Waterworld wonders

Texas A&M's Nautical Archaeology Program is bringing history to life - literally.

Students of the New World laboratory, which focuses on the study of ship evolution within the past 500 years, are in the midst of recreating "The Heroine," a Mississippi River steamboat built in 1832 that sank in the Red River between Texas and Oklahoma in 1838.

"At the time they weren't keeping records; there's a lot we don't know about early boats - how they designed and built them - this opens early steam boating in the early west, how they operated on the river and how it was to live and work on them. We want to know what our ancestors lived through," said Kevin Crisman, associate professor of nautical archaeology. "This is the oldest Mississippi steamboat studied by archaeologists."

The wreckage of the boat was discovered in 2002, and students spent the past six years excavating the site by diving 20 feet down into the murky waters of the Red River and digging up the steamboat, piece by piece.

"The paddle wheels and other parts of machinery were still on the boat," Crisman said. "We found barrels of picked pork and corncobs. You don't really know what you're going to find until you start digging it up."

After surfacing pieces of the boat's structure and artifacts that had been capsulated inside, students brought their work back to the University to treat the pieces for preservation and begin drafting plans of the steamboat.

Plans for "The Heroine" began to be drafted while the mission was still 20 feet below.

"When we're working underwater in the Red River, obviously paper dissolves under water, so what we use is plastic drafting film and pencils to make drawings of the ship. I couldn't hold it in front of me and see the whole thing so I had to hold it close and I had to get bifocal lenses put in my mask because I couldn't read it," Crisman said. "All our measurements, drawings and sketches put the whole thing back together piece by piece. We have to put it back together in sections because we could only dig up part of it at a time."

"The Heroine" may now sail the Red River again, Crisman said.

"Nobody's really seen these things -- a steam engine and machinery put together exactly as they were," Crisman said. "So what we'd like to do when we're all done with these plans is have somebody build a model of the whole thing, and maybe someday, someone could build an original size 140 feet long steamboat."

More than 200 nautical archaeological digs have been done in the world, in every continent except Antarctica and South America, and the field has contributed volumes to history, said James Delgado, president and CEO of Nautical Archaeology Institute.

Nautical archaeology provides modern man a better picture of the past because shipwrecks give scientists an untouched snapshot in time, he said.

New World lab assistant and nautical archaeology graduate student Bradley Krueger said he came from Michigan to A&M because it is considered the world leader in nautical archaeology.

"I would consider it the best, the best in the country for the type of work that we do. We're the first university to undertake this kind of work and we continue to be a leader in this field," Krueger said. "Since Kevin was down here as a professor I knew that was who I wanted to work with; I wanted to get to that caliber of professionalism."

50 years of discovery In 1960 Texas A&M Nautical Archaeology professor emeritus George F. Bass became the first archaeologist to conduct a scientific excavation under water. He uncovered a bronze-age merchant ship in the eastern Mediterranean Sea, the oldest known shipwreck. Texas A&M's Nautical Archaeology Program, which was founded in 1979, was the first in the nation. Students will attend a summer-filed school in Puerto Rico and in Turkey this summer. Much of the research done by A&M graduate students is published with the help of INA. History Channel producers visited the INA on campus Monday to interview Delgado for a documentary on ancient ships to discover if ancient seafarers could have sailed around the world. The documentary is still in production and an airtime has not yet been set.