How do I know? The Hudson’s Bay Company kept Isabella’s logbook, which Captain Ryan had saved from the wreck and in which he made entries each day as they labored to save the brig and her cargo, ending only when it was apparent she was doomed. While reading a copy of the ship’s log in preparation for the expedition, I learned that the ship’s carpenter had cut a hole in the side. As my fingers trace his crude but effective handiwork in the gloom at the bottom of the Columbia, I think back to that journal entry: “Cut a hole in the side to let the water out, so that we could better get at the cargo.”
Dan is signaling that it’s time to surface. As we climb out, there are grins all around. This wreck, dark and dangerous as it is, is fascinating. The next few days quickly fall into a routine of early morning breakfasts at a small fishermen’s restaurant and two dives a day, which is all we can manage because of the currents and tides.
On one of these dives, I nearly become part of the wreck. Working in the darkness to map the wreck, Larry and I are signaled by Dan to get back to the line. The current has picked up slightly ahead of schedule, and we’ve got to surface. As we slowly work our way up the line, the current hits hard, and we have to hold on with both hands to fight the current to reach the boats. I’m the last one up. Exhausted, I stand on the ladder at the stern of Jim White’s boat. Forgetting my training, I pull off my mask and spit out my regulator. Instead of climbing up or handing up my weight belt or tank, I reach down and pull off my fins, one at a time. I fumble the last fin. As I reach out to catch it, the weight of my gear pulls me off the ladder and back into the water.
I fall fast and hit the bottom. Without my mask, I can’t see very well, but it looks like I’ve landed next to the wreck. The strong current is rolling me along the bottom, and I can’t reach my regulator, which has twisted and is now behind me. With the desperate strength people sometimes find in these situations, I push off the bottom with my legs and kick for the surface, my lungs burning. My outstretched hands hit the bottom of the boat, and I claw and scratch my way along the fiberglass hull to get out from under it. But the weight of my tank and belt drags me back down into the water. I hit the bottom again and start rolling. My mouth opens convulsively, and I take in a breath of cold water and gag. I’m going to die, I realize, and I’m really angry. Like most accidents, this one is a combination of a foolish move and a deceptively dangerous dive site. My eyes are wide open, but my vision is narrowing, and I know that I’m about to black out.
Finally, my dive training kicks in. I reach down and tug at the clasp of my weight belt. It falls free. Then I reach up to my buoyancy compensator to pull the lanyard that activates a co2 cartridge. I start to float off the river bed and remember not to hold my breath or I’ll burst my lungs as I rocket to the surface. When my head rises out of the water, I reach up and try to draw in a breath, choking with the water I’ve inhaled. Hands grab me and pull me into a Zodiac — I’ve rolled and drifted a few hundred yards away from where I fell in. I lie on the bottom of the inflatable, coughing up the muddy water from my lungs. Shaky, dripping and miserable, I climb onto the deck of Jim White’s boat, wipe my face, and ask, “Well, did I die like a man?” Dan makes sure I’m okay and debriefs me to ensure I learned from my mistake, and then we’re back at work at the next slack tide.
When everything is all done, we have a beautiful plan of the wreck, drawn by Larry, that confirms this is indeed Isabella. The size and construction closely match the known characteristics of the ill-fated brig. The location is exactly where the ship’s log placed the efforts to save the stranded vessel, off what is still known as San Island inside the Columbia’s mouth. And the remains on the bottom show a determined salvage effort, from the open cargo ports to the hacked-off rigging fittings. But the real indicator, in the end, is that single, crudely hacked hole in the side.
On return dives to Isabella in 1994, Mike Montieth and Jerry Ostermiller, the director of the Columbia River Maritime Museum, discovered that more of the wreck had been exposed by shifting sand. So ten years after the first dives, I returned to Astoria with a team of divers from the Underwater Archaeological Society of British Columbia. With more of the hull exposed, we could see that the brig had literally unzipped along its keel, splitting in two as the bow and stern broke apart in the flying surf that battered Isabella. I also found the ship’s rudder post, torn free and broken, the thick fastenings for the rudder shattered by the force of the ship’s stern hitting the bar. We had hoped to find some of the brig’s fur-trade cargo, as the Hudson’s Bay Company archives showed that not everything had been recovered from the wreck in 1830. But the hull was empty of artifacts, and the only tale this shattered wreck could tell was the sad one of just how she had died.
CHAPTER TWO
PEARL HARBOR
Yesterday, December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy — the United States was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan… The attack yesterday on the Hawaiian Islands has caused severe damage to American naval and military forces. Very many American lives have been lost… Always we will remember the character of the onslaught against us. No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory.” The indignant and stirring words of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt as he addressed Congress on December 8, 1941, ring through my mind as my plane crosses the United States. I’m on the way to Pearl Harbor to join a long-standing National Park Service survey of USS Arizona and other ships that lie beneath the waters of that battlefield.
Being an archeologist thoroughly at home in the mid-nineteenth century, I am surprised by the realization that I’ve worked on more World War II wrecks than any other type of ship. That includes a decade of work for the National Park Service, studying and documenting World War II fortifications and battle sites. Recently, I have been posted to Washington, D.C., as the first maritime historian of the National Park Service, to head up a new program to inventory and assess the nation’s maritime heritage, and the work included dozens of visits to preserved warships and museums.
I’ve already studied one shipwreck, the Civil War ironclad USS Monitor, for historic landmark status. Now I’m on my way to Pearl Harbor to carry out a similar study of the battle-ravaged Arizona and the nearby USS Utah, both sunk on December 7, 1941. Dan Lenihan and the Submerged Cultural Resources Unit of the National Park Service have invited me to join them to dive at the site of the first action in America’s war in the Pacific. Congress had passed a law making Arizona, still the responsibility of the Navy, a memorial to be jointly administered by the Navy and the National Park Service.