Indiana Jones dials up a new adventure, but it isn’t shipshape

The Athlit Ram on display in Israel’s National Maritime Museum in Haifa

If you’re an Indiana Jones fan, you’re probably familiar with the plot structure for The Dial of Destiny, the latest installment in the film series. It follows the same pattern the previous films: Take a known archaeological artifact, give it mystical powers, and leave clues all over the world for Indy and his nemeses (usually Nazis) to pursue.

The Dial of Destiny focuses on the Antikthera Mechanism, a bronze device with interlocking gears that is believed to have predicted the movement of the sun, moon and planets. It may even have predicted solar and lunar eclipses.

The mechanism was discovered in the wreck of a Greek merchant ship found by sponge divers in 1900. But that’s where the movie veers from reality. The Antikthera Mechanism wasn’t split into two pieces and hidden, and neither of those pieces were collected by the Third Reich. It’s in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens. So far, it hasn’t opened any time portals.

The movie claims one part of the mechanism was found not on a Greek cargo ship, but a Roman warship. And here I have a few nits to pick, since I grew up with a father who was a leading authority on ancient ships and who frequently pointed out inaccuracies in films and television shows.

I don’t think my dad ever watched an entire Indiana Jones film, and he found the entire premise amusing. The closest my dad got to fighting Nazis was during his time on a destroyer escort in World War II.

But he would have taken issue with the claim that a Roman warship was found in 1900. 

While Greek and Turkish sponge divers discovered dozens of shipwrecks in the Mediterranean, they didn’t find warships. Nautical archaeologists for years puzzled why most of the ancients ships they discovered were merchant vessels, even though written texts speak of hundreds of naval battles.

One theory was that without cargo to press their hulls into the seafloor, sunken warships simply rotted away. Wood exposed to warm water for centuries deteriorates quickly, and it’s a favorite of teredo worms, mollusks that borrow into exposed wood.

The ram being lifted from the water by a crane in 1981

In 1981, Israeli archaeologists recovered a battering ram from a Roman warship in the Sea of Athlit. The main hull was long gone, but my father oversaw the removal of the 16 pieces of wood inside the ram’s bronze casing. As I wrote in my book The Man Who Thought Like a Ship:

The ram’s design was simply brilliant. Its blunted end ensured it would batter its enemy yet not ensnare its own vessel as a pointed, spear-like design would; its underlying wood structure [was designed for] dissipating the force of the impact along the hull, minimizing the damage to the ramming ship.

My other quibble with the movie is that the second half of the Antikthera device is unearthed in another wreck of a Roman warship (which was located way too easily). The wreck is remarkably intact. Again, a ship that sank in warm water in the 4^th century BC would not have any hull timbers remaining above the sea floor.

It’s the reason that nautical archaeologists for years debated ship design of upper hulls. For example, no one knew the spacing of oars on Byzantine galleys until about 20 years ago because bulwarks and upper hull sections rarely survived underwater.

It mattered because if galleys allowed too much room for the oarsmen, the hull would sag in the middle under their weight. If the oars were too close together, oarsmen couldn’t get a full stroke, leaving the vessel underpowered. Replicas of a Greek trireme and other vessels were built to test out various theories, but without the discovery of an upper hull, no one knew for sure.

Then, in 2004, construction crews digging a subway tunnel in Istanbul’s Yenikapi neighborhood undercovered the ancient harbor of Theodosius, one of Constantinople’s trading ports. The site contained 37 medieval ships, and because they hadn’t been rotting on the seabed for centuries, the bulwarks were preserved, giving an accurate measurement of the oar spacing for a Byzantine galley (95 centimeters).

And finally, one other point about the movie worth mentioning: if you’re a diver, you know that Antonio Banderas’s tactic for avoiding the bends is not just wrong but dangerous.

Of course, if you’re willing to accept the idea that Indiana Jones and a group of Nazis flew back in time to the 4^th century BC and witnessed the Battle of Syracuse, you probably aren’t too worried about whether the ships are depicted accurately.

