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A veteran of hundreds of shipwreck dives, Delgado had not been eager to visit the famous ocean liner, but had accepted an offer to tour it as an archeologist and to see how salvage operations might have affected it.
The site of the ship affected him.
“It changes your life,” he said. “I don’t mean to overstate that, but it does.”
In spite of the rust, the damage of sea currents and salvagers, the ship is highly preserved.
“It still looks like the Titanic,” Delgado said. “You know exactly where you are. I’m here at the bridge … You get to a spot and say … this is where Captain Smith was last seen.”
Delgado, an underwater archeologist, has studied famous shipwrecks — Titanic, USS Arizona, and the USS Monitor — as well as the no-name, workaday wrecks that help historians piece together the fabric of life in times past.
In recent years, he raised his profile through a five-year gig hosting the TV documentary series “The Sea Hunters.”
On Tuesday, the 49-year-old explorer and historian will be in Winona to share his stories of visiting the Titanic and the Carpathia, the ship that rescued Titanic survivors. The lecture at Winona State University’s Somsen Auditorium, is sponsored in part by the Minnesota Marine Art Museum to complement its current exhibit on the Titanic.
As awesome as it was to see the rusting hulk rising from the ocean, Delgado marvels about an artifact that was on exhibit when he ran the Vancouver Maritime Museum.
It was a woman’s blouse, recovered from a trunk that floated away as the ship sank on the night of April 14, 1912. The style suggested it was made in the 1870s, and it showed signs of multiple repairs and alterations more than 40 years.
“It had been a high-class piece in its time,” Delgado said. “Here it was a hand-me-down. Was it … passed down through generations? A hand-me-down from a wealthy family to someone who worked for them?”
It was then, he said, that his mind began reeling about the stories the wreck contained, the stories of the 2,209 people who had been onboard.
“Big events like the sinking of the Titanic tend to erase the individual,” he said. “You don’t hear the individual stories.”
Delgado traces his interest in the buried past to his childhood in San Jose, Calif., in the 1960s and ’70s. As bulldozers and backhoes transformed pastures and orchards into what would become Silicon Valley, they unearthed the trash, tools, weapons and skeletons of those who had inhabited the valley before.
At 14, Delgado would spend his afternoons helping to excavate the artifacts revealed by the day’s construction. He hung around with old folks who still had connections to California’s pioneer days, to long-past events like World War I.
“They gave me an appreciation for peoples’ stories,” he said. “It left me with a sense that history, as much as people think it’s big events, is individual lives.”
He got a job as an assistant at a nearby museum, where he eventually became a tour guide.
In 1978, while studying at San Francisco State University and working for the Park Service as an assistant historian, Delgado stumbled on a construction site where the remains of a 129-year-old Gold Rush ship had been uncovered and attached himself to an archeological crew that excavated a series of ships buried under the city.
That work led to dives to study other shipwrecks — and a career that has taken him around the world — from a fleet of sunken warships in the Bikini Atoll to the remains of the Arctic explorer ship Maud.
These days, Delgado spends most of his time on land as the head of the Institute for Nautical Archeology, based out of Texas A&M University. After 28 years of excavations, he recently finished work on his Ph.D.
“My job is not to go out and dig up ships,” he said, “but to create opportunities to build up resources so more work can be done, so the next generation can continue to have the kind of experiences I’ve had.”
Talk about the Titanic
What: Marine archeologist James Delgado discusses his exploration of the Titanic shipwreck
When: 7:30 p.m. Tuesday
Where: Somsen Auditorium, Johnson and Sanborn streets, Winona
Cost: $3 (free for college students and members of the Minnesota Marine Art Museum)
Tonia Krueger wrote on Apr 7, 2007 11:50 PM: