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Shipwrecks: a porthole to the past
00:53:18
David Gibbins explores the underwater secrets held by the world's shipwrecks
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- [00:01]
Google Gemini
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- [00:25]
Ryan Reynolds
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David Gibbons
Front for three months plus taxes and fees.
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David Gibbons
Time Unlimited More than 40 gigabytes per month slows full terms@mintmobile.com 70,000 people are here and Bob Dylan is the reason for it.
- [01:01]
James McComb
Inspired by the true story if anyone.
- [01:03]
David Gibbons
Is gonna attention on stage, you have to kind of be a freak.
- [01:06]
Emily Briffett
Are you a freak?
- [01:07]
David Gibbons
Hope so.
- [01:08]
James McComb
And starring Timothy Chalamet as Bob Dylan. He defied everyone.
- [01:13]
Emily Briffett
Turn it down.
- [01:14]
David Gibbons
He lied to change everything.
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James McComb
Make some noise. BD Timothy Chalamet Edward Norton EL Fanning Monica Barbaro A complete unknown Only theater's Christmas Day rated R under 1790 minute.
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- [01:58]
David Gibbons
Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of Beasts BBC History Magazine From a sunken Tudor flagship brought back to life by austeraeology to the tales of bravery and endurance that come from the naval clashes of World War II. Shipwrecks can tell us far more about human history than you might initially expect. Drawing on his experience as both a diver and a maritime archaeologist, David Gibbons reveals how the riches that lie beneath the waves can can act as a porthole to the past. He spoke to Emily Briffett So we're.
- [02:43]
Emily Briffett
Going to be talking about your new book, A History of the world in 12 shipwrecks. Now, I think the idea of discovering a shipwreck, researching, diving down and visiting one is quite a romantic idea, at least I imagine for some of our listeners. Now you yourself have actually had the opportunity to go and do that, and I'm sure we're going to be touching on that experience shortly. But firstly, I'm curious, how do you go about discovering a shipwreck? How do you find one? What's that experience like?
- [03:15]
David Gibbons
Well, most of the shipwrecks that I've discovered have been just using my eyeballs. You don't have to use high technology to find many of the sites that are close to the coast which you can get to by snorkeling and diving. You can, for historic shipwrecks, research known wrecks along stretches of coast. For example, in Cornwall, where I am now, there's quite a lot of record of wrecks over the last couple of centuries and it's possible to at least have a general idea of where wrecks are. But when it comes down to it, it's a matter of getting in the water and swimming and looking. And in fact, that's one of the great excitements of it because it's really kind of old fashioned exploration. You're not necessarily having to use anything more sophisticated than scuba diving equipment. And for me, that's one of the great. It's a very sort of immediate exposure when you're in the water to this great excitement when you suddenly see a cannon or an ancient amphora looming out of the depths in front of you. Incredibly exciting.
- [04:18]
Emily Briffett
Obviously going to go and look at a shipwreck isn't quite the same as sort of wandering down to an archive. Can we talk a bit about the accessibility of shipwrecks and the history that they present to us?
- [04:30]
David Gibbons
Well, they vary a great deal. I mean, there are some wrecks which are a huge challenge to reach. I've dived on wrecks, including several in my book, which really at the very limit of safe compressed air diving. So at about 50 meters or so, and two that I write about in the Mediterranean were off very remote rocky headlands. And the only way of getting there was by taking a boat for half an hour and coming to this site. And just very elemental experience of rock and sun and sea and, and this great blue depth beneath you. And quite intimidating because where you're looking at sites of that depth, you have quite a lot of physiological issues to contend with going deep and having to be concerned with nitrogen sickness, which happens if you breathe nitrogen under pressure and having to come up slowly. And so you're constantly in a kind of heightened state of awareness diving on wrecks like that, because you're having to be concerned with your own well being. But quite a few of the wrecks that I've dived on, and in fact some of the most interesting have been in very shallow water. So they're actually visible from the surface. You can look down and see cannon on the sand. And that's wonderful because the shallower a wreck is, the longer you can spend there, because your air will last for a lot longer. And you can actually approach those sites very much as you would do a land archaeological site. You can go down and you can contemplate and you can think about what you're looking at. Whereas with the deeper wrecks you don't really have that opportunity. You might have 15 or 20 minutes on the seabed and you might be suffering a bit from nitrogen narcosis, which is sort of another aspect of nitrogen, which causes you to feel slightly inebriated. So you have to be really focused before you go in on what you're going to do. But each time, no matter how deep a wreck is, no matter how challenging, for me, there's this kind of massive excitement of that moment when I get in the water. I've got all my gear on, I've sighted, psyched myself up for it. I've often been thinking and planning about it for days before. It's a very life enhancing thing, I find being underwater because everything just seems bigger and more colorful and more exciting. And that applies to any wreck, whatever its depth.
