Original subtitles

ROBERT BALLARD: I've dedicated my life to exploring the unknown.

I've been places no one else has ever gone.

I've seen life no human eye has ever seen.

It's my passion.

I found the Titanic.

God damn!

I've survived crushing depths

and a rogue wave.

But even after 50 years at sea,

I'm as fascinated with the deep as I was on my very first expedition.

You want to know my most important discovery?

Well, it's the one I'm about to make.

I'm Dr. Robert Ballard.

Come with me into the alien deep.

MAN: At the end of this move

we'll be within a 50-meter range of our expected target.

MAN: Alright, well, this looks good. I think we can go down now.

Just watch your altitude.

BALLARD: 12 meters.

Let's keep going, I think we've got it there, guys.

MAN: Yeah, not too bad.

BALLARD: Not bad. Hold! There's a lot of good hunting ground here.

WOMAN: Depth of 25.

MAN: Tilting camera down.

WOMAN: Tilting camera down.

BALLARD: These are the moments I live for.

You spend all this time out on the sea,

and then in between all the searching,

you make these incredible discoveries.

They completely change our understanding of human history.

It doesn't get much more exciting than that.

Alright, let's get down on the deck.

Get closer down.

MAN: 296. Okay, Rhonda, why don't you come around to that heading?

WOMAN: Gotcha.

MAN: And I'll try to...

BALLARD: Something here, what's this, what's this, what's this?

MAN: What's that right ahead?

WOMAN: I don't know.

MAN: Whoa!

MAN: What is this?

BALLARD: That's it, baby.

Come on in.

Come to papa.

Big one. Big one.

I love it.

Il love it, I love it, I love it, I love it.

NARRATOR: 95% of the ocean floor is unexplored.

And if it wasn't for Dr. Robert Ballard,

that number would be much higher.

BALLARD: I'm always looking forward to being underwater.

It's like fishing- if you don't have your lure in the water

you're not going to catch any fish.

NARRATOR: After a lifetime of exploring,

Ballard is out to prove a controversial theory-

that to find the oldest wrecks,

you have to look deep, in open waters.

You can't stay in the shallows, as common wisdom has it.

BALLARD: Jason and the Argonauts sailed through here

on the quest for the golden fleece.

This is where Odysseus made his journey back from Troy,

right up the street here.

The Roman Empire established an empire, Greeks.

I mean, this is where all these civilizations moved,

and commonly by sea.

NARRATOR: Which means their shipwrecks- if Ballard can find them-

would provide a window into history

as far back as the Phoenicians, and even the Egyptians.

Back in the day,

the southeastern coast of Turkey

was a hub of commerce and travel.

BALLARD: This is a confluence

of a lot of trade routes.

Whether you're coastal traffic

or you start heading out into the eastern Mediterranean,

or you head across to Greece and to Athens and that area,

or down that way towards Crete.

So this is quite a crossroads.

You go around the corner, you know,

you're headed up to the entrance to the Black Sea.

So we're here because they were here.

NARRATOR: Ballard hopes these waters will provide proof

of a long-held conviction-

that the ancients were confident, ambitious sailors.

BALLARD: If you're an ancient mariner,

and you want to go from A to B,

you pick the shortest route.

Time's money.

And so we simply try to figure out

where the starting point is, the end point is.

We draw a line between the two, and we hunt the line.

NARRATOR: It's an unconventional strategy.

Many experts believe ancient mariners

would have hugged the coast in their handcrafted wooden ships.

Ballard disagrees.

BALLARD: These early seafarers-

and I am talking about the time of Homer

in the eighth century BCE and even before-

they were a lot bolder than we ever gave them credit for.

NARRATOR: If Ballard's right,

the deep waters of this ancient crossroads

should hold some amazing archaeological finds.

But few researchers have the resources to get to there.

Exploration is an expensive business.

BALLARD: I'm putting a lot of money in the water,

and I want to get it back.

I mean, obviously, can't wait to see what it's going to see.

NARRATOR: Ballard is using one of the most sophisticated

underwater exploration systems ever assembled.

It allows him to go where no one has gone before.

