Stories
Field notes, editorials, and long-form pieces from the vault - the wrecks, the recoveries, and the artifacts that survived.
The Stone on the Mantle.
A limestone block, an inheritance, and a family history rooted in Nauvoo and the pioneer trail.
From the Ship Brooklyn to the Willie Handcart Company, a family heirloom holds generations of gathering, rescue, and faith.
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A Name Scratched in Gold.
1861 Double Eagle - SS Brother Jonathan, lost on St. George Reef, July 30, 1865.
Three letters cut by hand into the field before Liberty's portrait, and a little girl of that name on the roll of the lost.
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A Coin That Outlasted Its Admiral.
1617 Utrecht Lion Daalder - Piet Heyn's Hollandia, lost in the Bay of All Saints, March 1627.
354 years on the seafloor beneath a burned Dutch warship, recovered in 1981, and one of at most 29 ever documented from the wreck.
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A Coat That Walked the Frontier.
Perry Engle - Maryland to Kansas, four feet of buffalo hide, ten pounds of armor against the cold.
A 100-days man in the 3rd Maryland, a Kansas homestead, and a buffalo and beaver robe coat that outlived him by a century.
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The SS Japan
A wooden sidewheel steamer of the Lincoln era. A wreck the ocean kept.
Pacific Mail's flagship, the Chinese laborers she carried, and the 1874-CC Trade Dollars recovered from her.
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One Fare. 24,000 Miles.
The Oakland, Brooklyn & Fruitvale R.R. token - and the family that earned it.
An 1871 copper transit token, a 1846 voyage around Cape Horn, and the 3rd great-grandfather who connects them.
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Not a Coin. But Every Bit as Much History.
A French naval boarding cutlass, Chatellerault, July 1841 - carrying the V-shaped nicks of blade-on-blade combat.
Le Sabre d'Abordage M1833 - the most copied naval boarding weapon of the 19th century. The U.S. Navy modeled their Civil War cutlass on it.
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