I, THE SEA TRAMP

Schools of the creatures have swarmed back for the past two years, slowly revealing themselves to be real-life men and women on a mission to free me from Poseidon’s grasp. Wearing something called scuba in their odd but very human language, they are making a new science of me that they call “nautical archeology.” I must say, I like the attention. Turns out, these folks had been looking for me—well, maybe not for me personally, but for a well-preserved ancient ship like me that could be excavated scientifically. A Cypriot sponge diver, that first bubbler I saw, showed excited archeologists where he had discovered my grave. Since then, scuba-scholars have excavated me piece by piece from the ocean floor, recognizing in my misfortunes a rare opportunity to fill a huge gap in maritime history. Experts tell me that I’m the oldest Greek ship to be raised from the sea, with an astonishing 75 percent of my wooden hull still intact. I am like a waterlogged encyclopedia of ancient seafaring, waiting to be read.

As shipwrecks go, I’m about as rare as an unplundered royal tomb in Mesopotamia or Egypt —though I suppose there was a little pilfering in my case: For a while a greedy grave robber kept spoiling the excavations in sector 6A of my underwater sepulcher, until the scuba-scholars nabbed him red-tentacled. The culprit was an octopus living in one of my amphorae. “Octo,” as they christened the rascal, liked to prowl my cargo and stash whatever loot he could carry (dishes, a wooden spoon, an iron chisel, almonds) in the neck of a broken pot. Thanks to the excavators, Octo has moved on—and I am moving too, plank by plank, to the shores of sunny Cyprus.