The Haskins Collection

The Researcher

History disappears twice: once in the sea, and once in the archives.

Jack Haskins understood this better than anyone of his generation. A diver and salvor himself, he realized the real map to the lost fleets was not on the seafloor but in Seville, Spain, in the Archivo General de las Indias, where the Spanish empire filed the paperwork of four centuries of sailing. So he taught himself Spanish, and then the archaic, handwritten Spanish of colonial scribes, a script that defeats even native speakers. Then he spent years in the archives, copying and translating documents on the Caribbean's lost ships: manifests, salvage reports, survivor accounts.

The results made him a legend. Haskins located the log of the Henry, the English salvage ship whose records helped pinpoint the fabled Concepcion off Hispaniola, and he was the first to bring up treasure from that site. He dove and salvaged on the 1715 and 1733 fleets, the San Josef, and more, and for decades he was consulted on virtually every serious shipwreck project in the Caribbean. Divers with fast boats and good sonar still came to Blackjack first, because the archive always knew more than the ocean would admit.

Among the divers who learned from him was Carl Fismer, whose room stands next to this collection in our museum and who co-authored the book Time Ranger about his friend's remarkable life. Together, the two rooms tell one story: the researcher points, the diver descends.