I, THE SEA TRAMP

[Bianca]

             

[Bianca]

               

[Bianca]

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.

[Bianca]

Today I live in a castle, as I deserve.

Modern visitors flock to my side in this cozy museum at Kyrenia, Cyprus, yearning to glimpse my now-glamorous curves.

I have starred in several television shows, appeared in books and magazines, put my face on a new Euro coin, and dazzled surfers on some ocean called the Internet.

In my honor, two full-scale replicas have taken sail, assuring my legacy as though this old lady of the sea had given birth at last.

And, best of all, I finally heard the good news that Demetrius never did capture my home port of Rhodes. I suppose it’s fitting that instead of his great warships, the envy of the age, a little Rhodian tramp like me is the one survivor to be seen today.

Poor Demetrius never won a kingdom on land by conquering the sea, but I sure did
— castle and all.

[Bianca]

Frank L. Holt
(fholt@uh.edu)

is a professor of history at the University of Houston and most recently author of Into the Land of Bones: Alexander the Great in Afghanistan. He is writing another book on ancient Afghanistan. This is his fifth article in the "I Witness History" series.





 Norman MacDonald
(www.macdonaldart.net)

is a Canadian free-lance artist, living in Amsterdam, who specializes in history and portraiture. This is the fifth article he has illustrated in the series.

 

This article appeared on pages 18-23
of the January/February 2009
print edition of

Saudi Aramco World.