And if they hadn’t had an intact shipwreck, they wouldn’t have had a place for the moray eels. What’s an Indiana Jones movie without a gross-out snake/bug/invested skeleton scene?

I enjoyed the film, and I’m a little surprised the film is already being a labeled a flop. Its financial failure may say more about the state of cinema today than the movie itself. The new film is an enjoyable addition to the series, even if it pales compared with the original.

 

‘Tanks’ for the memories

Like many people, I have fond childhood memories of VW vans, but I suspect mine are a little different than most. For about a year in the early 1970s, my family’s primary transportation was a shared, late-60s-model VW van known as the Penn Tank.

The name referred to the University of Pennsylvania logo on each side. The University’s archaeology department had lent it to the Kyrenia Ship Expedition, a group of American and British nautical archaeologists recovering and reconstructing a 2,300-year-old Greek merchant ship on the northern coast of Cyprus. It earned the “tank” moniker as a tribute to its predecessor, an older, more beleaguered VW van dubbed simply “The Tank” by one of the British members of the team.

I found myself thinking about the Tanks as I read Jill Lepore’s piece in the latest issue of The New Yorker about the new electric version of the VW van that Volkswagen plans to roll out in 2024. The story is largely an ode to the iconic vehicle that Arlo Guthrie referred to as a “microbus.” (VW had to be careful what it called the vehicle. See the part in the article about LBJ, the Chicken War and the resulting legislation that still affects import vehicles.)

I was too young to appreciate the counterculture applications of the VW van, but Lepore noted that in Europe the van “could do anything: it was used as a fire truck, an ambulance, a delivery vehicle, a taxi.” I smirked. It was also used to haul diving equipment for raising ancient shipwrecks.

My father first arrived in Cyprus in mid-1971 with the hope of reassembling some 6,000 pieces of the Kyrenia Ships ancient hull fragments that had been sitting on the sea floor for more than two millennia. He had only the vaguest ideas of how to approach the project. No one had ever attempted anything like it.

He was greeted by two members of the expedition driving the faded green-and-white Tank. It had a tiny rear window, and both panels of the split windshield, inexplicably, opened outward so you could drive with the windshield up, breeze and bugs blowing in your face. The Tank was already about 15 years old by then, and the back seats had been removed to make room for air tanks, regulators and other equipment used for diving on the wreck site. In honor of my dad’s arrival, the team found an upholstered chair and put it in the back for my father to sit in for the 30-minute ride to Kyrenia. The Tank broke down three times on the way back, the last time as it topped the Kyrenia Mountains. They coasted into town.

By comparison, the Penn Tank, which arrived a year or so later from a land dig — in Afghanistan? Iran? — was pure luxury. It was much newer — larger rear window and while the windshield was still split, it didn’t open. Because my father was the only member of the expedition with children, we were allowed to use the Penn Tank as our family car. It was an American vehicle, with the steering on the left. In Cyprus, as a former British colony, everyone drove on the left. Every trip was an adventure.

The Penn Tank

And while the Penn Tank was an upgrade from its predecessor, it was still a work vehicle, pressed into service in hauling diving gear, carpentry or welding supplies, anything that was needed. My mother recalled that she and my father had to drive it to a fancy dinner at the American embassy in Nicosia. She put a towel on the seat so she wouldn’t get her dress dirty, and they parked three blocks away, figuring the valet at the embassy would never believe they had an invitation.

The Kyrenia Ship was being preserved and rebuilt in a harbor side castle, most of which was built by Richard the Lionheart enroute to the Holy Land during the Third Crusade. After the last of the Kyrenia Ship’s hull fragments moved from fresh water to tanks of polyethylene glycol (the next step in the conservation process), we needed to demolish the large freshwater pool the wood had been soaking. My father would use the space to start reassembling the hull. But before we did, we decided to have a pool party. Everyone in the expedition donned bathing suits and piled into the Tanks with beach balls, rafts and brightly colored towels. We then drove in tandem across the narrow bridge and into the castle. Tourists gaped in confusion. It was the closest the expedition workhorses came to the sort of hippie moments that people statesside associate with the VW van.

Kyrenia was a small town, and we walked most places. But sometimes, my father would take the Penn Tank to the castle before we embarked on another errand. Parked in the courtyard, outside the “ship room,” I would pretend to drive, turning the massive steering wheel, fiddling with the turn signals, even once pulling it out of gear without using (or knowing about) the clutch. We covered a lot of ground my imagination, the Penn Tank and me, while waiting on my dad to tear himself away from his beloved ship.

The Penn Tank ultimately made its way to another dig in Turkey, and later, one of my father’s associates used it to flee Beirut with his family after civil war erupted in 1975. As for The Tank, it, too, found itself in a war zone. In the summer of 1974, my dad drove The Tank to the airport in Nicosia, then flew to Turkey for what should have been a weeklong trip. War erupted soon after he left. He wound up coming back to the U.S.

Another member of the expedition made his way back into Cyprus after the hostilities, and eventually to the airport in Nicosia. The airport had taken heavy shelling, and the parking lot was full of burned-out vehicles. Nestled among them, seemingly untouched, was The Tank. The tires are deflated, but with a few shots of air from a bicycle pump, The Tank once again putt-putted its way over the Kyrenia Mountains and back into town.   

No one knows what happened to it after that. There are rumors it was spotted being driven around town, others say it was last seen near the harbor. I prefer to think of it atop the Kyrenia Mountains, lingering a moment before it begins to gather momentum and heads for the sea.

Father’s Day

My father and me, testing a Cub Scout rubber-band rocket in about 1975.

My dad’s been gone for almost 15 years now, which seems hard to believe. This Father’s Day, I found myself thinking about him a lot, so I dug out this from Father’s Day 2013 and decided to re-post it.

Publisher’s Weekly just put out its list of the “10 Worst Dads in Books,” which seems like bad timing just before Father’s Day. While the article notes that “bad dads turn up less in fiction than bad moms,” the issue of bad fathers in books reminded me of some early discussions I had with publishers about The Man Who Thought Like a Ship. 

I contacted a few commercial publishers, but they seemed disappointed that I hadn’t suffered any childhood angst, that my father hadn’t left me scarred somehow by showing greater love for his ships than his children.

Fortunately, the folks at Texas A&M Press knew my father well, and they understood. I approached my book as a journalist, but also as a son writing about his father. The fact that he was an inspiration was, I decided, part of the narrative. Soon after my father’s obituary appeared in the New York Times, a friend from Oregon emailed me and said “he sounds like the father the rest of us always wished we had.” I suppose that’s true.

A few months before he died, my father asked me out of the blue if I ever resented the fact the he was gone so much when I was growing up. I was shocked. We’d never talked about it, but even though he was often overseas for months at a time, I never felt abandoned. What I remembered was the hours he spent helping me on projects, taking me places, encouraging my interests and intellectual curiosity.

“I can’t think of anything that mattered to me that you weren’t there for,” I told him.

He looked surprised. “I missed your high school graduation,” he said. “Your mother never let me forget it.”

I thought about it for a moment and realized he was right. He’d gotten delayed overseas that year and hadn’t made it home in time. But I stood by my statement, and I still do.

After my father’s death in 2007, my brother and I knew lots of people would focus on his amazing accomplishments in nautical archaeology. In writing our eulogies, we wanted to focus on him as a father. Later, I tried to capture that in the book, too. Here’s what I wrote at the time:

Several years ago, after an INA board meeting, one of Dad’s students approached me and said she wanted to tell me how much Dad meant to his students and what a profound impact he’d had on their lives.

I remember thinking “yeah, he does that.” After all, if anyone can testify to the profound impact that Dad had on their lives, I can.

As many of you know, we spent a year on Cyprus when I was a kid – I was about seven at the time. That experience in and of itself was life changing – not many kids have a Crusader castle for a playground. But it was that time on Cyprus that awakened my interest in writing.

There weren’t a lot of books in English readily available for kids my age, and I was still young enough to command a bedtime story.

Often, the power would go off about the time I was getting ready for bed, and so between the lack of literature and the lack of lights, Dad began telling me stories from history. I learned about the Battle of Thermopolyae, the conquest of Alexander the Great, and, of course, Richard the Lionheart and the Third Crusade in our darkened living room.

