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JOHN ROSBOROUGH
Marine archaeologist Jim Delgado rounding Cape Froward, southernmost tip of continental South America, in January 2005.
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MARC PIKE / OPEN ROAD PRODUCTIONS
The explorer, in 2005, is dwarfed by the stern of the clipper ship Ambassador, beached and wrecked on the shores of the Straits of Magellan in Patagonia.
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GARY WILDMAN
Jim Delgado films a CBC news segment in 2006 about the Northwest Passage.
Jim Delgado Brings His Love of Exploration to Gales of November
For more than three decades, marine archaeologist James P. Delgado has explored shipwrecks. He’s explored the Titanic in a submersible, and in 2010 served as chief scientist for a project using sonar to create the first comprehensive map of the Titanic wreck site and send 3-D images to the surface. His undersea explorations include discoveries of Carpathia, the ship that rescued Titanic’s survivors (and was sunk by a German U-boat in 1918 near Ireland), and the “ghost ship” Mary Celeste.
He is perhaps best known for hosting the documentary series “The Sea Hunters” (2001-2006) on National Geographic International television. Other television credits include specials for the Discovery Channel, National Geographic Explorer, A&E, the History Channel and ABC.
He has surveyed the USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor and the sunken fleet of warships used for atomic bomb tests at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific. He’s done work at the USS Monitor, sunk in the Civil War.
Jim, director of Maritime Heritage in the office of National Marine Sanctuaries for the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), has worked on projects and dived in Lakes Erie, Huron and Michigan. He has relatives who settled in Duluth and Hermantown, Minnesota, where a number of them are buried.
The historian, diver, curator and author of more than 30 books will be the keynote speaker November 3 at this year’s 25th Gales of November program in Duluth, the main fundraiser for the Lake Superior Marine Museum Association. He spoke to Lake Superior Magazine’s Bob Berg about his work.
LSM: Have you ever been to Lake Superior?
JD: I have been to the Lake, visiting historic sites and Duluth. I just have not been underwater in Superior yet.
LSM: Have you explored other Great Lakes?
JD: Where I’ve spent the majority of time exploring or looking at shipwrecks has been on Lake Huron and in Lake Erie. In particular, the most recent project I worked on was one where I was able to work with a group of very talented folks from Woods Hole (Oceanographic Institution), from Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary and a number of other partners (and) with five exceptional kids – high school students from Saginaw, Michigan, to do Project Ship Hunt, which, funded by Sony and Intel, took five students from Arthur Hill High School to work with us to potentially find a shipwreck in Lake Erie. And they found not one but two (schooner M.F. Merrick that sank in 1889 and steel freighter Etruria, than sank in 1905, both off Presque Isle, Michigan). A great project. Not only were two previously undiscovered shipwrecks found, but these students did the work. It wasn’t a look-over-our-shoulder approach, but rather, here’s how we do this. Work with us. You do some of this research yourself. Here, drive the boat. Where should we dive? Make the decisions. And it was wonderful, absolutely wonderful to work with them. We did a tremendous documentary on it.
LSM: Where was it shown?
JD: It was shown on Current TV … I have to say it’s one of the finest projects I’ve ever been privileged to work on. I’ve had a very lucky career, I have to say. Been able to see some incredible things, work with some wonderful people and just touch history. And then to be able to share it with folks is just tremendous, too.
LSM: Freshwater diving versus saltwater diving: What’s the difference when it comes to shipwrecks?
JD: I think freshwater preservation certainly is incredible. I think where I’ve dived in circumstances where it’s fresh or near fresh, you see shipwrecks in an unparalleled state of preservation. I’ve only seen preservation that comes close to it in deep-ocean environments, and I mean deep-ocean environments. But diving in the Baltic, diving in the Great Lakes, you are confronted with the realization that if the bottom of the seas and the Lakes are museums, then some of the quality galleries are the Great Lakes and, say, the Baltic. The remains of the vessels themselves, particularly wooden ships and the artifacts in them, I mean, you are seeing things that are so much better preserved that it takes some of the guesswork out.
LSM: At the Gales of November event, what ships will you will talk about?