- [06:42]
Emily Briffett
So you're actually a maritime archaeologist yourself. What shipwrecks have captivated you the most?
- [06:48]
David Gibbons
I mean, I've been doing this for a long time and it's hard to actually isolate one above any others that's really drawn me to it. But I would say that of the wrecks that I talk about in my book, there are six which I've investigated myself or dived on myself. And inevitably those are the ones that excite me the most because I can remember those moments of just thrill as I was diving down and perhaps uncovering. I mean, I can remember on that one very deep wreck in the Mediterranean, classical Greek wreck, wafting away at almost 50 meters deep, which is very deep in the sand and revealing this beautiful painted Greek wine drinking cup absolutely intact, just sitting there in the sand. And that was just one of those sort of Eureka. Experiences that sticks with me. So where I can associate a wreck with my own personal experience on them probably gives them the edge. But it really is hard because each of those chapters in the book, each of those 12 wrecks, is kind of a book in itself. It's an essay in trying to tease out of these fascinating sites a wider context. And it's really hard to say which one of them, as a result of that, is sort of bigger in my imagination than the other. They all tell fascinating, equivalently important historic stories, I think.
- [08:11]
Emily Briffett
And we're definitely going to come onto some of these examples, I'm sure, as we're talking, but we should probably broaden out the scope a little bit. What can shipwrecks actually tell us about history? What paths do they preserve?
- [08:27]
David Gibbons
Well, I think there are many different levels. In the first instance, you have to understand the nature of a shipwrecker's archaeological context, which isn't all that technical. It's that they are really time capsules. They have, as an assemblage of artifacts, they have what you could call very high resolution. It's a bit like pixelation on a screen. Some archaeological sites are very poorly pixelated because they might represent a habitation place where people have discarded rubbish over years. And it's very difficult to sort of be more than a bit vague about them. Whereas with shipwrecks, you've got this single event in time of that catastrophe when a ship sank. And also you've got the very sort of dynamic nature of a ship as its sailing before it sank. As an archaeological and historic assemblage, it's representing one particular, very tight period in time. And as a result, all of the artifacts can tell very immediate and kind of easy stories, often because we know what they were there for, whether they were cargo or armaments or shipboard equipment or personal belongings of people, which are often the most poignant finds you make. Because I think accessing the past through archeology is really very much about accessing individuals, and it's about accessing people like us. And it's about really, very often people who are not so accessible through documentary evidence. The further you go back in time, the less easy it is to talk about, if you like, common people. And one very good example of where wreck archaeology has been so exciting in that respect is the Mary Rose sank in the Solent in 1545. And this is a ship which represented a big event in history. So you can see a wreck associated with Henry VIII and with a battle. And if you like with conventional history, you know, narrative history at that highly political level. But in fact, among the most important finds on the Mary Rose have been the remains of the sailors and soldiers on board, their physical remains and their belongings. And these are people who we don't know by name. And had we not found that wreck and had it not been excavated scientifically, they would be completely lost to history. And I think when people go to the Mary Rose, the wonderful Mary Rose Museum and see those finds, that's really what's most interesting because we can relate to that. And I think where you can use rec evidence on that level to have an insight into the lives of individuals like ourselves is at its most powerful. But also ships obviously tell us about seafaring, about maritime trade, warfare, maritime culture, if you like, as well, the way people lived on the sea. And often that's a more unified culture, if you like, across a very broad area, the notes from which they originally come. And when I was writing my book, what I loved doing was trying to contextualize wrecks in the widest and most interesting possible way to look at what that ship was involved in at that moment in time, which might have been explorational warfare, but to stand back from that and see it as a sort of pinprick of light on wider contexts in the past about economics, about personalities, individuals. Henry VIII is one example of a well known leader who's king, whose significance is reflected in the wreck of the Mary Rose. And there are many others like that. I found it very interesting to use wrecks again as just that porthole of clarity that allows so much to spring from it.
