Noted explorer hopes to find Gold Rush ship
When James Delgado was growing up as a kid in San Jose, he read about ancient history and dreamed of explorers finding unknown lands. And then, in the summer he was 11, man took his first walk on the moon. He was in despair.
“I wondered if everything had been discovered. Was there anything left?” he said. But then, three years later when he was 14 and hanging around a construction site near Highway 101 in San Jose, he was on hand when bulldozers uncovered an Indian burial ground, more than 2,000 years old, with the remains of people who had lived at the time of the Romans.
‘Stuff to be found’
Delgado looked on in wonder. The bulldozers had uncovered another world, blocks from his house. It was a discovery for him, too. “There was stuff to be found, in your own backyard,” he said.
That led Delgado on a life of adventure, a career exploring and leading explorations under cities and countrysides and, most of all, under the oceans.
He was in San Francisco last week to talk about the latest discovery — the sunken hulk of the aircraft carrier Independence, a combat veteran of World War II and a relic from the dawn of the age of nuclear bombs.
The ship sits upright on the sea floor, badly damaged by the force of the explosion of two atomic bombs. It is 2,600 feet under the surface only 30 miles from San Francisco. Delgado led a team of scientists who sent down a robot submersible and found the dead ship last month.
The Independence comes with a story. It fought in the Pacific, earned 18 battle stars, was torpedoed once and damaged, repaired on San Francisco Bay and sent out again. After the war, the ship was used as a target in two nuclear bomb tests at Bikini lagoon in 1946. It was later towed back to San Francisco and used for training about the effects of nuclear weapons. After four years at the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, the Independence was towed out through the Golden Gate in the winter of 1951 and sunk at sea. The exact location was a military secret.
But scientists knew the ship was out there, and this spring the wreck was located on sonar and a robot submersible mounted with a camera took a close look.
The camera sent back 3-D images of the In- dependence, looked inside and photographed what might be the wreckage of the last warplane the ship ever carried. Inside the ship are steel barrels filled with concrete and perhaps some kind of nuclear waste.
No one had seen the lost ship for generations. It was an important find, and a great moment for Delgado. “When I saw it, I thought, ‘Wow!’ ” he said. “In a way, I’m a bit like a kid. Nothing has ever taken the ‘Wow!’ out of me. I guess I’m an explorer at heart.”
Delgado has been a professional in the field since he was 20 years old and helped uncover a Gold Rush ship under San Francisco’s Financial District. Since then he’s become a deep sea diver, explored the wrecks of the Titanic, the famous Civil War ironclad USS Monitor, sunken battleships, and even the remnants of Kubla Khan’s mighty fleet, sunk in a storm more than 600 years ago.
Delgado is 57 now, in charge of maritime heritage programs for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. His hair has turned a silvery gray and he has the smooth self-assurance of a TV host; for years he was a star on “The Sea Hunters” on cable television. He is a fellow of the Royal Geographic Society and received a medal from the king of Spain.
Delgado returns to San Francisco often in search of new adventures. Last year he and NOAA scientists mapped the wreckage of the City of Rio de Janeiro, sunk in the Golden Gate in 1901 with great loss of life. He thinks modern technology — undersea robots, new kinds of electronics — are perfect for new explorations of the ocean floor. “There are many more wrecks out there,” he says, “a lot more.”
Final goal underfoot
Not all the adventures are at sea. Delgado walked down Market Street the other morning, talking about the Gold Rush, and stopping at the Donahue Monument at Battery Street, once the shoreline of the bay. “You have ships from the birth of San Francisco, still buried under the city, not far from here.”
He has one last San Francisco goal, he said, and it’s just under our feet. “I want to find just one more Gold Rush ship,” he said.
“I wondered if everything had been discovered. Was there anything left?” James Delgado, explorer