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Overview
Ancient arrowheads found on the shoreline of Sandy Hook reveal Native American settlement before the land was flooded by melting glaciers. In 1854, 240 passengers of the New Era clipper ship met their fate off Deal Beach. Nobody knows what happened to two hydrogen bombs the United States Air Force lost near Atlantic City in 1957. Lessons from such tragic wrecks and dangerous missteps urged the development of safer ships and the U.S. Coast Guard. Captain Stephen D. Nagiewicz uncovers curious tales of storms, heroism and oddities from New Jersey's maritime past.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781467118293 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Arcadia Publishing SC |
| Publication date: | 04/25/2016 |
| Series: | Hidden History |
| Pages: | 176 |
| Sales rank: | 1,070,573 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.50(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Scuba Diving
Experience Required!
We've looked at remote sensing technology or sonar as a great tool to locate and map shipwrecks remotely. Just as remote sensing technology has improved and become more available and affordable, so, too, have innovations in scuba diving made access easier and safer. As long as ships become shipwrecks, creative and scientifically minded people have found ways to salvage and study them. In the past, cannons, anchors and ship materials were expensive to make, and it was cheaper to go down underwater to salvage them than to replace them. It was not easier but cheaper and quicker, for instance, than ordering the iron cannons from a bog iron furnace in Batsto, New Jersey. That took time to make and even longer to deliver.
Innovation produced results. Long before scuba was invented, men found ways to reach the seafloor. In the illustrated drawing on the following page, showing helmeted divers salvaging a wreck, men from a few hundred years prior recovered salvaged materials from a shipwreck. The idea behind scuba is no different than holding a pail or bucket over your head underwater in a pool and being able to breathe the trapped air inside for a few seconds. The air is trapped by pressure, and the deeper you go, the more pressure compresses the air. You could only take a few breaths this way before you used up the oxygen and replaced it with exhaled carbon dioxide. More than a few of these intrepid pioneers lost their lives or got seriously injured this way, but they were also successful. This concept is what would become part of the science of rebreathers for today's divers and is also used to keep sailors comfortable aboard submarines for long periods of time while submerged.
In the early 1900s, this passage would fit as a job description for divers written by Rufus Wilson in his book The Sea Rovers in 1906:
There is something thrilling or perhaps frightening about the occupation of the diver that strongly appeals to the imagination, and with reason, for working fathoms [one fathom equals six feet of water depth] below the surface of the water, in semi-darkness, in turbid waters and life-dependent upon a rickety pump for the breath of life, his trade is at best a perilous and precarious one. Perhaps, that is why divers as a class are opposed to taking apprentices, and that a majority of the men who drift into the calling do so by accident. Most divers, if you question them, will tell you that the best, if not the only way to acquire their art is to put on a diving suit, go down into the depths, and learn the business for yourself.
Once a wreck is found, it is up to wreck divers to physically dive down on it to see what is there. Diving here in the Northeast is tough. Although there are several beach wrecks in shallow water of twenty-five to thirty feet, most of the wrecks lie in deeper water of seventy feet and much deeper. Ocean water temperatures on the bottom — even in the summer months — can be fifty-five degrees. In the spring, fall and winter, it's not unusual for bottom temperatures to only reach the upper thirties and low forties. It's cold.
If the cold water doesn't deter you, then deep water might. Wrecks here are mostly found in deep water or at least depths where divers have to be concerned with decompression. This limits the amount of time divers can spend on the bottom. At depths under thirty-five feet, the amount of time you have to dive is virtually unlimited except by the air you would need to carry in your dive cylinder to be able to breathe. Once you start getting deeper than forty feet, the time allowed to stay on the bottom is governed by physical properties of gases (mostly nitrogen) in your tissues under pressure. As you dive deeper, the water pressure or weight of the water forces the air molecules to compress in your tissues, and those physical properties limit the amount of gas your tissues can absorb at various depths. These gases are nitrogen and oxygen. Recreational dive tables have been developed that govern the maximum amount of time you can spend at various depths, which is based on the theorized absorption rate of these gases under pressure. These tables have been around for a long time and were initially developed by the United States Navy specifically for navy divers. These are referred to as the "No Decompression Dive Tables." If you overstay your time diving, you risk getting into decompression diving, and that requires a higher level of knowledge and experience. The risks start to add up for pushing the limits of what the dive industry calls "recreational diving," which is diving without using any complicated decompression system, although a safety stop at twenty feet for three minutes is always recommended. The risks of avoiding or bypassing safety can be substantial and life threatening. Risks include a sickness called the "bends," which happens when trapped gas bubbles in your tissues expand too quickly as you ascend to the surface rapidly or after staying underwater at depth longer than allowed. Those bubbles get lodged in joints, causing extreme pain and requiring time spent in a decompression chamber at a hospital. Or it could be an air or pulmonary embolism that can result from ascending too fast, causing those same gas bubbles to expand too quickly in your lungs and heart.
