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hipwrecks have always filled my imagination. When I was kid
I used to pull the world maps out of our National Geographic
magazines and paste them onto the ceiling so I could lie in
bed, look at all the faraway places and dream of the things
I could discover. At that young age, my fantasies were of
ancient, treasure-filled ships in strange seas, chests of gold and piles of
priceless china, all just waiting to be found by a fearless explorer.
Dreams never die easily, and a long decade later I was finally able
to follow up on that early idea. When I did, however, it wasn’t the
warm, clear sea of childhood memory I dived into. Instead, it was
the cold, dark and murky water of New York City. My mentors were
a dying breed of hardcore wreck explorers who followed that basic
human impulse to peer into the darkness and see what is there.
They didn’t dream of adventure, they lived it. They touched history,
brought it to life and imbued a young 17-year-old with a yearning to
explore shipwrecks of all ages, sorts and sizes all around the world.
I didn’t just want to explore, I wanted to learn more about
the thousands of ships that disappeared without a trace, to learn
their secrets and do my part in bringing the sometimes valiant,
sometimes horrifying and always human stories to the world of the
dry and living. But I quickly realized that telling stories of ships that
were lost is difficult, because, well, the ships were lost. So before I
could realize any part of my new ambition, I had one small thing to
do: I had to find a shipwreck.
Looking for lost ships is not a new endeavor; as long as ships
have been lost people have been searching for them. Some look for
wrecks to recover lost property (insurance companies and owners),
while others seek rewards for finding the lost property (salvors and
wreckers). Some are just looking for loot (treasure hunters), while
archaeologists search for wrecks to learn from the past. There are
likely as many reasons to look for lost ships as there are ships on
the bottom, but the many disparate groups who look are bound
by one common feature: the unbelievably costly, time-consuming,
By evan kovacs
The
shipwreck hunting
of
The bow of the RMS Titanic, located by
Woods Hole and IFREMER in 1985.
EMORY KRISTOF/NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC