Текст книги "Adventures of a Sea Hunter: In Search of Famous Shipwrecks"

Автор книги: Clive Cussler

Соавторы: James Delgado
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James Delgado, Foreword by Clive Cussler
Adventures of a Sea Hunter: In Search of Famous Shipwrecks

DEDICATION

This is for my mother, who had to tolerate human bones and stone tools in her bathtub as I learned about the past as a teenage archeologist. And for making her cry as a middle-aged archeologist who dives in dangerous places because, as she points out, I’ll always be her little boy.

This is also for Ann, who keeps the home fires burning while juggling a career and an often missing-in-action archeologist.

And last, for Beau, my faithful feline companion during many an evening’s writing marathon. It’s not the same without him.

His stories were what frightened people worst of all. Dreadful stories they were – about hanging, and walking the plank, and storms at sea, and the Dry Tortugas, and wild deeds and places on the Spanish Main.

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, TREASURE ISLAND

FOREWORD
BY CLIVE CUSSLER

Ships and their crews have been sailing off into oblivion since the dawn of recorded history. Through the millennia, more than a million ships have sunk or gone missing, along with untold numbers of their crews. A million ships is an impressive statistic not believed by most landsmen. Yet, to call the seven seas a vast cemetery is an understatement.

During the ages, storms have wreaked havoc on entire fleets, some consisting of more than a thousand ships, that were torn apart and hurled to the bottom. The first tragedy may have taken place when one of our Cro-Magnon ancestors happily discovered he could float on water atop a log, at least until he fell off and drowned. From that time forward, huge ships, small boats and men have vanished in an unending surge beneath the waves into dark watery depths that have yet to resurrect their dead.

Except for divers holding their breath and diving in shallow water, shipwrecks seemed as impossible to reach and touch as a rock on the moon. Finally, less than two hundred years ago, divers in hard hats, breathing air pumped down from the surface, started working on the sea bottom and riverbeds. At long last, the sea begrudging began to give up her secrets.

Treasure and salvage came into their own. Salvage became a thriving enterprise, while treasure hunting was about as hit or miss as buying stocks in a bear market. Suddenly, shipwrecks in shallower waters became accessible. The boom was on, and shipwrecks were discovered and studied in a prodigious number of projects. Soon, modern technology enabled the salvage of wrecks thousands of feet deep beneath the sea’s surface.

The dead in the depths of the sea have no tombstones, no grave markers, nothing to identify their remains that quickly cease to exist. There is an eerie feeling about diving on a shipwreck. You can sense the presence of the crew that died with the ship. A wizened old diver once said that swimming through a shipwreck was like walking through a haunted house.

The last to come on the underwater scene were the marine archeologists. These are about as strange and diverse people as you could ever hope to meet. They seldom become wealthy, and their main claim to fame is in their reports on shipwreck explorations, surveys and artifact removal for conservation and study. Some publish books on their expeditions, some teach, while many work in the commercial end, surveying for government or private corporations that develop properties along waterfronts which might contain history. Not until an accredited archeologist declares the site free of historical artifacts can they begin construction.

Nautical archeologists fight like the furies to preserve a wreck and keep it out of the hands of salvers, treasure hunters and sport divers who are out to pillage shipwrecks of historic significance. Mostly they win, but often they lose the battle to protect a wreck from looters. Their biggest problem is money. Few state, local and federal government agencies have the funding to preserve shipwrecks, so the archeologists squeak by on shoestring budgets from one project to the next.

One who has made a difference is Jim Delgado, a man whose dedication and hard-earned efforts have made a contribution to the field of nautical archeology that cannot be equaled. Of all the archeologists I’ve known in my years of chasing after historical shipwrecks, he is one of the few who has his feet on the ground and knows more about lost ships than the Congressional Library and Lloyd’s of London wrapped up together. His exploits beneath the sea have become legendary.

I’m honored and privileged to call him a friend.

INTRODUCTION
THE GREAT MUSEUM OF THE SEA

For the last thirteen years, I have shared my passion for the past with the public through books and newspaper articles, as a television “talking head” and host, and as a museum director. After I learned how to dive and embarked on a career with the U.S. National Park Service, I traveled the United States, and then the world, in search of shipwrecks. Not all of them were famous, but in the last few decades, the wrecks I’ve been privileged to see and explore have included some notable ones. But what really keeps me fired up with a passion for the past are the connections to everyday people like you and me. Often, it’s an unidentified wreck or the mute evidence of a life forever interrupted that moves me, and grounds the scientist in the firm reality of the human condition. Recently, I’ve enjoyed a new set of adventures “in search of famous shipwrecks,” thanks to John Davis, producer of the National Geographic International television series The Sea Hunters.Working with John, together with co-host and famous novelist, raconteur and shipwreck hunter Clive Cussler, master diver Mike Fletcher, his diving son Warren and a great crew behind the camera, is a wonderful experience. We’ve made dives on many of history’s legendary ships, from Titanicto lost warships and fabled fleets like the one Kublai Khan sent to conquer Japan in 1274. It’s great fun to work with Clive, whose passion is wrecks, particularly finding them when no one else can. With his blessing, we’ve joined the extended National Underwater and Marine Agency (NUMA) family that he founded, working in the field as more of his “sea hunters” scouting the world’s waters for shipwrecks.

In those seven seas, we’ve encountered history and the stories of the people who make history. Part of the record of humanity’s achievements, its triumphs and tragedies, rests out of sight on the seabed: the greatest museum of all lies at the bottom of the sea. My desire to see and touch the past and share it with others continues thanks to the friends and colleagues who have joined me on the ongoing quest. What I’ve learned along the way from these shipwrecks, both the unknown and the famous, is that they all have tales to tell. Sometimes their broken bones tell me who they are and how they died. Sometimes the story of their birth, their careers and the personalities who sailed in them also come to light, resurrected from the darkness of the deep or the back rooms of an archive. Nearly every time I dive, I am reminded of archeologist Howard Carter’s famous comment at the door to Tutankhamen’s tomb. No one had passed that threshold in thousands of years. Carter opened a small hole and held up a light as he peered into the darkness of millennia, now briefly illuminated again. “What do you see?” he was asked. “Wonderful things,” he answered.

No matter how many times I dive, how many shipwrecks I see, the awe, the excitement, the thrill of discovery, are always there. I, too, see wonderful things. And as an archeologist, educator and museum director, I bring back to the surface what I have seen. I bring back photographs, images, impressions, stories and, occasionally, items – artifacts – to share with others. I only raise an artifact after I or my colleagues have studied it on the bottom, mapped it, photographed it and learned how the piece fits into the puzzle that is the wreck as a whole. I raise artifacts that have the power to tell a story and place them in the laboratory for treatment, where the ravages of the sea and time are halted or reversed, so that they can go on display in public museums. There, artifacts – the “real thing” of history, history that people can see with their own eyes – make the past come alive.

I have had the privilege of diving on wrecks around the world and bringing their stories back from the ocean’s floor. From 1982 to 1991, as a member of a U.S. National Park Service team called the Submerged Cultural Resources Unit, I dived with a group of men and women committed to preserving shipwrecks and telling their stories. They included iron-hulled sailing ships swept onto Florida reefs by hurricanes, ocean steamers strewn along rocky shores on both coasts of the Americas, wooden-hulled schooners sunk in the Great Lakes and warships on the bottom of the Pacific. We mapped, photographed, researched, studied and then shared what we learned with the public through museum displays, books and magazine articles, television screens and newspapers. Since leaving government service thirteen years ago to become the director of a maritime museum, I have continued to dive and study wrecks. Now, thanks to The Sea Huntersshow and its television audience of forty million people around the world, I have an even greater ability to share these exciting discoveries.

^{James Delgado in the water examining the Civil War-era submarine Sub Marine Explorer. Marc Pike}

I have dived on many ships in the past two and a half decades. They include the Civil War gunboat USS Pickettin North Carolina, the Revolutionary War transport HMS Betsy(sunk at the Battle of Yorktown in 1788), the steamship Winfield Scott(lost off the California coast during the gold rush) and the aircraft carrier Saratoga(swamped and partly crushed in a 1946 atomic test at Bikini Atoll). I have dived in the freezing waters of the Arctic to study the wreck of Maud, the last command of polar explorer Roald Amundsen. There are many others, and you are about to share those adventures in the pages that follow.

