This story of the National Park Service’s Submerged Cultural Resources Unit or SCRU (though it has since been renamed the Submerged Resources Center)—an outfit charged with “finding and preserving historic shipwrecks and other sites important to American heritage in U.S. Parks and territorial waters”—by its first founder and first chief could have been an enthralling, compelling read on the order of if not the same level of intensity as Into Thin Air, The Bounty, Shadow Divers, Tracks, The Mapmaker’s Wife and The Cruelest Journey. But in a surprising number of places the author veers off into mundane, only slightly relevant and even boring issues. Fortunately, they are never long (a sentence or two or a couple of paragraphs) but they do have an annoying “stop sign” effect. (STOP. Learn this!) Stronger editing would have solved that and allowed the excitement of the story to shine more brightly. Mostly for that reason, I’d rate this only about a seven on a scale of one to ten: worth reading, but don’t expect to be gripped by it.

This story of SCRU, which originally began as a pilot program in 1975, was built from various roads that converged to create it from several directions. One of the most important was Lenihan himself whose childhood fascination with gold-laden shipwrecks turned professional when he arrived at Florida State University in 1970 to begin his anthropology studies. A passionate diver, he spent his weekends diving caves and sinkholes (water-filled caves whose overlying weight cause them to collapse at a weak point). Early on, he discovered an old ceramic pot which he proudly cleaned and donated to the FSU lab. Much to his chagrin, he found that instead of being a hero he was castigated—for failing to recognize that anthropological value lies not in the item per se but in the item in relation to its location. Context is all in archaeology and anthropology, and in moving the pot he had destroyed all the clues “for unraveling any mysteries of the human past.”

When the National Park Service (NPS) offered him a promotion with a project named the National Reservoir Inundation Study in Santa Fe, New Mexico, he had already spent time learning about and observing the effects of public policies, politics and greed at Dry Tortugas National Park, an underwater park 65 miles off Key West, Florida. His passion for ensuring the survival of historical landmarks underwater was solidified there, and in New Mexico he joined the four-year study project that looked at the effects of dams and reservoirs (“inundation”) on the remnants of past civilizations. While it was not something that initially interested him, it turned out to be the foundation for what became SCRU. The team he put together developed a specific research design with scientific rationales for each step, and they learned advanced diving techniques. They also worked on rescue-and-recovery techniques with park rangers, and created unusually effective procedures that ultimately created tight bonds between SCRU and the mainstream NPS rangers. By the time it came to an end, the personnel and assets belonging to the inundation study were turned into the NPS Submerged Cultural Resources Unit.

Though his work with the study provided a solid foundation for SCRU’s transformation into a permanent NPS unit, Lenihan’s first post-study experience was not an official assignment. Rather, it was a break with old diving friends that allowed him to “dive with people I enjoyed in an environment I loved . . .”, the underwater world of Mexico. One the best chapters in the book, his description of their dives into springs with difficult openings, tricky currents, treacherous interiors, seemingly endless depths and even quirky owners is vividly portrayed. What else could you feel but a sense of water-clogged claustrophobia when you read, “At 180 feet deep the angle of repose of he bottom cobbles became even steeper, and the ceiling came down sharply to meet it.” Did your heart skip a beat and did you—as I did when reading this sentence—take a deep breath just to remind yourself you could?  

Not all SCRUs assignments involved danger, but most of them did make history (even if just within the park service) and a few even helped make law. One of their early successes took place in the Florida Keys where a federal district court required that the NPS document its stewardship of a wreck in the underwater national park if the NPS were to prevent treasure hunting. A nine-mile search to find the remains of a single sand-embedded old wooden vessel within one week was successful, and the site declared off limits to all commercial interests.

Though the team’s work took them from the friendly, warm waters of Micronesia to turbulent Lake Superior, it was their assignments at Pearl Harbor and Bikini Atoll that again bring out the best in the author. Both are described in somber, respectful tones that manage to convey both the fascination of their survey work as well as the poignancy of their feelings about it.

“People take away memories from fearful experiences and close calls in various degrees of vividness,” notes Lenihan,“—there is something about almost drowning in a cave, however, that causes the strongest soul to shudder, and leaves an impression that doesn’t dull with the passing of time.” He manages to convey this in several instances throughout the book; one of the most memorable is an early experience recovering untrained cave divers’ bodies in Florida where he describes their frantic scratching of a cave ceiling and panicked removal of their equipment and clothing. But other than a few of these intense episodes his words about the dangers comes through almost entirely in the facts presented—the extreme depths, intense cold, the dangerous weather, the risky surroundings. In other words, you learn these things but you don’t experience them. And the reason for that, I think, is in his quote above. He saw it, he still sees it; he feels the power of it in his body and his mind and his soul. But for the reader the electrifying power of such events is muted because he tell us rather than shows us, and this is particularly sad given the powerful subject and haunting experiences.

Yet there is value in the reading. Submerged is not a boring book. Indeed, it has the ability to entice one to go deeper into the subject of underwater archaeology much as a shipwreck draws its explorers inside. We want to know more, to understand the experience and to feel it. While this book does not meet that standard, it does show well what Lenihan noted—and addresses why it is so important—when he writes: “. . . once wars are fought and the crises of the moment addressed, we still have the human race trying to comprehend itself. We look to our roots, some in literature, some in the ground, some of the most dramatic on the bed of the sea. Our past is writ large there in shipwrecks, ancient projectile points , ceramic pots . . . These artifacts are part of our world, a shrinking world, the only world we’ve got.”


Almost since her childhood days of Mother Goose, Lauren has been giving her opinion on books to anyone who will listen. That “talent” eventually took her out of magazine writing and into book reviewing in 2000 for an online review site where she cut her teeth (as well as a few authors). Stints as book editor for her local newspaper and contributing editor to Booklist and Bookmarks magazines have reinforced her belief that she has interesting things to say about books. Lauren shares her home with several significant others including three cats, 750 bookmarks and nearly 1,000 books that, whether previously read or not, constitute her to-be-read stack. She can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it