Encyclopedia of Underwater and Maritime Archaeology

Magazine Antiques, Sept, 1998 by Alfred Mayor

An example among many is the Fredensborg, a one-hundred-foot Danish-Norwegian frigate built in Copenhagen in 1752/53 and wrecked on an island off southern Norway in 1768. It was engaged in the triangular trade: to Africa, where it was loaded with slaves and ivory, thence sailing to the Danish West Indies, where the slaves were sold for sugar, spices, tobacco, cotton, and mahogany, and finally, returning home. The wreck yielded elephant and hippopotamus tusks, the leg bone of a water chevrotain (a tiny African deer), a millstone of African sandstone, a small amount of mahogany, day pipes of the kind issued to slaves, the imprint of leg irons, the leather bindings of a Bible and a prayer book, empty medicine bottles, ink pots, bits of Chinese porcelain, shoes, a kerchief, a whistle, a spur, a spinning top, some sealing wax and two seals, one engraved with a dove carrying an olive branch. The ship springs to life.

In addition to the risks taken and lost that often accounted for the watery end of ships at sea, vessels were entombed with the dead to provide passage to the next life, as in the case of the ancient Egyptians, or were incinerated with the departed, as in the case of the Vikings. Under the heading "Ship burials," which runs on engrossingly for six columns, the account is given of a Viking burial as related by Ibn Fadlan, an Arab traveler who, about 920 met a party of Vikings in Russia and took part in the burial of their chief. The Viking ship was hauled ashore and a burial chamber was built on board. The chief was placed in the chamber in his best clothes and with all his possessions around him. Animals and a female slave were sacrificed, the ship was torched, and a large mound of earth was heaped over the ashes.

Water is water, so there is a thorough treatment of the Sacred Cenote at the Mayan site of Chichenn Itza in Yucatan, Mexico. This sacred freshwater well was devoted to human sacrifices and other ceremonial tributes including treasure, which attracted treasure hunters from 1882 to the 1960s. Much groping in the muddy bottom, subsequent dredging, and finally the use of an airlift (a nautical vacuum cleaner) brought up many things, but lamentably most were "recovered without stratigraphic or contextual control." Finally, in the late 1960s, the water level in the cenote was lowered, the water was purified with chemicals, and an orderly search was made, layer by layer. It was concluded that the cenote was used between about 800 and 1150, when Chichen Itza was abandoned, and again between about 1250 and 1539. In the entry about the site the following words are highlighted for cross reference "Treasure," "National Geographic Society," and "Airlift." At those entries, other entries are highlighted, leading on as far as you are willing to go.

The encyclopedia is provocatively illustrated with underwater photographs of skeletal wrecks, half-submerged wrecks, scuba divers in action, and more or less imaginative reconstructions of what might have been. In addition to an alphabetical index, there is a very-useful topical index, with wrecks arranged both chronologically and by location of demise.

Encyclopedia of Underwater and Maritime Archaeology, ed. James P. Delgado (Yale University Press, 800-987-7323), $55.00 (hardcovers).