Modern Science Unveils Ancient History Lost At Sea

There arose … a tempestuous wind, called Euroclydon, … (and) all hope that we should be saved was then taken away.

- Acts, Chapter 27, the Bible

The skipper probably was in a hurry. He had a heavy load of Egyptian granite carved into columns and building blocks and a shipment of good Italian pottery. And there was money to be made 400 miles away in Carthage.

So one day about 2,000 years ago, a bold Roman mariner set out from Italy and, avoiding the safe route via Sicily, steered straight across the capricious Mediterranean on the fast but dangerous two-day run to North Africa.

Unlike St. Paul, whose brush with watery disaster was recorded in the Bible, the sailor never made it.

On Wednesday, for the first time in 20 centuries, the doomed captain’s story was recounted publicly, and underwater photographs of his still-neatly packed cargo were displayed, as a team of scientists unveiled the findings of a pioneering exploration that they said could revolutionize undersea archaeology.

In the age of computer imaging and fiber-optic cable, the term “lost at sea” may be obsolete.

Led by noted ocean explorer Robert D. Ballard, who in 1985 discovered the grave of the ocean liner Titanic, the team described last month’s culmination of the Skerki Bank Project, a long-term examination of eight shipwrecks along the cross-sea trade route from Carthage to Rome.

Speaking in Washington at the National Geographic Society, which co-sponsored the project, Ballard and other members of the team said their expedition had uncovered the largest concentration of ancient shipwrecks ever found in the deeper regions of the world’s seas.

They said they conducted research 2,500 feet below the surface with a combination of technologies - including a strange, wheeled Navy submarine armed with spotlights and long-range sonar - that now opens vast expanses of the Earth’s oceans to archaeologists.

And they described the pressures on ancient mariners, much like those on shippers of today, to move such goods as wine, cookware, kitchen utensils and “pre-fab” building materials as quickly and efficiently as possible in order to make a profit.

“They were capitalists; they were entrepreneurs,” Ballard said of the merchant sailors. “They’re taking risks. They’re taking gambles. If they make it, they make money. If not, they end up at the bottom of the sea.”

The research began in 1989, when evidence of a cluster of sunken ships was discovered and initially explored by the team off the coast of Tunisia, ancient Carthage. Scientists returned in 1995, and, finally, for six weeks in May and June of this year.

The scientists located the wrecks using the long-range sonar of the gray and orange Navy submarine, NR-1, which helped recover debris from the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, Ballard said.

Wrecks were found from the first century B.C., from the early centuries after Christ, and from the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. “NR-1 was finding a Roman … ship every other day, until we said, ‘Stop. That’s enough,”’ Ballard said.

Ballard, who now heads the new Institute for Exploration in Mystic, Conn., and the team’s chief archaeologist, Anna Marguerite McCann of Boston University, said the research details the busy and dangerous life of Mediterranean merchant sailors.

Sailing in two-masted, 100-foot-long wooden vessels, resembling those of the Vikings, the mariners transported huge loads of wine, fish oil, preserved fruit, stone building materials and often hundreds of passengers around the far-flung Roman empire.

Some vessels clung to the coastline, but others struck out across the often treacherous, and surprisingly deep, Mediterranean to make better time. as to open to archaeologists pristine, frigid and high-pressure ocean depths that have never before been probed.

So far, Ballard said, most underwater archaeology has been limited to depths of about 200 feet, where artifacts can be damaged by waves and scuba divers. Those areas make up only 4 percent of the world’s oceans.

Now, he said, exploration can go thousands of feet deep where the harsh environment acts as preserver, and can thus explore about 98 percent of Earth’s seas.

The average depth of the Mediterranean, for example, is 9,000 feet, he said, and there are pockets that are 12,000 feet deep.

“I’m convinced the deep sea holds a vast amount of human history,” Ballard said. “I think there’s more history in the deep sea than all the world’s museums of the world combined.”

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: WHAT THEY FOUND The relics include five ships from Roman times, lost between 100 B.C. and A.D. 400, plus one ship from an Islamic country from the 18th or 19th century, and two modern ships from the 1800s.