In Search of Maya Sea Traders

CHAPTER 16. Target Practice

156 CHAPTER 16 TARGET PRACTICE T he announcements on the radio not to travel in the coastal waters north of Punta Gorda for the next couple of weeks because of target practice by the British army presented a problem for survey and for getting food and other supplies from town. That the area was virtually unpopulated evidently made it a suitable location for bombing. The few occupants of the coastal area naturally had a different opinion. The sounds and sight of ammunition from the offshore ship falling short of their land targets were unsettling. If people didn’t listen carefully for the radio announcements of target practice, they were taken by surprise at sea. This is what happened early one morning on our way to town from Frenchman’s Cay in the summer of 1994. The sea was calm. The early morning fog lifted off the sea with the increasing warmth of the sun. Melissa and I savored the opportunity to sit back and motor to town with little effort. The boom of an explosion shattered the morning calm. The sound arched in the sky overhead and fell with a flash into the waters toward shore, sending out ripples where it landed. Instantly alert, I looked behind, beyond Moho Cay, where a battleship emerged from the mist. We were between the ship and their target, the Seven Hills Estate, north of the Rio Grande. The land was privately owned but was leased to the British army. The area represented a nagging gap in my survey coverage of the Port Honduras area. I was hesitant to explore there in case the stories of unexploded ammunition were true. Moreover, I had no interest in being a real target in a simulated war. Brief sojourns to the area — with the landowners ’ permission — had substantiated my fears. The Target Practice 157 ancient activity represented by a scatter of pottery sherds along a deserted stretch of beach was more enigmatic than the abandoned army vehicle pocked with holes. We called this site “Target Practice.” When we heard gunfire while following a winding creek behind Pork and Doughboy Point, I decided to survey elsewhere. I heard stories that undetonated ordnance lay scattered around. Regardless of whether the stories were true, the area was protected from occasional visitors like our archaeological team. However, I considered that the sea was my territory and I had a right to be there. Therefore, when I saw the British ship, I asked Jodi, who was in the bow of the dory, to send a flare to let the British navy know of our presence. She reached under the bow and opened the fluorescent orange box that we carried everywhere but normally used only on Christmas, New Year’s, or the fourth of July. This practice kept the flares tested and made me replace them periodically. One Christmas one of the volunteers had decided to stop taking his insulin — for the first time in his life. It may have been the rum and coconut water we had been drinking to celebrate the holiday. Whatever the cause, when Joe wandered back to his tent early, I noticed that he still had the flare in his pocket. I asked one of my field assistants to go to his tent and check. The assistant said he wasn’t going to stick his hand in a man’s pocket. I turned to a volunteer, Gerald Cole, a retired U.S. Navy Seal commander. I figured he would help me out if I asked correctly. Gerald — we called him Gerry — was always looking for challenges. What he really wanted was a machete and a swath of mangroves to be cut down. He told us stories of his days with the Seals — stories of dropping his group by helicopter in the darkness in the sea with instructions that he’d pick them up at 0700 in six days at a specified location, following completion of their mission. His wife, on the other hand, liked Holiday Inn vacations, sitting around the pool sipping martinis , and although Gerry said that was a perfectly fine way of spending a vacation , he also needed something more. My project was that something. With this knowledge, I turned to him and said I had something dangerous that needed to be done. He looked at me with complete attention. I began to tell him about the flare, but Gerry was gone before I could complete the sentence, returning in a very short time...