Protecting Historical Shipwrecks : College Students Dive Into Archeology

A group of divers recently revisited the scene of a long-ago maritime disaster. As they descended toward the bottom off Anacapa Island, the bits of encrusted wreckage strewn across the sand evoked a story that many of them already knew by heart.

It was on Dec. 2, 1853, that the Winfield Scott went down.

Just a day out of San Francisco, Capt. Simon F. Blunt was attempting to shave some time off his run to Panama by navigating between the Channel Islands, rather than seaward of them. Suddenly, scores of sleeping passengers were thrown out of their bunks as the steamship ran full speed into an outcropping of rock in a heavy fog.

“Our predicament seemed awful in the extreme,” passenger Edward Bosqui wrote in his memoirs, noting that the ship lay stuck on rocks amid the crashing surf.

Within hours, the Winfield Scott--a 225-foot wooden steamer that regularly ferried Gold Rush passengers up and down the coast--had settled on the bottom with $801,874 in gold and tons of mail, cargo and baggage in its hold. Miraculously, all the passengers survived, spending several days camped out on the barren island before being rescued by passing vessels.

Students Go to Site

The recent visitors to the site of the wreck were students from Cal State Long Beach. Experienced scuba divers, they were members of a hands-on course in underwater archeology that is the first of its kind in Southern California.

The course is sponsored jointly by the university and the Los Angeles Maritime Museum. Its mission, among other things: to provide an antidote to private plundering and bolster a national trend by helping state and federal archeologists map and document shipwrecks such as the one off Anacapa.

“They’re helping us with our work,” said James Delgado, maritime historian for the National Park Service. About 14 miles out of Ventura, the wreckage off Anacapa is in waters controlled by Channel Islands National Park.

“This is a historically important wreck, and (the students) are adding to our understanding of it,” Delgado said.

Hoping to dive in the calm waters of the early morning, the 21 students had left Ventura aboard the Cal State research vessel Yellowfin at 7 a.m. on a recent Saturday. They were accompanied by Donald P. Morris, a park archeologist. Their immediate goal was to expand and clarify the preliminary, partial site map they carried, which park rangers had started to draw in 1983. Descending about 30 feet to the wreckage, class members held crude plasticized maps while fanning the sand away from encrusted pieces of debris in search of artifacts.

To the untrained eye, the Winfield Scott no longer much resembles a ship. After 135 years under water, the once-proud vessel now consists in the main of a series of encrusted mounds encasing debris scattered over several hundred yards.

Most of the gold the ship carried has long since been picked up by scavengers. What remains of the vessel is a large, circular structure believed to be part of the paddle wheel; several bits of iron machinery, including the boiler, and a large number of artifacts from shipboard stores, passengers’ baggage and provisions. Hidden in the sand, the objects are sometimes uncovered by the underwater swirl of storms or the fanning of divers.

The first dive went uneventfully. Working in teams, the divers spread out over the wreck to survey its extent in smooth, clear waters. Then the sea kicked up, making the second dive difficult. Using all their strength, the divers swam against a current to reach the wreck and sift through its sand as the murkiness engulfed them.

It was a task for which they were well-prepared. Meeting weekly for 10 weeks, the students had heard presentations from experts on topics ranging from how to survey and map an underwater archeological site to how to collect and preserve artifacts.

Offered through the university’s extension program, the course carried three units of credit. In addition to attending lectures, the students--representing a variety of disciplines and professions--were required to write papers on various California wrecks, relying on original research.

To be sure, they were not the first to visit the watery grave site of the Winfield Scott. They were, however, among the first to visit it for a serious scientific purpose.

That purpose was enhanced last year when federal lawmakers enacted legislation called the Abandoned Shipwreck Act.

Conflict in Laws

The law is meant to protect the estimated 50,000 to 100,000 shipwrecks--including several thousand off the California coast--lying in waters regulated by state and federal governments. For at least 200 years, they had been governed by federal admirality law, which asserts that whoever finds a wreck has the right to salvage it and keep at least some of the take. While some states had enacted their own shipwreck legislation, the courts had been inconsistent in declaring whether state laws took precedence over admirality law.

Last year’s legislation changed all that. First it assigned ownership of historically significant shipwrecks to the federal government, which then transferred title to the states in which they were found. Second, it encouraged each state to establish a program by which to study and protect its wrecks.

In California, many see the Cal State Long Beach course as the beginning of just such a program.

“There are a lot of ships out there deteriorating, and there’s not enough money or trained archeologists to study them,” said Jack Hunter, a professional marine archeologist who taught the course with William B. Lee, director of the maritime museum in San Pedro. “What we’d like to develop is a cadre of knowledgeable (amateur) divers around the museum to actively survey and investigate shipwrecks with scientific precision and expertise.”

Added Lee, who said the museum plans to offer the course regularly: “There’s an endless supply of volunteer sport divers who eventually get tired of just going out for game. We can recruit them for this much-needed work.”

Until recently, it seems, many of those divers--who number an estimated 56,000 in California--were part of the problem. Equipped with private or chartered boats, they routinely raided coastal shipwrecks, retrieving the choicest artifacts as mantel decorations. Two years ago, 19 divers on a single boat were cited for illegally removing artifacts from the Winfield Scott, which, because it is in a national park, receives special protection.

The incident sent shock waves through the sport diving community, with most of those cited eventually paying heavy fines.

Archeologists say that such plundering is extremely damaging to their efforts to reconstruct the past. Once an artifact is removed without documentation, they say, much of its value to history is lost. This is especially true in a shipwreck such as the Winfield Scott, they say, which affords one of the few remaining examples of the maritime history of the California Gold Rush, a particularly colorful and important period of the state’s past.

“The Scott and its sister ships were the Concordes of their day,” Morris said.

Recently the ship was deemed of sufficient historic interest to be placed on the National Register, a list of historically significant sites maintained by the National Park Service. Only five other California shipwrecks have rated that status, according to Delgado, with another 11 nominated and awaiting approval by the secretary of the interior.

The students found nothing of significance on their recent Saturday dive. But they vowed to return, and Morris said they will be welcome.

“It’s slow, painstaking work,” he said, “but I think this represents a better attitude (than in the past). We as a society are realizing that there are valuable lessons to be learned under water, that these wrecks are good for more than producing mantel souvenirs.”

Class member Jackson Pearson could not have agreed more.

“I’m very pleased,” he said as the Yellowfin turned toward home. “(Preserving these ships) is a good deed for our grandchildren.”