Where The Story Ends - Maritime archaeologist Jim Delgado on the magic of stories revealed, what shipwrecks can tell us, and his time exploring Titanic

In today's episode, I speak with maritime archeologist, historian, author, television host, and explorer Jim Delgado. Jim's work has taken him around the globe, and he has known is one of the world's foremost experts in underwater archeology. And his CV reads almost like the greatest history of that field.

He started with the National Park Service in San Francisco, then went on to work for NOAA as the Director of Maritime Heritage, was Executive Director of the Canadian Maritime Museum, and headed the Institute of Nautical Archeology. At the same time, he was a TV host for Discovery, History Channel, A&E, and National Geographic.

Most recently in 2017, he left to become a senior vice president at Search Incorporated, a maritime archeology company. That was one of the leads on the recent discovery of Ernest Shackleton's Endurance. But beyond all the titles. When I spoke with Jim, I found him to be super fun to talk to, as he was an excellent storyteller. And he spoke about his beginnings as a teenage amateur archeologist, the reason why maritime archeology initially caught his attention, and what it was like to be the lead science officer on the most well-known shipwreck exploration of all time.

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Transcript

Jason Elias: (00:09)
Hi, and welcome to the Big Deep podcast. Big Deep is a podcast about people who have a connection to the ocean, people for whom that connection is so strong, it defines some aspect of their life. Over the course of the series, we'll talk to all sorts of people. And in each episode, we'll explore the deeper meaning of that connection.

Jason Elias: (00:33)
Today, I speak with a maritime archeologist whose work has taken him down to the most iconic shipwreck of all time.

Jason Elias: (00:43)
Hello, this is your host, Jason Elias. Welcome to the Big Deep podcast.

Jason Elias: (00:52)
In today's episode, I speak with maritime archeologist, historian, author, television host, and explorer Jim Delgado. Jim's work has taken him around the globe, and he has known is one of the world's foremost experts in underwater archeology. And his CV reads almost like the greatest history of that field.

Jason Elias: (01:09)
He started with the National Park Service in San Francisco, then went on to work for NOAA as the Director of Maritime Heritage, was Executive Director of the Canadian Maritime Museum, and headed the Institute of Nautical Archeology. At the same time, he was a TV host for Discovery, History Channel, A&E, and National Geographic.

Jason Elias: (01:28)
Most recently in 2017, he left to become a senior vice president at Search Incorporated, a maritime archeology company. That was one of the leads on the recent discovery of Ernest Shackleton's Endurance. But beyond all the titles. When I spoke with Jim, I found him to be super fun to talk to, as he was an excellent storyteller. And he spoke about his beginnings as a teenage amateur archeologist, the reason why maritime archeology initially caught his attention, and what it was like to be the lead science officer on the most well-known shipwreck exploration of all time.

Jim Delgado: (02:19)
My name is James Delgado, everybody calls me Jim, and I'm a maritime archeologist who works largely in the oceans.

Jason Elias: (02:27)
To a layperson like me, being a marine archeologist sounds like it falls somewhere between scraping rocks with a trial in the desert and maybe Indiana Jones grabbing idols and hidden jungle temples. Where in truth does it lie?

Jim Delgado: (02:44)
It actually lies somewhere in a very different genre. Just imagine us as a CSI team working where it's wet. I think Indiana Jones while famous generally is known for looking for iconic artifacts. And while we occasionally find something iconic, when we work on a shipwreck we're excavating and recovering everything, things like ancients DNA. We're looking at artifacts that we hope will tell us a story about the people who built it, the people who used it, the people who lost it. We're analyzing the skeletons of people that we occasionally find in ancient shipwrecks and we're even analyzing the pottery that you find in a shipwreck to figure out not only where it comes from, but by taking the DNA from the scrapings inside that pot, reconstructing ancient trade routes from thousands of years ago.

Jim Delgado: (03:41)
Early on when archeology hit me, it was the thought of Egypt, it was the thought of Mayan temples and cities, Ancient Rome, but also this fascination with people and people's stories. I was one of those kids who always was talking to grandparents and great grandparents wanting to learn their stories, because it's people's stories that are compelling and connect you. So what you're doing is you're not studying things, you're studying people.

Jason Elias: (04:11)
So it's not necessarily the objects you find, but the story of people's lives behind what you uncover and reveal that intrigues you, which as a human being is what we all want, stories to connect with. So what exactly is maritime archeology studying? Is it the shipwrecks? Is it the people? Is it the stories? And since I've used both terms, is it marine or maritime archeology?

