The Archeology Museum of Catalonia (MAC) bottoms out and to say that, even if just this once, is the highest praise. The MAC has decided to dedicate its new monographic exhibition to shipwrecks, that strategy that the management of this cultural center launched three years ago, the first time with an immersion in the concerns of prehistoric artists, the second, with a travel through time to the dawn and dusk of the Iberians and, this third time, that is, now and until July 2023, with a collection of the most exciting treasures rescued from the waters of the nearest Mediterranean, almost novel objects, in some cases never exhibited, Catherine the Great gold coins with which the English Navy paid its Russian mercenaries in the peninsular wars against the French; an intact bottle of fondillon from the 18th centurythe sweet wine with which Shakespeare (so they say) found inspiration; Narbonne ceramics from the times of Emperor Vespasian; of course the amphorae Cala Cativa, where underwater archeology was born in Catalonia; and, in a fantastic climax, a lead slipperwhich is so rare that it deserves, of course, three points and apart…
That’s how it is. In 1813, the Wellingtonian English Navy suffered a catastrophic day of navigation in the waters of the Ebro delta. A total of 18 ships were stranded in the sand, of which five could not be rescued. They were on their way to Tarragona to cut off the French Army’s supply chains, but the mission was a monumental failure. One of those boats, the Magnum Bonum, was accidentally found by a fisherman in 2008 and then the Center for Underwater Archeology of Catalonia (to which the MAC pays tribute at the expo, now that it celebrates 30 years of existence) came into action. to, as if they were Howard Carter sticking his mustache out of Tutankhamun’s tomb, to see “wonderful things through the glass of the diving mask.
There were the 62 Russian coins, the aforementioned sweet wine, which equally served to inspire Shakespeare as well as for Louis XIV to dip his favorite biscuits, assorted ammunition, officers’ dishes and, as said, a slipper with a lead heel, from which it has been deduced that it belonged to the ship’s magazine manager. The sheet of lead covered the iron nails of the heel and thus prevented a spark from jumping in the middle of that room where the gunpowder was stored with a bad step and, with it, blowing up the entire boat.
What the MAC has done once again is wonderful. In each monographic exhibition, the museum practically refounds its noble floor, some 1,000 square meters, a formula that is undoubtedly exhausting, but also very rewarding. ‘Art primer, Artistas de la prehistòria’, the first time the MAC got involved in such a colossal riot, won first prize at the Global Fine Art Awards (the Oscars of the exhibitions), then in a competition in which he beat nothing less than the British Museum and the MET in New York, among other cultural beacons. ‘Shipwreck, submerged history’ lives up to what was then consumed. Maybe even higher.
Underwater archeology can be claimed to be thousands of years old, but that would be misleading. It is true that the Romans had among their military units the ‘urinatores’, specialists in immersion, sappers of the depths who used a technique as simple as it was brute to reach their objective (they hugged a stone). It also deserves a mention, for close, the bell of Cadaqués, an ingenious solution lit in 1654 to rescue a treasure, literally a giant bell that sank with weights so that the protodivers of the time descended to the depths inside the air pocket that was formed. The funny thing was how they charged for that risky job. It was the bite, that is, the amount of silver coins that fit in their mouths before emerging.
But the exploration of the bottom of the seas was not really effective until in the 19th century all the technical problems of an ancient desire, to walk on the bottom of the sea, were circumvented. The diving suit was the 19th century Apollo 11 and, in the case of the Mediterranean, the immersion organized in 1894 with a group of coral hunters by Romuald Alfaras in Cala Cativa, an idyllic spot a stone’s throw from the Port de la Selva, was a milestone.
He rescued a set of wine amphorae that in the 1st century BC transported a ship of Iberian design, come on, the most inadvisable thing to complete the route of the often fierce Cap de Creus. They were ‘amphorated’ broths in Baetulo and bound for Narbonne. For two millennia they slept in the cool in Cala Cativa and their discovery was a piece of news that was unprecedented in the Mediterranean.
It is in honor of Alfaras that a scuba diver greets visitors, as if it were in search of the treasure of Red Rackham, but in all honesty, underwater archeology only took a real giant leap in 1943, when the engineer Émile Gagnan and the unrepeatable explorer Jacques-Yves Cousteau conceived the regulator of variable pressure and thus granted our species a domain of the seabed unimaginable before that date. Thus began the true underwater exploration and, in return, the great plundering. It is estimated that 95% of the underwater deposits of the Catalan coast have been partially or totally looted. The 1960s and 1970s brought about a brutal ‘de-samphorization’ of the seabed. Roman amphorae became a common object of decoration, sometimes with copies, but often with original pieces.
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The exhibition, therefore, very accurately reviews this evolution and, with it, invites fascination with underwater archaeology, which in the case of wrecks (because there are also prehistoric sites and even cities under the sea) is especially striking because the dating of finding is almost always a game of clues. The design of the ship, the shape of its sails and the arrangement of its oars indicate a time and origin, also the way in which the life of the sea has adhered to the wood of the hull, the navigation instruments, if any, are another fate of carbon-14 and, of course, the material found on board, although in the latter case there are always unknowns to be cleared up. The most famous of the episodes of this last category occurred in the Baix Llobregat in 1969. During sand moving operations between the beaches of Gavà and Viladecans, the remains of a Roman wreck appeared and, in what was once its interior, two etruscan helmets. Apart from the fact that the most valuable of them was illegally auctioned at Christie’s in 1990 and ended up like this in the United States, the striking thing about the case was the anachrony of the discovery, an Etruscan helmet on a Roman ship. Was it an antique even then, when that ship sank? Was it a replica of those used in gladiator shows to represent ancient battles?
The question is, in short, that the MAC has done it again, it has been reborn for the third time in three years, and it is to be hoped that the public responds as on previous occasions and that it goes to number 39 on Paseo de la Santa Madrona as if it were ‘La Posada de Jamaica’, a great film by Alfred Hitchcock about caused shipwrecks, although for that matter, with Jusèp Boya, director of the museum director, in the role of Charles Laughton. ‘La Posada de Jamaica’ is a story of rascals and, whatever things are, there is also a bit of that in the exhibition. It is worth paying attention to this new MAC adventure, for example, in that little bag of coins that was rescued in a dive in Aiguablava (Girona) and that to the great emotion of the archaeologists were made of silverbut that once the cleaning and restoration tasks began, it was discovered that they were fakes, simply copper covered with a silver layer. All this and much more, until July 2023, at the Museu d’Arqueologia de Catalunya.