JD: Well, I’ll certainly talk about Titanic and the site itself, the history of the site since it’s been found and some of the more recent discoveries that have been made about the wreck site. ... Basically what I want to do, without going into too much detail on any one of them, is to give folks a tour of these great museums of the sea, by which I included the Lakes. That reflects our ongoing, millennial relationship as humanity with the sea. How it’s been one of the key factors in defining who we are. ... How it has played a role in our history and our culture, and how these various shipwreck sites reflect that relationship and also key events in our history, from USS Arizona to ancient shipwrecks in the Mediterranean, to vessels that in more recent times speak to events of national significance, like the USS Monitor. Or wrecks that, while not famous individually, like some of the shipwrecks at Thunder Bay (Michigan), speak to life on the Lakes. The role of the Great Lakes in particular as a highway by which goods flowed from these various shoreside communities via the Lakes, via the Erie Canal to feed the American economy. How taconite fueled the industrial age through iron and steel, how timber from the lakes helped build America, and how the Lakes were a lifeline of American commerce. And how, as ships flowed out with that commerce, they came in with people to settle and to build up the states that we all know today, including my own family, who landed … in 1867 in New York from Prussia and made their way to Minnesota and settled there to work in the forest, to participate as the forests came down in the creation of farms. Not only did they become Americans, but in that process, they helped build America. And building America a community at a time. So I want to talk about how ships link us to all of that.
LSM: So is it possible to preserve the remains of the Titanic?
JD: Oh, it’s absolutely possible. You look at something like the National Parks Marine Sanctuaries – the idea being, you take sites like this and there’s active work by people to see them protected. Protected doesn’t mean that nobody can visit them; it doesn’t mean that you can’t learn from them. It’s simply a question of let’s not disassemble them or take them apart to go into private collections in some cases. Let’s study them and give people a guide to what they’re seeing and help them understand it
LSM: What’s one thing that surprised you about Titanic?
JD: I think people talk about how Titanic is going away and corroding. What struck me was the level of preservation and the incredible things that one sees down there. When you are down there, when you’re exploring, you see with Titanic that it is a museum in many ways, even with change that is happening. And all the shipwrecks do change, even the ones in fresh water. What you see is places that speak to you powerfully, because the stories that are associated with them are real. And you get that when you’re there. It’s not in a book. It’s not in a film. You’re actually looking at a spot where those lifeboats were being loaded, where families said goodbye
LSM: Is it hard to believe that you’re looking at it?
JD: It is. It is. And I think that’s one of the reasons why I feel so lucky, and that’s why I feel compelled to share what I see with people. I’m not doing my archaeology just to talk to other archaeologists or to write a technical report. I think what you see is so compelling and so powerful and it’s so relevant in many ways to stories of who we are, that you come back from these (shipwrecks) and you do want to talk about it. You want to make it accessible.
LSM: One of the things you’ve stated is that after 27 years of exploration, there remains much to be learned about Titanic. What is one thing that you would like to learn about it?
JD: I think the outstanding question that I have is fully getting a more detailed sense of how that marine environment down there is affecting Titanic and how Titanic is affecting that marine environment itself. And in that, it’s more than just history. That’s something that speaks to the heart of a critical issue that we face today as human beings. And that is: health of the oceans. What struck me powerfully in this last visit to Titanic as the images came back from the bottom – in addition to the history that confronts you, in addition to the ship as a unique memorial and as a museum – is the paper garbage, the plastic cups, the beer cans that litter that site. And, as well, the processes by which the ship is slowly returning to a natural environment as it breaks down and changes. People ask me, “How is it that somebody could throw garbage at the Titanic site?” And I said, “Well, I think the question is bigger. It’s how can people throw garbage into the ocean? Where the ocean is the means of replenishment of a fair amount of oxygen. The health of over half of the food in this world comes from the ocean. So why would we throw garbage into our food chain? We pollute it with radiation. Why would we throw things into the ocean, as we’ve done in the past, like barrels of nuclear waste, without understanding how that metal will ultimately change and corrode on the bottom? And so Titanic has been studied at length because it’s such a famous ship with an iconic pull on the public’s consciousness. But by the same token, that study has given us insight into more than Titanic. … When you look at other wrecks, which slowly are deteriorating at various depths, and which contain oil. When you look at ships containing high levels of explosives or other toxic waste, and how is that going to be transmitted out of a shipwreck as it deteriorates into the marine environment and, ultimately perhaps, into the food chain. So for me, studying Titanic, the next steps are to really better understand those processes … and begin to make some decisions. In the past, the phrase ‘deep 6’ meant you put something in the water and it was gone. And we now know that to not be true.
