Hoi An Hoard - The Excavation
hyt...@my-deja.com
Destination VN
Kim Fay
During the 15th century, off the Hoi An coast of Vietnam in
the South China Sea, a trading vessel filled with porcelain
vanished without a trace. Five hundred years later, in
1999, as a storm swept toward this very same area, the
archaeological excavation barge Tropical 388 was confronted
by the possibility of a similar fate.
The divers working out of Tropical 388 were attempting to
retrieve artifacts from the wreckage of the trading vessel,
a procedure that was hazardous under the best of
conditions. By no means were these the best of conditions.
The shipwreck was located in the middle of a typhoon zone
known as the Dragon Sea.
The storm was detected 1,500 miles away, but these were men
on a mission – to rewrite a crucial chapter in the history
of Vietnam. They were accustomed to obstacles, and they
forged on, bracing themselves against the swells that were
battering Tropical 388, until it was obvious that the
tempest was heading straight for the dive site.
Down below, the divers struggled to return to their diving
bell. “The bell was bouncing up to six feet off the
seabed,” says Ong Soo Hin, the president of the salvage
company. “The divers go in and out of the bell through the
bottom, so you can imagine how much trouble they were having
at this time.”
This was the second typhoon that the expedition had
experienced. The first had been harrowing, but at the time
the divers were using surface methods. Now, they were
living and working inside a pressurized cabin and diving
bell. This innovative technique, scientifically
orchestrated to acclimatize the human body to the
shipwreck’s depth of seventy meters, meant that the divers
could not simply be yanked to the surface and released into
the fresh air.
It took six hours for the divers and their underwater
connections to be locked into the pressurized live-in
chamber on board Tropical 388. Even then they were still at
the mercy of circumstances beyond their control. The
transition from the chamber to a normal surface environment
required a three-day depressurization process. Despite the
churning meter-and-a-half waves, the divers could not leave
their cabin. To emerge without undergoing the proper
procedures would mean instant death.
All six divers were transferred into a pressurized rescue
chamber. In the worst case, the chamber would be
jettisoned. Adrift in the sea, the divers would be able to
survive for a day and a half. It was hoped that this was
enough time for a storm to pass and a rescue team to arrive.
To outsiders, this may have seemed like an extreme
precaution – the rescue chamber was a cramped space that
could offer no relief from the typhoon raging outside – but
it was one that could not be excluded. In the midst of a
storm on another salvage operation in 1996, a pressurized
cabin came loose and flew overboard. It sank and drifted,
and all of the divers suffocated.
This may have been an expedition constructed on a teetering
foundation of risks, but trepidation was not allowed to
factor into the operation’s progress. As soon as this
typhoon passed, the divers returned to the wreck. The
team’s willingness to participate at all costs signaled
their belief in the significance of this particular treasure
hunt – the possibility that a few bits of ceramic found
drifting in the sea would result in one of the greatest
underwater archaeological discoveries of all time.
oOo
In the early 1990s, in the waters surrounding Cu Lao Cham
Island, fishermen trawling for squid and red snapper began
finding broken porcelain ensnared in their drift nets. They
took the shards to the nearby town of Hoi An. This ancient
trading port in Central Vietnam is now a sleepy town whose
main street is lined with shops that cater to a steady
tourist trade. The merchants who examined the pieces
quickly realized their value.
Vietnam has strict laws prohibiting the export of national
artifacts, and the unpublicized nature of this find paved
the way for the sowing of a lucrative underground trade.
But the secret was too good to be kept, at least in
commercial circles. Middlemen drifted into town,
professional dealers got involved and pieces began to show
up in antique markets in Saigon, Singapore, Tokyo, Hong Kong
and London. One piece made it all the way to New York City.
By 1995 an avaricious demand inspired an activity that could
have led to the total destruction of all remaining intact
artifacts. Nets dragged through the sea were no longer
snagging loose objects. Because the wreck was so deep,
diving was not feasible. Greedy looters devised a way of
dragging steel rakes over the site in hope of dislodging
porcelain from the wreck mound. This method was massively
destructive, but those involved didn’t care. They were
getting exactly what they wanted – new pieces to sell.
