For an archipelago of such
modest dimensions, the Pityuses certainly have their fair share of
archaeological secrets - real or imaginary. In Part Nineteen (of Weekly
Edition 087 Saturday 26th October 2002) we saw that Bes’s
sanctuary could well be lying concealed beneath the weeds of Dalt Vila,
while in Part Twenty (of Weekly Edition 088 Saturday 9th
November 2002) we speculated that James (or even Jude) stopped off on an
evangelising mission to Iberia. For the sake of argument, let us imagine
he did exactly that. What on earth would his boat have looked like? This
week we are going to answer that very question, starting with the
subject of book-titles.
Would you - be honest - ever take a serious look at a novel called
Pansy? The authoress herself must have had doubts as she eventually
chose Gone With the Wind instead. Another author - a prickly
character - scrawled the German equivalent of Four-and-a-Half Years
of Struggle against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice on
his title-page. He subsequently pruned this down to Mein Kampf.
Trimalchio in West Egg is our third non-starter: its creator was
convinced that this was the only possible label for his literary
masterpiece; fortunately his editors disagreed and sent it to the
printers as The Great Gatsby. Which brings us to our current
book: how could you know that Ted Falcon-Barker’s Roman Galley
Beneath the Sea (1964) had anything to do with Ibiza? Cyprus, you
might think, or Sardinia. Cyrene or Syracuse at a pinch. But Ibiza? Your
Chief Bibliomaniac himself would never have taken a second look at this
little gem if the blonde diver who appears three times on its jacket
hadn’t let him in on the secret. She can be seen first rummaging about
on the seabed, then elegantly conveying an amphora to the surface and
finally wearing a low-cut number up on deck. She is one of Ibiza’s
living legends and her name is Bel Barker.
Bel
must be one of the most attractive women ever to have set foot on this
glamorous rock. You may have seen her on the front cover of the Pacha
magazine a few years back, but she is far more than just a cover girl
for fashionable glossies. Back in the sixties an old weaver taught her
the secrets of her craft and as a result Bel became the only person on
the island capable of making the thick woollen worsted, once a staple of
the local dress. She has passed her professional secrets on to a few
others so that the ancient tradition is no longer in danger of
disappearing and deserves a special feature (take note, Ed.), but I
would like today to focus on her first husband, Captain Ted, pioneer and
author of six books on underwater archaeology.
The
Falcon-Barker C.V. would sweep the board in any Boy’s Own
Olympics. Brought up in the south of France to a Cuban mother and a
father who prospected for diamonds in the Belgian Congo, he ran away to
Australia from an English public school aged fourteen, volunteered for
the army the following year, was directed into the Intelligence Corps
and found himself as a spy in Damascus before parachuting behind
Japanese lines into New Guinea. After the War he became a photographer,
learned to fly, bought a publicity business, infiltrated the Communist
Party as an undercover agent and finally started diving shortly after
acquiring a yacht. For relaxation he strode off to the Bulgarian Alps to
photograph the world’s last remaining Thracians. One of his many unusual
traits was a natural immunity to venomous snakes. Which brings us to
Ibiza, where he had his first big break in the underwater treasure
business:
One day I was in a small café
having drinks with some Dutch friends when the subject of sunken
treasure and lost cities came up. Hans van Praag, a geologist from Java
who had settled in Ibiza after the takeover by the Indonesians, and who
now ran the local art gallery, mentioned that years before while on
holiday in Yugoslavia he had
seen walls beneath the water of a bay near Dubrovnik. The fishermen
there had told him a fabulous tale of a sunken city once known as
Epidauros, settled by Greek colonists from the original Epidauros in
Sparta. Approaching archaeological authorities for more information, he
was surprised to be told that it was all an old wives’ tale, nothing in
reality existing beneath the waters at all, since the Greek city had
been destroyed by barbaric tribes driving South from Germany.
The Reluctant Adventurer
(1962), p. 196
Needless to say, the authorities got it all wrong. In 1958 Ted, Hans and
Bel mounted a full-scale expedition which established once and for all
that Epidauros was there beneath the turquoise waters of the bay, an
adventure written up in 1600 Years Under the Sea (1960), Cap’n
Ted’s first book. The following two diving seasons (June-September) were
spent prospecting the Maghreb coastline for ancient wrecks but the
returns were generally meagre. Back on Vara de Rey in the winter of
1961-2 they started casting about for their next stunt. Ibiza had no
sunken cities, but there were plenty of half-submerged rocks and
treacherous shoals. The shallow strait between Sa Conillera and Illa des
Bosc was an obvious place to look for ancient luxury items:
The reef stretched from
Conejera Island to an outcrop of the mainland. As shallow as 6 feet in
parts, it was what we had thought: an almost invisible danger to anyone
of greater draught trying for a short cut across to the port [of San
Antonio, then Portus Magnus]. As we had deduced, any ship caught in a
south-westerly gale would have been hard put to round Conejera Point. As
a last resort it would have tried the passage and ripping its bottom out
on the sharp rocks, would have sunk in the sheltered waters sloping
gently down to 120 feet.
