ory a commodity," he says. "When you start selling off your heritage, you damage the real core and fabric of what you are as a people." But Lenihan has helped discover, catalog, and preserve much of America's sunken past.
In Lake Superior, he found 19th-century shipwrecks piled on top of one another, testimony to the region's sudden, violent storms. While examining a Japanese submarine in the Aleutian Islands, Lenihan suddenly realized the "ramp" he was straddling was, in fact, a live torpedo.
At Bikini his team surveyed the bomb-scorched Saratoga and the Japanese battleship Nagato, clearing the way for recreational divers, who now spend thousands of dollars to dive to these cold-war monuments.
Currently the team is examining a ferry that sank at Ellis Island, whence it had transported millions of immigrants to real freedom on the mainland.
While Lenihan is passionate about preserving America's shipwrecks, he's equally passionate about allowing the public to visit them. It was Lenihan's love of scuba diving that led him to study archaeology, rather than the other way around, and he believes properly trained divers should be free to explore wrecks, even dangerous ones.
Lenihan's lifelong advocacy for recreational divers is starting to pay off. Sport diving has grown enormously since Lenihan started surveying wrecks a quarter century ago, building an increasingly important lobby for the preservation of historic shipwrecks. "After a [prop-wash] blower runs over a wreck, you may not want to dive on it," he says. "Sport divers are finding they have a lot more in common with preservationists than treasure salvers."