Throughout this whole process, scholars and other experts in
the field had been hearing rumors of the existence of a
newly discovered, archaeologically significant cache, but
they were unable to flush out its source. The negligent
raking might have continued until the entire collection was
either destroyed or sold off were it not for a pair of
greedy Japanese art dealers who were stopped at the Da Nang
Airport. Their suitcases were loaded with contraband
pottery.
Although the exact location of the source of the ceramics
was still a secret, this was the break the authorities had
needed. They traced the porcelain back to the Cu Lao Cham
Island region, and from there they honed in on the general
vicinity of the wreck site. The question now was how to
deal with this newfound information.
Vietnam’s coastal waters are an aquatic graveyard. Reports
of shipwrecks – from pirate ships and Spanish galleons to
British, Dutch and French trading vessels – have been
circulating since the early 1600s. Many were not worth the
effort and expense that an official diving operation
entails. Others exceeded all expectations.
Just a few years earlier, while cruising near Con Dau
Island, south of the coastal resort town of Vung Tau, a
local fisherman snagged a lump of iron that contained
several fragments of porcelain. His catch led to the
recovery of a Chinese junk that was dated at1690. When the
cargo from this ship was auctioned at Christie’s in
Amsterdam in 1992, it brought in over seven million US
dollars.
Cases such as the Vung Tau Wreck contributed to the
compelling argument for serious investigations into the
recent find. The Ministry of Culture, the Ministry of
Transport and the Vietnamese History Museum were consulted.
According to Mensun Bound, Director of the Oxford University
Maritime Archaeological Unit (MARE), scientists and scholars
cannot afford to deal with such a shipwreck without
commercial involvement, and so the decision was made to
authorize the Vietnam Salvage Company (VISAL) to undertake
initial exploratory dives. Lacking the capabilities for
conducting a thorough search at a depth of seventy meters,
VISAL contacted the Malaysian salvage company, Saga.
Saga had been working with VISAL on a project to recover tin
ingots from a WWII wreck in Da Nang. VISAL knew that Saga
would be able to provide the financial resources, state of
the art diving equipment and necessary expertise for this
kind of deep underwater work. Together, VISAL and Saga
submitted a proposal to the Vietnamese government asking
permission to jointly assess the area and locate the wreck.
Saga would bear all costs. In return, if the survey proved
fruitful, the government would grant Saga exclusive
excavation rights.
Saga’s government-sanctioned exploration began in mid-1997.
Under the supervision of Bound and local archaeologists,
they began searching for the wreck. By June, side scans,
which bounce sonar waves off abnormalities, verified an
“anomaly” on the sea floor. But when a video camera mounted
in a Remote Operated Vehicle was sent down to take photos,
it malfunctioned.
Frustration was setting in. Money was running low. And in
a desperate and reckless move, two of the divers decided to
dive off a fishing boat to investigate the wreck. Because
they would not have access to a decompression chamber when
they surfaced, they were putting themselves at the grave
risk of nitrogennarcosis.
When nitrogen is breathed under extreme pressure, it
saturates the nervous system. This can happen when a diver
ascends too quickly and doesn’t undergo the crucial
decompression process. Normal functions become impaired,
and effects range from numbness or feelings of euphoria to
convulsions or unconsciousness.
To compensate, the divers created their own makeshift
decompression system. They hung air tanks at different
depths so that they could surface gradually without running
out of air. Their scheme was resourceful, but the result,
ultimately, failed. One of the divers couldn’t reach the
sea floor. The other made it, but his camera caved in under
pressure and he was unable to determine what he was looking
at.
Eventually, a remote controlled camera was maneuvered into
the wreck. No one on the crew knew what to expect, and the
safest bet, to stave off disappointment, was to prepare for
the worst. The looters had raised an estimated
extraordinary 50,000 to 70,000 pieces, and it was not
unreasonable to assume that they had done irreversible
damage.
At first, it seemed as if this fear was true. There were
fresh breaks in everything contained in the upper layers.
But as the camera continued to roam the shadow depths, it
eventually revealed an incredible sight. Behind a veil of
dark, murky water were rows and rows of porcelain.
