Salty Podcast #100 ⛵ Stories Sunken Ships Tell with Dr. James Delgado

For the 100th episode of the Salty Podcast, Dr. James Delgado joins Cap’n Tinsley to explore what shipwrecks reveal about the people who built, sailed and sometimes died aboard them.
James is a maritime archaeologist, historian, author and explorer whose five-decade career has included more than 100 shipwreck projects around the world. His investigations have included Titanic, USS Arizona, Alabama’s Clotilda, buried Gold Rush ships beneath downtown San Francisco and deep-sea wrecks connected to the Battle of Midway.
He explains how maritime archaeologists identify an unknown wreck and why the most valuable discoveries are often not gold or treasure. Personal belongings, human remains and small physical details can reveal how people lived, worked and traveled at sea.
James shares stories about a teapot still hanging inside Titanic’s engine room, sailors’ bones showing the physical toll of life aboard historic ships, salted pork and weevil-filled hardtack, fire hoses left behind on USS Arizona and the research that helped confirm the identity of Clotilda.
The conversation also explores Gold Rush ships buried beneath San Francisco, press gangs and kidnapped sailors, wrecks near the Dry Tortugas, Confederate blockade runners around Bermuda, Blackbeard’s Queen Anne’s Revenge, the Atocha and the myths surrounding sunken treasure.
James also discusses using robots and submersibles to explore wrecks too deep for divers, surviving a typhoon near Bikini Atoll, working with descendant communities and deciding whether a wreck should be recovered, preserved, memorialized or left where it rests.
Throughout the episode, James returns to one central idea: shipwrecks are not simply broken vessels on the bottom. They are places where human stories survive, preserved inside what may be the largest museum on Earth.

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Transcript

Salty Podcast Episode #100

James Delgado 0:00

And our vessel lost power in a touchboard. And we were over practically on our beam. We were pretty sure we were.

Capn Tinsley 0:07

When you study all wrecks, do you see the same mistakes that sailors make today?

James Delgado 0:11

Over 200 ships have been abandoned by crews that have run off to the gold field.

Capn Tinsley 0:16

So you served as chief scientist 2010 Titanic expedition?

James Delgado 0:20

Better than 300 bodies were covered floating. Others just went to the bottom. I've gone through all those coroner's records. And I brought the photographs. Matilda's the last known ship to come to the United States with cargo of people for the purposes of selling them into slavery.

What does a maritime archaeologist do?

James Delgado 0:44

Oh yes.

Capn Tinsley 0:46

Welcome to a special salty podcast, episode 100. You're my 100. Today I'm joined by Dr. James Delgado, an underwater archaeologist, historian, and author whose five decade careers included more than a hundred shipwrecks from Titanic, Alabama's Clotilda. That's where I am, Alabama. We're going to talk about how we got started, what lost ships can tell us about that written history can't, and what sailing life was really like before modern navigation and technology. I'm Captain Tinsley, James, welcome and thank you for being here.

James Delgado 1:21

Thank you. Good to be here.

Capn Tinsley 1:22

So let's start off with before we dive into the shipwrecks, where are you joining us from today?

James Delgado 1:28

Just outside Washington, DC.

Capn Tinsley 1:30

And for listeners and watchers who may be new to your work, what how would you describe? I've seen it said as maritime archaeologist or underwater archaeologist, underwater, but tell us what that is exactly.

James Delgado 1:45

Well, I'm an archaeologist. My work focuses on

The buried ship that changed James Delgado’s career

James Delgado 1:50

learning more about the past and particularly the people of the past by what they leave behind. That is included in my career excavating the people themselves. It's included digging up and finding lost ships. It's also included work on land and digging up ancient harbors as well as more modern harbors. So if it's wet or if it's got a tie to the sea or to the lakes or to the rivers, that fascinates me. And the stories that these sites can tell have inspired me to share them with global audiences for decades.

Capn Tinsley 2:23

It's fascinating. If you go into historical harbors and you dig deep enough, must be just tons of history layer upon layer.

James Delgado 2:31

I will always remember the first time I saw a ship emerge from the mud. It was in downtown San Francisco. Year was 1978. I was already digging things, but back then it was ancient people. And I just finished an excavation where we'd rescued over a thousand burials. I then joined the National Park Service. I was in San Francisco, and right next to the Trans-America Pyramid, that very iconic building, they struck a buried ship that had been pulled up onto the beach in July of 1849. Now, that ship had been converted into a floating warehouse and offices. It had burned to the waterline in 1850 and then been covered over and had become the source of many stories and legend. And there was exposed. And with that, let's just say that for a boy who had grown up with two grandfathers that had boats, that was just enough needed to nudge me on over into the maritime world.

Capn Tinsley 3:29

Okay, the wharf area in San Francisco. I know it's been extended, so there's a lot of landfill, and there must be a lot of stuff underneath that landfill.

James Delgado 3:37

Oh, yes, that wasn't the first find of such a thing, and it wasn't the last. I worked on a number of those projects through the years. Everything from Montgomery Street, that entire financial district, all the way down, even Fisherman's Wharf itself is built on landfill.

Learning to sail historic schooners

James Delgado 3:53

So, yes, from there on to learning how to dive and moving into the waters of San Francisco Bay and then beyond to the global ocean, lots of lakes and rivers, too.

Capn Tinsley 4:05

I'm fascinated with that. So, and so what did you do after that? What how did you move towards that direction?

James Delgado 4:11

Well, I was with the National Park Service. Not too long after that, I was assigned to San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park, where I learned a lot about big ships, full-rigged sailing ships of the 1880s, to the two-masted schooners, to three-masted schooner, and with that got really into that aspect of it. And that's where I learned to sail. I don't sail yachts. I used to drive grandpa's ski boat when I was a boy, but more to that point. What I've been sailing since then have been historic ships, particularly two-masted schooners. I love that rig. Takes a little bit of work. You're hauling online, and we're talking about old hemp. Tough hands, lots of brawn, and dropping the centerboard to attack around, whether it's up in Maine or indeed, even sailing on a tall ship out of Galveston. Love it. Just love it.

Capn Tinsley 5:05

So Commodore Vanderbilt got his start this way, didn't he?

James Delgado 5:10

He did.

Capn Tinsley 5:11

From Staten Island to Manhattan.

James Delgado 5:14

Well, old Cornel, as they used to call him, was quite the character. We've looked at a couple of sites that pertain to his maritime interests. You can't be involved in this, whether back then in time or from those of us today, without coming together with a shipwreck.

Capn Tinsley 5:31

Okay. Is any evidence of his ship still around?

James Delgado 5:34

Yes, colleagues just worked on one down in the river in Nicaragua. I've worked on one that's off the coast of California.

The ocean as the world’s largest museum

James Delgado 5:42

Indeed. No, there's lots of traces of that as well as so much other. That's why I keep going back. I'm not the first, nor would I be the last to say that what's underwater is the biggest museum we have on this planet.

Capn Tinsley 5:55

What has been revealed to you about sailors back then? When you either dove on a ship or went down in your is it ROV? Okay. What did you see evidence that you didn't know about how

What shipwrecks reveal about sailors

Capn Tinsley 6:10

they navigated and how they checked weather?

