The Man Who Thought like a Ship by Loren C. Steffy

Author:Loren C. Steffy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
Published: 2012-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

10 : ZOE’S GARAGE

Probably few people in Denver knew the small town’s status as the world’s hub of nautical archaeology, but for the remainder of 1974 and into 1975, Dick and George Bass hammered out plans around one dining room table or the other, figuring out how to keep AINA going despite the political turmoil that had engulfed its expedition sites in Cyprus and Turkey. Things didn’t look good for the fledgling institution. After the Cyprus war, AINA’s directors urged Bass to abandon the whole idea of an institute. Since it had begun in 1973, AINA had been run on a shoestring budget, and Bass and Michael Katzev continued to lament the low salary they paid Dick. Now, with Bass back in the States, it was clear that neither he nor Dick could support their families on the money AINA paid them.

Neither of them, though, was willing to give up on the dream. War might have complicated things, but the Kyrenia Ship remained an impressive achievement. Then there was the Byzantine wreck and others discovered during Bass’s recent survey of the Turkish coast. Bass, after all, had predicted they had enough wrecks to occupy them for the rest of their lives. How could they abandon these ships when everything they’d worked for finally seemed so close to fruition? Clearly, though, the ambitions of AINA’s leaders surpassed its funding and resources.

One of AINA’s directors offered a solution: Affiliate with a university. AINA could remain separate, with its own board and staff, but share facilities and faculty with the university. It was a promising idea, and soon Bass fielded an offer from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. He and Dick drove down from Denver to investigate. UNC already offered programs in marine biology and marine geology, and marine archaeology seemed a good fit. The school offered a building for AINA, set on pilings over the water. It had a long pier where Dick imagined himself sitting and writing. The two of them, as well as Fred van Doorninck, would have faculty positions.

The university had one requirement: As a state school, they wanted the Institute to do some work closer to home, to focus on New World ships, hopefully off the North Carolina coast, rather than just ancient wrecks half a world away. That meant they needed another archaeologist to seal the deal. Bass contacted Carl Clausen, who had recently become the state underwater archaeologist for Texas. Previously, Clausen had filled a similar role in Florida, where he had helped to explore Little Salt Spring, a sinkhole that yielded artifacts ranging from seven thousand to twelve thousand years old, some of the earliest evidence of human existence in the New World. He also had been involved in the salvage of a fleet of Spanish galleons that sank near Cape Canaveral in 1715. After moving to Texas, Clausen helped excavate Spanish ships that sank off Padre Island, on the southern Texas coast, in 1554. It was the earliest example of Spanish seafaring recovered in American waters, and it garnered widespread attention.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.