- [12:17]
Emily Briffett
I just want to drill down into something, take a pause, as it were. I'm intrigued about what you said about shipwrecks being a time capsule, particularly when they come to this moment of tragedy that might have resulted in the ship being wrecked. Do you find that evocative as someone who goes down and takes a look at these wrecks?
- [12:38]
David Gibbons
Very much so. I think you would be a diminished archaeologist or explorer if you didn't feel the emotion of that moment. And certainly when I dive on wrecks most often, you know, tragically, wrecks involve people dying and, you know, terrible final moments of life as they realize that they're probably not going to survive. There are two wrecks that I dive on regularly off the coast of Cornwall, both of which are in the book. One of which is the wreck of the Royal Anne Galley, which went down in 1721 off the terrifying rocks of Lizard Point, which is a very southerly Point in England and a very dangerous place because there are reefs offshore which have caught many ships that was sailing out towards the Atlantic or coming back. And she was on the way to the Caribbean, taking the new governor out to Barbados, after which she was meant to go and chase pirates. This is the bang in the middle of the most exciting period of the pirates of the Caribbean. And she was swept into the rocks off Lizard Point and went down with only three survivors out of about 210 on board. And this is within a stone's throw offshore. And these people would have seen that coming and known what was about to happen in this terrible sea, which is one of the most dangerous to dive as well off Britain because of the tides and the currents. So when I've been diving there, I've not only had to look after my own safety, but also been acutely conscious of the fact that I'm actually swimming into this immense emotional cauldron as well. Because in a way, you do have this sense of the imprint of those final moments still being there in a wrecked site. I'm very conscious of that. And there's nothing mystical about it. It's just a sort of awareness and a little bit of respect as well, because you know that these are really actually graves, too, or places of people's final moments. So I think that as a result of that, when you look at the lives of those people that you're able to reconstruct through the artifacts you're finding, it gives it that extra little edge because you know that these people are living abbreviated lives. And it makes you also think about how so often in the past, before our time with, I suppose, in many respects, a safer world, medically and otherwise, people did actually live for the moment much more. And if you look at exploration and the history of colonization around the world, you're often looking at people who really don't know whether they're going to survive that day, whether they're on the sea or on land. They don't know whether they're going to survive illness. And so it's very close temporal immediacy to everything that you're looking at with the wreck. It's very, very intense.
- [15:27]
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- [16:21]
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- [16:43]
Emily Briffett
Following on from what you said about those sort of last, final moments of a person almost coming close to the rocks that experience historically, what might have been someone's chance of surviving a shipwreck? And what can this tell us about the mentality or the human endurance?
- [17:03]
David Gibbons
Well, it's an endlessly astonishing fact when you read stories of shipwreck where there is survival, particularly where they're wrecked on inhospitable foreign shores. And that would be many of the shores of the world before certainly the 18th century. And what is most extraordinary is, is exactly that it's endurance. And the final wreck that I deal with in my book is the SS Gersapa, which was a British merchant ship torpedoed and sunk off Ireland in 1941. And it's a fascinating site because it was sunk in very, very deep water way beyond diving depths. So it was discovered using a remote operated vehicle. And it was fascinating for the cargo it carried, which included huge quantities of silver, but also mail, because she was carrying from India, coming from India, carrying mail that was meant to arrive in Britain and also in America, and that was all very well preserved on the wreck. And as a result, this is another way in which to answer one of your previous questions. Wrecks as time capsules or context have this extraordinary thing to offer as a result of the preservation that you often get on them. And those letters are a fascinating insight into what English and Indian people in India in early 1941, late 1940, before the beginning of the war against Japan, which involved them very much more what they thought about what was going on in Europe and the world, the concerns they had for relatives in England and in America. And that doesn't really answer your question, but it's a fascinating aspect of that wreck. But what does answer your question is what happened to the survivors? And it's the most extraordinary story and one that's repeated very often in the annals of the Second World War. And this was that the ship went down very quickly. There were possibly about 30 survivors amongst the crew. They got into a lifeboat and the ship's second officer, called Richard Ayres, he managed to take that boat all the way to the coast of Cornwall over a period of about two, two and a half weeks. And in the end, he was the sole survivor, because on the way, all of these men who'd been on the boat died. And reading that account is just one of many instances where you see that when we are put in situations of great duress, we can come up with incredible strength. Not everybody, but the most surprising people can. And I think that's another aspect of looking at ships and at wrecks that is is sort of life enhancing, because we on the whole lead quite comfortable and relatively cosseted lives. And often we're not really exposed to circumstances in which we're pushed like that. And it does show what we are capable of and what people can do to endure. And I think that's something which you really do see in stories of wreck that people do their very best to survive and they can survive in the most extraordinary of circumstances. But there is also the fatalism. There is also the knowledge when people get on a sailing ship and are heading off to the Americas or India or wherever that they just don't know what will arise the next day. They don't know what the next storm will bring. And they have to be mentally prepared.
- [20:20]
Emily Briffett
For that, obviously, as well as the many tragic cases of lives being lost within your book, within shipwrecks throughout history, a lot of history has lost itself to the depths. What would you say have been some of the most significant losses, at least from cases in your book?
- [20:39]
David Gibbons
Well, I think that the ones that strike me most are the very earliest and one of the most extraordinary wrecks in my book. If I was to choose a favorite, it might be one. But as I said before, I don't really think I have those is a Bronze Age wreck off a place called Uluberun in Turkey, very close to the site of the classical shipwreck, which I talked about diving on earlier. And this was an extraordinary wreck which was of a ship probably coming from the near east, from the area of modern Syria and Lebanon, heading towards the Mycenaean world, possibly to Mycenae itself, the great citadel of the Greek Bronze Age. And she was carrying a cargo mainly of raw materials of metal ingots of copper and tin, which are the ingredients of bronze. And there was so much on that ship that it's been calculated about 11 or 12 tons altogether, that it would have been enough to equip an entire Bronze Age army. So this is enough to have been smelted into swords and armor and other armaments that would have had a massive potential impact on the power dynamics of the world at the time. This is a world that we know of through Homer, through the Iliad and the Odyssey, the world of the age of heroes. So adding a kind of fantastically rich archaeological backdrop to the story of heroic epic that we get from Homer. And in this, you've got this shipwreck which is again another one of those wonderful sort of portholes of light into that period that you see a cargo which wasn't just any old trader or ship traveling with pots along the coast. This is a ship carrying a cargo of immense importance and was just lost to history. And you have to think, I wonder what the significance of that loss was in terms of what was going on in the Aegean Sea at the time between the various kingdoms and the power play. The cargo was one aspect of that wreck, but the belongings also of the people on board were also extremely rich. And it's been said, and I think rightly, that this is the underwater equivalent of King Tut's tomb. And it's just as important for the rich picture it gives of the world at almost exactly that time in the late 14th century BC, the time of Tutankhamun, and that immense richness that we see from his tomb excavation as such.
- [23:09]
Emily Briffett
Rich treasure troves of the past, I guess they're must have been a lot of opportunity for piracy, at least while the ship was still sailing, but also competition between archaeologists and treasure hunters as well. Do we have any other evidence of that in your cases?
- [23:24]
David Gibbons
Well, yes, indeed. I mean, piracy, first of all in the past was a very big deal. And it wasn't just pirates of the Caribbean. It was also the pirates of the so called Barbary coast of North Africa, the Corsairs, who in fact, over several centuries were a constant menace for shipping into the Mediterranean and down the coast of Africa and indeed as far north as Britain, because coastal towns were raided and a ship such as the Royal Anne Galley, the one which I've been involved with investigating off Lizard Point, which is heading off to the Caribbean, she, in 1712, when she was off on her first voyage, was mandated to go and counter the pirates, the Barbary pirates of North Africa. She was a galley as well as a sailing ship. And by having oars, she was able to negotiate calm seas in the Mediterranean and get into sort of estuaries and backwaters and chase pirate ships much more effectively. And she then was, of course, going off to the Caribbean on her fateful final voyage, where she would have been part of the great attempt by the Royal Navy to quash piracy at the time of the Pirates of the Caribbean. And all of that was real. It's not just Hollywood. It was an extraordinary period. Pirates are nowhere near as glamorous mostly as they're made out to be, and it was a pretty grim business, but it was a real issue and a real problem at the time. And the Royal Navy was an instrumental part in quashing it. Treasure hunters and archaeologists is a constant theme, and it's very difficult. There is no common ground really between the two. There have been treasure hunting expeditions which have involved an attempt to do archaeology as well, and sometimes that's been quite successful. And it's worked best for very deep water projects where the funding required to go as deep as the wreck, for example, of the Gersapa, the Second World warship, is often way beyond the reach of archaeological funding bodies to cover. So those projects have by