“The dishes and rice cups were stacked as if in a market,”
says Bound. “We found one nest of six circles, the same as
can be found in Vietnam today. We found smaller, more
delicate pots stored within larger jars.”
The wreck was intact, and the prospect for a full-fledged
recovery had become a reality. That is if the crew could
figure out a way to pull it off. Relics had been retrieved
from greater depths, using cherry pickers to pluck artifacts
from the seabed, but the enormity of the contents of this
wreck required a more efficient approach. Bound and his
colleagues began plotting the deepest, full-scale
archaeological excavation ever attempted.
oOo
Zero visibility. Raging currents. Freezing cold.
Collectively, they were the welcome wagon that greeted the
excavation team when it launched its operation in the late
spring of 1998. Still, the group was optimistic. It
determined a technique that seemed ideal considering the
limitations inflicted by the location of the wreck. By
using a surface-supplied mixed gas system, topside
archaeologists would be able to directly supervise the
activities of twelve divers and debrief them after each
dive.
Quickly, though, it was realized that this method was
riddled with disadvantages. Divers were able to stay on the
seabed for only thirty-five minutes at a time. This made it
impossible to conduct uninterrupted underwater work. It
also meant that the divers must spend three hours in a
decompression chamber daily. Added to these complications
were out-of-season storms that culminated in the first of
the pair of typhoons that had attempted to wipe out the
entire expedition.
It arrived without warning. According to Bound, “The ship
stirred, the anchors tangled, and slowly it began to edge
over on its beam end. Grown men were crying. They were
down on their knees praying. One man was rigid with fear.
We sounded the claxon to abandon ship, and we cut through
the anchor lines. Somehow, the ship righted itself. But we
were completely wiped out.” The operation was halted for
reassessment.
Rather than give up, the team returned with an extraordinary
proposal. For the first time in underwater excavation
history, they would employ a technique known as “saturation
diving.” It would no doubt prove to be the most effective
approach. It was also undeniably the most dangerous, since
it required that the divers’ tissues become saturated with
an artificial combination of gases.
The divers would live inside a chamber pressurized to that
of the dive site – seventy meters under seawater – breathing
up to ninety percent helium mixed with oxygen for the
duration of the operation. This would allow the divers to
operate continually underwater, and they would face only one
three-day decompression procedure when they finally exited.
In May 1999, the 220-foot Tropical 388 arrived on the
scene. The barge was fitted out with a complete saturation
diving unit that included a pressurized cabin, a detachable
diving bell and a rescue chamber that could be cut free if
necessary. For the next seventy days the divers from
Australia, New Zealand and Ireland would eat, sleep, read,
listen to music, watch TV and most of all work inside the
restricted quarters that looked like the interior of a space
shuttle, only smaller.
What they could not do was have a little privacy. A crew of
nineteen life-support technicians and twelve supervisors
kept the divers under round-the-clock video surveillance to
ensure their safety and health. The technicians were
responsible for monitoring the mixed gas supply and the
environment of the living unit, operating the gas
reclamation system and ensuring the food supply via an
airlock.
The six divers were split into three-man teams. By
alternating twelve-hour shifts, which allowed them to
jointly work twenty-four hours a day, one team remained in
the living quarters while the other descended to the sea
floor in the detachable bell. One diver, acting as
supervisor, took direction from a topside archaeologist,
while two of the divers swam out to the wreck. An
“umbilical cord,” connecting the bell to the topside unit,
channeled everything the divers needed, from gasses to
hardwire cables. Hot water was pumped down and circulated
in the suits around their bodies to keep them from freezing
to death.
All in all the divers’ time, not only in the water but
inside their living chamber as well, was consumed by the
variety of tasks assigned to them. At times they were
compared to robots, with the sole reason for their existence
to be the eyesight and manpower of the supervising
archaeologists.
They took photographs, measured, kept logs, installed steel
grids over the entire wreck and methodically handled each
individual artifact under direction from the archaeologists
on the ship above. “Because of the light sensors on the
cameras they used, we could actually see what they were
doing better than they could themselves,” Bound explains.
