Diving Into the Past : History: The Park Service tries to chart and protect turn-of-the-century shipwrecks off the coast before age and modern pirates take their toll.

Amid the mustard-colored kelp in a cove at Anacapa Island, pieces of machinery from a Gold Rush-era steamship nestle in the sand. On the ocean floor near San Miguel, a sealing schooner that once smuggled opium and immigrants to California resists the shifting tides.

These shipwrecks off the Ventura coast offer an occasional glimpse of gold coins or brass portholes, but most recreational divers are lucky to spot a plank of soiled lumber.

Still, it’s state history that you can’t find in area museums.

Ranging in size from 36 to 307 feet, at least 13 historical wrecks have been found within one nautical mile of the Channel Islands, and officials at the Channel Island’s National Park Service believe that about 22 additional sites of turn-of-the-century shipwrecks remain to be found.

“The typical end for a vessel, a 19th-Century vessel, was wrecking somewhere,” park archeologist Don Morris said.

Morris, who makes 70 dives a year, researches the ships’ pasts in the UCLA library, then sketches treasure maps of a sort that one day may be available for park visitors.

To the archeologist’s eye, a few pieces of machinery offer a mine of information regarding the area’s nautical history.

“The shipwrecks are tangible remnants of our past. They’re busted up and spread all around the area,” he said. But “it’s important to look at it not as a brass mine or a treasure hunt for little golden knickknacks.”

Instead, the wrecks offer a sample of Southern California life before the automobile, when maritime commerce tied the West Coast to the rest of the world.

“Before there were freeways, there were railroads. Before there were railroads, there were ships,” Morris said, adding that they offered the cheapest and safest means of travel.

The 53-year-old archeologist has been gathering information from century-old Los Angeles Times clippings since he went to work for the Channel Islands park in 1985. His library research helps him locate the wrecks and draft maps of the remains.

“A shipwreck is a pretty hard thing to find,” he said. “Places that generally generate shipwrecks are not often nice places to dive.”

Weather conditions, an intimidating underwater environment and offshore rocks place limitations on an aquatic researcher, he said.

“The ocean is so big,” said Morris, who has explored the islands’ caves and crannies with Mylar, sheets of plastic that enable him to plot his findings underwater. “Even when you know where the ship is, it can still be extremely aggravating.”

In 1987, the importance of Morris’ project intensified when the district attorneys’ offices from Ventura and Santa Barbara counties filed 32 criminal charges against divers from a Los Angeles-based club, the California Wreck Divers, who had allegedly pillaged the Winfield Scott wreck with hacksaws and hammers.

Park managers realized at the time how limited their information was regarding the location of the wrecks and the valuables there, said Kate Faulkner, the park’s resource manager.

“It really highlighted the fact that we definitely had a problem with divers going in and damaging the wrecks and looting resources,” Faulkner said. “In order to prosecute, we have to have fairly extensive knowledge of what was associated with the wreck in the first place.”

Morris has expanded the park’s knowledge of Anacapa Island beyond the Winfield Scott wreck with histories and maps of 13 historical wrecks.

Park management aims to use Morris’ research to provide cruises to the sites within the next five years, Faulkner said.

The largest of the wrecks and Morris’ favorite, the Cuba, rests a quarter-mile off Point Bennett at San Miguel Island. Parts of the Cuba’s 397-foot frame still are intact, and divers today speculate on whether they’ll catch a glimpse of the passenger freighter’s cargo--silver bullion.

A massive anchor chain and anchor of the Aggi, a cargo ship, lie in about 15 feet of water at the Talcott Shoal at Santa Rosa Island. The steel-hulled vessel brought grain out of San Francisco before it wrecked on the offshore rocks in 1915.

The Kate and Anna was on a seal-hunting sealing trip in 1902 when it sank. Although licensed for fishing, it earned a reputation for smuggling Chinese immigrants and opium into California.

On an autumn afternoon, Morris suits up, checks the compression on his air tank and drops, feet first, into the water. About 150 feet from a cove on Anacapa Island’s northern end, Morris dives past kelp plants to point out the Winfield Scott’s paddle wheel hub. Afterward, he draws additional lines on his map, thrilled with the most minute discovery.

The Winfield Scott, a wooden-hulled steamship, ran aground in 1853 with 825 passengers aboard, mostly miners returning to the East Coast with nearly $2 million in gold. All the miners survived.

“Everyone says the Winfield Scott’s a mess; it’s just a random assortment of junk. That’s not true,” Morris said. “This thing is not any more messed up than your average archeological site.

“The thing we need to accomplish here is a basic understanding of where our underwater resources are located and what they are.”

Today, “the vast majority of stuff you see down there is only stuff an archeologist would love, not material that’s innately precious,” Morris said.

It’s unclear how much if any gold remains on the Winfield Scott, although the California Wreck Divers charged in 1987 admitted to taking up to 160 coins during a 20-year period, said Jack Fitzgerald, the park’s chief ranger.

Of the 32 criminal charges filed in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties against members of the California Wreck Divers, 26 divers pleaded guilty and paid fines up to $750, two cases were dismissed, one resulted in a mistrial and three failed to appear in court, said Fitzgerald, who has summarized the cases for the park.

Of the 20 civil cases filed in federal court, 13 paid fines up to $10,000. Rulings are pending on the remaining seven cases, he said. The dive boat’s captain spent 20 days in jail and the president of the club worked 30 days of community service, he said.

Park rangers, who enforce state and federal laws regarding the wrecks, continue to conduct undercover investigations to prevent modern-day plundering.

The Park Service finds about three incidents of pillaging each year but has not filed charges since 1987 because of lack of evidence, Fitzgerald said.

“As pieces are taken away, it’s not as much fun to go there and visit the site,” Fitzgerald said. “Once they’re gone, they’re gone forever.”