James Delgado 6:13

Well, most of us in the field always go back to one of the most ancient bits of evidence of smart navigators, and that's Anti Catherine shipwreck, which had a navigational computer on board, and we're talking second century. But then you've got other ships and the stories that they tell. And it's from wrecks that are older and unnamed to being on Titanic and entering the engine room with the mere submersibles. Inevitably, what you're drawn to is what it's like to be on those ships, to live on those ships, to work on those ships, and in some cases to die on those

Inside Titanic’s engine room

James Delgado 6:49

ships. The engine room of Titanic is an incredible place and a sad one because as I recall drifting through that engine space, we looked over and there was still a tin teapot hanging by a wire on the railing there by the engines. And it just reminded you that this is a story of people. You can get caught up in the technology and where did the iceberg hit and the rest. But for me, ultimately, the story of Titanic is the people. And not just the rich and famous, people like Jack in the movie who bought a ticket to the lottery and didn't quite make it, as well as those who had to stay at their posts and did bravely. So there's that, but I will always go back again to San Francisco and to home, where we were looking at a series of burials of sailors who drowned in a shipwreck in the early 19th century.

What sailors’ bones reveal about life at sea

James Delgado 7:42

And what their bones showed us forensically was a life of hard work with ruptured discs in their backs, repeated scarring on their shins from having their shins knocked, not by some mean old bosun, but by casks and barrels and things bloating wood, probably in the surge of a deck that's been overwashed by waves, to evidence of malnutrition and poor dental health and repetitive strain injuries that left them bones built up where those muscles had been stretched, and in particular on both their forearms and their lower legs, because these guys would hang over a mast and gather sail, pulling it up and balanced with bare feet on the foot ropes of that yard. And that's why Seagar drew Popeye the sailor that way, because 19th century sailors could always be told because they had the big brawny arms and those strong leg muscles.

Capn Tinsley 8:43

Yeah, and they didn't wear harnesses, did they?

James Delgado 8:46

No.

Capn Tinsley 8:48

You found evidence of the problem with that, didn't you?

James Delgado 8:51

Oh, I've climbed a master two, yes.

Capn Tinsley 8:54

The actual injuries. So you said there was the sailors that are buried in San Francisco from shipwrecks. So where do those shipwrecks was it close by?

James Delgado 9:04

In this case, these guys had all drowned in an accident just south of San Francisco, near Point Anya Nuevo. And their graves had eroded out of a sand dune where they'd been buried. In other cases, we've looked at those things. I haven't worked that much with the dead in that capacity. It's been more as of late, you see traces of them in the most recent mission when we were at the Battle of Midway sites, 15,000 feet down. Wow. Like Titanic, you see the shoes and the boots oftentimes together in pairs, uh indicating where these guys had sunk to the bottom of their vessels. The other part of it, while we deal with the people of the past, what fascinates me is, of course, it's respecting, and in cases of service and sacrifice, honoring those who died. What really gets my interest piqued is how they lived. One of the projects we worked on is we dug up a provisioners, a ship Chandler's warehouse that had burned

Salt pork, hardtack and weevils

James Delgado 10:06

and fallen into the bay in a fire in 1851. You would not believe what those barrels of salted pork looked like. The barrels were intact. They'd survived because they fell into the mud and then they dumped fill over it within a matter of a month or two to help build out over that waterfront. These barrels, the meat had disintegrated and was gone, but the bones were still packed in there, but all the fat was left, and there was a lot of that. But the worst part of it was when you realize what these guys had to eat. We remember lifting a chunk out of fat, and it was half a pig's face split this way. And it was that scrap here and here that those things would have to peel off after it had been soaked and boiled to get rid of the salt, and that was their meal. So you get a sense of it. But we also saw hard tech and biscuits. We did an electron microscope on one biscuit from the 1830s, and it was full of brown-up weevils. So yeah, so life was hard.

Capn Tinsley 11:07

Yeah.

James Delgado 11:08

Yeah, that's why they had to conscript or just plane up, hijack you, kidnap you, particularly with the Royal Navy press gang.

Capn Tinsley 11:17

Right. And that happened a lot in San

Press gangs and kidnapped sailors

Capn Tinsley 11:20

Francisco, didn't it?

James Delgado 11:20

There's an awful lot. Yes. Well, you had everything going in San Francisco. You had boarding housemasters who, when a captain needed a crew, they just slip something into the drink, and the next thing you wake up and the mates kicking you to get up there and you're 50 miles offshore. In one well-known story in San Francisco, one of the crimps, as they were called, decided that he would drug and sell the cops on the waterfront beat who were constantly harassing him. These guys woke up and they were well on their way to see De Valparaiso, Chile. When they got back, let's just say it wasn't a pleasant day for that crimp.

Capn Tinsley 12:01

Oh, okay. Well, how much of your job happens underwater? It involves the research, sonar mapping, detective work on land. How much you underwater these days?

James Delgado 12:12

These days, not underwater. I send robots

How much of the job happens underwater?

James Delgado 12:15

now. I've been at this for decades. And you get to the point where, particularly learning to dive in those early days when it was just on air, let's just say that if those sailors' bones reflect their work, so do mine. Okay. I haven't gotten the bins, but there's a variety of things. You're looking at a guy with three rounds of spinal surgery, things of that sort, it adds up. But the wrecks that I'm working on now, they're very deep. You couldn't dive to them. Yeah. Whether Titanic, we used robotic vehicles, but the first time I went to Titanic was in a sub with the Russians. I've done submarine work, submersible work off of Hawaii and elsewhere. But these days, whether it's out in the Pacific looking at deep sea wrecks, it's all robotics. And that's what we just did with Akagi and Kaga and USS Yorktown in mid.

Capn Tinsley 13:08

Okay. Now tell me about Cotilda.

James Delgado 13:10

Clotilda for Clotilde, one of the French saints. Hence good old French founded Alabama. She's a patron saint.

Capn Tinsley 13:19

Yes. And so that was in Africa Town. You were working with the descendants?

The story of Clotilda

James Delgado 13:24

Yes.

Capn Tinsley 13:24

And that's in Mobile, well, north of Mobile. And I'm in Gulf Shores, Alabama, but I've never heard of it.

James Delgado 13:31

Well, the last time I was in Gulf Shores, I was looking at a shipwreck that we washed out on the beach there.

Capn Tinsley 13:37

Oh, which one? In Orange Beach or Gulf Shores?

James Delgado 13:40

Gulf Shores.

Capn Tinsley 13:40

Okay. When was that?

James Delgado 13:42

Oh I was afraid you were gonna ask. It's been a while.

Capn Tinsley 13:46

Was it in the 2000s? Was it in the 1900s?

James Delgado 13:50

It was in the 2000s, yeah. The uh story of Clotilda is an interesting one. The transatlantic slave trade saw 12 and a half million people brought to the New World on ships, over 10,000 voyages, and we know of about a thousand of them that were lost. That is the ships. That many of those wrecks have certainly that's not the number found. There's only a handful. Glotilda is the last known ship to come to the United States with a cargo of people for the purposes of selling them into slavery. Went out on a bank and local mobilians to see if they could do this because the trade was illegal. You couldn't bring people from Africa to the United States at that stage. They got away with it. But the descendants of those people that were landed, those who stayed, created Africa Town, just outside of Mobile. And while only a few live there today, those descendants, that descendant community, spread throughout the country. The story of Clotilda was known to locals, but the exact location was only known to a few people.

Capn Tinsley 15:01

Was it up the river?

James Delgado 15:03

It's right up the river.

Capn Tinsley 15:04

I don't remember the name, but I do remember them finding something up there somewhere.