and large, been run as commercial ventures. And where they're run, well, they have been run by people who recognize the archaeological and moral importance of investigating sites such as that as scientifically and carefully as possible. And that, of course, is very much the case with wrecks of the Second and the First World wars, which are official war graves. Often it's necessary to do them with a kind of moral rigor as well as a scientific recording. And in other respects, the problem really is that it's very difficult to see a melding of interests where you've got profit motivation, on the one hand, fueling treasure hunting, and for me, the much richer treasure of historical revelation, which comes from the scientific investigation of ships. And actually that often, if you're looking at ships as shipwrecks as a sort of possibilities for lucrative gain is the best route to go anyway is to investigate a shipwreck scientifically, do it archaeologically, put the finds in a museum, and if you want to recoup, you charge people to go into the museum. You write books, which I've done, you make films, you make TV series, and if you want to be profit motivated and plow those profits back into the costs of further excavations, that's the way to do it. Very, very few treasure hunting ventures are successful. Very, very few indeed. Most are loss making. And so I personally don't think there is an easy blending of the two. But it is a constant issue, particularly with wrecks that are far offshore and outside territorial limits, where there are no legal restraints really on investigation. And there are some wrecks which have been very problematic because of their historic significance, which have been damaged through looting and treasure hunting. And that's a constant legal quandary to deal with. Very, very difficult to police as well in offshore waters.
- [27:29]
Emily Briffett
This might be a bit of a how deep is the iceberg Question, but do we get a sense of how much has been lost maybe in the cases where treasure hunting has been present?
- [27:39]
David Gibbons
Yes, we do, because I've dived on wrecks in the Mediterranean, ancient wrecks and also in fact, off Cornwall, which have been stripped by looting or by salvaging. So a lot of salvage work went on during the early period of intensive scuba diving off Britain, for example, which was perfectly legal and fine, but it was often looking for copper and other materials which could be sold. So a lot of more recent wrecks have been extensively salvaged. And it is distressing sometimes because I have been on wrecks which are really historically significant, and you can see they look like bomb sites because people have looted them, often not in a very organized way. It might just be divers in the past or diving clubs who come down and do it, which they wouldn't be doing or be allowed to do anymore. But in the early days of diving in the 60s and 70s, a lot of that went on. But I have to say, at the same time, I'm hugely admiring of divers of that period because many of them didn't really know what they were doing. They didn't know how to do things scientifically, they didn't know much about archaeology. And many of them did actually have a very deep historic interest in what they were discovering. I had a meeting with a man who's now 90, who's one of the original investigators of one of the wrecks that I've been looking at off Cornwall. And he was a former Royal Navy officer and passionate diver, and he really learned from scratch how to be an archaeologist, how to record, how to draw, how to excavate and how to write proper reports, and did it incredibly admirably. And so that early period was one also of great strides being made in people from all walks of life, not just trained archaeologists, working out how to do shipwreck archaeology and how to make it really Produce the kind of historical excitements which the wrecks really ought to be, rather than treasure and salvageable materials. I find treasure hunting stories sometimes to be somewhat soulless, that if they are successful and the treasure is found, it's sold, and then what does it do? It's gone. It buys somebody a car. I mean, it loses completely its significance. Whereas doing it archaeologically, when you make that discovery, which is sort of the end of the treasure hunting story, it's the beginning of the archaeological story, because it's making that discovery that suddenly allows this incredible sort of fountain of excitement and information to blossom, which is what I've done in my book, I hope, in showing what artifacts that you then might spend years studying what they can really tell us. And that's something you may not know at the moment of discovery either.
- [30:31]
Emily Briffett
What other factors dictate what we actually have left in a shipwreck?