Worried yet? These are the extreme cases, but any diver needs to understand these risks. Like an astronaut in space, so must a diver rely on a totally self-contained life support system to stay alive while working in an alien environment. Recreational diving is generally considered to be scuba diving to depths no greater than 120 feet and applies to about 75 to 80 percent of divers certified. According to international diver certification agencies, recreational divers make an average of eight to twelve dives per year, mostly while on vacation. Wreck divers in New Jersey easily match that and go far beyond, making as many as thirty to sixty dives on average per year and in conditions nowhere as easy as on the reefs of warm Caribbean waters. We weren't built to live or work underwater for extended periods of time. The underwater environment off the New Jersey coast is pretty extreme with cold water and deeper-than-usual working depths, often with limited visibility underwater and fifty to eighty pounds or more of dive gear on your waist and back. You need to be able to navigate around the wreck and be able to find your way back to the line that takes you back to the boat. All of these conditions get added into your task load or dive plan, and to function well requires exceptional skill, confidence and experience. Many New Jersey wreck divers may also bring bulky underwater cameras or video equipment made larger with waterproof containers to keep them dry and safe. Some bring tools, even utilizing dive scooters, which are normally used to tow divers underwater for navigating the wreck but can be flipped around to blow sand away from a place on the wreck to dig for artifacts. Sometimes bigger tools are needed, and heavy air or water dredges, which are powered by surface-supplied pumps and hoses, can dig a hole on the wreck in minutes. All of this adds to the task load of divers. Your dive plan has to account for the time to set up the equipment, work your underwater mission and, at the same time, build in time to safely ascend from the dive, as well as be able to communicate effectively with other divers.
Technology has helped improve divers' chances and reduce some of the risks of diving. Underwater dive computers have sensors that run mathematic programs or algorithms that constantly track your depth, which allows the computer to "average" your time at various depths and allow you more time underwater. The dive tables assume you always reach the maximum prescribed depth on your dive. The reality is that you may be swimming at various shallower depths until you get to where you are going. Your dive computer then tracks those varying depths and extends your dive time safely since you would not always be at the maximum depth.
The advent of this type of technology, as well as a better understanding of how we breathe gases under pressure, has also extended time spent underwater. The average vacation diver may dive to reefs in shallow water no deeper than thirty to forty feet for short periods of time, usually thirty to forty-five minutes. Wreck divers are diving much deeper and conduct their dives for the same if not longer periods of time, so as more technical methods of diving became available, divers adapted. One of these technical aspects involves the use of Nitrox, which is enriched oxygen (normal air, the kind in our atmosphere that we breathe every day, is composed of 21 percent oxygen, but Nitrox mixes can include anywhere from 22 to 40 percent oxygen). It helps your body by absorbing less nitrogen during the dive and thereby extending your bottom time. Nitrogen can cause an effect known as the "bends," a condition that traps nitrogen bubbles in your bloodstream and in your joints that causes great pain and, in rare cases, death.
The "bends" were discovered when treating coal miners back in the early 1900s who mysteriously developed pain in their limbs after they rose from the depths of the mines. Back then, this illness was called caisson disease or decompression sickness. The fast trips coming up from the mine depths were the cause of those pains. Nitrox is never recommended for dives deeper than 130 feet, as oxygen becomes more toxic medically in the divers' lungs. For dives at depths over 150 feet to well over 250 feet, the use of mixed gases helps in much the same way. As you go deeper, oxygen becomes more dangerous to your body, so mixing in helium with regular air limits the effects by diluting the oxygen content. A gas mix of 17 percent oxygen allows divers to work more effectively in water deeper than 150 feet than those using air (21 percent oxygen). The downside is that diving with less oxygen adds more stress to your body, which has to work a bit harder to make that gas exchange in your lungs and the bloodstream. This is why diving to deeper depths (150 feet or greater) involves having more technical diving education that covers any type of diving that is not considered recreational diving (shallow dives of less than 80 feet) and almost always includes at least one but perhaps two or more decompression stops, which allow your body to off-gas the compressed nitrogen gas that you absorbed while diving.
Let's look at a couple examples. A diver making a dive to the wreck of the Andrea Doria, an Italian passenger liner located one hundred miles off the coast in 250 feet of water will use mixed gases to make the dive. That dive for one hour or ninety minutes underwater will require decompression at various depths on the way up, usually starting at 50 feet from the surface. The total run time on this one example dive, including actual time spent on the wreck and all decompression stops before surfacing, might total four to six hours. This is all before you could safely surface. If you did that dive breathing just air with no decompression stops, you would be limited to about five minutes total time underwater.