James Delgado 15:08

It's up the Mobile River and just around the bend by 12 Mile Island. So lots of efforts were made to look for it. The descendants had a pretty good idea, and the family that hired the vessel knew exactly

Finding the wreck near Africatown

James Delgado 15:23

where it was because the wreck lay right off their property. But it was ultimately located. Our job was to come in and do the forensic CSI work. Earlier, a wreck had been found that people thought might be it, and it turned out not to be. So in this case, we had to apply a lot of forensic work and analysis, and it took a few years to be able to conclusively say, yes, this is Clotilda. The wreck sits in the river, it's rather shallow. It's been preserved a bit by the fresh water, but salt water will push in the bay, of course, with certain tides and winds. And so marine organisms come in and they inhabit it and eat on it a little bit, and then the freshwater comes, they die off. So the wreck's in a funny little status of arrested decay, but it's gradually going to go away over time, perhaps. The ship is largely intact, and what's chilling is, and very few have dived it. I'm one of the few because it's a pretty important and it's a very I think for that community in particular, this is where their ancestors were held. This is where some of them died and were cast into the ocean. The area where they were held still survives with the collapsed remains of the bunks, or I should say the planks on which they were laid out.

Capn Tinsley 16:44

And what was this? When did this happen?

James Delgado 16:48

1860.

Capn Tinsley 16:49

Okay, after the beginning of the Civil War. Well, that was 61.

James Delgado 16:52

Yes. No, and because I'd previously worked in Mobile on other sites and had also been involved early on in discussions to bring artifacts back from France from the CSS Alabama. But no, it's a pretty important site. It's on the National Register of Historic Places. The Alabama Historical Commission looks after it, working closely with the community. And now what is being discussed is what best to do with it, how to memorialize what happened, and also is it visible in the water? It's not occasionally at very low water, you can see a trace of it here and there. But no, it's and there's not much to see. You wouldn't really, unless you knew what a ship of that type or that time really would look like after all these years.

Capn Tinsley 17:43

So, what how did you identify it?

James Delgado 17:45

A lot of careful work. We excavated, we looked at the we were able, there's enough of it that survives. You could see the form and not just the outline, but the form of the ship. We were able to take samples of the wood. We were able to take samples of the fasteners, we were able to identify the results of the fire that the captain had set to burn and sink it. We found other artifacts that spoke to when it was built and how it was built. And

How Clotilda was identified

James Delgado 18:11

ultimately what we ended up doing was looking at over close to 2,000 official registry certificates for every schooner built or registered in the Gulf of Mexico from the War of 1812 all the way to the turn of the century. Only one of all of those fit exactly what we had in terms of not just the size, but the form of the vessel and how much it could carry, as well as having the right type of wood, the right type of fasteners, evidence of fire, and most powerfully, the actual slave hold itself that had been built temporarily, a space of little better than 500 square feet to pack 100 people.

Capn Tinsley 18:57

So, how is AI helping you with all this?

James Delgado 19:01

AI, this is the AI. Well, it's probably gotten a little easier over the years with the searching abilities and well it has, but to do this right, we went to the National Archives and we opened up books that hadn't been opened in a long time. Looking at the official records, looking at the insurance records, looking at the court records, and the certificates of registry, as I said, for every port in the Gulf that was registering schooners, and including those in Mobile. No, I think you've got to do it. For me, it's been hands-on, whether it's in the archives and the records, talking to people and stories that are passed down by families, which is a really important part of this story with Clotilda, but also then the physical work. Diving it, touching it, understanding, doing all of that scientific work has been important. But I will say this, particularly for a sailing podcast, I more or less knew what I was looking at because I'd studied and actually sailed a schooner up in Maine that's roughly built about the same time as Clotilda, 10 years or so later. Same basic size, not as big in terms of cargo capacity.

Sailing experience helped identify the ship

James Delgado 20:10

Centerboard schooner, two master. So yeah, I had a sense of it. I even had a sense of how schooner responds when you just unleash those two yards and out they swing, and the wind catches the canvas and off you go. Centerboard down.

Capn Tinsley 20:28

So the did any of the descendants have any stories that were passed down?

James Delgado 20:33

Yes, many of them.

Capn Tinsley 20:35

Wow. So did they all seem pretty accurate? You know how things get passed down?

James Delgado 20:40

Yes.

Capn Tinsley 20:41

Can you share one with me?

James Delgado 20:43

Well, it's really their stories to share. I think the important thing to note is that they all have very strong stories about how their rel their ancestors had come to be on that ship, some accounts of what it was like on that ship

Stories preserved by Clotilda descendants

James Delgado 21:00

that were passed down, in many cases, from mother to daughter to granddaughter and beyond, and some cases from the on the male sides of the family, too. But bear in mind that these folks who stayed created a community based on their values as Africans. And Africa Town got that name for that reason. And so the stories also reflect what it was like then for them working there, working on the river, working in that community. And some of those stories have been shared. There's a number of books that have been written now. Ben Rains, the reporter who went and, you know, tried to find the wreck and initially didn't, and then was able to drop onto the wreck that ultimately would be proved to be Clotilda. Nick Tabor wrote a great book, but also you've got authors like Sylvian Dayouf. You've got Natalie Roberts and others who have written books about it. We did one just on Clotilda for the University of Alabama Press. But many of these stories, but also going Way back. Zora Neil Hurston, Emma Roach, a great southern historian, all wrote about these stories and wrote down what some of these people were saying, particularly Kusola, known as Kujo Lewis, to the locals, who had been one of those who had been captured and brought over on Clotilde and lived into the 20th century, as did others.

Capn Tinsley 22:20

And he's been interviewed. He's his story is written down somewhere. Wow.

James Delgado 22:24

Yes, it is. It is. And a more recent version of his account as written down was published the book titled Air's Barracun.

Capn Tinsley 22:56

Okay. So who was the first person that you think laid eyes on that ship and knew what it was?

James Delgado 23:04

There's a 1912 photograph. There's a 1912 photograph of it ticking out of the water at a really low water, low tide. The wreck was never lost. It was, like I said, it sits off the property of the family that commissioned the ship to go to Africa. It was partially burned and scuttled there. It's a chartered wreck. It's just one of those stories where people say, Well, that's it, and somebody else says, No, it's not. And so, no, there were people in the community who knew it, knew what it was. A lot of people looked for it with certain parties going, but I think if it hadn't been for Ben Rain's perseverance as a crusading environmental reporter who cared about Africa Town, I think And how did you get involved with it?

Capn Tinsley 23:50

What made you go out there?

James Delgado 23:52

When the wreck was initially thought to be found, National Geographic and others suggested take a look, offered help to the Alabama Historical Commission, were able to bring a team with the Slave Rex Project and the Smithsonian and National Geographic and search the company I worked for at the time, which had a good strong cadre of maritime archaeologists based out of Pensacola.

Capn Tinsley 24:16

What year are we talking? What year was that?

James Delgado 24:19

2018, 2019.

Capn Tinsley 24:20

Okay, pretty recent. Okay.

James Delgado 24:23

So we came

How James joined the Clotilda investigation

James Delgado 24:24

out and did a lot of work, a lot of diving, a lot of survey, but we also surveyed everything in the area because that's not the only wreck. And yes, uh but of course, even because I'm fascinated with all of them, there's a couple four-masted schooner wrecks. Them are the biggest that were built, though. They had five and six masters as sailing vessels. But no, one of those, of course, being Jimmy Buffett's grandfather's boat.

Capn Tinsley 24:46

Gosh, really.

James Delgado 24:49

No, I love ships.

Capn Tinsley 24:51

Can you tell me more about that one?

James Delgado 24:53

Just one of these vessels built as large sailing vessels to offset losses to German U-boats in World War I. And they ended up, many of them ended up in the Gulf working in the bulk trades. And this one had a long career.

Other wrecks around Mobile Bay

James Delgado 25:07

It ended up being a floating building of its own and ultimately fell into ruin. I think may have even been burned. But it remains there, just out there on one edge of the bay. But one of one of many, the first wreck actually thought to be or suggested to be Clotilda, was another one of those four masted schooners. Sailing vessels persisted for quite a long time in the trades. And some of the wrecks that we've worked on are some of these larger sailing ships that in their day were fast and beautiful and well acquainted, that at the end of their lives were run down and worked hard with uh a handful of sailors, and in some cases not enough. We worked on one wreck in the Florida Keys where these guys had been caught in a storm carrying lumber. And it's very visible when you actually look at the wreck. It's broken. It's right off of Fort Jefferson in the Florida Keys, in the dry Tortugas. Right. And this big, massive iron sailing ship broke into three pieces, the stern here, midships there, and at the bow. And I remember coming up to it and seeing the anchor sticking out of the sand very close to the bow. What

A sailing ship destroyed near the Dry Tortugas

James Delgado 26:26

these guys and then going in and seeing the chain when I banned away the sand tightly stretched, and there wasn't much of it. And what they'd done is they'd come through the hawse pipe and wrapped what had been a snapped-off piece of chain because the wind should been windless, had been pulled right out. These guys were dragging in the wind in a hurricane. And lost anchor after anchor, lost their chain. What was left they wrapped around the bits, held it tight, and she dragged until she hit the reef and broke into three, and they didn't make it. And so you see that there, and you realize, you know, that the end of sail, for those who were working in it, oftentimes was a very tough business, and not everybody made it out.

Capn Tinsley 27:10

Right. And when do you is I know that sailing ships and steamships overlapped.

James Delgado 27:16

Oh, yeah. See, you know, first shows up in a real serious way in the early 19th century. And I worked on a large number of steamers, and steam persisted well into the diesel age. And I've actually shoveled coal into the boiler of a small working steamer back in the day.

Capn Tinsley 27:36

Did you say early 19th century for steamships?

James Delgado 27:40

Yeah.

Capn Tinsley 27:41

They go back that far.

James Delgado 27:42

Oh, yeah.

Capn Tinsley 27:43

Wow.

James Delgado 27:43

Steam itself goes back to the late 18th.

The transition from sail to steam

James Delgado 27:46

Uh, but we actually are seeing evidence of boilers, full series boilers in Roman houses. There's one in Pompeii. Uh ancient people weren't stupid. They just didn't have the large industrial capacity.

Capn Tinsley 27:59

Here's a question we've already covered, but early in your career you worked with gold rush era ships buried beneath downtown. How does the ship go under underneath the modern city? And what was the most surprising thing that vessels relieved? Maybe you didn't answer that one, or maybe you did. That last part. What was the most surprising thing?

James Delgado 28:19

The half of the pig face, or it's the first ship that we looked at, the Niantic, was full of goods that come from around the world. And what that spoke to was the fact that San Francisco, thanks to the gold rush, was catapulted into becoming America's

Gold Rush ships buried beneath San Francisco

James Delgado 28:34

great port on the Pacific. And this is where it happens, is in that waterfront because it's completely inadequate. It's a shallow cove that's a mud flat in low tide. So they started building wharves out to cross that. And they also started planting ships in there because buildings were expensive, and over 200 ships had been abandoned by crews that had run off to the gold fields. That's the romance, and that's the story that many people hear about. And it's a fascinating one. But for me, it was looking at what had come out of Niantic, and then later General Harrison, a ship nearby that had also burned. And you had goods from all over the world. Everybody was coming to participate in the Great Bonanza, the great, the great emporium of the Pacific, San Francisco. So the gold provided the means to build a tremendous economy. And out of that first initial rush of, well, we're going to bring champagne, we're going to bring good food, but there were also we're going to bring bricks, we're going to bring lumber, we're going to bring nails, we're going to bring shovels, everything that you need.

Capn Tinsley 29:37

We're going to provide things for all these people.

James Delgado 29:40

Everything. And first, too, is an awful lot that comes because it's a gold rush economy. The Reverend Hinton Helper, no stranger to Alabama. He's a minister who hails from the South and wrote a series of books. Helper was in San Francisco at the time, and he said, We'll say this. In California, and specifically, he'd certainly been in San Francisco, you see the shootingest guns, the sharpest knives, the prettiest of courtesans. But this I will say of California, it has the best of the bad things that you can offer. So that's again the myth. That's a it's a myth that's based in some truth. But what we were really seeing was what was needed to build San Francisco up from a tiny little mud flat harbor into this great port that would dominate Pacific trade and commerce for the United States until after World War II.

Capn Tinsley 30:32

And then it slowly just turned into less shipping or fishing into tourism.

James Delgado 30:40

Well, San Francisco's waterfront is so narrow, it didn't have what modern ports need today, which is, as you'll see, and why mobile port is expanding, is big flat areas where container ships can come in. Ships have gotten huge. You've got 5,000, 8,000 TEU container ships coming in now. And the world's still a place where 90% of the goods we all use and consume come by water. So you need big open areas in which you handle these intermodal ports where rail cars come in and offload those containers or load them, and likewise trucks that do the same. And San Francisco didn't have the room for that. Oakland did, and across Long Beach, Vancouver, Seattle to some extent took over there.

Capn Tinsley 31:25

So the more modern the ships became, the less it was useful there.

James Delgado 31:30

Yes. So, no, for all of us who lived there, of course, you have fisherman's wharf, you have the local sailing scene, which is fun. And you really got to know how to handle sail if you're sailing on that bay, I'll tell you. The last time I did it, though, I was sailing a one-masted scout scunner of the 1890s around Alcatraz.

Capn Tinsley 31:51

You think those guys got off Alcatraz?

James Delgado 31:54

Oh, yeah.

Capn Tinsley 31:55

Do you know that one? You think so?

James Delgado 31:57

I know so. Well, they just didn't live long.

Capn Tinsley 32:03

Do to drowned.

James Delgado 32:05

You're talking about the Eastwood movie guys.

Capn Tinsley 32:07

Yes, yeah, those guys.

James Delgado 32:09

Well, when I was in the park service at the same time I was doing all of this, I was the chief historian for the park out there, and that included Alcatraz.

Capn Tinsley 32:17

Okay.

James Delgado 32:17

So I know the rack

Sailing around Alcatraz

James Delgado 32:19

pretty well. Slipped over.

Capn Tinsley 32:20

We've been there one time.

James Delgado 32:21

We opened it up to the public. We sat down and interviewed a lot of folks back in the day. And the audio tour that people take now is based on the interviews that we all did with former correctional officers, family members of those officers, former inmates. In those early days, the Bureau of Prisons wasn't happy with how the tours were all being given. So they came to the park and they said, give us your historian. So they took me and opened up all the files. The FBI opened up all their files. So I read all of those. I had to sign in non-disclosure agreement for those files just because the inmate files I was reading would say, Inmate Y told us that inmate X is doing this or is trying to escape. So, and at that stage, we're talking the 80s. These guys are still alive, and you could see a couple of octagenarian ex-cons saying, You ratted me out to the ward in 1950, and still try to kill her. So there that was. The other part that was interesting is that the Bureau also decided to send me to prison as a tourist. Correctional officer showing me around, and I went to basically a federal club Fed to see what that was like, not as an overnight visitor, and then to San Quentin and to Death Row. So perspectives from that certainly remain with me in terms of what prisons can be and Alcatraz's own stories. But back to it, reading the files and following the route of those guys. And from the Eastwood movie, and actually having been on the island when Clint was filming it, because that's how we were able to restore the island was by films coming in and having those film companies paid. The warden's house and the lightkeepers' house were burned. There was a lot of vandalism, but also just when the prison closed in 63, it was left to the elements. The General Services Administration was looking after it until the Indian occupation. And then after that, what happened is GSA government service agency, they tore down the living quarters so nobody could come back and do that again. That's what we inherited when the National Park was created in 72, and we opened it up for the first time in October of 73, as we the Park Service. The island, of course, had previously been Army Fort, had been heavily fortified during the Civil War, but then gradually transitioned to an army prison and then in 1929.

