[Archport] Caça ao tesouro: testemunho

["Alexandre Monteiro" <no.arame@gmail.com>]

The Sunday Times, June 8, 2008

Best of Times, Worst of Times: Frank Pope

By Charlotte Hunt-Grubbe

The amazing thing about gold is that it remains unchanged by sea
water, even after hundreds of years. But once you've discovered it,
gold fever seems to infect everyone around it. In 2001, I was
excavating a 400-year-old Portuguese trading vessel known as a nao,
who'd broken her back on a reef off a remote island off northern
Mozambique and snapped in two. Her stern lay nestled in a little
valley, 30 metres down, sealed from the water by large stones that had
cascaded down on top. She was an important wreck, because very little
is known about these early colonial excavation vessels — the
shipwrights' plans were destroyed by fires that swept through Lisbon
in 1755, so the only way we can work out how they were built is from
remains left on the sea bed.

Once you break open the "time capsule" of a shipwreck and expose the
timbers to oxygenated water, nothing stops the decay. It's a race
against the clock to get as much information as possible before it
disintegrates. When we lifted the stones off the nao, the timbers
underneath were a wonderful Iberian oak, dark and strong, with marks
where the carpenters' adzes had struck. Every few days we lifted
sections to the surface and studied them. It was paradise, working on
a beautiful wreck in clear waters with a tight team of divers who were
passionate about shipwrecks.

We heard a rumour that a local spear-fisherman had found gold near the
site. But I was sceptical — the reef was within wading distance of the
shore. How could gold have sat unnoticed for some 400 years? We
dropped metal detectors onto the sea bed where the bow of the ship had
broken off, and the volcanic rock had made huge long tubes down into
the sea bed. Then one of the team, Alejandro, put his detector over a
hole and instantly it started screeching.

He put his hand in and pulled out loaf-of-bread-sized stones and
clouds of sand. His arm went deeper and deeper until, suddenly, there
was a pristine ingot of gold sitting on his fingertips.

I was astonished. Underwater, gold is absolutely staggering — the
colour leaps out; it's surreally bright. Even a little fleck sparkles
in water. We crowded our masks around his hand, to get as much of an
eyeful of this colour as we could. Alejandro carried on digging. The
rest of us had nothing to do but sit and watch, but there was an
impatience now from the other divers. They were pawing the ground and
climbing over stones. Behind their masks they were manic — I've never
forgotten that look. There was a desperation in the way they were
turning over rocks and sweeping away sand. Archeology is about doing
things calmly, and this sudden frenzy made my heart sink — I could
sense trouble.

Fourteen kilos of ingots came up in the end, but they left me
completely cold. In archeology, you look for the human story, in order
to peer into the minds of people from the past and their world. This
gold was without any artistic value or the imprints of whoever made it
or who for. But the power it held over the expedition members was
intense.

The island was a dangerous place to be with treasure: people had guns,
and if anyone got a sniff of this news it would be easy to find us. We
hid the gold under floorboards and tried to clamp everyone's mouth
shut, but the divers wanted to celebrate. Suddenly we had people
telling others not to drink in the local bar, in case their tongues
loosened. Rifts started to appear; insanity crept in. There were
tensions and accusations and people not getting on. When you're a
small, tight team, that's oppressive.

When the company who were financing us heard about the discovery,
things got worse. They sent a guy from the UK to join our team to
"help us along". After a week he admitted he was there to spy on us
and make sure we weren't finding more gold than we were telling them.
We were outraged. At least he'd been honest with us, but he kept
disappearing to make reports on his satellite phone, so we knew he was
watching at all times. And the trip was no longer about uncovering the
wreck's story: we were ordered to search every square foot of the reef
crest for gold.

I begged to finish excavating the wreck first. Gold doesn't corrode in
sea water, so it made sense to study the ship's timbers first. That
was not what they wanted to hear. And then we found an ingot had been
hidden under nearby rocks in the past few days, and bigger cracks
started to show. The wreck was in a delicate state and every day the
timbers rotted and lost precious detail.

It was utterly dispiriting. You put your heart and soul into this kind
of work, and I'd had such high hopes for the project — but it had
turned into a treasure hunt.