But one night, Dad sat down at story time with some typewritten pages in his hand and began to read them to me. It was the tale of a pine tree – an Aleppo pine – that grew in a zig zag fashion. Because of this deformity, the other trees in the forest laughed at him. They were made into furniture and fine woodworking, but this tree, this Crooked Aleppo, was left behind.

One day a shipwright showed up in the forest and decided that the crooked tree would be perfect for the keel of a ship – a merchant ship as it were. The ship and its keel, crooked no more, sailed the Mediterranean for many years until one day it sank. Many more years went by until strange men with tanks on their backs uncovered the keel. They tried to raise him, and he broke into 16 pieces. They rebuilt him in a Crusader castle in a small town in northern Cyprus.

I think I caught on at the first mention of the word “keel,” but it didn’t matter. I was captivated. Every writer has some story, something they read in their youth, that they can point to as the spark that ignited their passion for words. For me, it was the story of Crooked Aleppo.

Not only was it a great story, but it was a story about something I knew and, more importantly, written by someone I knew. And written for me. It made me realize that stories didn’t just appear on shelves or in magazines, people wrote them. They wrote them for others. And I could write them too.

The summer we returned from Cyprus, I shamelessly copied my Dad’s format. I wrote an entire series about every piece of the Kyrenia ship – the frames, the maststep, the mast.

And from then on, I was always writing, always weaving stories.

It almost backfired, though. Years later, when I was a senior in high school, still driven by my passion for writing, I was dragging my feet about college. [Kids, you may now plug your ears.]

One night my dad came into my room and said we needed to talk seriously about college. I basically said I was thinking I’d just become a great and famous writer instead.

My dad, of course, didn’t get angry, didn’t raise his voice or even show any signs of disapproval. He paused for a moment, and then calmly said that he understood how I felt, but that I should realize making a living as a writer could be difficult and that it was a subjective business. And then he said: “I think you’re a good writer. But I’m your father, and I’m a little biased. So we have to realize there’s a chance you could stink. And if you stink, you’ll want something to fall back on.”

Even at 17, I couldn’t argue with that logic. Needless to say, I enrolled in A&M, found a career that combined my passion for words with the thirst for knowledge I inherited from my father and have spent the past 20 or so years trying very hard not to stink.

All of you who knew my dad as a friend, colleague, professor, mentor, brother, uncle or grandfather, were fortunate. But Dave and I were uniquely blessed because we knew him as a father.

At the time, it all seemed very normal, but I was reminded of how special it was just a few days ago when a friend in Oregon, having seen the stories on Dad’s death, said: “He sounds like the father the rest of us always wished we had.”

I’ve been a father myself now for about 16 ½ years, and every day I try to live up to the example he set. Every day, I come up short. His are shoes too big to fill.

Fortunately, my father also taught me perseverance, determination and that important achievements come through persistence.

Dad showed us the importance of chasing dreams. In fact, his life could be a practical guide to chasing dreams. He took risks, he gambled, but his gambles were rooted in practical sensibility and his victories were muted with humility.

As he allowed us to share in this great adventure that was his life, he never forgot the importance of simple pleasures like bedtime stories.

And in pursuing his own dream, he managed to ignite the dreams of others.

Maybe there are a lot of bad dads in books. I’m grateful to tell the story of a good one. Happy Father’s Day.

Three days at Camp David and a year in Cyprus

Jeffrey Garten’s new book, Three Days at Camp David,has worked its way to the top of my reading pile. Why would I want to spend some 300 pages studying a change in monetary policy from 50 years ago? 

Well, I’m a bit of a money nerd, having covered business for more than 30 years, including a decade or so covering regional Federal Reserve banks. But the main reason is more personal. The Camp David meetings in 1971 led to President Nixon’s decision to sever the dollar from the gold supply. The effects of that decision hit home for my family a year later and half a world away. 

In 1972, we had moved to the Mediterranean island nation of Cyprus, where my father was reassembling the sunken fragments of a 2,300-year-old Greek merchant ship in the coastal hamlet of Kyrenia. 