- [30:36]
David Gibbons
The biggest factor is environmental, and that is that the circumstances of wrecks can often be as bad for the site itself over subsequent years as it was for the event that caused the wreck itself. So again, going back to the wrecks off Cornwall, the Royal Anne Galley off Lizard Point, which was wrecked in one of the terrific storms that you get here, massive westerlies blowing in off the Atlantic. Those storms carry on and on and on all the time every year. And they mean that the wreck sites themselves are often pulverized into almost nothingness. You don't see a ship shaped mound on the bottom with timbers sticking out. You see a site where the material that was left in the wreck has been spread by the tide and by storms all through gullies. And the iron has disintegrated into concretion which has caused this sort of rock hard mat over a lot of the artifacts. Having said which, it is extraordinary what you will find sometimes at these very shallow wrecks where you've got gullies that have very quickly been filled with material from the wreck and they then have been covered over, they can be swept by storms and left intact. And we found the most incredible organic finds sometimes in wrecks only 7 or 8 meters deep. One of the wrecks that I've been diving on this year again, in fact, was an East Indiaman called the Boyne. And she was coming back from Jakarta and she wrecked on the coast of the Lizard, a terrible wreck with a lot of loss of life. And we found a gully which was five or six meters deep at low water, completely exposed to these storms that often produce sort of 30, 40 foot waves during the winter. And in the gully, we found a completely intact wooden cased chronometer, absolutely intact, just sitting there because it had been buried under concretion and rock. And so it is incredible what you can find. Any wreck can produce extraordinary discoveries, but the environment is definitely the biggest factor. Human interference is another factor. Wrecks a bit further offshore off the coast of England can be damaged by trawling, by bottom trawling, which has ripped up a lot of wrecks. So all of these factors make a difference. And of course, salvage in the past as well, not just by recent divers, but also far back with attempts at salvage taking place even in the 18th and 19th centuries. So all of these can reduce what you see on the site from these.
- [33:08]
Emily Briffett
Obviously quite fragile remains. How do you actually go about identifying a ship or its age?
- [33:15]
David Gibbons
Well, first of all, generally speaking, you know you're looking at a wreck very quickly from the context where it is and the fact that there's unlikely to be any other archaeological explanation for what you're looking at. Sometimes there can be sunken cities and remains that have eroded into the sea from land sites, but most often than not, it's a wreck. The most important thing is the nature of the archaeological investigation, the way you do it, the exactitude with which you record and raise, if that's appropriate, which isn't necessarily always with all artifacts and then conserve. And again, Mary Rose, anybody who's worked for the Trust there or been familiar with it, knows the immense effort that's been required far more since the excavation on the artifacts to conserve and preserve them and then study them. I mean, it's an astonishing and wonderful project, that one, because you see now, all those years after the hull was raised, that it's still an ongoing and immensely productive project, producing every year there are new revelations from, for example, more sophisticated kinds of scientific techniques that are used to characterize materials, osteoarchaeology. Looking at the bones with a site such as the Mary Rose, you can see that it's just being endless, endless revelation. And so that's how we end up discovering what we do from wrecks. It's through really, really hard, careful science.
- [34:49]
Emily Briffett
How about trying to put a name to a ship? If it's an unknown ship, how can we get to that point of going, ah, it's this one?
- [34:57]
David Gibbons
Well, that's a very interesting question, because in classical antiquity, that's more or less impossible. We know that ships did have names, but they're just not recorded. But as we move into more recent historic times, sometimes it's very easy. You can be fairly certain, as with the case of the Boyne, the wreck I was talking about with the chronometer. We have records that was in the 1860s, newspaper accounts and eyewitness accounts of the ship coming in, so we can be pretty certain that's what we're dealing with. But the wreck next, called the Santo Cristo di Castello, which is a really amazing wreck. That's my main site at the moment in terms of ongoing investigation. When she was first Discovered by Peter McBride Back in 1969, they had no idea what its identity was. They'd looked at all the records in the 17th century and this dates from 1667, as it happened. The records are considerable, but they're often quite sparse. So you'll get what actually was a really major wreck only being mentioned in one sentence in the local manorial records. And it was very interesting for me talking to Peter about the process over a couple of years, as he and his team began to isolate the possibilities of the identity of this wreck. And what they eventually identified was a ship called the Santa Cruz of di Castello, which was coming from Amsterdam in 1667 and wrecked against the coast of Cornwall. That identity was secured by some artefacts on the wreck which actually had date stamps on them. They're these little weights, merchants weights made of brass, which had the certifying date of the Amsterdam authorities on them right the way up to 1666, which is the final possible year for this wreck. And they knew of no other wreck of that time period that would fit the bill for this particular site. They then found a fragment of the ship's bell with a little bit of the name on it. And they began to find artifacts which just spoke exactly of what would be right for that particular wreck and what it was carrying. What I've been able to do is do research in the National Archives, going and looking at what there was about this ship and its cargo, which might allow us to talk about some of the materials which have not survived, some of the perishable materials that the ship was carrying. And that's massively opened up the world of the trade that this ship was involved in the 17th century. We know that she was carrying spices that had come all the way from India, shipped by the Dutch East India Company to Amsterdam, and then reshipped out on these vessels like the Santa Cruza di Castella, which were taking goods into the Mediterranean and all manner of other fascinating materials which haven't survived archaeologically, but also ships, merchants, bills of lading, which can be correlated with what we have found, which includes ingots of lead and copper, which includes all kinds of fascinating artifacts, religious, church ornaments. And so we've been able to relate the documentary and the archaeological evidence very well in that case and. And tighten up the identity of the ship and its backdrop, begin to talk about the men and women who were involved as merchants and as owners of the ship. She was Genoese, built in Amsterdam, and that's allowed me to explore all of that history as well. So it's a great instance of the complicated story, which is sometimes complicated sequence of investigations which is necessary to. To pin down the identity of a ship. And some it's easier and some it's not at all. Some we will never know. And that's always a bit poignant because even Wrecks of the 16th or 17th century can be quite significant sites with a lot of material on them, and we just will never know the name of the ship or the names of the people involved at all. They're lost to history from a documentary viewpoint, which in a way makes them as significant as archaeological sites as some of the wrecks of classical antiquity, which are unique evidence for trade during those periods.
