Mapping the Robert J. Walker

Introduction

“They’re surfing out there!” That’s all I could think as I viewed the ocean from my room on the 39th floor at the Revel Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey. “They’re surfing out there and getting wiped out!” The next day I would find myself on a boat headed for the remains of the U.S.C.S.S. Robert J. Walker. But at that moment, all I could think was how badly I and my crew were going to get tossed about in the Atlantic attempting to map the remains of a 155-year-old government steamer. Was I really going to be able to pull off this expedition? Did I just make seventeen people, some traveling across the country, leave their friends and families to get seasick and dive in zero visibility? This was not the way I envisioned it would all go. With two days of a six-day expedition already gone due to weather, the following day would be critical. We only had four days of diving built into our schedule. Tomorrow, we’d go, come hell or high water.

Plans for my expedition began in 2014 when I received a phone call from Joyce Steinmetz, an archaeologist with connections to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Joyce said that the new head of Maritime Heritage for NOAA’s National Marine Sanctuaries Program, Dr. James P. Delgado, had a dilemma. Some of his predecessors had a rather dim view of SCUBA divers who retrieved anything from shipwrecks. So much so that some labeled divers “rapists and pillagers of submerged cultural resources.” On the other side of the fence were those who likened some archaeologists with Nazism. Clearly, battle lines had been drawn between the two sides. Joyce explained to me that Dr. Delgado, or Jim as he prefers to be called, had the task