Sadly, in those same years, I have also seen serious damage done to wrecks by thoughtless souvenir seekers and treasure hunters. In Mexico, while studying the wreck of the brig Somers—the only ship in the U.S. Navy to suffer a mutiny and whose story inspired Melville to write Billy Budd—I discovered that souvenir hunters had ripped into the ship’s stern, taking some of the small arms, swords and the ship’s chronometer. We never got them back. They either crumbled into dust without treatment, or were treated and sold on the black market. This happens too often. I also have watched countless auctions of artifacts from shipwrecks, raised by treasure hunters and sold off to the highest bidder, usually not museums, as most museums will not participate in activities that turn archeological relics into commodities for sale. Our role is to encourage understanding and appreciation of the past, of other cultures and of who we are. We work to encourage science and knowledge. Wrenching a porthole off a wreck or digging into a ballast pile on the bottom to take a copper spike home is as wrong as systematically mining a wreck of its artifacts and then selling them off with some hype, often abetted by the media.

A few years ago, I went on a trip to Bermuda, a graveyard of lost ships and home to one of the world’s great maritime museums. In a souvenir shop, I saw a brick with a maker’s stamp from San Francisco. I had only seen that stamp once before, in the ballast of a mid-nineteenth century wreck in the North Pacific that I was still trying to identify. I asked where the brick came from. “A shipwreck off the coast,” I was told. Did they know what ship? Where had it come from? How old was it? How had this brick from far-off San Francisco reached the Caribbean? Where had the wrecked ship gone in her travels? The shopkeeper didn’t know. A local diver had pulled it off the bottom a long time ago, and others had followed to strip the wreck clean. The souvenir shop, and others like it, had been selling bits and pieces of the wreck to tourists for years. This was an opportunity lost, a story never told. The divers, the shops, the buyers who wanted a “piece of the past,” had scattered the pieces of the puzzle all over the globe, and now the puzzle will never be assembled to reveal the whole picture.

It is those pictures, the connections that these wrecks have not just to the great sweep of history but to individual lives, to stories of people like you and me, that compel me to explore and investigate. My life has been defined by a quest to learn about the past and share it. This is the story of that quest, as related by the stories of the lost ships in the great museum of the sea.

CHAPTER ONE
GRAVEYARD OF THE PACIFIC

OFF CAPE DISAPPOINTMENT, WASHINGTON

The long, uninterrupted swells of the north Pacific gather momentum as they surge eastward across thousands of miles of open water to break, finally, on the shoals and rocks of the northern coast of the American continent. On that rough and savage shoreline is the mouth of the Columbia, the great and mighty river that divides Oregon and Washington.

At the mouth of the Columbia, buttressed by the two small settlements of Astoria, Oregon, and Ilwaco, Washington, the river’s burden of silt and sand spreads out into the ocean, forming a massive “bar” at the entrance. The bulk of the bar catches the force of the open sea, and as a result the transition zone from ocean to river is a dangerous one that surprises unwary mariners – the area is a graveyard of ships drowned by the force of huge waves that surge over the bar’s shallows. More than two thousand vessels, from mighty square-riggers and freighters to hardworking fish boats, have been caught in the bar’s trap and lost, along with countless lives. And yet, because this bar is an obstacle that must be overcome to engage in trade on the Columbia, with its ports full of produce, wheat, lumber and fish, for more than two centuries seafarers have braved it and their chances to enter the great river of the west.

Efforts to make the passage safer commenced in the mid-nineteenth century with the installation of a lighthouse at Cape Disappointment and continued with the construction of breakwaters and the marking of a channel through the shoals. But the power of nature can never be tamed, and the government’s money has perhaps more effectively been spent upholding the century-old traditions of the United States Life-Saving Service and its successor, the U.S. Coast Guard. There is no rougher or more dangerous place to ply the trade of the lifesaver than here, at the mouth of the Columbia, a grim reality measured by the memorials to those who laid down their own lives so that others might survive, and by the fact that it is here that America’s lifesavers come to learn their trade at Cape Disappointment’s National Motor Lifeboat School. It is not for the faint of heart or the timid – the sea is a rough teacher, and the Columbia River bar, if you relax your guard, will kill you.