My book, The Man Who Thought Like a Ship,tells the story of how my dad, a small-town electrician at the time, found himself in a position of rebuilding an ancient ship on the other side of the world, but the point is that then, as now, nautical archaeology doesn’t happen without funding.  

My parents were counting on a UNESCO grant to pay our living expenses for a year. The grant not only paid my father’s salary, it also had an expense account that enabled him to buy tools and equipment. 

The decision to decouple the dollar from the gold standard caused the dollar’s value to fall, and the decline accelerated as the Watergate scandal unfolded. UNESCO paid its grantees in U.S. dollars, but the Cypriot pound was tied to the British pound in those days. At first, my parents just faced the concern that the money wouldn’t go as far. Then, UNESCO began cutting back on grantees, starting with the newest ones. My dad was near the top of the list. 

He was chasing a dream, but he was also practical. He told Michael Katzev, the director of the Kyrenia Ship Project, that without the grant, he’d have to return to the U.S. and resume his electrician’s job. He support a family on no income. 

It was the first time I remembered my parents being openly worried about money. They rarely discussed their finances, and in fact, I had no idea what my parents made or how grave the situation in Cyprus was until I started writing my book. But I remember my mother telling me we might be leaving early, and I knew my dad would never leave the Kyrenia Ship unfinished unless the situation was dire. 

When you’re a child, seeing your parents in distress leaves an impression. So I wanted to understand more about this monetary policy decision that wound up having such an impact on my family. 

Our personal crisis itself was averted. Katzev told my father he would figure something out, and he did. “Michael somehow scraped some funding together to keep me on; I have always suspected it was his own money,” my dad wrote years later. 

The financial struggles would continue for the next few years, and my dad did, in fact, go without an income for a few years until he joined the faculty of Texas A&M University in 1976. 

The Camp David meetings may have “transformed the global economy,” as Garten’s subtitle says, but it almost undermined the transformation of my father’s career and derailed his dreams. 

In a subtle way, it also influenced my approach to business writing. I’ve always gravitated toward stories about the unintended consequences of money, and as a columnist at the Houston Chronicle, I frequently wrote about how esoteric monetary issues affected ordinary people, often in ways they hadn’t thought about. So I’d like to better understand one of the most important money policy decisions of my lifetime, and I’ll be interested to read Garten’s perspective.    

Droogs, telephony and, yes, bar ditches

Milkbars, but no bar ditches

My post on bar ditches generated a lot of response on various platforms. The consensus was that I was right to use the term, though some people suggested I should have defined it. Honestly, I didn’t think about defining the term when I used it, and even when my editor suggested people wouldn’t know what it was, I was unmoved. 

When you’re introducing readers to a place they aren’t familiar with — and by that I mean the fictional world of your story — it adds a bit of mystery to throw out unusual terms. You have to do it sparingly, of course, otherwise it’s just becomes confusing. 

But as a reader, you’re jumping into this world; it’s not going to stop for you. That, by the way, is how the real word works too. Move to a new place or start a new job, and you have to learn how things are done there, or you have to pick up on the unique customers or language that helps define the place. 

The first time I read Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange (the American version), I just jumped in. I “learned” Nadsat, the Russian-influenced English slang spoken by the gangs  from the context. Only when I finished it did I discover that the publisher had put a helpful glossary at the end, defining all the terms. 

But to this day, I’m glad I didn’t know it was there. Part of what Burgess wanted to achieve was a sense of alienation. The language barrier created a distance with the characters and may even have helped make them more palatable to readers, who typically might not have identified with youthful murders and rapists, let alone cheered for them to be able to continue murdering and raping. 

Of course, The Big Empty is tamer fare. We have bar ditches, gimme caps, and the occasional bois d’arc tree, and there’s some tech jargon like telephony, but for the most part, it’s written in plain English (I hope). 