BALLARD: Our vehicles are designed to go to 20,000 feet.

So we're not restricted by depth.

In fact, I prefer going deep.

NARRATOR: Before he starts a search,

Ballard does a dry run.

BALLARD: Now they'll drive back out,

like a dog on a leash.

NARRATOR: The dog is Hercules, a camera-carrying robot.

BALLARD: It wants to go.

NARRATOR: Next is Argus, Hercules' support module.

It helps the dog sniff out its prey.

BALLARD: Argus has got all the lights.

Argus will light up the bottom down there.

Plus, it's got a camera that's sort of the eye in the sky,

sort of a helicopter watching Hercules do his stuff.

NARRATOR: He needs all the technology he can get,

because the deep is vast and dark.

And his targets are tiny.

BALLARD: Right now we're in my backyard.

This is the world that I live in- a world of total darkness.

Most of the planet is pitch black.

The average depth of the ocean is 12,000 feet down.

It gets down to 35,800 feet.

The pressure is eight tons per square inch.

NARRATOR: Only a handful of human beings

have ever been to the deepest part of our planet.

And yet Ballard believes the crushing depths

have much to tell us about our history.

BALLARD: And when you go down there,

you can only see about 30 feet.

And then I come across an artifact,

an ancient shipwreck.

Who knows when that went down.

NARRATOR: Finding shipwrecks is what made Ballard famous.

BALLARD: Most of it's unexplored.

We have no idea what we're gonna encounter.

And we simply just are gonna go down there

with a flashlight and look.

MAN: We're gonna bring it up.

NARRATOR: The shakedown dive is complete.

Now it's a waiting game

as the sonar searches for possible targets.

Meanwhile, Ballard meets with his archaeology team,

Tufan Turanli and Bridget Buxton.

BALLARD: We began going south and we...

People ask me how many we've found.

Probably about 20 so far.

How many do I think are down there?

Thousands and thousands of them.

NARRATOR: Of the wrecks Ballard has found here,

most have been no more than 2,000 years old.

But to prove that even earlier civilizations

ventured out across open waters,

he needs to find something older-

something only the ocean could have preserved.

BRIDGET BUXTON: We've exhausted a lot of the land-based sources.

For example, they aren't going to find

another tomb of Tutankhamen.

We've found all the New Kingdom pharaohs.

The next big, really world-changing discoveries

could be made underwater,

and they could be made in this area.

NARRATOR: But they won't be found in the shallows.

TUFAN TURANLI: Through our contacts,

especially sponge divers,

I think we have found possibly almost all of the wrecks

that are in diveable depths.

But the sea is very vast,

and there are many ships out there,

and those are the ones that are the prime shipwrecks,

because they are mostly untouched.

NARRATOR: If Ballard is right about the ancient mariners' routes,

they're untouched because they're deep-

his favorite place to explore.

BALLARD: Look at that!

NARRATOR: Next morning there's good news.

BALLARD: It's got my name on it.

NARRATOR: The night watch has picked up some interesting targets.

BALLARD: No one's touched the ones we're about to look at.

We'll be the first in on them since they sank,

whenever they sank, hundreds and hundreds of years,

thousands of years ago.

So ll like that.

BUXTON: 25 meters maybe, give or take.

NARRATOR: It's painstaking work, requiring intense concentration

and an eye for sonar anomalies.

BALLARD: What do we see on sonar, Dwight?

Anything interesting?

DWIGHT: Just the bottom.

The sonar's tipped.

BALLARD: I want to get away from the biology

that destroys wrecks and covers it and encases it.

I want to get away from the sponge divers

and the looters who take things.

I want to get away from, in particular, the trawler.

NARRATOR: Trawlers destroy everything in their path,

as they drag the ocean floor with their nets.

BALLARD: Our real nemesis is the deepwater trawler

that's trawling history off the-

sweeping it off the bottom of the ocean.

Trawl mark, trawl mark, trawl mark.

Look at all those trawl marks.

Funny thing is, have you seen a fish yet?

What are they catching?

So we're going to keep going until we bottom out.

Hopefully we bottom out at what, 500 meters, Dwight?

DWIGHT: Five, yeah.

BALLARD: 500 meters.

And we're wanting the trawl marks to go away any second now.

NARRATOR: Ballard searches deep using a technique

that transformed underwater archaeology

when he pioneered it on his most spectacular discovery.

BALLARD: The RMS Titanic.

You're looking down to- now those are the portholes.

And you can see the rust literally bleeding.

It's like a waterfall of blood.

NARRATOR: For over 70 years,

the whereabouts of the world's most famous shipwreck

were unknown...

...until Ballard had an idea.

Imagine this Nebraska field is the North Atlantic,

and you're hunting for Titanic.

BALLARD: Somewhere in this wheat field is a trail.

When the Titanic sank, it broke in half at the surface.

Witnesses saw it.

And these two pieces became giant salt shakers,

shaking out their contents.

So everything was coming out of the Titanic!

Boilers were coming out.

People were coming out.

Wine bottles were coming out.

And during that free fall, it creates a trail of debris

that's much bigger signature than the Titanic itself.

So now, we're searching the ocean floor

and we come across our first piece of debris,

and then another.

The pieces are getting bigger and bigger.

We're going in the right direction.

We are heading directly to the wreck itself.

NARRATOR: September 1, 1985.

1:00 AM.

BALLARD: Initially, we didn't know if we were on the right trail,

until that magic moment

when the boiler came underneath our cameras.

MAN: Look at it What the hell?

Oh! God, it looks like the boiler.

MAN: Boiler!

MAN: Yes, yes!

BALLARD: We had a picture of that boiler

on the wall of the control van,

and everyone's head looked to the picture, looked back,

and we knew it was the Titanic.

God damn!

NARRATOR: 25 years later in the Mediterranean,

Ballard is as enthusiastic as ever-

now searching for much older debris trails.

BALLARD: I feel lucky, don't you, Dwight?

DWIGHT: Yup.

BALLARD: Feel lucky?

Yeah, I feel lucky.

Something here, what's this, what's this, what's this,

what's this, what's this?

Looks like an amphora off to the left.

Mark it.

Possible amphora.

NARRATOR: Amphorae are the shipping containers

of the ancient world-

clay jars that transported everything from grain, to olive oil, to wine.

BALLARD: These ancient mariners treated an amphora

like, you know, we treat trash.

They throw them overboard.

In the deep sea, the average rate of sedimentation

is a centimeter per 1,000 years.

1,000 years!

An amphora, a typical one, is about,

little less than a meter, about 18 centimeters.

You can't bury it.

So if you throw over an amphora over the side in the deep sea,

it's probably still laying there, and you can still see it with your eye.

This smells right.

Something dead ahead.

Ah-ha!

That's it, baby.

There she blows. There she blows!

Come on in.

Come to papa.

MAN: It's a wreck.

BALLARD: It's a wreck.

[cheering]

WOMAN: All right!

BALLARD: Yes! Ha-ha!

Big one. Big one.

That's a big boy. That's a big boy.

That is a big boy.

NARRATOR: 1,500 feet down,

the wooden masts and hull of the ship are long gone,

devoured by organisms that live in the muddy bottom.

But the cargo of amphorae remains.

BUXTON: I'm going to guess this is Type 1 Byzantine.

But I want you to erase that if I'm wrong.

BALLARD: You think it's Byzantine?

BUXTON: it's-that's...

Look at the striations across the bottom.

BALLARD: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

NARRATOR: Markings on the amphora

point to a ship from the sixth century CE-

Byzantine.

The Byzantine Empire arose from the eastern remnants

of the old Roman Empire.

From its capital, Constantinople,

trade routes radiated out across the eastern Mediterranean.

BALLARD: The first impression is Byzantine, so...

we'll move on.

MAN: Byzantine. That's good? Bad?

BALLARD: Could be better.

So we'll make it better.

Hello!

NARRATOR: But before they move on,

something catches Ballard's eye.

BALLARD: Yeah, yeah. Look at this puppy.

Hello.

Hold the shot, zoom back, zoom back.

Lovely, lovely.

There we go.