- [39:13]
Emily Briffett
It's certainly a very poignant point. I was wondering about something that you mentioned earlier about diving in the 1960s. How have attitudes to diving for researching, analyzing, and also preserving shipwrecks, how have they changed since then?
- [39:32]
David Gibbons
They've hugely changed. In the 60s, there were very, very few people who would describe themselves as diving archaeologists. In fact, the first properly scientific excavation of shipwreck only took place in 1960. And this, in fact, was off southeast Turkey, where these other wrecks I've been talking about were later discovered. Classical wreck and that Uluburn Bronze Age wreck. And this was another Bronze Age wreck at a place called Cape Caledonia. It had been discovered by sponge divers. So these are Aegean divers who put hard hats on, went out in their little boats and had air pumped down to them by a sort of bicycle pump. Incredibly dangerous. And they knew nothing about the problems of nitrogen sickness. So many of them suffered acutely through their lives or died because of what's called the bends, which is where nitrogen causes problems in the joints and in the brain. But in the course of sponge diving, they found wrecks, and they were the first great discoverers of ancient, classical and earlier wrecks in the Aegean and elsewhere in the Mediterranean. And this particular wreck had been discovered by sponge divers. And it came to the attention of a young archaeology graduate student in the United States, in Pennsylvania, called George Bass, who then became really the father of, of maritime archaeology as a scientific discipline, because he decided, against the expectations of a lot of his peers who were very skeptical about this, that it was actually possible to don scuba gear and go down and record as you would, a land site. He was the first one to show that. But it did take a long time for that to influence the way that divers approach wrecks around the world. And it was not really until the 70s that we start to see developments such as the Protection of Wrecks act in the UK. So this became law in 1973, and that allows for wrecks in UK waters of real historic significance, such as the Mary Rose, to be protected, which means that divers are not allowed legally to go onto the sites without a license, which is now administered by Historic England. There are many, many wrecks that are not protected, though. But I think the huge change in my lifetime as a div diver is that more often than not, divers now have done some form of training in the techniques of nautical archaeology, because there are courses that are run that are now integrated within diver training programs. And they want to be doing that because divers generally like doing stuff underwater and they'd much rather, on the whole, be doing scientific things that they can see furthering knowledge and that they can participate in as a. As a team project, than going off and being involved with any sort of shady business of looting or salvaging. Most of the wreck investigations off Britain have been carried out by amateurs, by divers doing it in their spare time. And that's a hugely positive step, I think, in my lifetime anyway, is that many, many, many more divers now see the value of Shipwright psychologically above all else, and are fascinated to be involved with wreck excavation. That's a very exciting prospect for the future, I think.
- [42:56]
Emily Briffett
What about preservation? How have attitudes towards that changed?
- [43:00]
David Gibbons
Well, very significantly, because generally the philosophy now of Historic England, for example, across the board, archaeologically, is to preserve in situ, if at all possible, in other words, not to assume that the objective of an investigation underwater, or indeed on land as well, is to be the recovery of materials. And that's a very big and positive step forward. Because one of the downsides of diving in the old days on shipwrecks is that, generally speaking, divers would have wanted to raise what they found and some of that material would end up in museums, but a lot of it didn't, and a lot of it has kind of been lost to history because it's ended up in divers backyards and sheds. And the main issue with wreck materials Is that very often they do require a lot of conservation. I mean, if you're dealing with wood that's come from the water, it dries out and desiccates and deforms. And again, back to the Mary Rose. That's one of the sort of outstanding examples of how a hull can be raised and how it can be preserved. But what an enormous expense is involved and effort. It took many, many years for the timbers of the Mary Rose to be treated to be replaced with polyethylene glycol, which replaces the cellular structure of the wood and creates a stable artifact. Very expensive and very time consuming. And the issue really is unless you have the facility to conserve and preserve, you shouldn't really be raising material from a wreck. Very often. The material, if it's there, if wood is there in a wreck, it survived there for a long time and it is possible, if you've excavated it, to rebury it and to preserve it in a stable environment also. The critical point here is that if we're looking at archaeological value, we know how to record in huge detail timbers on the seabed without having to raise them to do that. And the other aspect of that is that particularly in the last 20 to 30 years, photography and videography has become such a huge part of underwater archaeology and diving, almost every diver now goes out with a camera. It's just part of your gear and that allows a virtual reconstruction of, of what's found underwater without having to lift it. And all of that combined has been probably the biggest technical development in my.
- [45:33]
Emily Briffett
Lifetime to head towards the future. What's in store for you in your research then?
- [45:39]
David Gibbons
Ah, endless excitement. I mean, I have this never ending list of things I want to do, but in terms of actual shipwreck investigations, there are still the two that I've written about in my book. The Rolan Galli and in particular the Santa Crista di Castello, which was amongst the other discoveries that I made in the archives. One of the most extraordinary was that she was about 99.9% certainly carrying two paintings by Rembrandt. And so every time I go and dive on that wreck, there's this sort of, again, sort of that extraordinary connection with the past that you can feel with somebody as significant as that, with art as well. So wrecks are not just about prosaic things like cargo and armaments. They can also be about art and about books, about literature and about that sort of whole wider context you have of creative endeavor too. I'd love to write another book like a history of the world and 12 shipwrecks. There are many more shipwrecks than 12, and any one of them tells a great story. So endless possibilities ahead.
- [46:47]
Emily Briffett
Sounds very exciting. Lots in store then.
- [46:49]
David Gibbons
Definitely.
- [46:50]
Emily Briffett
As a final question to you for any keen listeners or keen maritime archaeologists to be out there, what wrecks, maybe some from your book, maybe elsewhere, would you suggest are worth their investigation, if not visiting their investigation?
- [47:07]
David Gibbons
Well, one of the great excitements of the world we live in now, different from the one I grew up in, is the Internet. And it means that we can do exactly what you said and we can go on these wonderful sort of archaeological trails, can't we, and visit sites and actually be involved in watching ongoing investigations too, where there are blogs and websites that are really rich in detail. And obviously I would say the first port of call would be my book and the Rec Senate and the additional material which I've included, in fact on my website with links to the sites for individual ongoing projects. If you're in Britain, there can be no better experience than the Mary Rose Museum. You don't have to actually go there because they've got a wonderful website as well. But if you have the chance to go to Portsmouth and spend time there, it's the most revelatory experience. And it's probably one of the very best museums in the world, not just for shipwrecks. If you're in Sweden, you can go to Stockholm and to the Museum of the Vasa, which was another warship raised almost intact that sank in the harbor there in the 17th century. And that also is an extraordinary museum. If you're in the Mediterranean on holiday in Turkey, you can go to Bodrum, and in the castle there is the museum that contains many of the artifacts from these wonderful Classical and Bronze Age wrecks that I've been talking about that were investigated off Turkey. If you're in the United States, there are many good maritime museums that you can visit as well.
- [48:45]
That was diver, archaeologist and author David Gibbons. David's book is a history of the world in 12 shipwrecks and is out now, published by Weidenfeld and Nicholson. You can delve further into the history of one of Britain's most famous shipwrecks with our podcast series, the Mary Secrets of a Tudor Warship. Find a link to the first episode in that series in the description of this podcast.
- [49:16]
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James McComb
I'm James McComb reporting live from home in my bathrobe and slippers. Tonight we're talking Dunkin Polar peppermint coffee. Gene's here with the latest. Gene, do you copy?
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