All of these thoughts, and the lessons of history evident in the lists of lost ships and images of crushed, broken and mangled hulls, fill my head as the Coast Guard’s motor lifeboat pitches and rolls on the bar. The lifeboat lifts high on a wave, into the bright blue sky, before dropping into the trough of the next wave, so that all I see is the dark gray-green water towering high above, blocking out the sun. Then, as the boat turns, the water crashes down, swirling and thundering as it sweeps over the deck. Then, suddenly, it is gone, as the plucky lifeboat sheds the sea and gives itself a shake, just like a dog, and climbs the next wave. It is both terrifying and exhilarating. The skill of the Coast Guard coxswain and the fact that I’m dressed in a survival suit with a crash helmet on my head and am tied down to the deck by a harness that tethers me tightly so that even if I fall I will not be swept away, add to my confidence. My fellow archeologists share a shaky grin with me, savoring the risk while not acknowledging the fear in our eyes.

The hours we spend in this lifeboat experiencing the waters of the bar are a lesson in the power of the sea and the danger of the Columbia’s entrance, courtesy of the Coast Guard and the commander of the “Cape D” station, Lieutenant Commander Mike Montieth. Our team, assembled by the National Park Service (NPS), has come here to the graveyard of the Pacific to dive on a recently discovered wreck that may just be the earliest one yet found on this coast, the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) supply ship Isabella, lost on the Columbia bar in 1830. Montieth, who has already visited the wreck, has arranged this no-holds barred introduction to the Columbia so that we might better understand the dynamic and violent environment in which we are about to dive. As we ride the roller-coaster seas off Cape Disappointment, the team gains a new perspective on the predicament of Captain William Ryan and Isabella’screw more than 150 years ago.

ISABELLA:COLUMBIA RIVER, MAY 3, 1830

The Hudson’s Bay Company supply ship Isabellahad survived a long and hard six-month voyage from London’s docks to the “North West Coast,” marked by rough seas, a stormy passage around Cape Horn that had damaged the ship and a mutinous carpenter whom Captain William Ryan had clapped in irons for several weeks. Scanning his chart, Ryan squinted at the coast. For over a day, they had maneuvered off Columbia’s bar, searching for the channel and a safe entrance. Now, in the predawn darkness, Ryan saw a point of land that he was certain had to be Cape Disappointment. Turning to first mate William Eales, he gave the order to head into the channel.

Now, the end of the voyage was in sight. Ryan’s orders were to slowly work Isabellaup the Columbia River for no miles to Fort Vancouver, the Pacific coast headquarters of the Hudson’s Bay Company. There, he would discharge his cargo of trade goods and take on bundles of valuable fur, gathered by trappers and traders, for the return trip to England.

But as Isabellasailed across the bar, Ryan immediately realized that he had made a mistake. The sea surged and rolled over the shallows, picking up the ship and hurtling it towards a patch of broken water. They were not in the channel, but on the bar itself. Then Isabellahit hard at the stern. “She’s not answering the helm,” shouted the mate. Looking over the stern, Ryan saw broken pieces of the rudder swirling in the sea. Without her steering, the ship swung wildly. Waves crashed over the side and filled the deck with masses of water. As each wave rolled over the ship, Isabellapounded hard on the sand. Ryan had to act quickly, or the ship would be lost. Using the sails to catch the wind and steer off the bar was his only chance. But first, the crew had to lighten the ship. Pinned by her heavy cargo, Isabellawas slowly sinking into the sand as the waves washed around the hull.

The men set to work, heaving overboard piles of lumber stacked on the deck. With axes, they smashed open the heavy water casks to empty them. Then, laboring in the surging surf, they dumped 30 tons of cargo and stores into the sea, but still Isabellawould not budge. As the sun climbed into the sky, Ryan saw that they were stuck fast and pounding hard, and that water was flooding into the hold. He later explained to his superiors that as “there appeared little prospect of saving her and being surrounded by heavy breakers fearing she would drive on shore into them when it would be impossible to save ourselves,” he gave the order to abandon ship. Grabbing what they could, the crew piled into the ship’s two boats and dropped into the sea. “Pull! Pull for your lives!” the mate roared as the boats climbed one breaker, then another, and Isabelladisappeared behind them in the towering waves.

The men strained at the oars until the boats at last pulled free of the breakers and flying surf. Wiping the stinging salt water from his eyes, Ryan scanned the horizon. Darkness had fallen, and along the shore, he saw fires blazing up. Some of the men saw them, too, and muttered among themselves. Ryan’s voice, loud and clear, reassured them: “We are strangers in this uncivilized country, and we shall not land, lest we be murdered by the natives.” Just the year before, the Hudson’s Bay Company supply ship William and Annhad wrecked on the Columbia bar, and none of the crew had survived. The headless body of her captain, identified by his blue uniform jacket, had borne mute witness to what the HBC was sure was the savagery of the neighboring Clatsop people. A search of the native village had turned up items from the wreck, and the HBC men had bombarded the Clatsop with cannon fire to punish them for pilfering the wreck.

