The Ship, the Saint, and the Sailor. Bradley G. Stevens

Чтение книги онлайн.

      CHAPTER 7

      NEW

      DIRECTIONS

      SUMMER-WINTER 2002: ONE DAY IN the summer of 2002, Dave McMahan walked into my office at the Kodiak Fisheries Research Center (KFRC). Dave was the chief archaeologist for the State of Alaska Office of History and Archaeology and worked in Anchorage. His job primarily involved managing, documenting, and protecting archaeological resources on state lands, including submerged lands. He investigated historical sites, such as “the Castle” that Alexander Baranov had built as his home and headquarters in Sitka, and occasionally human bones that turned up when modern humans disturbed ancient (or not-so-ancient) gravesites. Dave had just completed his certification as a scuba diver and had developed an interest in marine archaeology. He knew Mike Yarborough, who had suggested that Dave should come see me.

      “What do you know about the Kad’yak?” he asked.

      “Oh, a little bit,” I teased. “Let me show you.” It was like taking the cork out of a champagne bottle. I opened my mapping program and showed Dave all the lines I had drawn on the computer. After many years of drawing with pencils on paper charts, I had finally graduated to using electronic charts. I could draw lines all over them, then just as easily erase them and start over. Somewhere in that morass of red lines lay the Kad’yak. Dave’s eyes lit up. He knew I was interested in the ship but he didn’t know that I had done so much work on it. Over the next hour we talked about the Kad’yak and what it meant for the history of Alaska. There had been lots of shipwrecks during the period of Russian Colonialism, but none of them had ever been found. Most were poorly documented, and their locations were not well known. But the Kad’yak was well documented and still could possibly be found. If discovered, it would be the first ship from the Russian period ever to be located. Dave knew a number of other archaeologists around the country who he thought would be willing to help. He put me in contact with Dr. Tim Runyan, Director of the Maritime Heritage program at East Carolina University (ECU), in North Carolina. As soon as Dave walked out of my office, I was on the phone with Tim. That connection was the missing link in my quest.

      Tim’s specialty was investigating shipwrecks of the East Coast. His biggest accomplishment to date was locating the Queen Anne’s Revenge, reputed to be the flagship of Blackbeard the Pirate. It had been scuttled in Beaufort Inlet, North Carolina, and Tim had been working on it for several years. But he was also interested in the Kad’yak. In fact, he had a Russian graduate student who wanted to do her thesis on the ships of the Russian-American Company. We immediately agreed to collaborate on a proposal to search for the ship. I would provide the local expertise, and Tim would provide the archeological credentials.

      We put our heads together and came up with a plan. By early December, we wrote and submitted a pre-proposal to the NOAA Ocean Exploration Program (OEP). Now all we had to do was wait.

      JANUARY 2003

      On January 15, I received a letter from the Ocean Exploration Program saying that our pre-proposal had been approved and a full proposal was requested. I was ecstatic. I spent the next three days working frantically on the proposal, putting in all the details I could and poring over the budget details. When I had done as much as I could, I emailed it to Tim. I expected to submit the proposal through my agency (NMFS), and I needed the budget details for the ECU folks. Over the next few days, I checked my email hourly, expecting some response from Tim. It wasn’t until Wednesday, January 22, that I finally got a message from him, saying that he was working on the proposal and would get back to me as soon as he could.

      The next morning, I called Tim to ask about the proposal. We decided that it would be better for ECU to submit the proposal, with my agency as a subcontractor. That was easier for me because I would not have to fill out all the paperwork required to have it approved by the Alaska Fisheries Science Center (AFSC) in Seattle, a process that would add two or three days to the preparation time. Tim also said they wanted to beef up the methods descriptions. I was fine with that, though I thought it was fairly complete when I wrote it.¹

      TIME DRAGGED ON. I WENT in to my office at the KFRC over the weekend and checked my mail several times but found no messages. On Friday, I contacted Dave Kaplan, Director of the Baranov Museum, and Balika Haakanson, a teacher at Kodiak High School, and requested letters of support from them. They responded positively and provided us with very supportive letters of recommendation. I was very happy with that, especially with the opportunity to help Balika develop a lesson plan around the project for middle school science students. I also received a letter of support from Stefan Quinth, a Swedish filmmaker who wanted to videotape the search. Stefan was an internationally recognized nature photographer who had spent several years crashing through the brushy thickets and salmon streams of Kodiak Island to film the great Kodiak bears, and he was well known around Kodiak as somebody who could film just about anything.

      The day before the full proposal was due to be sent out, I finally got an email from Tim. He wanted to keep the budget under $90,000 and wondered if we could cut the boat schedule from fourteen to eleven days and include more salary for one of his employees. I originally had only wanted six days of boat time. Eleven should be plenty, but I felt like the budget was getting whittled away with salaries. What were all these people going to do? The real work was in the logistics, diving, and on-site supervision, and I was reluctant to see too much of the budget go into salaries. We needed boat time and equipment. I needed a new drysuit. СКАЧАТЬ