I should also note that fiction differs from nonfiction in this regard. For nonfiction, it can be completely appropriate to define terms as they’re introduced. You can also use footnotes or a glossary. In fact, I added a glossary of ship terms to The Man Who Thought Like a Ship, which a number of readers said they found helpful. (That glossary was actually my father’s. I used an abridged version from his textbook Wooden Shipbuilding and the Interpretation of Shipwrecks. I was able to do that because we had the same publisher.) 

I know why I made the decisions I made on the language in The Big Empty, but from a reader’s perspective, how do you feel about coming across unfamiliar terms? Is it off-putting, or does it make you feel like you’re listening into to a conversation? 

The Saws of My Father

I have three crosscut saws I never use. One I bought myself soon after I got married because I needed to cut something, and it seemed like a basic tool that I needed to have. The other two came from my father.

He always had a crosscut saw hanging from a peg over his work bench, just as I do now. In fact, my work bench is an imitation of his, right down to the 4x4s I use for the legs and the 2x6s for the top. It’s a design my dad developed over the years, and when we moved, one of the first things he did was build a new one.

My father died eight years ago this week. After I cleaned out his house, I collected all his tools and moved them into my garage. Many had rusted or deteriorated, left unused for too long in the Central Texas humidity during final years of his life. I was saddened by the state of their neglect, but I couldn’t bring myself to throw them away.

Now, my wife and I are “downsizing,” embracing the latest financial fad of middle-aged empty nesters, and one of my tasks is cleaning out the garage. Tool redundancy would be a logical place to start, yet after several months, it remains an uncompleted chore.

I open a drawer and see my father’s saws. I open another one and see his stainless-steel Black & Decker electric drill, a relic from Eisenhower’s America that probably is worth more as an antique than a tool. But it still works and its housing shines with the memories of all the holes my father and I drilled with it. There’s a soldering gun that hasn’t been used since my dad and I wired my model railroad when I was 11. There are hammers, wrenches, screwdrivers, hacksaws, backsaws and coping saws – a montage of mid-Twentieth century manual labor.

They are more than the touchstone of childhood memories. Tools were a part of who my father was, even after he shed his blue-collar career to become an academic. If he were to walk into my garage today, he would look at these unused, rusted remembrances and ask why I’ve kept them. He had a word for such sentimental retention – “junk.” (Decades ago, my mother boxed up family memorabilia, and my father labeled it “four generations of stuff – some junk.”)

I sort through the tools, moving them in the drawers but not actually moving them closer to the door. More than any of my father’s possessions that I still have, the tools feel as if they harbor his soul. I feel his presence most strongly when I pick up his favorite hammer or pull out the screwdriver that still bears the name of the family electrical business, M.G. Steffy & Sons, which dissolved in 1972.

The tools reflect a lifetime spent working with this hands, whether it was fixing a balky light switch in our home or rebuilding a 2,300-year-old Greek merchant ship half a world away.

To me, they also serve as a reminder of his overwhelming patience. My father never got visibly angry or frustrated. His tools were never thrown in frustration, and he never broke something he was working on because it wasn’t cooperating. If things weren’t going well, he would pour another cup of coffee or light a cigarette and think it through. I search for that patience within myself daily, yet it eludes me.

I spent countless hours watching him work with those tools, then helping him, and then having him watch me. But a generational chain was broken. My ancestors progressed from farmer to stonemason to electrician. They used tools to make a living. I work with my hands as a hobby, a diversion from the never-finished job of tapping out thoughts on a computer keyboard. My own children, exposed only to the occasional birdhouse-building scout project or the mandatory instruction of my “car camp,” have little interest in the excess tools in my garage.

Do I need three crosscut saws? Two hacksaws? Four hammers (three claw, one ball peen)? Three wooden mallets? A wood plane? Monkey wrenches that haven’t turned a pipe fitting in 50 years?

I do. Not in a practical sense, of course, but those old tools remind me of a willingness to take on every project, of a patience to do it well, and of the quiet satisfaction that comes with a board well cut or a screw well turned.

I close the drawers again and move on to the nearby shelf. Old door knobs and radiator hoses from a Honda Pilot? Those can go.

