Hail fell on the Magong district of Penghu for the first time in 11 years on March 5, 2009. As the storm raged, a dozen or so ships had little choice but to tie up at the docks for safety. We arrived at Magong Harbor four days later to investigate Huang Jiajin's legacy.

Li Ming-ju, the dean of general affairs at National Penghu University and a personal friend of Huang's for 10 years, has written of "Penghu's Number-One Diver": "Huang Jiajin was born in Magong, Penghu County, on February 16, 1952. He joined the army, which trained him and stationed him on Taiwan. Following his discharge, he returned to Penghu and became a dive-fisherman. At the peak of his career, he owned two boats and carried out professional underwater salvage work."

Huang Jiajin, the discoverer of the General No. 1, passed away in 2006 and can now only be glimpsed in documentary film footage.

Catching sight of a wreck

Huang's first encounter with the General No. 1 owed much to a natural disaster. Typhoon Wayne, which struck Taiwan in August 1986, was reportedly the first typhoon to do so from the Penghu side. That is, it was the first recorded typhoon to have hit Penghu without first having been weakened by passing over Taiwan. While pounding Penghu, the storm also roiled the surrounding ocean, exposing artifacts long buried on the seafloor. Huang discovered pottery shards that looked like they dated from the Ming or Qing Dynasty on the seafloor while diving for lobsters the following year. He went down several times, bringing up a large number of objects, including intact porcelain cups and earthenware bottles, that made him suspect there was a wreck in the area.

Sometime around 1990, the then 38-year-old Huang brought several bags of porcelain shards wrapped in newspaper to Chen Kwei-miew, a Penghu legislator who had just left his position as head of the National Museum of History (NMH). Huang argued that the government should take an interest in Penghu's wrecks, and Chen brought the issue up during a legislative interpellation. In 1992, Ho Jinn-tsair, then the head of the Department of Social Education at the Ministry of Education (MOE), later told the media that the interpellation session marked the first time the MOE (then in charge of antiquities) had heard there might be wrecks in Taiwan's waters.

Once the news got out, Taiwanese began to contemplate that the phrase "sunken vessel" might refer to more than just celebrated international salvage operations like those of the Mary Rose or the Diana. Indeed, Taiwan's political and academic communities began to think that such vessels might exist in our domestic waters. But was the ship off Penghu a treasure ship or just a garbage scow? To what period did it date? No one knew, and without and relevant research or experience, no one was quite sure how to go about salvaging it.

In 1990, the MOE asked National Taiwan University's Institute of Oceanography and Department of Anthropology to study the problem. NTU proposed surveying, locating, conducting a trial dig, and estimating the value of the antiquities before beginning a full-scale salvage operation. But the MOE feared that Huang Jiajin was concerned only with salvaging items himself and that he wouldn't cooperate with its efforts.

Under the version of the Cultural Heritage Preservation Act then in effect, it was up to the MOE to designate who would carry out the excavation of antiquities. These designees were to be governmental bodies involved with the preservation of antiquities, or academic groups. This left the MOE unable to authorize Huang to raise items from the vessel himself. "From Huang's standpoint, the MOE appeared to be dragging its feet. He worried that items might be stolen from the site while it deliberated," says Ho Jinn-tsair, explaining the difference between the approach of the government and individuals to dealing with the situation.

The MOE ultimately chose not to make use of NTU's proposal, reportedly because it would have cost tens of millions of NT dollars and because Huang had never provided the wreck's precise location. The project was effectively tabled for five years, until the NMH finally revived it in 1995.

This intact blue-and-white porcelain jar retrieved from the General is decorated with four handles. The mouth is 10 centimeters in diameter, the base 13.7 cm in diameter, and the waist 63.5 cm (about 25 inches) in circumference.

Failure to report equals theft

Before he died, Huang revealed to the media that he had found four other wrecks between 1987 and 1995, and that the structures and even cannons of a few of them were clearly visible. Li Ming-ju, who began studying diving with Huang in 1990, says that Huang originally dived purely for lobster, but that his love of antiques later led him to dive largely for antiquities. He went down as deep as 60 meters, far below the 30-meter floor typical for fishing and recreational dives, and even below the 50-meter limit on salvage from the General No. 1.

Li says that Huang not only loved these ancient objects, but enjoyed sharing them. He turned the front porch of his home into an exhibition hall for the blue-and-white porcelain and other ceramics he found, and even borrowed space from the Penghu County Police Bureau in 1993 for an exhibition of items he had recovered.

Huang's large, very public displays aroused the MOE's ire. It charged him in 1995 in the Penghu District Court with violating an article of the old Cultural Heritage Preservation Act that stated that antiquities from abandoned shipwrecks are the property of the state. The MOE accused Huang of pilfering antiquities belonging to the state and forced him to turn over 783 items-mostly earthenware pots and pieces of porcelain-to the Penghu Cultural Affairs Bureau.

Lacking domestic precedents for handling sunken vessels, the MOE decided to establish an incentive mechanism to reward the discoverers of abandoned antiquities. "This was new territory for Taiwan and the law wasn't comprehensive, so there was a great deal of confusion," recalls Chi Li-mei, who was in charge of creating the mechanism and is now the deputy director of the Penghu Cultural Affairs Bureau.

Huang's friends complain of the unfairness of the MOE's "carrot and stick" approach. Chi says their objections run something like: "Had he known he was going to face legal action, he could have just hidden the stuff and kept quiet about it. He acted in good faith, and you filed charges against him!"

"In those days, the Cultural Heritage Preservation Act didn't receive nearly as much attention as it does today," says Chi. "Few people knew what the law required them to do with 'abandoned antiquities.' Such objects typically used to become decorations in people's living rooms. Honestly, they probably still don't understand the value and significance of antiquities recovered from the sea."

The ridiculous thing about the MOE's accusation that Huang had pillaged Ming and Qing antiquities is that after the museum had found the wreck in September 1998 and dubbed it the General No. 1, archaeologists had little good to say about the items Huang had recovered. They called them "fragments," "common utensils," "discoveries of no particular interest," and "of no historical significance." When they were submitted to the MOE's rewards program, they were estimated to be worth just NT$10,000. Huang accepted a certificate of thanks from the Penghu County Government, which praised his donation of "historical evidence of the trade between Taiwan and Fujian," but he refused the cash award, feeling that it was insulting to both the artifacts and him personally.

These four "olive pits" are perhaps the strangest artifacts retrieved from the General No. 1. They come from a kind of white Chinese olive grown in the southern part of mainland China that is frequently candied. Did they sink with the General, or were they perhaps spit overboard by a modern tourist sucking on them to prevent seasickness?

Hiding the General?

Ordered to find and excavate the vessel, the museum began searching the seas around Penghu in April 1995. Even with Huang's assistance, three months of surveying failed to yield even a trace of the ship. Some began to wonder whether Huang was intentionally leading them astray. But Huang Yung-chuan, an assistant director of the Penghu expedition who now heads up the National Museum of History, has previously acknowledged Huang Jiajin's contribution. "We really did find the wreck near Dawen," he told this reporter.

Huang Yung-chuan, who had no previous experience with underwater archaeological work, recalled that when he climbed aboard the expedition vessel, the sea around them was "black as crude oil" and he lost all sense of direction.

Were Huang Jiajin and the others with diving experience putting one over on the excavation team? Or had they too lost their bearings? "We had to believe in him. Huang relied on his experience and impressions of the area every time he went into the water. It's virtually impossible for anyone to precisely eyeball their position on the open water," says Chi Li-mei.

The underwater archaeology team from the National Museum of History found rows of tiles on the deck of the General No. 1, suggesting that it was a transport for construction materials.

Oh Captain, my Captain!

Li Ming-ju says that Huang was a generally quiet man. He only really talked when the conversation turned to antiquities, but he could tell you quite a bit about Ming and Qing antiquities when he got going. Speaking as a former student of his, Li says that diving was the death of Huang.

Huang Yung-chuan, who also knew Huang Jiajin personally, has a similar view of the man. He says that Huang Jiajin had too much confidence in his own skills and long ignored the decompression routine at the end of dives. As a result, he suffered decompression sickness that resulted in necrosis in his right shoulder and both hip joints.

Li fishes out one of the last pictures taken of Huang and says that when Magong Harbor was dredged in 2005, they found numerous porcelain shards and several complete anping pots. (These porcelain pots were fired in northern Fujian by the Shaowu Kiln and used for maritime trade in the Ming Dynasty. Legend says that Zheng Chenggong used them as grenades against the Dutch, earning them the nickname "Koxinga bottles.") At this point, Huang had already been diagnosed with colon cancer and was deeply concerned about his health. But, hiding his condition from his friends, he went on a dive. When they returned to shore, Huang had to be rushed to the emergency room. He never left the hospital again. He was transferred to a hospice unit at Kaohsiung's Veterans General Hospital at the end of the year, and died the following February at the age of 55.

"He was like an old ship's captain," says Li. "No matter how old and beat up the diving equipment, he had no fear." Laughing in spite of his pain, he says his old friend had his quirks, including always wearing an outdated old compass on his wrist when he dove.

Whatever Huang's successes and failures, Taiwanese underwater archaeology begins with him. Perhaps he really did have a moment of selfishness and want to pocket antiquities for himself. But that's just human nature. Chi Li-mei puts it well, arguing that Huang provided Taiwan with the opportunity to begin doing underwater archaeology, and with the impetus to flesh out the field's legal framework. He also increased public awareness of cultural properties and ensured that Penghu's fishermen would no longer see ancient wrecks on the seafloor as potential treasure troves.

Standing on the Magong pier beneath gray skies, we imagine Huang carrying an air tank in one hand and a wetsuit in the other, walking swiftly towards us from the berth of the Taihua liner where he made his last dive.

The 10 years since the antiquities were raised from the General No. 1 have cast the mixed sands of gratitude and resentment which surrounded Huang's involvement with the dig to the winds. His name and role surely deserve to be remembered.

This white porcelain spoon retrieved from the General is nine centimeters long and 4.7 cm wide. Archaeologists believe it belonged to a sailor on the vessel.

More than 150 years beneath the sea has badly degraded the wooden hull of the General. The museum team fears that raising the ship would destroy it, and has only brought a few fragments ashore for preservation. Testing has shown the wood to be from the Luanta fir (Cunninghamia konishii), a species of cypress found in Fujian and Taiwan that is often used to make tools and build ships.