Watching the fires on the beach, Ryan shivered at the thought of landing and falling into the hands of the Clatsop, having “heard such evil reports of the savage character” of the natives. So Isabella’screw headed up the river to Fort Vancouver. It took them a full day to reach the fort.

At Fort Vancouver, Ryan and his men reported to Dr. John McLoughlin, the chief factor, or head of the fort, and the officer in charge of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s activities on the Pacific coast. Tall, with a full head of flowing white hair, McLoughlin represented what was then the most powerful commercial interest on the continent. Chartered in 1670 by King Charles n as the “Company of Adventurers of England trading into Hudson’s Bay,” the Hudson’s Bay Company had royal authority to exploit the resources of a vast area that stretched from the shores of Hudson Bay to encompass much of what eventually would become Canada and some of the United States.

The HBC’S first ship on the coast was the 161-ton, Bermuda-built brig William and Ann, which started operating in 1824. But the coastal trading effort, as well as the annual supply of Fort Vancouver, had been dealt a serious blow when William and Annwrecked at the mouth of the Columbia River on March 10, 1829, with the loss of the entire crew and most of the cargo. To replace her, the HBC bought Isabella, a four-year-old 194-ton brig, for the tidy sum of £2,900in October 1829. Isabellawas loaded with a diverse and expensive cargo that reflected the needs of Fort Vancouver’s growing agricultural and industrial community: tools, medicines, preserved foods, lead and pig iron, paint and stationery supplies. She was also loaded with the commodities of the fur trade: guns, ammunition, blankets, beads, copper cooking pots, candles, mirrors, tinware, buttons, combs, tobacco and tea.

Following right after the wreck of William and Ann, the loss of Isabellawas a serious blow. But McLoughlin’s consternation turned to rage the day after Ryan and his shipwrecked crew arrived at Fort Vancouver. Messengers from Fort George, a small Hudson’s Bay Company outpost at the Columbia’s mouth, reported they had seen Isabellaenter the wrong channel and become stranded on the bar. They had raced to the brig’s assistance and lit a fire to signal Ryan, but the captain had mistaken it for marauding and murderous natives and had fled up the river with his crew. In the morning, the Fort George men had boarded Isabellaand found that the ship and her cargo were aground but reasonably safe, then sent word to McLoughlin.

Furious, McLoughlin sent the hapless Ryan and his crew back down the river to their ship to save what they could. In a letter to his superiors, he reported: “When Capt. Ryan arrived here he could not distinctly ascertain where he had left his vessel… it was only when I received Mr. Mansons [report] I actually learnt where she was and if Capt. Ryan had remained on board with his crew it is certain the vessel would have been saved as on the turn of the tide they had only to slip her cable and she would have drifted into smooth water.”

When Ryan and his crew arrived back at the wreck, they found Isabellaon her side on a small island just inside the river’s mouth. She was full of water and, as the incoming tide washed away the sand that swirled around the hull, was slowly being swallowed up. The first task was to save the valuable cargo still inside the brig.

The next few days were spent stripping the wreck. The masts and rigging were chopped free and stacked on the island, and the crew began to unload the cargo from the dark, wet confines of the hold. Work stopped each day at high tide, when the heavy surf that broke over the capsized hulk made it dangerous to even approach the wreck. The hold flooded each day, making each day a repetition of pumping. After two weeks of back-breaking work, Isabellawas at last emptied and the task of trying to save the dismasted hull began.

But the sand and the sea would not relinquish the wreck. A survey on May 24 found the brig settled into a deep hole, the hold full of water, beams cracked, decks and bulwarks washed away, and the hull beginning to crack in half. It was hopeless, and the surveyors wrote to McLoughlin that any attempts to save Isabella“would be an unnecessary sacrifice of labour… as we consider her a total wreck.” With that, the ship was abandoned to the water and the sands of the Columbia bar.