Capn Tinsley 34:48

And I seem pretty sure that you knew that they drowned.

James Delgado 34:53

Well, there were all sorts of personal items that they would have taken that were found floating. The conditions are such I've been in that water off that island. I've dived off of Alcatraz. There's a couple of shipwrecks there, but we did other work. No. The Bureau of Prisons is pretty clear. And you hear the stories out there that the rumors that somebody picked them up on land and all this stuff. John and Clarence Anglin and Franklin Morris lived. I don't think anybody's credibly proven any of that. Most everybody else didn't make it. The only guy came close, drifted in the tides, and was caught on the rocks at the Golden Gate by Fort Point and was nearly dead. One other guy actually cleverly during World War II saved all the spare pieces that he could from uniforms that they were laundering, and then put that uniform on and stepped onto the prison boat to go back over to Angel Island, the Army Post, as a sergeant. But when they did the head count and realized he was missing, they figured it out, went to the boat, and picked him up and stepped onto the dock off the transport.

Capn Tinsley 35:52

So your opinion, that water too cold, too rough, too many sharks.

James Delgado 35:56

For guys like that who have been in there, there's a lot of mist.

Capn Tinsley 36:00

Yeah, they weren't trained for triathlon or currents are strong.

James Delgado 36:03

If you don't get those right, and the current rips around there, just look recently at that boat that was scattering ashes with a family that had trouble, and they still haven't found a UF hospital. Wow. So yeah, that's it's a tough place to learn to sail. It's a tough place to learn to dive. And I learned to dive there on San Francisco Bay. It's those are rough waters.

Capn Tinsley 36:25

So you served as a chief scientist on the 2010 Titanic expedition.

James Delgado 36:30

Yeah.

Capn Tinsley 36:31

Mapping you wrote you map the wreck, debris field. Can you tell me is there anything there that you discovered that maybe the historical record had missed?

James Delgado 36:42

No, I think what most importantly, all of the work that's done from Bob Ballard and the team going out with Hen Louis Michel and the others and discovering the site and doing the initial documentation and all of the missions then up to 2010 and then after. What they've given us is a profound sense of just how much of Titanic is spread out. There's been a lot of discussion over how it broke up and what about this, what about that? And those kinds of forensics are important questions to ask. But for me, and no surprise given where we've been talking previously in this podcast, it's what

Mapping Titanic and its debris field

James Delgado 37:18

tells us about people. And what you see there is the evidence of a community, a small town that basically died that night. With the number of dead, some of whom likely went were still in the ship, others who were on the water. A little better than 300 bodies were recovered floating. Others just went to the bottom. And you can see where that number of those are. Really? The shoes are still there side by side. And we've seen this on other wrecks too. There will be those who will say shoes that fell out of suitcases. And in a couple of cases, there's a couple of suitcases that have fallen open. But that doesn't explain all the shoes that are still laced up one next to the other that we've seen. But again, I think coming back to the people side of it, the suitcases as well, some of which have been recovered by Salvage, speak to these folks. And I'm not talking about, say, John Jacob Astor's suitcase. You have an idea, particularly because a lot of these people's families filed insurance claims

Titanic as a lost community

James Delgado 38:16

for all the fancy stuff and clothes they lost. It's the suitcases like one for that belonged to a fellow named Franz Puebla, was a German immigrant who'd come to the United States to make a life, had gone back to Europe and was returning home, and his suitcase, well preserved by being down there two and a half miles, had everything he owned because he lived in a boarding house. So if he's going to go back and be away for a while, his work boots, his clothing, the tools of his trade, he worked on what today we would call Ferris wheels, amusement parks, a stack of postcards that he was bringing back, and on top with his nice clothes as a second class passenger was his piece of paperwork for when he got to Ellis Island, which had previously been processed. And it was his declaration of intent to

The suitcase of immigrant Franz Pohlbaum

James Delgado 39:04

become a U.S. citizen. That dream ended that night in those icy waters of the North Atlantic. And yet that suitcase spoke for him. And so that's what I think so many of these expeditions have done. It's given us a better sense beyond the hype, beyond the stories of the rich and famous. It's given us a sense of that community, those who worked on the ship, those who were using it as a means to immigrate, as well as those who were crossing back and forth, even on first class. It's not to denigrate them as a class or to say that while there was a disproportionate number of first class who lived, that their losses were not horrible and terrible in that families suffered and still do. And I've met descendants. I've also met a few people who were on the ship. And it's again, it comes back to the people. It's the human stories.

Capn Tinsley 40:04

How far did that go back when you met people that were on the ship?

James Delgado 40:09

Early nineties.

Capn Tinsley 40:13

So really old interviews from the 50s or 60s of people talking about it that were there. But you talk to people in the nineties.

James Delgado 40:25

Well, yeah, I want to be 70 pretty soon. Of course. But to that end, I knew so many folks that you know that kids today, like really World War II. World War I. One of the neighbors was the widow of a soldier that fought in the Spanish-American War.

Capn Tinsley 40:43

Wow. 1898. Is that right?

James Delgado 40:46

Yeah. My great-grandmother who looked after me as a baby was the daughter of a Confederate veteran of the Civil War. So yeah, it's it seems like a long time, but in this vast scope of human history, it's literally just around the corner.

Capn Tinsley 41:01

Did anybody ever the people that were taken to is it Nova Scotia that they went out and recovered? And then anybody ever do any autopsies or anything on those people?

James Delgado 41:13

No, the ships that came out to pick up the bodies did an initial analysis. Not an autopsy. It was clear that they either drowned or died of the cold. They were looking, they stripped them to see if there were any identifying marks, scars, tattoos. And a number of those tattoos really speak to where these sailors had come from, what they were doing. And many of them are poignant because those I've gone through all those coroner's records. And I've gone and I've gone through the photographs.

Capn Tinsley 41:44

That's amazing. You've seen so much.

James Delgado 41:47

Got a new book coming out later this year out of out of the UK. And it's all about Titanic as a ship of immigrants and working people and what the dead

Titanic’s crew, passengers and recovered bodies

James Delgado 41:59

tell us. Not the dead themselves in terms of the bodies, though I do draw on that a bit, but rather as an archaeologist, what I see is the story here, which is the ship of immigrants, people's dreams, whether they're working on that ship. And what as an archaeologist I'm drawn to, particularly why I went through those records, is they undress a body on the Mackey Bennett, and he's got his uniform, and underneath it are the pajamas because he was off duty and he quickly threw his uniform on. And in his pocket are the keys that he was entrusted with, but also his union seat, his seafarers union book in his pocket, and some spare change, and

James Delgado’s upcoming Titanic book

James Delgado 42:45

maybe a family photograph.

Capn Tinsley 42:46

British, English, British, Scottish, Irish, yeah.

James Delgado 42:53

All of these guys. And so with that, no, it's it's poignant and powerful. So some bodies were identified, others were not. Only one has really been the subject of DNA testing, and that's the little Sidney Goodwin. The child body was found carefully dressed by his mother. The entire family died. He was the only one found, as I recollect. And his little shoes are still preserved and on display at the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Capn Tinsley 43:22

So it's such a pivotal event. You know, the whole drama about unsinkable and then it sank. And all questioning of all the decisions have gone down that rabbit hole. What coming away from that whole thing after all of your investigating and looking at corners reports and diving on it, or not diving on it, but RO's ROV? ROV.

James Delgado 43:46

Well, dive did submersibles.

Capn Tinsley 43:48

Yes.

