Daniel Lenihan, author, diver and archaeologist, has surveyed many of America's underwater treasures.
By TERRY TOMALIN
Published October 30, 2003
[Photo: Brett Seymour]
Daniel Lenihan is the author of Submerged: Adventures of America's Most Elite Underwater Archeology Team.
Daniel Lenihan isn't afraid to admit that he is a scuba diver first, archaeologist second.
"Usually, it is the other way around," said Lenihan, founder of the National Park Service's elite Submerged Cultural Resources Unit. He's also the author of Submerged: Adventures of America's Most Elite Underwater Archeology Team. "But it is diving that brought me to the world of archaeology."
During his quarter-century career with the Park Service, Lenihan has braved the icy depths of Lake Superior and enjoyed the warm waters of Hawaii's Pearl Harbor. He has surveyed the rusted hulk of a Japanese submarine off the Alaska coast and the decaying remains of a Confederate blockade runner in the English Channel.
"Each experience has had its own unique set of challenges," Lenihan said. "Where do you start?"
In Florida, where in the early 1970s, Lenihan and a few other intrepid explorers first penetrated the state's freshwater cave system.
"It was a hostile environment," said Lenihan, who at the time was a graduate student in anthropology at Florida State University. "If something went wrong, you couldn't simply rise to the surface.
"Much of what today's cave divers accept as common procedure (was) developed back in those early days at great cost," he said.
The lessons Lenihan learned in the Florida caves would serve him well later as he investigated shipwrecks around the globe.
"Some of the first archaeological work that I took part in was in the (American) Southwest," he said.
The damming of rivers and creation of reservoirs left hundreds of archaeological sites beneath hundreds of feet of water.
"For a time, there was more money being spent on that type of archaeology than any other," he said. "It was a real intellectual challenge trying to determine what had happened to all these prehistoric cultures that were suddenly underwater."
The mapping skills he developed in the Southwest proved valuable when Lenihan was faced with a more daunting task in the murky waters of Pearl Harbor. The job: to map the wreck of the USS Arizona, which was sunk in the Japanese surprise attack of Dec. 7, 1941.
The Arizona was the pride of the Pacific fleet. The battleship, 600 feet long and 100 feet wide, went down with more than 1,000 men aboard.
"The work was hard because the visibility was low, sometimes only 5 or 6 feet," he said. "The object itself is huge, and the job of mapping it very complex."
Lenihan said that he was determined from the start to remain emotionally detached working around the tomb of so many men.
"I looked at it as just another job," he said. Then one day in his second year, he was swimming back alone one evening after a day's work. "Then it suddenly hit me - I felt as strong a connection to the past and my father's generation as anyone could.
"To try to distance oneself at a site like that is doomed to failure," he said. "You can't help but be personally moved."
Years later, Lenihan and his crew of "archaeologist rangers" would be asked to chronicle the remnants of another war, this one undeclared. After World War II, the United States faced a new adversary, the Soviet Union.
Before 1946, three nuclear devices had been detonated: the first at Trinity, New Mexico; the second at Hiroshima; the third at Nagasaki. But the military wanted to know if an atomic weapon could be used against a naval target.
"So they took 90 ships and anchored them off Bikini Atoll," Lenihan said. "They set off the device and about 10 ships sank. However, they underestimated the problem that they would have with fallout."
Lenihan said post-blast photographs show sailors in shirt sleeves trying to "scrub" the radiation off the decks of the crippled warships.
"Eventually, in the late '80s, the Bikinians said they wanted the sunken ships removed, saying the wrecks amounted to pollution," Lenihan said. "So we went in to assess the situations."
Lenihan said he thought long and hard before accepting the assignment. But in the end, it was diving's more mundane dangers - cold, darkness and depth - that caused the problems.
"We eventually found that the radiation wasn't an issue," he said. "It was the more common problems, like working so far from the nearest decompression chamber, that caused us the most worries."
As a result of Lenihan's work, the ships of Bikini Atoll were no longer seen as a threat and reclassified as historical assets.
Looking back over his career, Lenihan said Americans should consider this country's own national treasures.
"Think in the long term," he said. "Don't be fixated on immediate gratification. I think that currently, we don't have a particularly environmentally friendly leadership running things. Let's make sure we have something left for future generations."
AT A GLANCE
Daniel Lenihan will appear at 10 a.m. in Sheen Auditorium.