Jim Delgado: (04:37)
We used to use marine archeology more as a term, but then people expected us occasionally to show up with a very gung ho attitude and a flat top haircut. Maritime is where it's at now because what we're really studying is maritime culture and maritime behavior. And in that, for me, what it really boils down to is how the sea have influenced human society, how it has led to not just the rise of certain cultures and civilizations, it's been the link by which people have spread around the planet, by which we have traded and interacted with each other. It's the means by which we've defended and fought. 90% of the world's goods is still moved by water. Half the world's food comes from the oceans.

Jim Delgado: (05:17)
And when you study that and how we express that through the creation of waterfronts, through the building of ships, through the development of a maritime culture and subcultures, that's where we maritime archeologists like to go. So occasionally I'll study a ship. Occasionally I'll study a waterfront and wars and peers and docs may be buried and forgotten or still around. But ultimately what I'm looking at is people and their interactions with the sea. And it takes on even more importance because we've finally reached an era in which archeologists, anthropologists and other scientists agree. We passed the tipping point of where we have responded to the oceans. They respond to us now.

Jason Elias: (06:02)
Wow, that's a very powerful way to explain that. I know for you there is one wreck that set your path towards maritime archeology. And I wonder if you can share that with us and tell us why you connected with that story?

Jim Delgado: (06:16)
Well, it was May of 1978 and I had just joined the National Park Service and was in San Francisco to begin my work. And right in the heart of downtown, the corner of Clay and Sansome Streets, right next to the big Transamerica Pyramid that rises up, workers were digging down and they struck the bones of a ship 12 blocks from the sea. The origins of many modern cities who are waterfronts see that their older waterfront has been covered over by landfill as they've encroached and moved out. And as the backhoe scraped away some of the mud from along the side, the copper sheathing which had been sitting in that mud since that ship was beached in August of 1849, as the mud peeled away, it shined as bright as a freshly minted penny and then began to patina as the air hit it.

Jim Delgado: (07:13)
Packed inside a portion of the ship were goods that had been stored inside by 49ers who'd gone off to the gold fields and left their trunks and used it as a big floating warehouse. Its name was Niantic. It had been a whaling ship previous to that China trader. When it came to San Francisco arriving in July of 1849, the crew ran off to the gold fields. So the captain on behalf of the owners sold it to become a floating warehouse. They took the masks out, pulled it up under the mud flats, the water surrounded it with a big door cut in the side and a sign painted over it that said, "Rest for the weary and storage for trunks."

Jim Delgado: (08:03)
Niantic burned in a waterfront fire on May 4th, 1851, and was covered over and forgotten. Looking at that, seeing that story in particular, the idea that sealed in the mud was this veritable Pompeii of a city destroyed at the height of the gold rush. I knew then that ships were where it was at.

Jason Elias: (08:32)
Jim, you are such a great storyteller. And I think in a way what that really is is your passion for the stories you uncover and the way you want to relate your excitement about them to others. So we have the whole science aspect of it, but as we've talked about again and again, it's really the stories that intrigue you, that intrigue us as human beings, that connect us to the history of what you've uncovered. Even with all your incredible life experiences underwater, of course, for laypeople, the most iconic shipwreck of all time would be Titanic. So I would love to hear you talk a little bit about your work on that wreck. What did you do on Titanic and what did it mean to you?

Jim Delgado: (09:15)
Well, Titanic is of course the best known shipwreck of our time, and that has not changed in the 108 years since Titanic sank. And Titanic of course resonates because of the powerful human stories. I was part of a team that was assembled by NOOA, the Institute of Nautical Archeology, the National Park Service, RMS Titanic, the people who've been working on the wreck, and I was chief scientist for the 2010 mission to do the first complete scientific mapping of the entire wreck site.

Jim Delgado: (09:53)
So using vehicles we mapped everything on the sea bed, not just the big section of the bow or the stern, not just the big chunks of where the ship had flexed and broken, but down to individual scatters of artifacts. And there what really came across was Titanic is more than a ship. Like all ships, it represents a floating community. Titanic happened to be a big community with a few thousand people on board, the size of a small town that suddenly an abruptly came to an end with most of them dying on that night and the early morning hours of April 15th, 1912. You see the evidence not only of the disaster and how the ship broke up and where the sterns slammed down or where the bow planed away and dug a trench into the sea bed.

