Model of the HMS DeBraak from the Zwaanendael Museum in Delaware
Whose heart doesn’t beat fast at the thought of finding treasure? Nowadays, stories of finding buried treasure in the press are pretty common – like the recent story, reported by the BBC, of the find of an Anglo-Saxon treasure hoard buried on a farm in England.
When I was a little girl in the mid 1960s, though, hardly anybody was in the treasure-hunting business except Mel Fisher of Atocha fame and… my dad. My dad, always possessed of an interest in archaeology and artifacts, became interested in sunken galleons and wrecks when he was a boy spending his summers on the Jersey shore. Stories of wrecks abound there, and his interest grew as he grew into manhood.
In 1965 or so, my dad founded a treasure salvage company called “D & D Salvage.” Their prize: An 18th century Dutch galleon, the DeBraak, which sank off Cape Henlopen, Delaware, in a gale in 1798. The DeBraak was reportedly carrying gold when she sank in 60 feet of water not too far offshore.
For months, my father researched old manuscripts and documents from the Philadelphia library and also microfilms from Spain in an effort to find exactly where the DeBraak sank. He eventually gathered enough funds to hire a small plane so they could fly over the site with a magnetometer – old fashioned nowadays – to try to poinpoint where the ship actually lay, and eventually the small company bought a barge and hired divers to explore the silty waters where the DeBraak purportedly lay.
An 18th century bottle like the one my dad recovered from the DeBraak
All of this was incredibly exciting to me as a 10 year old. And not particularly because of the thought of finding gold. I was more interested in the artifacts that my dad’s team eventually brought to the surface – buttons from the sailors’ jackets; a pipe, an 18th century green glass bottle, and a cannon! The cannon reportedly went to the Smithsonian, but some of the other objects went right to my dad’s desk. I used to stare at the old dark green glass bottle, with its globby base full of bubbles, and think about the glassmaker whose trade it was to create those bottles. He might have been a member of an artisans or trade guild, having learned his craft from a master who himself learned from masters who came before him. So did the buttonmaker, the textile weaver, and even the blacksmith who helped forge the cannon. The maker’s hand is apparent in all of those artifacts. Marks of the chisel, or the hammer, reminded me that a real live person, who once lived and breathed, made those things, and not a machine.
While my dad was ultimately unsuccessful in raising any “real” treasure, I wasn’t disappointed in the least. Just growing up with those artifacts taught me to have a profound interest in, and respect for, manmade objects from the past. To this day, I thrill to finding objects lost or buried in the ground. I seem to be particularly good at finding old marbles. Now that’s treasure.
This rarely, if ever, happens to me: I see a product I just have to have. I have to have it, and I purchase it on the spot. Naturally, this is not a good thing to do with, say, a $3500 guitar. But with this utterly delicious Frutino, my spontaneity was well spent.