James Delgado 43:49

And that's that's a two and a half hour commute to work.

Capn Tinsley 43:52

Did you learn anything like, oh, new that made you conclude something that maybe you didn't before?

James Delgado 44:00

Every time I go and see a site, I learn something new based on the physical evidence that's left. What's more powerful coming back to Clotilda is when what you see in terms of the physical, the forensic, the archaeological evidence is exactly what the families have told you.

Capn Tinsley 44:16

Really?

James Delgado 44:16

Yeah.

Capn Tinsley 44:17

So it the folklore was true.

James Delgado 44:19

In some cases, yes. Also where it comes Titanic, yes. And even if the stories are well known, there's something about just seeing it. You're there. Being there, going right up to the fallen mast with the crow's nest was where Fred Fleet spotted the berg and rang the bell and phoned and to the bridge itself, which is largely gone. But the wires with the switches for the watertight door still lie there. You can see the mount where the gear was and the stand for the wheel. All of that. And it's I know exactly why

What visiting Titanic reveals

James Delgado 44:57

Jim, I'd like to think why Jim made the movie the way he did. Cameron did it because Titanic's a ghost town. And that's the power of that site. But all the work we did at Roll Work.

Capn Tinsley 45:09

Did you feel that when you were there?

James Delgado 45:11

You have a strong sense that this is where people lived and died.

Capn Tinsley 45:15

Yeah.

James Delgado 45:15

That's for sure. Nothing supernatural, just a sadness. Because you know the stories, and there it is, and it's no longer a story, it's real because you're there. The stage may be empty, but you know exactly what played out on it. So there's that. But I'm the same thing's true on the Arizona as we've dived that through the years and worked on that.

Capn Tinsley 45:37

I haven't been I haven't dove on it, but I've been there.

James Delgado 45:42

We're swimming over the deck, and we're in an area and mapping this in the 80s, and there's a tangle of fire hose. And when you begin to look at it, you realize the entire team was there working to put the fires out that had been started in the initial attack when that final bomb came through and set off the mountain, the magazines, and those crews vaporized in that blast, leaving only the hose played out where they had been standing and fighting the fire. I have to say that this is times like that, again, where you just and I think this is a story, father's a firefighter. I know what it's like to have a parent who goes out and risks it all. And my father's a decorated, life-saving hero in the fire department and nearly died in doing so. And that's something you live.

USS Arizona and the fire hoses left behind

James Delgado 46:27

And the same thing is true in military families, and our family is a military family as well. But in this, when you see something like that at Arizona, again, it just comes back to here's a moment in time that remains there and visible to you if you're open to seeing it and letting it in. The human story, not just ultimately, archaeologists sometimes can get criticized for wanting to just study an individual artifact and say, wow, fascinating pen built here, bent there, and this is I'm more interested in how the pen was used and what it meant.

Capn Tinsley 47:05

Well, speaking of that, when you study old wrecks, do you see the same mistakes that sailors make today? Such just taking chances with weather, poor maintenance, fatigue, or overconfidence. But there's so many sailors now that are, you know, I'm one of them, you know. I don't think we might have would have made it on a sailing ship back then. You know, it's so much harder back then.

James Delgado 47:29

It is. The one thing I'll say is this I've looked at sites both on land and underwater, and I've traveled the world. It doesn't matter what language you speak, whether you're praying to Baal or Osiris or to Yahweh or Allah. People are people. It doesn't matter what language you speak. It doesn't matter what gender you are, people are people. And that's what I see everywhere I go with the sites, whether it's the cities they built, the homes that they stayed in, at the end of the Roman Empire, in

Do sailors still make the same mistakes?

James Delgado 48:02

a wind-blown, empty metropolis with walls built of fallen temples to keep the invading Arabs out, to pump to so many of these other sites, to sliding down into a shaft to see Pharaoh's burial chamber, all of these things are just even in the jungles of Angkor. Looking at all of that, people are people. We build tremendous monuments, we believe in certain things, we have ties to communities, to institutions, but also more powerfully to people and to families. People are people, and that's what I see. My colleagues who are working, even very early humans, you see signs of violence, but you also see signs of love and caring.

Capn Tinsley 48:46

You see people not changed that much, just the technology.

James Delgado 48:51

Yes, and to that end, no, sailors are sailors, and people are people. So you have good sailors, you have not so good sailors, you have risk takers, you have very cautious people, and sometimes you just get caught up in things that are above and beyond your ability to deal with it. And with that, we were out of Quadjalain, the missile base, to go to bikini to work on and dive on the ships from the atomic bomb tests of 1946.

Capn Tinsley 49:18

Oh, wow.

James Delgado 49:19

And our vessel lost power in a typhoon, and we were over practically on our beam ends. And the rest of us just strapped in and prayed as the engineers worked, tying themselves into the engine room to get everything up and running. And if they hadn't, then we would have been one of those great mysteries of the sea. And again, that's where you see the best of people knowing that they have to step up and do this, and they saved all of us. So again, common stories of the sea, whether it goes back

Nearly lost in a typhoon near Bikini Atoll

James Delgado 49:51

thousands of years, whether you're Odysseus and his crew, or shall I say Matt Damon, crossing in those boats, yeah, to you know, more modern ones, to Joshua Slocum and other single sailors, to ancient Polynesians who understood the currents and the winds, to people that sign up whether it's in a full-rigged man of war or a nuclear submarine to serve their country. There's all of these. Again, it's the human stories that I find compelling. And back to sailors. Yes, the one thing I will say is this the sea shaped this planet in so many ways. The sea has been the great highway by which we created global economies going way back. It's how we've exchanged DNA and beliefs and ideas, and some of the most powerful and amazing communities on this planet have been those places where the sea brings people together. I remain steadfastly, unabashedly a fan of the maritime world and ships and sailing. And with that, as I was once told by one of my bosses in the Park Service, who was a World War II combat battle, Guadacanal, you can't write about a battle unless you walk it. You gotta walk the battlefield. You can't write about ships, you can't understand them unless you sail them. You can't understand what it's like to do that unless you have crossed those waters. I've sailed through the Straits of Ormuz, I've crossed the Atlantic and the Pacific, I've sailed throughout the Gulf and down the coast and around

How the sea connected the world

James Delgado 51:30

Cape Horn and up to the Cape of Good Hope.

Capn Tinsley 51:33

And what were you on?

James Delgado 51:34

Just oh different types of ships.

Capn Tinsley 51:38

Not small ones.

James Delgado 51:39

No. No, occasionally, but I like small ones, that's that's like San Francisco Bay. That's like sailing the Alma or that wonderful little 1890s scout schooner.

Capn Tinsley 51:51

They decide which will be recovered and or documented, left in place.

James Delgado 51:57

Depends on what there's a couple of answers. One is that inevitably it will always boil down to cost. Raising Clotilda and trying to put to preserve it once it's out of the water, because it immediately starts to fall apart. Any of these things dip back. Over $10 million. Maybe even more. What's the reason for doing it? If you can we excavate to seek answers to questions, to add to or to rewrite the history books. So unless that, you're just picking up a souvenir that's inexpensive.

Capn Tinsley 52:36

Because it has to be preserved somewhere so it doesn't just disintegrate.

James Delgado 52:41

It will. And with that, it needs to be in a museum for people to be seen and to stories to be told. So there's that aspect. And then there's just the thought that, as I've said, I think the

When should a shipwreck be recovered?

