

These coins recovered from sunken cities of 

 Magna Graecia sliow a variety of sea motifs: 

 crab, from Motya; octopus, from Syracuse; 

 scat top from Oxentum; and the dolphin 

 from Tarentum. 



of Italy to Scidrus and Laus. This saved a long sea journey and 

 enabled ships to avoid the dangerous Strait of Messana. The over- 

 land route probably took about two days. Recently the Italians have 

 excavated in the area of Laus and have discovered enough to show- 

 that they are on the right trail, but the site of Scidrus, like that of 

 Sybaris, is completely lost. 



Sybaris was founded about 720 b.c. and was razed to the ground 

 in 5 10 B.C., after about two hundred glorious years. The city was 

 destroyed by the citizens of the neighboring colony of Croton, 

 which was famous for its athletes. The account of Phylarchus states 

 that the Sybarites murdered thirty ambassadors from Croton and 

 threw their bodies over the city wall to be eaten by beasts. Although 

 the Sybarites put three hundred thousand men into ensuing battle 

 against the Crotoniates, this was not enough. Led by Milo, the 

 greatest athlete of the ancient world, the Croton forces crushed 

 their enemy. To quote Strabo: "Because of their luxuriousness and 

 their insolence all their high fortune was wrested from them by the 

 Crotoniates in seventy days." All stragglers were killed, and the 

 waters of the river Crathis were diverted to flow over the site of 

 the ruined city. 



So far we have spoken only of lost cities of the Mediterranean. 

 In 1959, Edwin Link, the American of Link aviation trainer fame, 

 extended the scope of underwater archaeology by his work at Port 

 Royal, in Jamaica. Two-thirds of this town was destroyed by an 

 earthquake that struck at about 11:40 a.m. on June 7, 1692. Here 

 is an eye witness account of the event, which compares nicely with 

 the Greek geographer Pausanias' vivid description of the destruc- 

 tion of Helike. 



"The earth heaved and swelled like the rolling billows, and in 

 many places the earth cracked, open'd, and shut with a motion 

 quick and fast ... in some of these people were swallowed up, in 

 others they were caught by the middle and pressed to death. The 

 whole was attended with the noise of falling mountains at a distance, 

 while the sky was turned dull and reddish like an glowing oven." 



Port Royal was reputed to be the wickedest town in the world. 

 It was Henry Morgan's base for operations against the Spaniards 

 and was the headquarters of pirates and buccaneers. They spent 

 their ill-gotten wealth recklessly on the usual pleasures of sailors, 

 and the town was well equipped to provide them. As the merchants 

 prospered by selling and trading, the town expanded dangerously 

 to the very edges of the sand spit on which it was built, but appar- 

 ently no thought was given to the stupidity of building four-story 

 houses on sand and shingle. 



On the fatal June day the whole waterfront was precipitated 

 into the sea in a few minutes, and, as crevasses opened to swallow 

 buildings and people, a vast wave roared in from the sea. Ware- 

 houses and docks were smashed, and ships were battered to splin- 

 ters. The frigate Swan was carried high over the roof tops. Two 

 thousand people were killed. 



In the 270 years since the earthquake, sand has deposited and 

 enlarged the spit, and the ruins of the town lie deep in mud. To 

 cope with this difficult situation. Link had a special diving and 

 salvage ship built, called the Sea Diver. The water was so dirty that 

 aerial photography was hopeless, so a great search was made for 

 reliable old charts to give the divers some idea of the town plan 



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