Beneath the Sands of Time: Explorations with Sue Hendrickson
TEXT BY ANNE L. DOUBILET
PHOTOGRAPH BY SUE HENDRICKSON
To slip slowly and exquisitely beneath the surface of the sea is to enter another realm—a realm of science and fiction and history. No one knows this better than Sue Hendrickson, independent explorer extraordinaire, whose discoveries have taken her around the planet from dusty desert landscapes to ancient underwater artifact sites. She is perhaps best known for her discovery of the largest and most complete skeleton of Tyrannosaurus rex ever found. On display in Chicago’s Field Museum, “Sue” (also female) is appropriately named for her finder. Or as Hendrickson describes, “Sue actually found me. She was embedded in the dry, dusty cliffs directly above my head where I was searching for dinosaurs in an exposure in the badlands of South Dakota.”
Natural Treasure Hunter
During the past 35 years Hendrickson has been working around the globe as a professional diver, paleontologist, and marine archeologist. She has also been collecting conch pearls that would prove to be as unique as the historical artifacts she recovers from the ocean floor. Found only in the waters of the New World as charted by Christopher Columbus, conch pearls (although known to the Mayans) had sunk into obscurity in the following centuries. They might have remained forgotten without Hendrickson’s uncanny instinct for the uncommon. While diving for shells, fish, and lobster in the Florida Keys in the 1970s, she started gathering this glowing pink natural treasure that would later balloon into the most valuable private collection in the world. Evolving from an enthusiastic collector, Hendrickson became the world’s leading expert on conch pearls.
Hendrickson found her first pearl just as the conch-fishing industry was igniting. Millions of conchs were fished to export meat starting in the mid-1970s. By the early 1990s, conchs were vastly overfished throughout the Caribbean. What started out as a sustainable food business to support local populations had exploded in the subsequent 20 years into a major export industry. Thirty-three Caribbean countries used to fish conch in sufficient quantities for export. Now only six do so, and three of them do it illegally. As herds of slow-grazing conchs disappeared alarmingly from the shallow sea-grass beds, conservation measures were enacted across the area with varying degrees of success.
Hendrickson had traveled all through the Caribbean from town to town, fisherman to fisherman, and diver to diver, always asking for pearls. One in 10,000 shells produces a pearl, and only one out of every ten of those pearls is gem quality. Hendrickson’s first great conch pearl—ten carats with excellent pink color and flame structure—came from a fisherman in the Dominican Republic in the late 1970s. After three days of negotiating with the fisherman’s wife (hesitant to sell without her husband’s permission), she finally bought it for $50—up from the usual payment of $10. People in the Dominican Republic were then living on $25 per month; Hendrickson was living on $100 per month. Today a pearl of that size and quality would wholesale for $25,000 to $35,000.
Slowly, Hendrickson acquired a sizable pearl collection. She found pearls everywhere. A Cuban diver had one implanted into the shaft of his manhood in order to provide pleasure to his female friends. Upon hearing that Hendrickson would pay cash for pearls, he advised her to wait a moment while he went around the corner, made a little incision, removed the pearl, and sold it to her on the spot. Although not of the highest quality, it certainly has a unique provenance.
In addition to conch pearls and dinosaur bones, her fascination with fossils led her to the Dominican Republic, where she collected three of only six known butterfly-containing specimens of amber. “I like to find things,” says Hendrickson. “I am happiest when out in the world by myself searching and collecting.” Becoming a world-recognized expert on amber, she helped form four major museum collections—the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, and the natural history museums in Karlsruhe and Stuttgart, Germany
Diving Discoveries
But it is in the ocean where Sue truly started to live her dream of exploring the past and present of this curious blue planet Earth. Continuing with underwater salvage work started in Florida, she joined the team of French marine archeologist Franck Goddio in 1992. His organization, the European Institute of Underwater Archeology (Institut Européen d’Archéologie de Sous-Marine), sponsored by the Hilti Foundation, has conducted some of the worlds’ most exciting and productive excavations to date. “I am proud to be working with Franck on what are the best underwater archeology projects in the world,” says Hendrickson.
Off the coast of Egypt, the entire submerged Royal Port of Alexandria—including the remains of Cleopatra’s Royal Quarters built on the Isle of Antirhodos—was identified, mapped, and excavated by the Goddio team with Hendrickson, including an important statue of a priest holding Osiris- Canobos from Cleopatra’s private temple that was raised. The divers also explored a shipwreck dating from Cleopatra’s time and Mark Antony’s home, the Timonium. The city of Herakleion was submerged in an earthquake 2,300 years ago but has since yielded up remarkable treasures: the world’s largest stele, colossal 18-foot statues, sunken ships, and gold jewelry. These bits and pieces are all tumbled together just 30 feet below the surface in the sands of the bay of Aboukir.
The results of just one year of Goddio’s excavation were presented at a news conference in 2001 in Alexandria. “History is materializing in our hands,” commented Egyptian Culture Minister Farouk Hosni. Ancient texts speak of Herakleion as the port of entry to Egypt and a major customs port at the mouth of the Nile before Alexandria was founded in 331 B.C. Now, after 14 years of ongoing excavations on the two sites in Alexandria and Herakleion, “Egypt’s Sunken Treasures” is a blockbuster exhibition that premiered in May 2006 at the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin. With more than 500 artifacts on display representing more than 1,500 years of ancient Egyptian history—from the last pharaohs to Alexander the Great, from the Hellenic conquests to the Roman Empire, from the Christian era to the rise of Islam—the exhibition will be at the Grand Palais in Paris until March 2007.
The Nile Delta at Aboukir was always known as the gateway to Egypt and its riches. Almost 2,000 years after Alexander the Great, another great commander, Napoleon Bonaparte, was forced to abandon his attempt to conquer Egypt. Napoleon’s fleet was almost entirely destroyed by the British under Admiral Horatio Nelson. On the night of August 1, 1998, exactly two centuries after the famous Battle of the Nile between the French and the English, Hendrickson was part of the Goddio team that located and excavated L’Orient, General Napoleon Bonaparte’s flagship.When Napoleon set sail to Egypt with 365 ships and 50,000 men, he saw it as a scientific expedition as well as a military campaign. He brought artists, mathematicians, astronomers, architects, and engineers—all of whom launched modern Egyptology. Although the military campaign was a devastating failure, the scientific expedition was a success, because in 1799 the Rosetta Stone was discovered by French scholars and in 1822 was translated by another French scholar, thereby unlocking the secrets of ancient Egypt.
To find an artifact, a piece of history from a shipwreck on the ocean floor, is a special thrill. Add meters of water to hundreds of years already imbued in a found object and the excitement of discovery intensifies. The Spanish shipwreck of the San Diego in the Philippines “was definitely the best shipwreck excavation of my life,” states Hendrickson. “We found 400 chicken eggs, human bones, more than 500 large stone jars, hundreds of gold and silver coins, and thousands of unbroken ceramics, mostly Ming porcelains.” After the ship was located in 175 feet of water, water dredges, double pumps, and other heavy equipment were brought in to clear sand and sediment and remove tons of rock used as ballast. This demanding and dangerous salvage work revealed an almost perfectly preserved hull and keel underneath all the rock.
On another excavation in the Philippines off the coastal village of Santa Cruz, Goddio’s team with Hendrickson found a 500-year-old Chinese junk. Heavily laden with the finest Chinese porcelain, silk, and other goods, the ship was en route from the southeast coast of China to Luzon, where it struck a reef and sank within minutes just off the western coast of the island. Named for its found location, the Santa Cruz is the best conserved junk of the Ming Dynasty ever recovered. To hold in hand an intact piece of blue-and-white Ming porcelain from a Chinese junk that wrecked sometime in the 15th century is to feel the pulse of history.
Curiouser and Curiouser
Hendrickson has often been called a female Indiana Jones. But she is much more than a figure of fantasy dashing around the world in search of celluloid adventures. A self-educated woman, she reads voraciously on a subject that fascinates her and then seeks out the leading expert in the field and apprentices herself. Accompanied on most worldwide expeditions by her golden retriever (presently Skywalker, who is a direct descendant of Gypsy), Hendrickson is a dedicated animal rights activist. She has initiated a neutering and vaccination program for all the animals on her home island of Guanaja, off the coast of Honduras.
A high-school dropout, she was awarded an honorary PhD from the University of Illinois. Deep curiosity, incredible hard work, unflinching determination, and a refusal to take no for an answer have made Hendrickson an inspirational explorer. Conch pearls from the Caribbean, dinosaur bones from South Dakota, fossilized whalebones from Peru, insects immortalized in amber from the Dominican Republic, ancient historical treasures recovered from ocean floors—all this sounds the stuff of fantasy, not reality. “Curiouser and curiouser,” says Alice in Wonderland as she disappears down the rabbit hole. Sue, like Alice, brings together all the wonder and mystery of our planet, past and present.