the rust that crusts the once pristine steel. As I rise up from the muddy bottom, I encounter my first porthole. It is an empty dark hole that I cannot bring myself to look into. I feel the presence of the ship’s dead, and though I know it is only some primitive level of my subconscious at work, I can’t look in because of the irrational fear that someone inside will look back.