Loren C. Steffy - The Man Who Thought like a Ship

THE MAN
WHO THOUGHT
LIKE A SHIP

ED RACHAL FOUNDATION
NAUTICAL ARCHAEOLOGY
SERIES

LOREN C. STEFFY

Copyright 2012 by Loren C. Steffy
Manufactured in the United States of America
All rights reserved
First edition

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992
(Permanence of Paper).
Binding materials have been chosen for durability.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Steffy, Loren C.
The man who thought like a ship / Loren C. Steffy.1st ed.
p. cm.(Ed Rachal Foundation nautical archaeology series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-60344-664-8 (cloth : alk. paper)ISBN 1-60344-664-8 (cloth : alk. paper)ISBN 978-1-60344-058-5 (e-book)ISBN 1-60344-058-5 (e-book)
1. Steffy, J. Richard (John Richard), 19242007. 2. Institute of Nautical Archaeology (U.S.)History20th century. 3. Institute of Nautical Archaeology (U.S.)History21st century. 4. American Institute of Nautical ArchaeologyHistory. 5. Marine archaeologistsTexasBiography. 6. Underwater archaeology. I. Title. II. Series: Ed Rachal Foundation nautical archaeology series.
CC115.S74S74 2012
930.102804092dc23
[B]
2011049776

To Ben, Daniel, and Annie,
in hopes that the past may illuminate the future

And a boat, above all other inanimate things,
is personified in mans mind.... Man, building
this greatest and most personal of all tools, has
in turn received a boat-shaped mind, and the boat,
a man-shaped soul.

John Steinbeck, The Log from the Sea of Cortez

Perhaps its no longer appropriate to refer to ships as she.
Editorial stricture demands that an inanimate object is an it.
Nevertheless, I have chosen to keep with the long-standing nautical
tradition of assigning a feminine pronoun to these ancient vessels.
For my father, ships were always something more than simple objects;
they inspired a reverence bordering on affection. My mother always
said that ships were his first love. She was wrong about that. They
were a close second. I ask that you overlook the editorial and social
incorrectness and indulge this minor anthropomorphism.

The wood, dark as obsidian, is harder than I remember it, and heavier. For more than three decades, it had existed in my memory as a fragile thing, the object of warnings to a young boy to be careful in its presence. Its irreplaceable and old beyond beliefolder than the ancient castle walls that surround it, older than Christolder, perhaps, than Alexander the Great.

In this moment, as I hold a piece of the ancient wood, transformed to a rock-like heft by chemical preservation, the millennia seem less significant than the mere thirty-five years that have passed since I last saw these timbers. It was my father who reassembled them like some massive jigsaw puzzle into the hull of the merchant ship they had been before they spent centuries rotting and forgotten on the sea floor.

Near the battered bow, my children stand alongside the restored planks, touching for the first time a history theyve known only through pictures and stories. We all agree we can feel my fathers presence here as we stand before his greatest achievement. My mind wanders over the decades like a river flowing backward.

For more than a year in the early 1970s, my father handled these same timbers, positioning them on scaffolding that would hold them in their original shape. Rotted and broken and eaten through by parasites, the wood nevertheless forms a thing of beauty, an elegant arch from shattered bow to broken stern, a vessel transporting knowledge of its ancient world into the future.

I look at the frames, or ribs, spread like strips of licorice across the inside of the hull planking. I remember him squeezing between them, attaching one piece or another. He stood over them on ladders, squinted with one eye as he looked along the length of the keel, and lay suspended above the entire ship on a cradle, placing some of the innermost pieces.

I can see him standing to one side, lost in thought, stepping back from the half-assembled wood as he mulled why a piece didnt seem to line up and made calculations anew as he compensated for some discrepancy. The ship, he would say, talked to him. She would tell him when hed misplaced a particular piece.

His face was weatherworn, almost craggy by then, and his hands were rough and scarred from half a lifetime spent doing physical labor. His hair was black and slicked back from his face. He was about 6 feet tall, slender and muscular from climbing ladders and working on heavy machinery. It was a physique leftover from an earlier part of his life, a life that by then was changing because of the ancient hull. Even here, in the sweltering Mediterranean heat, he usually wore dress pants. Sometimes, he would talk softly to himself as he tried to decipher the latest problem, yet he never seemed to grow discouraged. It was almost as if he rejoiced in each setback, eager at the chance of unraveling the latest mystery that confronted him. Each problem was telling him something new. The lines on his forehead would furrow ever so slightly, and if you spoke to him then, he probably wouldnt hear you, even if he grunted in acknowledgment.

He wasnt just solving an archaeological puzzle. He was laying the foundation for a new life, a new field of study, a method of unlocking the lessons of history. He lacked any formal training, yet in a harborside castle in northern Cyprus, J. Richard Steffy, known to all his friends as Dick, became the first person to ever reconstruct an ancient ship from its sunken fragments, to take its flattened hull from the sea floor and piece it together in its original form. Today, the darkened timbers stand as a monument to history, a window into the ancient world, but they also stand as the culmination of a dream. For an electrician from a tiny Pennsylvania town, this rotted wood changed everything.

The Kyrenia Ship was the first ship in human history to be built twice. She rests aloft on black iron stanchions, giving her the illusion of sailing on air. During Dicks reconstruction process, though, the fragments were supported by a cradle of wooden battens that were really his analytical equations expressed in wood. The whole thing could be adjusted as he corrected his calculations, which was inevitable because he was trying to realign several thousand broken nail shafts and mortise joints.

Before she sank, the ship probably had traded at the Greek islands of Samos, Rhodes, and Nisyros, then headed to Cyprus. A tramp trader of her day, the merchantman probably picked up cargo in one port and dropped it off in another, hopping around the eastern Mediterranean on a perpetual voyage of commerce. When she sank, she was hauling wine,