So many pieces meant that the crew needed a system that
could bring up more than one at a time. The solution was a
giant crane situated on the deck of the salvage barge. “The
people who stored the ship made everything easy for us by
laying it out in a line,” says Bound. “We would fill a
crate in line with the ship, then use the crane to bring the
crate to the surface. There could be as many as 8,000
pieces coming up in a crate at one time.”
oOo
Bringing the artifacts to the light of day was just the
beginning, as far as the entire archaeological excavation
process was concerned. Each piece was transferred topside
to the Abex and the OL Star, storage and desalination
barges, where twelve washers were waiting to clean the
pieces as soon as they came up.
After being cleaned, a piece was placed in a desalination
tank, to keep it from drying out and cracking. The tanks
were laid out according to the grid system that had been
laid over the entire wreck site, to keep track of where the
artifact had originally been located. In essence, the tanks
were a meticulously assembled representation of the
shipwreck.
This operation, in conjunction with the dives, involved 120
men, including archaeologists, photographers, artists and
technical crew. While these teams labored round the clock
on three main barges, they were kept under the watchful eye
of the Vietnamese Navy, whose responsibility it was to keep
pirates away.
A recent AP article had reported “an alarming jump in the
destruction and ransacking of shipwrecks in many Asian
countries, including Vietnam.” And a “Vietnam News” report
had attributed the recent looting of hundreds of artifacts
and antiques to “a shortage of security measures [that] pave
the way for thieves.”
“Whole ships are known to go missing for weeks in the South
China Sea,” explains Bound. “We had armed contingents on
each of our vessels and gunboat protection.” Not only was
the military present, but twenty-four hour a day security
guards were authorized to search all personnel and their
carry-on bags.
In the end, pirates, typhoons and hazardous diving
conditions could not prevent the operation from being a
success. After desalination, the artifacts were sorted and
tagged. They were then transferred a warehouse outside Da
Nang, where a workforce of over sixty continued cleaning,
photographing, drawing and recording, preparing the
porcelain for its final destination – the outside world.
oOo
At 65,000 US dollars a day, the final cost of this journey
from seabed to history-in-the-making was four million
dollars. Is such an escapade worth that much? Historians
and scholars would no doubt insist yes. But what about
materially?
All unique pieces have been retained by the National History
Museum in Hanoi. Another ten percent, selected by type,
were dispersed among the more than one-hundred museums
throughout the country. Saga received forty percent of all
duplicate objects. As for the rest, the collection will be
auctioned by San Francisco based Butterfield’s. Profits
from the auction are to be shared equally between Saga and
VISAL, which means that the Vietnamese government is sure to
benefit substantially. VISAL is a state-owned company.
It’s difficult to say how much the auction will bring in,
since this collection so unprecedented. Many of the designs
have Chinese prototypes, but a few are being seen for the
first time in history. Butterfield’s Asian Art Expert,
Henry Kleinhenz, notes the originality of a set of cups
shaped like parrots, and the exquisite design of an
egg-shaped ewer with a birds head spout. “This is going to
be a very unique opportunity for collectors and museums.”
“The range was really quite amazing on this ship,” says
Bound. “You could see the mind of the merchant. You have
on one hand, well, not great works of art, and on the other
hand these grand magisterial pieces."
While the auctioning of such a collection isn’t unusual in
and of itself, this situation stands out for two specific
reasons. By choosing Butterfield’s over the more
prestigious Christie’s or Sotheby’s, the Vietnamese
government will be hawking its wares in the US for the very
first time. And because Butterfield’s is owned by eBay,
this collection will the “the first online art sale in
history featuring material of this scope, age and
importance.”
The Hoi An Hoard, as the collection has come to be known,
will completely reshape current beliefs about Vietnam’s
ancient ceramics and trading traditions. Like the country
itself, it won’t be content to rest on its past laurels. As
it is dispersed to collectors around the world, it will
carry on Vietnam’s tradition of never failing to surprise,
and it will remind us once again to not underestimate the
talents, skills and ingenuity at work inside this small,
Southeast Asian nation.
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