James Delgado 52:52

sea is one of the greatest museums we have. And not all of us can dive, not everybody can go with us on these missions. But I'll tell you, when we did the Battle of Midway, your government and mine does this work for a variety of reasons to understand what's down there, to understand what it's like, particularly in an area in the Pacific that's being challenged by the Chinese, but also to understand this history. And also in those moments, too, and I say this as a former senior official in both Republican and Democratic administrations, oftentimes we use these opportunities for what I was talking about, and that is to reach other people into other areas. We dived midway with Japanese participation because those enemies have then are our friends now. And strategically, we need friends in the Pacific. So with that, we broadcast those missions because it was taxpayer funded for free, out there online for people to watch. Those videos are available. And when the results came back, do you know how many people watched the Midway missions?

Capn Tinsley 54:01

How many?

James Delgado 54:02

Over one billion.

Capn Tinsley 54:04

Wow. One seventh of the world was watching.

James Delgado 54:09

And when we were on the Japanese carriers that were sunk, they were broadcasting that footage from the U.S. government ship and then from Dr. Ballard's ship, because Bob was out there earlier with the other mission that we had on the jumpotrons on the sides of the high-rises of Tokyo. That's but it's also a reminder that there are these things that connect us. Good stories, bad stories, they connect us. When we start feeling that we're all alone, when we start feeling that we're just the only ones, that's where trouble starts.

Capn Tinsley 55:12

Well, the latest movie that came out about Midway, the effects of what they actually had to do, which is nothing what they have to do. Still battles are hard, but that was amazing. Those explains, those diving on it, and just the last minute pulling up, amazing.

James Delgado 55:30

My wife's uncle. My wife's uncle was one of those pilots on the York

Archaeodiplomacy at the Battle of Midway

James Delgado 55:35

10.

Capn Tinsley 55:36

Well, they agree, the greatest generation. Those guys were tough. Oh my gosh. Such bravery.

James Delgado 55:45

No, I'm laughing because I'm remembering my combat wounded World War II Marine Corps Raider boss who was had some amazing stories. Basically, get it done, get be tough. And remember once he said somebody said something, and they said, Don't boss, don't you have any sympathy? And I will apologize for this. He goes, Sympathy. Sympathy in a Marines dictionary is somewhere between suicide and syphilis. They were tough.

Capn Tinsley 56:18

They were tough.

James Delgado 56:19

The survival rate are was it 50% if you went out there and these guys he got shot multiple times by a Japanese sniper, and the last hit, he yelled at the guy and he said, Damn it, don't you know you don't shoot a man when you're down? You don't shoot a man when he's down? And sniper said in English, sorry, and his buddy shot the sniper out of the tree.

Capn Tinsley 56:42

Oh my gosh.

James Delgado 56:44

But he was there for Red Beach and some of that stuff at the canal.

Capn Tinsley 56:49

Okay, I got a couple of fun questions for you. What historic ship would you sail aboard for one day with with a guaranteed safe return? I think it'd be more interesting if it said without a guarantee.

James Delgado 57:01

We don't know its name, but one of the very first ships to cross along the edge of the ice or up atop the Bering Strait, bringing the first people from Asia into the New World tens of thousands of years ago.

Capn Tinsley 57:16

It was a ship. It wasn't walking.

James Delgado 57:20

They didn't just walk. Oh, there were some that walked for sure, but the bulk of them, as far as we now know, came in skin boats. And you found talking kayaks, I'm talking large umiac, where they had a ready supply of food. And even if you weren't fishing, the moment the tide goes down, as many indigenous cultures say, the table is set.

Capn Tinsley 57:46

And you there's evidence of this?

James Delgado 57:48

It's anecdotal. Okay. Of course, this is what the tribes themselves say. I mean, people don't forget their history.

Capn Tinsley 57:55

You really do cover all the information.

What historic ship would James sail aboard?

Capn Tinsley 57:57

I like that.

James Delgado 57:59

So I'd love to do that. Guaranteed, Beck. I'd you'd be fascinating. Here's the problem. There's so many of them. I'd like to I just can't pick one. Which favorite, which historical figure would I like to talk to the most? So there's this hard to answer other than to say the ones that would compel me the most are the ones perhaps we don't know about that would really change or alter our understanding of the past and the people in it.

Capn Tinsley 58:26

That's a good answer. Okay. What do you what's the one thing Hollywood always gets wrong about shipwrecks? Do you ever consult for them?

James Delgado 58:35

If you look online, you will see a video where I was brought into a studio for a series called Is It Real or something like that, where I rated a bunch of movies.

Capn Tinsley 58:45

Ah.

James Delgado 58:46

Yeah, Hollywood gets right shipwrecks. What did they get wrong? Sometimes they get very right. I think what they don't get right sometimes is, and maybe let me rephrase that. It's not what they don't get right. More often than not, I think movies offer a romantic view and they don't really give you a sense of just how awful those events are and how few people make it, if any. Shipwrecks were the the greatest source outside of major natural disasters of human loss of life. Tsunamis, earthquakes, typhoons, all of those, you know, massive fires started by lightning in early societies and cultures, other than human-caused things, these

What Hollywood gets wrong about shipwrecks

James Delgado 59:39

are the big events out there caused by our own hubris or just being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Much of the span of human history. 80,000 years ago, there's clear evidence of people using water to cross over areas. And how does Australia get settled? People are moving out into the Pacific, and we now know from DNA evidence and the rest that people were sailing across the Pacific long before the Spaniards ever showed up in the 16th century in the Pacific.

Capn Tinsley 1:00:08

Like the Vikings.

James Delgado 1:00:10

Guys got everywhere. Back to the movies. No, is it real?

Capn Tinsley 1:00:14

They can't even get a salute right. One person's going like this, one person's going like that. That's such a simple thing to get right. I've never been in the military, but I know what a proper salute looks like.

James Delgado 1:00:25

Well, yeah. If I didn't get that right with the boss and the I would always like to rib him on that time honored tradition of sailors ribbing Marines. But no, seriously, I think Hollywood does a pretty fair job in some cases. What is hard to convey is just that sense of helplessness. And when you're really in it.

Capn Tinsley 1:00:51

And you felt that when you were off bikini.

James Delgado 1:00:55

Oh yeah. No, the well, we were pretty sure we were.

Capn Tinsley 1:00:58

Yeah, no engine, and that's what people went through.

James Delgado 1:01:01

Of course, they had sails, but and we're strapped into bunks because the ship.

Capn Tinsley 1:01:08

I know that Hitocha, you know, would I think you've probably been there just by what you've been saying. Have you been there?

James Delgado 1:01:14

Well, not on that wreck, right over it and in all those waters and on other wrecks. Yes, in the keys.

Capn Tinsley 1:01:20

Yeah. Are they still finding that was in the 80s? Are they still finding those?

James Delgado 1:01:25

I believe they are, but one of the greatest myths out there is how much treasure sits beneath the sea.

Capn Tinsley 1:01:30

What do you mean?

James Delgado 1:01:31

Well, I think most people think every wreck has treasure. Doesn't the treasure of it, the stories it tells, it's what it offers to change our views of history or to connect us to people whose stories we might not otherwise know. And in some cases, no, there's a certain amount of wealth that still sits in the oceans, and there's commercial salvagers who go out and find that and recover it.

Capn Tinsley 1:01:55

And they did not recover all of those ships that were taking all those gold bars.

James Delgado 1:02:01

No, a lot of them made it, but others didn't. No. So it's still wrecks out there, some treasure wrecks that have not been found. The bulk of attention as of late has been for the ships that were carrying specie or precious minerals, metals, I should say, during World War II. But that quest to start recovering those came after both world wars, both World War I and then after World War II. And the great salvage firm Risden Beasley out of the UK did a lot of work getting back some of those really precious metals.

Capn Tinsley 1:02:31

And where were they? Centered in the middle of the Atlantic or Atlantic.