Jim Delgado: (10:50)
But you see it through a variety of things down there that speak to life on board the ship. From the fittings to the plates, the dishes, but for me what powerfully spoke, again, and this would be no surprise, was the reminders of people. In some cases, pairs of shoes side by side where the inevitable conclusion this is where people came to rest. A coat with sea boots, trunks some of which have been raised and recovered and when preserved in the laboratory have given voice to people who otherwise were silenced forever when those cold waters closed over them that night. People who just got caught up in so bigger than themselves.

Jim Delgado: (11:42)
The archeology of Titanic is in that baggage and I don't care necessarily to unpack Molly Brown or John Jacob Astor's bags. I'm interested to do real archeology that looked at people on Titanic. You would find bags and trunks that belonged to people in third class. People who were immigrating trying to find a new life. Who put everything they had or they could take, their world as it was, packed to that trunk. And it speaks to who they are, what choices they made, what life they led and there it is on the bottom. They probably went to the bottom too. And if they went down with Titanic or were scattered to the sea, their story doesn't have to end.

Jim Delgado: (12:34)
The one trunk that has always spoken to me most, Franz Pulbaum was a German immigrant who drowned on Titanic. And he had settled in the New York area. And he was working as a mechanic working on today what we'd call Ferris wheels. His trunk had everything because he probably lived in a boarding house so he's not going to have stuff in storage. So it had his work clothes. It had some of his tools. It had his German-English dictionary. It had a stack of postcards of where he'd come from either to remind himself of the home he was leaving for good or to show his friends where he'd come from.

Jim Delgado: (13:15)
And at the top carefully arrayed was the notarized piece of paper that he had completed to be opened, to be shown to the inspectors at Ellis Island of his intent to become a U.S. citizen. That's what strikes me most about Titanic, but also when you are there because there's so many stories. You glide across those decks, and I've done this both with submersibles in the mirror or with a remotely operated vehicle, and suddenly lit up briefly is a scene whether you've seen it in a movie or read about it that you recognize where you are and what it says, what it means, what happened here.

Jim Delgado: (14:09)
So for me I will always remember seeing the bow. Then you see the crow's nest and then you see the bridge and then you keep moving and you see doors open, windows intact, and finally davits where the lifeboats were launched. And for a moment as I drifted on that very first dive, we passed a davit and I could see a block was there hanging and I get to the spot where one lifeboat was. And then it struck me exactly where I was. And there's something about that. I mean, here you are in a nickel steel sphere that's six feet in diameter packed in with two other people breathing recycled air in freezing cold with over 6,000 pounds of pressure squeezing on the outsides of this four inches of nickel steel, looking through a narrow portal at this lit section of deck and realizing that this is where the Straus' were. Mrs. Straus in the boat crying because she doesn't want to leave.

Jim Delgado: (15:21)
And as he stands back with the other men, because women and children first was interpreted in some cases as only women and children. When the officer said that perhaps a man of his age could get into the boat, Mr. Straus announced that the other men were not going and could not go so too he would not go. And when they were getting ready to launch, Mrs. Straus steps out of the boat then. And when the officer asked her to get back in, she explained they'd been together for a long time and where he goes, I go.

Jim Delgado: (15:59)
And I just remember looking at that scene and suddenly it ceased being a story because there I was exactly where it had happened. And if you've ever loved and if you've ever lost, that was the first but not the last time I cried on the wreck of Titanic.

Jason Elias: (16:36)
Finally, we end every interview and every episode with a single open-ended question we ask everyone we talk to. What does the ocean mean to you?

Jim Delgado: (16:47)
It is the source of life. It is of course the basis of the blood that courses through our veins. But it also is the means by which the planet lives. Mother Earth is also Mother Ocean. In this era of the anthroposophy, I hope that the lessons of the past as well as the science of now will inform a better future.

Jason Elias: (17:15)
Thanks again for listening to our season three finale and we'll see you soon in season four of the Big Deep podcast.

Jason Elias: (17:23)
We really appreciate you being on this journey into the Big Deep as we explore an ocean of stories. If you like what we're doing, please make sure to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. Also, please like and comment because those subscribes, likes and comments really make a difference. For more interviews, deeper discussions with our guests, photos and updates on anything you've heard, there's a lot more content at our website bigdeep.com. Plus if you know someone who you think we should talk to, let us know at our Big Deep website as we are always looking to hear more stories from interesting people who are deeply connected to our world's oceans. Thanks again for joining us.