NARRATOR: Eels are nice,

but Byzantine wrecks are a dime a dozen along this coast.

İt's old, but not old enough

to be an example of truly early open-ocean sailing.

BALLARD: We're looking for those particular lost ships

that really have something to tell us,

and then we'll spend time on those.

Otherwise we'll just move on.

Alright, zoom back and we'll come down a while.

Then I think we'll get out of Dodge.

NARRATOR: The Nautilus sets course for a new target

a few miles away.

BALLARD: Okay, roger. Okay, so that's where we'll head.

MAN: I am seeing a really great-looking return on the sonar.

It's very common to all the piles of jars we've seen,

or amphoras.

NARRATOR: Suddenly, Hercules' camera picks up something in the dark.

BALLARD: Your heading is 2367

WOMAN: Around about that, yes.

BALLARD: That's about...

You should pick it up on the right.

That might be that puppy over there.

WOMAN: Yeah.

BALLARD: We're coming in on it.

Yeah. Here it comes.

MAN: It's a sailboat.

WOMAN: Comin' up.

ALL: That's a sailboat!

WOMAN: Whoa, is right, I've got to come way up, guys.

BALLARD: You're kidding, it is a sailboat.

Oh, it's a net.

Oh, there we've got a name on it.

It's got a name.

MAN: Want to zoom in on the numbers?

BALLARD: Yeah. Go see what its home port is on the stern.

I'll bet you it's Delaware.

Want to bet on it? Anyone?

MAN: What's the flag?

MAN: Miranda?

MAN: Miranda.

BALLARD: Miranda.

What's underneath?

MAN: Heidelberg.

WOMAN: Do you want me to go in on that?

BALLARD: Heidelberg, yeah.

Look at-is it- what's it sitting on?

Looks like it's sitting on a pile of amphora.

I'm joking, those are shadows of the ropes.

[laughter]

NARRATOR: There may be a good story behind this eerie wreck,

but it's not one Ballard has time to pursue.

His laser focus remains on ancient mariners-

and the older, the better.

BALLARD: You're looking for the most dangerous stretch of ocean

along the trade routes.

That's the trouble spot,

that's where these sailing ships were most likely to go down.

NARRATOR: To find those trouble spots,

Ballard must get into the mind of the ancient sailor.

He puts himself at the helm of some traditional sail power.

BALLARD: Trying to get from A to B

in a powerboat like the Nautilus,

you just point your bow towards it and off you go.

But a sailing ship must do a series of tacking maneuvers,

trying to get the reach,

trying to get the best winds

that will give him the direction he wants to go

at the highest speed.

NARRATOR: Steering a zigzag course along the Turkish coast,

Ballard soon discovers a potential danger zone.

BALLARD: As the ancient mariner was carrying his cargo north,

coming up on the Datca Peninsula,

he would turn west and travel along the peninsula,

being protected from the winds by the land itself.

If he turned the corner,

he was going to encounter the winds from the northwest.

If the winds were not that severe,

he could make safe passage.

But if they were severe, he could be in serious trouble.

NARRATOR: If conditions turned bad,

there was little an early sea captain could do.

BALLARD: They had very primitive sailing technology,

so it was much, much more difficult to do

what I'm doing right now.

You've got a very simplistic square rig.

It doesn't have a keel, so it's basically a big bathtub.

And it's not capable of the maneuvering that we can now do

with modern sailing ships.

And sure enough, if he was overloaded

or the winds were severe, he would sink.

This is just the right spot to find shipwrecks.

It has all the necessary ingredients.

But of course,

just when you think you've got it all figured out,

that's when something goes wrong.

MAN: You all set, Brennan?

NARRATOR: When Ballard rejoins the Nautilus,

he's met with bad news-

his sonar system, Diana, is down.

BALLARD: Did they recover Diana or they haven't done that yet?

MAN: Yeah, we still have to recover it.

BALLARD: They're recovering it now?

NARRATOR: With no sonar, exploration grinds to a halt.

BALLARD: Diana severed one of its terminating wires

and got flooded with seawater.

And it'll take just as much time to fix it as bring Echo on line.

