THE TORRE SGARATTA WRECK

Torre Sgaratta

Between 1967 and 1968, I joined a National Geographic/University of Pennsylvania archeological expedition to help excavate a Roman shipwreck near the medieval tower - Torre Sgaratta - in southern Italy.

My mentor, Peter Throckmorton, led the expedition. His wife, Joan, was the artist. Terry Vose, a good friend, and Kim Hart, my cousin, joined as diver/archeologists.

The Story of the ancient ship  - as told by Peter Throckmorton after analysis of artifacts found aboard:

"Like dozens her kind, she loaded her cargo of half-finished sarcophagi and marble blocks on the Turkish coast, perhaps in Miletus . She may have set sail late in the summer, stopping for additional marble at Greek island ports. Rounding the Peloponnesus, she beat northward along the Greek coast, staying in sight of land as long as possible. At last she swung westward across the Ionian Sea to Cape Santa Maria di Leuca at the tip of the heel of Italy. She then set course for Messina. That night the wind must have changed. From the south the dreaded sirocco began to blow. By midnight, his ship laboring heavily, the anxious captain would have put lookouts in the rigging. At dawn they sighted land. With her great square sail, and her heavy load, the ship did not go well to windward. She was trapped in the Gulf of Taranto."

"The captain ordered the anchor out in 15 or 20 fathoms. As the gale increased, the first anchor dragged and the doomed ship inched toward shore. The first anchor and then another were lost as the stout cables broke. In the deepening darkness, the big ship worked inexorably toward the six-fathom line, where the long seas curled to break. The gale shrieked louder. Nothing to do but cast out all remaining anchors and pray, as St. Paul did in like circumstances. If the vessel survived until daylight, there was a chance—just a chance—to run her ashore, accepting the loss of ship but saving the lives of those aboard. It was the captain's last gamble: His ship foundered that night, five hundred yards offshore. The old vessel had given up at last, as old ships must when pushed too hard."

Archangel - the expedition's vessel

Archangel was a Greek Perama especially outfitted for underwater archeological work. Based in Greece, she was sailed to the site near Taranto, italy.

"In the spring of 1967, we sailed Archangel to Piraeus, and the rest of the crew reported for duty. Sanford (Sam) Low, our "executive officer," had just served his tour as a naval reserve lieutenant on a tanker off Viet Nam. Terry Vose from Boston signed on to look after Archangel's primitive engine and our four cantankerous compressors. Sam's cousin, Kim Hart, came along as sailor, photographer. A retired Greek sea captain, a friend of Archangel's former owner, joined us as bosun and man-expedition of-all-work. His name was Manolis. He had gotten tired, he told us, of sitting around the house with the women all day. Captain Manolis and Joan made friends, not a simple thing in the Mediterranean world where it is considered bad form for women to scrub out bilges with lye. It was Joan's proudest day when the Greek skipper trusted her with the blowtorch while he worked along with the scraper, and together they cleaned 20 years of paint from deck and scuppers.

"In the middle of June 1967, we sailed Archangel from Greece to Taranto. When we arrived, we found to our astonishment that most of our diving machinery was in working order and ready to go. Joan, who had been sent ahead in May to prepare for our arrival, modestly explained, 'I told the men my husband would beat me if everything wasn't ready.'"

A view of the wreck from above showing dozens of marble sarcophagi - coffins - which were part of the ship's cargo. The diver is filling "lifting bags" with air which will lift one of the coffins off the wreck site so we can explore what is left of the hull of the ship. One of the expedition's goals was to provide data for the study of the evolution of marine architecture - how ancient ships were built.

"We moored Archangel over the wreck and began digging with the air lift. As the great pit on the bottom sank deeper, we kept finding more and more sarcophagi. The sand also held thousands of fragments of the half-inch-thick marble sheeting which had formed part of the ship's cargo. One sarcophagus, fortunately, stored intact seven of these fragile marble panels."

Peter with the airlift - an underwater vacuum cleaner. A bag of marble pieces is in the foreground. He is surrounded by the ship's cargo - marble sarcophagi (coffins) - which were being shipped from Marmaris, Turkey, to Rome when the ship sank.

Excavating in between the sarcophagi by carefully removing handfuls of sand and introducing them into the mouth of the airlift. A piece of wood - part of the hull of the ancient ship is in the foreground.

"By mid-July we had moved perhaps a thousand tons of sand. Now our air-lift diggers began to uncover a lot of wood pinned under the sarcophagi. Imagine our excitement to find planking. Big pieces of pine were fastened together with oak tenons, construction like that of the third-century B.C. ship Captain Cousteau had excavated at Grand Congloue."

We removed our swim fins when diving on the wreck so as not to stir up sediment or damage delicate pieces of wood with the wash from the fins.

Beneath the cargo of sarcophagi we found pieces of the wooden hull of the ancient ship. Each piece was tagged and drawn in place before being lifted to the surface. Joan Throckmorton uses a sheet of plastic to sketch the wood. Later, she will draw it to scale on a plan of the ship.

Joan measures the wood for later use in making her scale drawing/plan of the ancient ship.

"What a task for our draftsmen! Joan and archeologist-artist Diana Wood made most of the drawings; artist Joe Conroy assisted with measurements which by summer's end totaled 10,000. As each piece was uncovered, they had to draw in every nail and nail hole, every mortise and tenon, every mark on the wood while underwater.

One day Diana watched in fascinated horror as a whole section of hull planking began to ripple slowly up and down. Soon two eyes and four arms appeared at one edge of the section: An octopus was making his home beneath our flimsy ruin.

In many places the planking looked almost freshly cut. The newly uncovered pine shone breathtakingly bright yellow, but darkened in the sea after very few days. The frames were in a much poorer state of preservation, blackened by rot and far more fragile.

We found pieces of hull with characteristics previously known only from ancient mosaics.

One cherished object was the step for the forward-raking foremast that held the artemon, or steering sail.

Digging into the deepest layers of the wreck, we began to find potsherds by the hundreds. They helped us date the ship. Most of the pots seemed to be Imperial Roman, from the end of the second century A.D. or a little later. Definitely not Italian in style, they probably came from Asia Minor. We found pieces of fine plates, bowls, and jugs that may have graced the captain's table, and bits of cooking pots blackened by the galley fire.

The skill of the shipwrights who had built our vessel nearly 2,000 years before stirred our sense of wonder. Unlike modern vessels, ours had no calking between the heavy planks. They had been fastened edge-to-edge with mortises and tenons, and were so well matched that the swelling of the wood in water was enough to make the ship watertight."

NOT THAT IT WAS ALL WORK....

Kim and one of Joan's sons playing after work.

HARRY, DANI, MARY, KIM

Back at the tower - after diving....