“Pretty piece,” Buck commented. However casual the words, his voice betrayed his excitement.
“Tate liked it.” Matthew glanced toward her. She was standing in her wet suit, the tears that had threatened forty feet below flowing freely.
“There are so many things,” she managed. “Dad, you can’t imagine. Under the sand. All these years under the sand. Then you find them. Something like this.”
After rubbing the heels of her hands over her face, she crouched by her mother, dared to skim a gentle fingertip over the rim of the bowl.
“Not a chip. It survived a hurricane and more than two hundred and fifty years, and it’s perfect.”
The Reef
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By Jorge GT from Orihuela, Spain - http://www.flickr.com/photos/24735056@N00/485316236/,
CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2064442
The wreckage of a ship from the fleet of the celebrated 16th century Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama (1460-1524) has been discovered off the coast of Oman, archaeologists said on Tuesday.
National Geographic called the 500-year-old shipwreck the oldest ever found from the Europe's Golden Age of Exploration, a period when European nations sought to uncover global sea trade routes. Da Gama established the Indian trade route in 1498 when he sailed around Africa and through the India Ocean to what is now the southern Indian state of Kerala.
It's believed to be the wreck of the Esmeralda, which went down in May 1503 during a storm near al-Hallaniyah Island in the Indian Ocean, likely on its way to India.
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Tate swam clear to set the plate beside the broken sword out of
the range of fallout. She studied the two pieces lying side by side on the sand.
They had been on the same ship, through the same storm, had been tossed, then
buried by the same sea. Two different kinds of pride, she mused. Force and
beauty. Only one had survived.
What whim had chosen between them? she wondered.
Snapping steel and leaving the
fragile undamaged?
The Reef
