Hanalei Bay, Kauai

"Hey Paul, you better strap on a tank and come see this," said Steve James, one of the project archaeologists and an incurable practical joker. At the time I was cold, wet and hungry, having just struggled out of my dive gear after a long morning on the bottom of Hanalei Bay. I didn't know whether or not to believe him, but something in his tone prevented any questions. Anyway, he hadn't waited around to chat before ducking underwater again. Moreover, we had just started a new trench at a spot directly on the edge of the reef struck by Ha'aheo o Hawaii (formerly Cleopatra's Barge), the royal yacht of Hawaiian King Kamehameha II (Liholiho) on April 24, 1824. Steve was the first diver in the trench.

Resigned, I fetched a fresh tank, shrugged into the 30-pound buoyancy compensator and tank combination, belted 16 more pounds of lead around my waist, grabbed the underwater camera, spat in my mask and giant-stepped into the bay. I was already plotting heinous revenge if Steve had pulled my leg again. Cold before, I shivered anew when I settled on the bottom and saw inside the new trench below. Steve hadn't been kidding, and he was urgently hand-fanning sand from the rapidly-collapsing sides of the shallow, conical depression to expose his discovery. A single glance confirmed that my principal research hypothesis for the shipwreck, two years in the making, was totally invalid. And it was a thrilling discovery!

For the first three out of the four weeks of the 1996 excavation, the surface of the bay had been too choppy for Capt. Rick Rogers to back R/V Pilialoha in close to the reef. As a consequence, we had been forced to set trenches away from the reef edge, in the vicinity of the 1995 trenches. Thus far, the finds had pretty well mirrored the 1995 survey artifacts, and we were resigned simply to find more of the same. In fact, the most exciting event of the entire season had been the failed attempt of a car on the beach one Saturday night to jump the mouth of the Waioli River, and watching the resulting formation of a new local wreck site. However, the chop vanished during the last week, leaving a flat, glassy surface on the bay's waters. Rick carefully backed and moored Pili within 18 inches of the jagged edge of the reef, which is only five feet under the water surface.

Hindsight, as they say, is twenty-twenty. In retrospect, perhaps I should have expected something unusual in the last trench of the season. For one thing, archaeological lore is filled with such tales, wherein spectacular discoveries found on the last day of a dig season must be covered over and left unexcavated until the following year. In addition, our penultimate trench, which had been opened nearby, had yielded something most unusual in the form of a large, long strip of leather. An inordinate amount of ceramics and glass also had appeared in trench E11.

So I dropped down onto the sandy bottom of Hanalei Bay next to Steve and shook my head in disbelief, for there at the bottom of E12 was an immense jumble of massive hull timbers poking up out of the sand, much like a hyperactive kid's game of pickup sticks. There must have been a dozen of them, jammed against and actually under the coral reef itself. It was a shock, since all of the evidence uncovered on the site to date had told us not to expect much in the way of hull remains. Kicking up to the surface, I collected some underwater tapes and slates, slipped new sheets of drawing plastic into them, and we set to work recording and photographing the freshly-exposed finds. Halfway through the next day, the downpour began.

Normally, rain has little effect on diving operations. However, these were not normal rains. In a little over an hour a foot of rain fell, flooding the entire eastern side of Kauai. The Waioli River swelled up like a recently-fed snake and blew out the sandbar across its mouth, dumping tons of fine silt into the trench and totally obscuring its contents. That afternoon, it was so dark underwater that I got lost at the bottom of E12 and had to abort operations for the day. Time was running out, and we still had to backfill all the trenches over the next three days. The next day, while hand-fanning sand off a timber at the bottom of the trench for photography, a fragmentary piece of red-and-black painted furniture emerged from the silty ooze. Nearly all of its edges were eroded away, but enough remained to verify its overall size and manifest fragility.

It was just too much to handle. Rick dashed off a measured sketch of the delicate find while I shot some photographs, and we were forced to cover it back up with a couple of buckets of sterile sand and fill the trench back in. Despite the temptation, there was not enough time to excavate it safely and it was just too fragile to risk recovery this year.

We spent the last two days of the 1996 field season recovering our moorings, securing Pilialoha for the open water passage from Hanalei back to Oahu's North Shore and backfilling the trenches. The latter is a relatively mindless activity, wherein the diver straps an extra weight belt of at least 20 lbs. around his waist, drops like a stone to the bottom of a trench and spins in slow spirals around the trench while directing a fire hose against its walls, collapsing them inwards upon themselves. There is little to see and plenty of time to think, so long as you avoid entanglement in the long, high-pressure hose and avoid reflecting on the tiger shark's documented interest in turbulent water. I confess to enjoying the process. In this I am alone among our stalwart crew; nevertheless, my thoughts turned to the furniture fragment and what it could mean in the waning hours of the 1996 season in Hanalei Bay. First, it and the hull remains indicated that there was far more left of King Liholiho's yacht than we had believed only a few days earlier. Second, it had a story of its own to tell, if only we could figure it out. Were we excavating in the bow or stern of the storied ship? Was it a table, bed or bench from the crew area, or a chair from the king's cabin? My imagination soared - could it be the actual throne of King Kamehameha, mute witness to so many of the seminal changes to Hawaiian culture during his short but eventful monarchy? One of the fundamental tenets of archaeological fieldwork is that it can pose more questions than it can answer.

A map of Hawaii and Hanalei Bay. The wreck site at the mouth of the Waioli River is marked by an asterisk on the inset of Hanalei Bay. Map by Kenneth Spaulding.

Diver Rick Rogers sketches hull timbers.