ON THE WRECK OF ISABELLA

Although the sands of the bar had swallowed Isabella, occasionally they washed away to expose some broken timbers. Charts from 1880 to 1921 mark a wreck at the site where, in September 1986, Daryl Hughes, a commercial fisherman, snagged his nets. Other fishermen had snagged nets there, but Hughes was the first to send down a diver, who reported that Hughes’s net was wrapped around the hull of a wooden ship. Hughes, who knew the river’s history, thought that he might have found Isabellaand reported the discovery to the Columbia River Maritime Museum, just across the river from the wreck site.

The museum’s curator, Larry Gilmore, enlisted the support of a number of people, notably Mike Montieth, the Coast Guard commander of the “Cape D” station. An avid wreck diver himself, Montieth led a group of volunteers on a series of explorations of the wreck. In the murky darkness, Montieth began to sketch out the sloping sides of a wooden ship with a series of what looked like gun ports, a discovery that puzzled the investigators. Perhaps the hulk emerging from the sand wasn’t Isabellaafter all, but USS Peacockor USS Shark, two warships lost on the deadly Columbia River bar in 1841 and 1846. A sand-encrusted cutlass from Sharkand a rock with a message carved into it by the survivors of that wreck are among the prize exhibits at the Columbia River Maritime Museum, relics of one of the hundreds of ships lost at this graveyard of the Pacific.

To help resolve the questions, our National Park Service team was called in. The team leader, Daniel J. “Dan” Lenihan, who is an intensely focused, hardworking archeologist with a quiet demeanor, created the U.S. government’s first field team of underwater archeologists. The work of Dan and his team has also revolutionized underwater archeology in the United States, both in the way that work is done in the water and how archeologists think about shipwreck sites.

* * *

The team that assembles at Astoria in August 1987 includes Dan Lenihan, myself and another adjunct member of his team, Larry Nordby, who looks like a Viking and whose skill in the science of archeology is enhanced by the ability to measure and draw the remains of ships on the bottom in the worst possible conditions. We three are joined by volunteers – Mike Montieth, local shipwreck historian and wreck diver James Seeley White, and other local divers who have already been exploring the wreck of Isabella.

As we gear up on the boats that are tied off the line that Mike has rigged to the wreck, he and Dan brief us. The wreck lies in only 48 feet of water on a hard sand bottom. That’s the easy part. The tough part is that the current rips through at such a fast pace that a diver can’t hold on when the tide ebbs and flows, so we can only go in the water at slack tide, when the current dies down to a dull roar. It’s also dark down there. Mud in the water near the surface blocks the light, so we have to feel our way over the broken wooden hulk, guided by a flashlight that illuminates just a few yards ahead. Then there are the fishing nets and crab pots caught on the ship’s protruding timbers, along with fishing line drifting in the current, to snag dive gear and unwary divers.

This is not going to be easy. In fact, I’m scared, but not enough to stay out of the water. We all jump in and make our way to the buoy that marks the wreck. The current tugs and pulls at us. Dan looks carefully at each one of us, checking to see if we’re ready. With a series of nods, we vent the air from our buoyancy compensating vests and start down the line, into the dark water.

The green water becomes gray and then black. Then, suddenly, I land on a thick wooden beam, encrusted with barnacles and wrapped with the buoy line. I’m on the wreck. Mike and the other divers have done an excellent job of sketching the basic outline of the wreck – the curving side of the hull, with ports open in what may be two rows. I turn and put my face close to the hull to examine it better, then switch on my light and follow Larry and Dan as we make a quick inspection of the hull. It is clearly half of a ship, with broken beams and timbers indicating where the decks were. From the weather deck to the bottom of the hull, this half is nearly complete, though we don’t yet know which side of the ship it is. Later dives will confirm that it is the starboard, or right-hand side, of the wreck.

^{A site map of Isabellaas the wreck looked in 1987. National Park Service}

Dan has asked me to take a careful look at the ports to see if they are for guns. Six of them, in a row, line the hull below the level of the deck. They are small square ports – they seem too small to be for guns, I think – and I run my gloved hand along the top of one to check for hardware or the hole for a lanyard to pull open a gun port. The wood is solid, and there is no evidence of hinges or other hardware. They look to be cargo ports – square holes cut to load bulk cargo like coal or grain, then plugged with wood and caulked for the voyage. To make sure, I inspect each one. My reward for this meticulous work is a sudden encounter with the rotting head of a salmon, stuck in a wad of net inside one of the ports, its empty eye sockets staring at me as I stick my head into the port. It gives me a start, and I hit my head on the top of the narrow aperture and curse.