`The Failure Stuff:’ Why Ignorance and Mistakes Matter

My father, left, “listening” to the Kyrenia Ship with Michael Katzev as the first frames on the port side were put in place. (Photo: Susan Katzev)

In Sunday’s New York Times, author and New America fellow Jamie Holmes makes the case for teaching students the importance of ignorance. Too often, Holmes argues, students are taught about scientific breakthroughs and understanding, but not the important role that ignorance plays in achieving them. As Holmes explains:

Presenting ignorance as less extensive than it is, knowledge as more solid and more stable, and discovery as neater also leads students to misunderstand the interplay between answers and questions.

People tend to think of not knowing as something to be wiped out or overcome, as if ignorance were simply the absence of knowledge. But answers don’t merely resolve questions; they provoke new ones.

In reading the piece, I was reminded of a conversation I had in researching my book The Man Who Thought Like a Ship. I was talking with Kevin Crisman, one of my father’s former students, who’s now a nautical archaeology professor at Texas A&M.

My father believed that reconstructing ancient ships involved embracing ignorance. With little information about how many ancient ships were built, he perfected the technique of “listening to the ship” by allowing the original hull fragments to “show” him how the hull originally was constructed.

Of course, it isn’t perfect communication; a lot can be lost in translation. He was trying to get inside the minds of shipwrights who lived centuries ago. Once he became a professor, he often allowed his students to share in a problem he was struggling to solve. He never hesitated to admit when he got something wrong. In fact, he often argued that getting something wrong was the only way to be certain you eventually got it right. “If you put 6,000 pieces of ancient wood together, and they all seem to fit perfectly the first time, you’ve done something wrong,” he used to say.

He tried to instill in his students the importance of failures, mistakes and do-overs. “It’s not something professors talk about a lot in their work — the failure stuff,” Crisman told me. “That is so important for students to get, too. People who are less secure in themselves don’t want to be wrong and show weakness.”

By listening to the ship, by embracing failures and trying again, a reconstruction would get closer to the original design. Of course, the idea that a reconstruction was ever really finished was folly. Ancient ships are complicated constructs, and my father learned that the ships did more than “talk” to him. The more he studied them, the more they would ask him questions he hadn’t thought to ask in his first study of them.”You’re going to solve one question and raise five,” he said.

Even now, new generations of archaeologists are reviewing some of his reconstructions, learning new lessons by using his methods. Therein lies the value of ignorance and failure.

The Elissa: The Untold Story

I was recently in Galveston, and I stopped by to see the tall ship Elissa. She wasn’t there, but before too long she pulled into view and I snapped the above picture. For those who aren’t familiar, the Elissa is a barque, a three-masted, iron-hulled merchant ship built in Aberdeen, Scotland in 1877.

How she came to Galveston, though, is a colorful tale that indirectly involves my father, the details of which I pieced together when I was working on my book, The Man Who Thought Like a Ship.  However, it was an aside to the main narrative, so I left it out of the book.

The Elissa was discovered in Piraeus, near Athens, by Peter Throckmorton, a photojournalist an early pioneer of nautical archaeology. Throckmorton was an early supporter of my father’s work on the Kyrenia Ship and recommended my father for the prestigious Hellenic Institute of Marine Archaeology in 1974, when my father was still a relative unknown in the field.

The official story is that Throckmorton spotted the Elissa near a shipbreaker’s yard awaiting salvage, but the real story, as it was relayed to me by people who knew him, is more involved. He saw what appeared to be a beaten-down old cargo ship in the Piraeus harbor and guessed by the cut of her bow that she had been a sailing ship even though all her masts had been removed.

Throckmorton made some inquiries around the harbor and found that the ship was owned by smugglers who were bringing in coffee from Italy. He talked his way aboard, and eventually made his way below deck, spotting the plaque that indicated the ship had been built in Aberdeeen in 1877. (You can still see the plaque if you tour the Elissa today.)

Throckmorton knew he had found a classic sailing ship that needed to be preserved. He made an offer to buy her, keeping the ship’s true nature a secret because he didn’t want the smugglers to raise the price. He took out a second mortgage on his apartment in Piraeus, and bought the Elissa. He then set about finding someone who would help him preserve the ship. Among those who were interested were members of the Galveston Historical Foundation, which was looking for a sailing ship to preserve as part of its efforts to restore the city’s historic Strand district.

