Preserving pirate plunders.

• Author: Luxner, Larry
• Position: Preserving underwater cultural resources of the Dominican Republic - Ojo

A FORMER HIGH SCHOOL science teacher who grew tired of always reading about other people's discoveries is finally making a few of his own. Jerome Lynn Hall has hit upon the ultimate shipwreck.

The vessel, which went down around 1650--just off the northern coast of the Dominican Republic, near their border with Haiti--sits in only 15 feet of water. Many people have seen it and some have even stolen artifacts from it, but Hall is the first scientist to systematically take the wreck apart and preserve its many treasures for future generations of Dominicans.

"Our submerged cultural resources are disappearing at an alarming rate," said Hall, director of the Montecristi shipwreck project and president of the Pan-American Institute of Maritime Archaeology. "When you study how a society moves from one place to another, you're studying the leading edge of their technology."

With the help of Earthwatch, Inc., a non-profit organization based in Watertown, Massachusetts, Hall has excavated 40 feet of the 100-foot wreck. In the three seasons of operation, the project has yielded more than 13,400 Dutch-manufactured clay tobacco pipes dating from the early seventeenth century. All items recovered are donated to the Dominican government.

This particular ship interests Hall because no one seems to know anything about it or why it was sunk. But Hall says he has a pretty good idea about when it went down. "We know the ship was built from wood forested in England between 1642 and 1643. We know this by growth rings," he said. "We know who made the pipes, Edward Bird, an Englishman living in Amsterdam." Hall suspects the ship was involved in illegal trade between European merchants and wild...