Teddy Tucker - the Bermudian who in the 1950's found the first underwater treasure in the New World and who has achieved almost legendary status in the scientific and historical communities for his encyclopedic knowledge of ships and shipbuilding, coins, bottles, ceramics, arms and marine wildlife - estimates that he and his colleagues have found 100 wrecks over the years, including the enigmatic one now known simply as ''the Frenchman,'' which Tucker's friend Billy McCallan discovered while being towed behind his own boat.Their best guess is that some 200 others still lie undetected amid the sands and shoals, overgrown by reefs or crushed to bits against the rocky shore. I choose not to dwell on the fact that my good fortune is the direct result of their ill fortune, of their stupendously bad luck in sailing east across the trackless Atlantic in blissful ignorance that they were heading directly toward the one infinitesimal speck in all the sea that could send them to the bottom: Bermuda. To feel a strand of rope that no man has touched in more than 200 years, to plunge a hand into a mass of indigo unseen since before America's Revolution, to fan away the sand and uncover a pair of leather shoe soles, one with a raised heel indicating a short leg or a clubfoot - these sensations allow me to travel in time on a ship of my own imagining. She was of ordinary design - the Chevy truck of her day - carrying ordinary cargo on ordinary routes.īut to me she is wonderful, for she lets me touch the past. It is unlikely that she will ever yield answers to her mysteries, for there is nothing special enough about her to warrant expensive, exhaustive academic exploration. Yes, some barrel tops were marked in French, but in the 17th and 18th centuries ships were often equipped adventitiously: English guns, Spanish coins, French wines, Chinese porcelain, Dutch stoneware. Yes, a few wooden plates were marked ''L.F.D.G.,'' which may have stood for ''Louis de France Dei Gratia.'' Then again, it may not have. Yes, a couple of pewter spoons carried a crest that included a fleur-de-lis, but study of a seven-volume compendium of 18th-century French heraldry failed to turn up the crest. Probably she was French, but after nearly five years of meticulous excavation, after analysis and study of artifacts by archeologists, historians, numismatists and experts in everything from weapons to crockery, no one knows for sure. She lived in the mid-1700's, that much I know, for the one hard, incontrovertible piece of evidence we have found is a single badly oxidized silver coin, a Spanish piece of eight, dated 1752. For what used to be 30 or 40 feet high, deck upon deck of bilge space and cargo space and living space what used to carry stout masts and square sails what was home to bold and questing men (or were they fearful, unwilling voyagers impressed from squalid dockside taverns?) has been squashed into a lumpy paste six or eight feet thick. She must have struck the reef over there and slid off into this sand hole and stuck, all of her, and wallowed and worked and rocked back and forth under the force of tide and current and countless storm seas, vanishing into the living coral and beneath the shifting sand until, back in 1983, a sharp-eyed Bermudian spotted an anomaly on the bottom and decided to investigate. Now she looks like something that spent a hundred years in a food processor and another hundred in a trash compactor. Once she was a ship, a few centuries ago. WHAT IS THIS THING? A ship, you say? Well, no.
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