LSM: Another site you’ve explored is the USS Arizona. Is there something there that you can tell about that you learned?
JD: We’ve learned a great deal about Arizona and how it died, and I think that’s important for a couple reasons. One is not just the forensic analysis of the battle damage and how that compares and in some cases contrasts with memories of that day. But I think that there is something else for me that spoke, and that was, as you swim over those decks, what you see is evidence not just of the damage and how Arizona died, but you see the evidence of how the crew that day fought to save that ship and save their shipmates, and in that, pretty powerful stories that, I think, people have forgotten that that sort of thing happened until 9/11. There’s a tangle of fire hose, which dropped exactly where the crew was, where they were fighting the fires when the final blast came and their ship erupted into a fireball and they were caught up and disintegrated in that fireball.
LSM: On the Great Lakes, is there a shipwreck you would like to explore?
JD: No individual wreck. But people will ask me, ‘What’s your favorite wreck?’ I always like to say it’s the next one. It doesn’t have to be a famous ship. Vessels that have stories to tell, that connect us to real people and to the events of the past and help bring that alive, that’s what speaks to me.
I love it. I just love being able to work on this stuff. Like I said, I feel lucky, and part of that luck is meeting a lot of folks who care about it, who have an interest to be able to connect it with families. Folks who – it’s their families, it’s their relatives, some of whom are still down there in these ships. Being able to be associated with something like that, it means the world to me. I don’t study the past and I don’t study shipwrecks to just look at things. My interest and my passion is people, and archaeology is all about people. And history is about people, and not just the rich or the powerful or the famous. It’s everyone. And what I’ve been able to do, and people I’ve been able to work with, many of them believe in the same things. And it is giving an opportunity for people that otherwise would have been silenced through circumstances in the past, whether gender, race. Whether it’s socioeconomics or society, or just the fact that they were swallowed up by the ocean. To be able to give them a chance, in what they left behind, to speak to us and to share their stories, and in some cases to learn more about them individually, has been important.
Gales of November
Lake Superior Marine Museum Association
218-727-2497, www.lsmma.com
Friday, November 2
Noon, Grandma’s Sports Garden: Bob Krumenaker, superintendent of Apostle Islands National Lakeshore, presents “Managing the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore: A Behind the Scenes Look at the Challenges of Maintaining Maritime Heritage.”
Afternoon tour options: Great Lakes Aquarium; Lake Superior Maritime Collections, University of Wisconsin-Superior and Fairlawn Mansion & Museum.
6 p.m., Lake Superior Maritime Visitor Center: Lake Superior Magazine hosts the opening Gala Reception.
Saturday, November 3
8:30 a.m.-6 p.m., Duluth Entertainment Convention Center: Exhibitors and vendors all day. Presentations by many speakers, including C. Patrick Labadie, Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary, on “The Evolution of Great Lakes Ship Construction;” Terry Pepper, Great Lakes Lighthouse Keepers Association, on building the nation’s most isolated lighthouse at Stannard Rock; and Steve Daniels, Great Lakes Shipwreck Preservation Society, on “Bringing Maritime History Back Into View.”
Noon, Luncheon speaker is Dr. James Delgado, director of Maritime Heritage, office of National Marine Sanctuaries, NOAA, on “The Museum Beneath the Seas.”
6-7 p.m., Grandma’s Saloon & Grill: Closing reception.
The Saturday package (with lunch) is $40, or $20 for students 16 and under. Preregistration required for luncheons; on-site registration available for other activities. Full schedule and other details online.