James Delgado 1:02:35

They developed a diving bell that

The Atocha and the myth of sunken treasure

James Delgado 1:02:38

basically just dragged along the bottom and would look, and then the guy say, okay, and they would lower claws and charges and open up a Liberty ship and say, okay, now start plucking it. The other thing, by the way, I just wanted to say about all of that is that in some cases, when some of these wrecks are found, and some of the Spanish ones are particularly interesting, is what you see is how different well, the biological transfer, not just plants and food types, and it's the oceans that introduced the world's cuisines because sailors from different ports brought all these things together, and spice trade is just one example of that. Some of these early Spanish wrecks, and there's some off of Florida that aren't treasure ships, they're colonized. What's in the ballast piles and the holds, the insects and the other stuff, but also yes, ships had cats.

Capn Tinsley 1:03:34

They did.

James Delgado 1:03:35

Just like yours is right behind you.

Capn Tinsley 1:03:39

Her ancestors came over on a ship, I feel pretty certain.

James Delgado 1:03:42

Oh, absolutely, absolutely. Our cat, now gone, definitely was a waterfront cat, and that's was rescued from under a dumpster in the port of Vancouver. But no, we're seeing that they're taking cats to sea very early on.

Capn Tinsley 1:03:58

For the rats, right?

James Delgado 1:03:59

Yes. Sometimes those rats are as big as those cats. Matthew Flinders, famously English, British, I should say, mariner, charting and navigating, did the first chart of all of the coast Australia. He brought his black cat with him. Trim was the cat's name. And Trim became very famous. The sailors all loved Trim. Trim ultimately met his demise, I think, on Madagascar. But Trim was so beloved by the crew and Flinders himself, and they

Ships, trade and the spread of animals and food

James Delgado 1:04:28

wrote about him that years later, in Adelaide, Australia, there's a big statue to Flinders. And heraldly long ago, the community put a statue of Trim at his feet. This is one very famous seafaring. Yeah. So with that, there was a book I was asked to review. The author had just finished writing it, and it was going to be called Seafarers. And that's the title. And it was all about cats and history. And as she was writing it, and I helped her with some thoughts. And this is what we've seen archaeologically in these stories of cats. She knew Trim, of course. But when it was all done, oftentimes when you do review somebody else's book, you help they ask you to do a blur. So those

The history of cats at sea

James Delgado 1:05:10

lines on the back. Something she asked for a I think in this case, maybe it was a forward, not a blur. So she got one, but I didn't write it.

Capn Tinsley 1:05:20

Who wrote it?

James Delgado 1:05:22

Our cat. Schooner was from the kitty.

Capn Tinsley 1:05:26

Schooner.

James Delgado 1:05:27

So yeah, schooner, our cat.

Capn Tinsley 1:05:32

Well, I have a couple of questions. I don't know if you get asked. Blackbeard's ship that went down to North Carolina.

James Delgado 1:05:38

Queen Anne's Revenge. Former slave ship. Yes.

Capn Tinsley 1:05:40

Was it ever is there any evidence of it still around?

James Delgado 1:05:44

Oh, yes. Yes, they've been working on it. It's still on the bottom. There've been a fair amount of work done with excavating it. Some of the material is on display. There's a few books about it. Fascinating ship, fascinating story. And the artifacts speak to both its use as a slaver as well as Blackbeard's pirate ship. I've seen a number of the artifacts in the laboratory in North Carolina.

Capn Tinsley 1:06:06

And then Nassau, which was like a pirate haven back in the day. Have you been all through there? Is there ships still under there?

James Delgado 1:06:13

There's a bunch of ships there. I've not gone to Nassau.

Capn Tinsley 1:06:16

Oh, really? I have on my boat.

James Delgado 1:06:19

I generally don't get to go to all of the beauty spots out of the world.

Capn Tinsley 1:06:24

I hope you have a good place to dive.

James Delgado 1:06:27

Where I've done a lot of work is in Bermuda. And there, of course, there's a whole range of ships that include pirate vessels, Confederate blockade runners, warships, a whole it's a veritable museum in the waters around there. One of them, it's one of those big four masted schooners that I was talking about earlier that wrecked during World War II with a cargo of window glass, other construction materials, and morphine in little. Ampules and that constellation sits here below it at the bottom of the reef is one of those iron-hulled Civil War blockade runners lost during the war. And this Confederate blockade runner and the larger are what inspired Peter Benchley.

Capn Tinsley 1:07:09

I don't know. The deep okay. It's came out in the 70s.

James Delgado 1:07:14

So with that, yes, a whole number of teenage boys

Blackbeard and Queen Anne’s Revenge

James Delgado 1:07:17

who watched that movie forever fell in love with Jacqueline Bassett, as I recall.

Capn Tinsley 1:07:20

Yeah. And it was it Nick Nolte.

James Delgado 1:07:23

I think it was Nick Nolte, yeah.

Capn Tinsley 1:07:25

Uh young Nick Nolte. He was cute.

James Delgado 1:07:28

Good actor. And in the deep, of course, there's a modern wreck that's got drugs in it, and the morphine ampules. And then below it is a Spanish treasure ship of gold.

Capn Tinsley 1:07:39

And that I'll have to go back and watch it. Wasn't there a face that popped out of a hole in the ship?

James Delgado 1:07:44

It was a moray. It was a morayel, I think. And those, yeah, can startle you. I had one come around the bend once on that same wreck in the Florida Keys,

Pirate and blockade-runner wrecks near Bermuda

James Delgado 1:07:54

where those guys have a very bad end. There's a big moray that was living in the stern. They lark they leave you alone.

Capn Tinsley 1:08:02

The last thing I ask you about. The Golden Globe Race, 1968. Just okay. I just interviewed Lynn Party. The 1968 Golden Globe Race.

James Delgado 1:08:13

Remember, yes, okay.

Capn Tinsley 1:08:15

And that did not happen again. They brought it back in 2018, and it's still a retro race. You can't have any of the GPS and the weather forecasting or use your engine or any of that. What do you think about all that?

James Delgado 1:08:28

I think it reminds me that people always need a challenge. And increasingly, as we live in an interconnected technical world, that the number of people want to go back and just do it the way the old, the old way. The strength of their muscles, the cleverness of their own mind, the breadth of their own experience, and live sometimes on the edge. And that I think is what's always been part of the siren song and the call of the sea.

Capn Tinsley 1:09:01

And the southern ocean. I mean, I'd rather bless you. I'd rather do anything than go in the southern ocean. You won't catch me there. But you've been there. Would you want to go back?

James Delgado 1:09:13

Depends. If there's a really powerful story.

Capn Tinsley 1:09:17

You're going. You're a brave man.

James Delgado 1:09:19

I still I'm not done yet. I'm still happy. I've got another expedition coming up.

Capn Tinsley 1:09:24

Yeah.

James Delgado 1:09:24

No.

Capn Tinsley 1:09:25

Can you say what it is? Okay. I had to try.

James Delgado 1:09:29

That's it's fine.

Capn Tinsley 1:09:31

It was a pleasure talking with you.

James Delgado 1:09:33

I really enjoyed chatting with you. I'm glad you're doing this podcast. I think stories like these need to be shared. And not just my stories, but any stories that people out on the water doing what they love. And also just sharing the reality of that. That's great.

Capn Tinsley 1:09:47

Well, thank you so much. It's a pleasure. And maybe I'll run into you somewhere sometime.

James Delgado 1:09:52

Yeah, we'll should be. I'll be back in your neighborhood sometime. It's this year, possibly. Possibly.

Capn Tinsley 1:09:58

Okay. With that, salty abandon. Out

The 1968 Golden Globe Race

Capn Tinsley 1:10:13

of the