But who would do the restoration work? Peter paid my father a visit in the castle in Kyrenia. In an April 30, 1974 letter to my mother, my father wrote:

Peter Throckmorton has asked me to build or rebuild a three-masted bark, probably in Galveston, Texas, and probably for the ’76 celebration. We don’t know much about it yet except that he has a $300,000 budget.

He didn’t. The $300,000 was likely the money Throckmorton had gotten from mortgaging his apartment. At any rate, nothing ever became of the discussions. The Elissa didn’t make it to Texas for the U.S. Bicentennial. She was finally towed there in 1979 and underwent an extensive two-year restoration effort.

By then, my father had completed the Kyrenia Ship reconstruction and had become one of the founding faculty for the nautical archaeology program at Texas A&M University in College Station, about 150 miles from Galveston.

A Glimpse of Life at Sea, Circa 1943

I’m excited about a new project I’ve just unveiled on my website — a page devoted to World War II photos my father took during his time in the Navy. I got the idea around Veteran’s Day, when many of my friends posted pictures on social media of family members who served. That sent me digging through my photo archives for a shot of my dad — shown here with his brother Milt, who also later joined the Navy.

In looking for that picture, I found dozens of others that I had scanned when I was researching my book The Man Who Thought Like a Ship. In January 1943, my father, J. Richard Steffy, was assigned as an electrician’s mate to the USS Wyffels, DE6, a new Evarts-class destroyer escort. After a brief shakedown cruise off Bermuda, the Wyffels and her crew of 198 were assigned to the Sixth Fleet in the North Atlantic. In all, the Wyffels made 11 crossings of the Atlantic during World War II.

My father rarely talked about his time in the Navy, and he didn’t keep in touch with his shipmates. After his death in 2007, I found hundreds of these photos he’d taken during his deployment. Some of them were beginning to deteriorate, and I began the scanning project in hopes of preserving them. I found myself looking at them from time to time, wondering who the men where, how well my father knew them and what their shared experiences may have been. The Wyffels saw little combat, something for which my father was always thankful, and as a result, most of the photos capture the mundane duties and pastimes of life aboard ship.

I haven’t retouched any of the pictures, and I’ve labeled them as my father did — except, of course, for the ones that have no descriptions at all. In some cases, you can see my father’s handwriting on the margins. Citation Solutions’ Margie Seaman — who’s appropriately named for this project —  put the page together and organized the photos. You can click on each one to enlarge it.

I still have many more photos to scan, so I hope to update the page periodically as I get more done. I’ll continue to share them on the website in hopes that others may enjoy seeing a glimpse of day to day life at sea during World War II.

The Return of the Charles W. Morgan

The Charles W. Morgan at Mystic Seaport. (Photo: Mystic Seaport)

As a child, I spent a lot of time at the Mystic Seaport Museum in Mystic, Conn. As I discuss in The Man Who Thought Like a Ship, it was among my father’s favorite maritime museums, and we often stopped there as part our summer vacation. Before he got into nautical archaeology, my father’s dream was to volunteer at the museum once he retired.

Among other things, the museum housed the ship model collection of Charles G. Davis, whose books on built-up ship modeling techniques inspired my father’s own early work with models.

My dad also used to take pictures of the rigging of old sailing ships, and he probably photographed the rigging of the Charles W. Morgan more than any other ship. The Charles W. Morgan is the museum’s showcase and the oldest whaling ship still in existence. As a child, I spent hours running around her decks. 

She was towed into Mystic in 1941, and she’s basically been there ever since. This summer, however, the Charles W. Morgan will set sail for the first time in more than 90 years. Fresh off a five-year renovation program, the museum is sending the her on a victory lap, of sorts that will take her to her former home port of New Bedford, Mass., as well as Boston, where she’ll be berthed next to the U.S.S. Constitution. 

Smithsonian.com has more on the Charles W. Morgan’s “38th Voyage.”