Roman Galley Beneath the
Sea (1964), p. 39
Good
thinking, Watson. They decided to canvas northern diving clubs and get
some professional divers to help them in their quest. Cap’n Ted
continues:
The first two weeks’ diving
showed that we were on the right track, and that our deductions had been
correct. Amphorae of all kinds, mostly in broken condition, dating from
400 BC to about AD 200, were scattered in an area of about one square
mile. But we were not there to collect pieces of amphorae. What we
wanted was a complete ship.
Roman Galley Beneath the
Sea, p. 44
They
began to focus on an area where the amphorae pieces were all consistent
with a type from southern Spain of about AD 50. And who was it
who eventually found the complete vessel. Dr Who, of course!
While playing with a baby octopus, the English actor Jon Pertwee
discovered that its rocky home was in fact a buried amphora, which
turned out to be stacked next to dozens of others. The wreck had been
lying there all along, hidden by a protective blanket of fine sand and
weed. Over the following weeks they carried out a painstaking
excavation, first establishing the size of the wreck, laying a grid of
numbered 10-foot squares, photographing each one as the sand was removed
by a suction hose and keeping an exact visual record in layers of every
stage of the excavation.
The
finds included several hundred amphorae (one of which, completely
sealed, was drunk on Hans van Praag’s birthday), brushwood to protect
the pottery from impact with the hull, bronze and ceramic oil lamps by
the thousand, Roman copies of black-and-red Greek vases, jars containing
caulking bitumen and purple dye and large numbers of coins, chiefly from
the reign of Nero. The star pieces were jewellery, one-of-a-kind vases,
figurines and terracotta heads. Among the jugs and pots were numerous
types from every part of the Mediterranean never before encountered -
one even resembling a modern teapot. 1964 estimates for a unique small
silver pouring vase stood at $60,000. You can add a nought for its
present-day value. Then there was a dancing faun, an exact replica of a
piece excavated in Pompei, also worth a king’s ransom. A complete set of
weaving and pottery-making tools provided evidence of artisans on board.
One particularly intriguing find beneath the ship’s keel was a bronze
bowl with a fish design, obviously from China. The author concludes that
it must been part an earlier wreck and have travelled via an overland
route as sea trade between Rome and the Far East only got underway
during the reign of Hadrian (AD 117-38), two or three generations after
the latest coin found on the site of the wreck.
This
book is special for several reasons. Firstly, not only is the text
totally riveting but it is laced with just the right amount of dry
Aussie humour. I thus learnt more about diving after half an hour in my
armchair than during the course of a lifetime’s swimming. Then there is
David Adcock’s first-class design, whereby photographs, drawings,
diagrams, maps and plans complement the text perfectly: as well as
photographs of all the principles players and every type of object
brought up from the deep, there are diagrams and drawings of all the
vital things an armchair diver should know before strapping on his
aqualung, from the workings of the ear and barracudas to how to measure
out an ancient wreck. Finally in a fascinating Epilogue, Falcon-Barker
gives free rein to his extremely lively imagination: we can see the
500-ton vessel setting out early one June morning around AD 50 from
Ostia, laden with oil lamps (several thousand of which were deposited
off Conillera) plus a cargo of mixed goods from all over the Empire:
glass from Tyre, oil from Spain, timber and venison from Gaul, pottery
from Germany, marble from Tuscany and Greece - ‘the list is endless’.
Three weeks later it arrived in Alexandria, gateway not just to Africa
but to India and the whole of the Far East. Ivory, precious metals,
cotton, papyrus, bitumen, ebony all poured through the city on their way
north and west. As the Greek metropolis par excellence it also
held a special fascination for Roman art collectors, and Falcon-Barker
explains why he thinks the wreck had been specially commissioned, very
probably by Nero himself, to bring back as many varied works of art as
could be obtained on a voyage round the Mediterranean. He quotes
Petronius to bring the point home:
The world entire was in the
hands of the victorious Romans. They possessed the earth and the seas
and the double field of stars and were not satisfied. Their keels,
weighed down with heavy cargos, ploughed furrows in the waves. If there
was afar some hidden gulf, some unknown continent which dared to export
gold, it was an enemy and the fates prepared murderous wars for the
conquest of the new treasures … The simple soldiers caressed the bronzes
of Corinth. Here the Numidians, there the Seres wove for the Romans new
fleeces and for him the Arab tribes plundered their steppes.
Petronius, the Satyricon
(quoted in Roman Galley Beneath the Sea,
p. 112)
Were
there any Christians on board when they left Egypt heading west? Nero
had not yet begun his systematic persecution of the new religion which
was beginning to undermine his sovereignty. Let us continue our fantasy
a little longer. They stopped off at Apollonia (in present-day Libya),
Carthage and finally Cartagena on the Spanish Levant before heading for
Marseille where they hoped to lay up for the winter. It was late
September when a sudden gale blew up as they approached the cape just
south of Denia. They steered a course for the safe harbour of Portus
Magnus, took a short cut between the two little Pityusan offshore
islands and there came to grief. We can imagine the better swimmers
making it to the shore, perhaps one of them using a sealed jar with
early Christian texts as a lifebuoy. Well, why not? He or she would have
been one of the very first to bring the new faith to the Pityuses.
So
with Nero’s (or Judas’s) treasure-boat we have come to the end of our
archaeological exploration for the time being. In a fortnight’s time,
something completely different!
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