Research in depth

Students to dive for shipwreck's historic secrets off Bermuda

By Hope Green

Long before they became a land of winter escapes and honeymoons, the Bermuda islands had a very different significance to seafarers.

To early Spanish explorers, they were landmarks for navigation. Later, Britain established island outposts to control trade routes into the North American colonies. But ships traveled through the hurricane-plagued region at their peril.

Those rough journeys are now legendary: Shakespeare supposedly took his inspiration for The Tempest from accounts of a notorious Bermuda shipwreck in 1609. The same coral reef where that Virginia Company vessel, the Sea Venture, came to grief are littered with the remains of more than 400 other craft that have succumbed to violent tropical storms.

Francisco Estrada-Belli and Claire Calcagno examine a map of Bermuda shipwreck sites. Photo by Vernon Doucette

Under calmer skies, 14 students in scuba gear will search for historical clues in one of the hulks this summer, when the CAS department of archaeology launches its Maritime Archaeology Pilot Field School.

The intensive four-week program, intended for graduate and undergraduate students certified in scuba, begins in early August. Claire Calcagno, a CAS adjunct assistant professor, and CAS lecturer Francisco Estrada-Belli are the instructors.

"This is not a vacation in Bermuda," Calcagno says. "We want the students to have a pleasant time, but it's going to be a lot of hard work."

The course will have as its home base the Bermuda Maritime Museum, a refurbished 18th-century British fortress located at the farthest northwestern point of the archipelago. Working six days a week, the students will join Calcagno and Estrada-Belli in a series of dives near the reef, where the clear water reaches a maximum depth of just 15 meters. They will assist in mapping, measuring, and digitally photographing the wreck site before retrieving any of its contents.

In such shallow waters, says Calcagno, looters probably took what they deemed valuable from the area long ago. Left untouched, though, is a cache of historically important items hinting at ways of life on board and nautical technology. Among the more likely finds could be ballast stones, which were used as dead weight in the hold of a ship to steady the vessel. Students might also come across metal ship fittings, anchors, cannonballs, and even organic materials such as timbers, rope, and leather that have been sealed off from scavenging microorganisms under airtight layers of coral and sand.

"You can discover not only cargo that indicates economic activity," says Calcagno, "but also the more informal artifacts and personal belongings. What's so amazing about shipwreck archaeology is that you get a microcosm of different strata of society, from the lowliest sailor up to the captain."

Back on land, students will gather in the museum's conservation laboratory to learn about proper handling and documentation of the waterlogged items. Calcagno and Estrada-Belli will lecture in the evenings and keep close tabs on participants' work throughout the four-credit course.

Although the museum has worked sporadically with academic institutions to document Bermuda's maritime heritage, says Calcagno, a more permanent connection with BU is in the planning stages. Within the next few years, the CAS archaeology department aims to launch a full-fledged maritime archaeology field school.

The program in Bermuda would combine traditional exploration methods with robotic devices and other remote-sensing technology of the sort used to investigate the Titanic.

The department has been applying this integrated method to land-based archaeology projects for several years. Estrada-Belli, for instance, has worked extensively with BU's Center for Remote Sensing in a project to map the Maya lowlands of Guatemala. Meanwhile, Calcagno and Anna Marguerite McCann, a CAS adjunct professor, are teaching a pair of new courses on maritime archaeology and technology, and the department plans to add two more courses in the fall.

Only a few other universities, all in the South, support a maritime archaeology field school. BU already has the distinction of offering the only undergraduate archaeology program in the country.

At a time of growing academic interest in shipwrecks, "the maritime field school would strengthen BU's primacy," Estrada-Belli says. "We will give other schools a sense of the future of archaeology."

For more information, contact Gigi Green at International Programs at ggreen@bu.edu.