One other strategy that divers must use is slow ascents. The idea is go up slowly to allow gases that built up under pressure in your tissues to off-gas as the pressure decreases on the way to the surface. The rate of ascent is considered to be one foot per second. So our example dive of 250 feet to the wreck below would require over four minutes just to go from that wreck to the surface. You would have no time to survey or map the wreck. Of course, this is overly simplified. No technical diver would calculate in such broad terms. Now, at shallower depths of 80 feet, a Nitrox diver using an oxygen mixture of 36 percent could spend forty-five to sixty minutes at that depth. An air diver using recreational dive planning could spend only thirty minutes maximum, and a U.S. Navy dive table diver would be allowed a maximum of forty minutes. (The U.S. Navy dive tables were based on fit, young male navy divers doing one dive per day with not too much task loading.)
Maximizing your dive time on the bottom allows you to search for artifacts, catch lobsters or do videography or photography of the wreck and marine life. As explorers, you always balance the risk with the benefits of making the dive. It's not all mission-orientated; most times it's just a relaxing dive, enjoying the underwater experience. When your dive requires digging on the wreck to look for artifacts or mapping parts of the wreck to determine information about its construction and possible identification, then dive planning is essential to your safety and your success. Scuba diving in New Jersey can be rewarding, but it is complicated and thus experience is required.
CHAPTER 2Ancient Indians off Sandy Hook
There is a sense of wonder about history when you dive these shipwrecks off the coast and certainly as you research more about them while trying to discern their stories. History is relative to where you are. For example, our country's history only goes back a little over four hundred years. On a diving expedition to Greece a few years ago, however, I had a chance to dive shipwrecks that sank between two thousand and three thousand years ago. That's a lot of history and a long time ago. There is a feeling of both excitement and overwhelming insignificance when you put that experience into context today.
What does this have to do with the next story? I was able to be a small part of an expedition that looked into early — let's call it "prehistoric" — New Jersey history several years ago with Daria E. Merwin, a Stony Brook University doctoral candidate at the time, off the coast of Sandy Hook in 2003.
Dr. Merwin (yes, she received her PhD) was trying to prove her thesis, "The Potential for Submerged Prehistoric Archeological Sites Off Sandy Hook," published in the 2003 Bulletin of the Archeological Society of New Jersey, that ancient Indians had lived along the New York Bight ten thousand years ago and left traces of that existence in what is now the beaches off Sandy Hook. A surprising opportunity came from an unlikely source during an Army Corps of Engineers beach nourishment or replenishment project. As a result of all the beach replenishment, a West Long Branch woman who was out beachcombing looking for sea glass on Monmouth Beach a few miles south of Sandy Hook wound up discovering over two hundred arrowheads and other artifacts. A few of the artifacts were later scientifically dated to be from the Early Archaic Period. Archaeologists divide the Archaic Period into three sub-periods: Early, Middle and Late. Each subsequent period is distinguished by important changes in cultural conditions and social complexity. It turns out those arrowheads were between eight thousand and ten thousand years old, from the beginning of this period. It's no surprise that Indians lived in the area, but it was surprising to find out that those arrowheads came from the general area from which those Army Corps engineers were pumping sand.
The process of beach replenishment involves pumping sand from an offshore site through large hoses onto the shore beach. The sites can be a few hundred feet or miles and are chosen by the bottom material and, of course, the logistics in accessing it. Natural erosion takes place from storms and ocean currents. In Sandy Hook's case, this current is called the littoral or longshore drift current, which moves sand and water northward. Predominate wave and swell directions are from the southeast and contribute to the erosion. As storms and currents take sand away, the coast becomes more susceptible to storm damage and tidal erosion, so replenishing the sand back onto beaches and building those beaches as a barrier to that erosion is an important task to protect shore communities. This process has been ongoing for many years. It has its share of supporters and critics for its cost and for its protection of shore communities.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Hidden History of Maritime New Jersey"
by .
Copyright © 2016 Stephen D. Nagiewicz.
Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Foreword Vincent J. Gapone 11
Acknowledgements 13
Introduction: Shipwreck Hunters 15
1 Scuba Diving: Experience Required! 25
2 Ancient Indians off Sandy Hook 33
3 Buried Beach Wrecks: John Minturn, Ayrshire and New Era 39
4 The Mullica River Shipwrecks and the Revolutionary War 75
5 Treasure and Shipwrecks 81
6 Robert J. Walker. Civil War Connections 91
7 Submarine: The Jersey Shore and the World Wars 103
8 Collision at Sea: SS Mohawk 115
9 Fire! The Mono Castle 121
10 The New Shipwrecks: Artificial Reefs 131
11 Underwater Subway: Steam Trains and Redbirds…All Aboard! 137
12 Shark! First Recorded Attack in History 145
13 Super Storms and Changing Coastlines 151
14 Final Notes 159
Bibliography 167
About the Author 175