Under the Sea – BUEI Travel Video duration – 8.50 minutes Bermuda Underwater Exploration Institute Hamilton, Bermuda Adventure – Ecology Travel Video (Earth Calling) Wendy Tucker Museum Director, BUEI My name is Wendy Tucker. I’m the director of the Bermuda Underwater Exploration Institute which is a mouthful so we call it BUEI and we opened in July of 1997 and we’re here to show the world the ocean. We have a vast collection of shipwreck artifacts and the ships are from around the world. A shipwreck is fascinating. It’s like you have your own personal little detective plot. You find a shipwreck; you don’t know the name, the origin, where it was going and by the artifacts, then you can sort of put the story together. We’re surrounded by them (laughter) all nationalities, all shapes, sizes, we’ve had well, 1595 up to modern day, we’ve day super tankers on the rocks and part of the reason is that the reef barrier is so close to the south shore and it goes out just over 8 miles on the north shore so ships cut in close. So we were notorious, I think, we were called the Isle of Devils and also Shakespeare thought we were interesting and then, later on it became the Bermuda Triangle. And I have to tell you, everyone that comes through here says ‘Do you have anything on the Bermuda Triangle?’ and that’s constant, our modern day claim to fame. Here we have a shipwreck map and it gives you an idea of the shipwrecks around Bermuda and this reel shows you how we discovered some of the shipwrecks. There’s probably 200 to 300 shipwrecks and every time we have a storm, we find something different, so the sand moves and we discover something more. We’re an old Bermudian family and so the ocean is in our blood and has been for about 400 years. So it was just a natural thing, I think, for my father, growing up around the ocean, to be interested in exploring and of course he discovered a shipwreck in 1951. It was a Spanish shipwreck and she was coming up from, from what we come to talk about as the New World and that was South America and going back to the Old World which was Spain. And they come up past Bermuda because they travel on the Gulf Stream and then they knew basically that if they got to Bermuda, they’d turn right and pick up the currents in the trade winds and then get home. Well anyway the ship didn’t make it. It landed on the reefs here. So my father discovered the shipwreck and at the time he discovered it, he didn’t go back for about 4 to 5 years. And then he went back and I think the first or second day he was diving, he found treasure and then he found an emerald and gold cross and it was absolutely beautiful and that was the beginning of his life in treasure hunting and ocean exploration. When he found the cross it was the most valuable piece found in the western hemisphere. Then it was stolen. My father sold the collection for a very fair price to the Bermuda government. They were displaying it down at the aquarium; the Queen was coming to Bermuda and was going to the Maritime Museum. The government very kindly asked my father if he would present it and show it to the Queen. My father likes to joke a lot and we, my mother and I were sort of outside the Maritime Museum and my father started to unpack the collection that had been packed up from the aquarium and all of a sudden he said ‘Where is the real cross?’ So there were like 4 or 5 people in the room and they ignored him. He said ‘Where is the real cross?’ and somebody said ‘You know, that is not even funny.’ He said ‘I’ve got paint on my hand.’ The Replica of the Tucker Cross It was a professional job because they put an exact reproduction in its place. If you walk around the room, you can see the front of the cross and then you can see the back. The back was very oily and did come off and the back of it we believe it was a religious artifact. There’s an outline that something was definitely in there and it’s very pretty and we haven’t seen it or heard about it since. BUEI exhibits and programs The treasure wasn’t the pull, it was the interest, the discovery, every day was a different day. Now there’s of course shipwreck laws and if you find anything you have to get permission from the Bermudian government for us to go out and even just look at it and if you have permission, then there’s further steps that you take. But before that, it was open. If you found anything, if you wanted to get rid of it, you had to offer it to the Bermuda government first and they had first option on it and if not, then it was yours. And basically my father kept everything and restored it and we just had this huge collection. We have qualified educators here and we design all our programs from scratch. So that you want to see anything like what we do anywhere else and it’s usually based on projects around Bermuda and we talk about William BB, he did the first deep dive in the world and it was just off Bermuda. Then we have the Bermuda Sea Level Project that my father’s doing with a Geological Survey of Canada and we started at 18000 years ago and there were up to 2000. We do incorporate the rest of the world. Right now we’re doing the Arctic and the Antarctic; of course we have the Titanic exhibits that we were doing that’ll also… The shark cage was my idea, Peter Benchley was a very good friend of my family and he was coming back from South Africa, been diving in a shark cage with the great white sharks and stopped by here in Bermuda on his way home.. We were just sitting on a porch one afternoon and Peter was like ‘the shark was huge and he wanted in’ and he said ‘you know never ever experience anything like that’ and he said that the shark just had a vengeance, he was in a bad bad mood. We were sitting there and laughing and teasing him and then I thought ‘Hmmm this would be fun. How many people in the world are going to experience a great white shark attack?’ Hopefully not a lot.. So I thought ‘This would make a great exhibit’ and from the giggles and screams that we get down there, it works well. Throughout the exhibits there is always something to learn and what we do, conservation with fish and our shipwrecks and of course, these artifacts. It’s an ideal place to start your vacation. It’s an entire family experience because not only are you engaging your children, you’re engaged.