Echo can go a lot deeper,

and we're in real deep water now, happy hunting ground,

so I want to bring this guy on line.

The game is get someone in the pool.

NARRATOR: Sonar is the first crucial link in Ballard's search system.

He needs it to locate targets in the imaginary wheat field below.

BALLARD: Well, my hands are my side-scan sonars.

But my sonar can reach further than my hands,

it can reach out about 1,000 meters.

So I have, basically, a lawnmower that's 1,000 meters wide

when I'm using the sonar.

And I can quickly get through a large search area that way.

NARRATOR; When the sonar's working, that is.

To be out of the water on day four of a five-day expedition

is exasperating, to say the least.

BALLARD: You know, it's like I just got in a cab in New York City

with four dollars in my pocket,

and I'm stuck in traffic

watching the cab meter go [buzz).

When you get on this ship and mobilize,

you start these meters.

And it burns,

it's got a $1,000 an hour burn rate.

NARRATOR: While Ballard frets about lost bottom time,

other crewmembers jump at the chance to relax.

BALLARD: This is humbling.

To be in beautiful weather and not in the water, but...

You know, I don't have patience on land,

but I've learned to have patience at sea...

kind of.

It's just that I have too much to do.

I'm out here trying to prove

how adventurous the ancient mariners really were,

and now I'm just wasting time and money.

[men singing]

NARRATOR: Ballard's lightbulb moment about open-ocean voyaging

came to him, not in the Med, but during a trip to Hawaii.

Over 1,500 years ago,

Polynesians made incredible open-sea voyages

around the Pacific in simple wooden sailing boats.

In modern Hawaii,

the ancient Polynesian sailing traditions live on.

CHADD ONOHI PAISHON: So we're just going to stretch this

as tight as we can get it.

BALLARD: This tight...

NARRATOR: Master navigator Chadd Onohi Paishon

is skipper of the voyaging canoe Makali'i.

It's named after the Polynesian navigator who, as legend has it,

steered the first humans to Hawaii.

BALLARD: So Chadd, when you're sailing

and you're sailing overnight, where do you sleep?

PAISHON: I get the penthouse bunk.

Right there.

BALLARD: You're right here under the stars.

And where do I sleep?

PAISHON: You're down below with the rest of the crew.

Let me show you where you will be sleeping.

BALLARD: It's amazing the guts they had

to literally go where no one has gone before

and wonder if they were going to get there.

NARRATOR: Chadd's ancestors sailed for a month,

across over 2,000 miles of open ocean to get to Hawaii.

BALLARD: They didn't even know Hawaii was here.

PAISHON: Yeah.

BALLARD: They sailed out into the most remote parts of the planet.

PAISHON: The ocean has always been our road.

BALLARD: The highway.

PAISHON: Yeah, it's not something that separated us,

it's something that joins us together.

BALLARD: Very few Hawaiians live on the tops of the islands.

PAISHON: Right, right, we all live here where we're supposed to live.

BALLARD: Exactly.

PAISHON: The tops are for the gods.

BALLARD: That's for the gods.

That idea of a highway, that's what stood out to me.

Maybe the early Greeks had highways, too,

across the Mediterranean.

The experts say ancient mariners would have sailed

close to the shore,

but I say they would have been just as bold

as the first Hawaiians.

They were sailing about the same time,

and probably just as sophisticated.

If I'm right, the shipwrecks should be there to prove it.

NARRATOR: Eventually the crew gets the sonar system

back in the water.

But now the conditions have changed.

BALLARD: We're in a real weather pattern right now.

We had winds up to 30 knots and more.

We actually came and hid behind this island

because it was so bad around the corner.

NARRATOR: Their move to calmer waters

proves to be a lucky one.

BALLARD: We came here literally escaping the bad seas,

and looks like we might have picked up some good targets

that we're gonna go and dive on right now.

They're about 11-12 meters long,

about three and a half meters wide,

so it's a classic three-to-one ratio.

You can see the individual...

NARRATOR: While hiding from the storm,

the sonar picked up several interesting anomalies,

including this one.

BALLARD: So it sort of looks like a cluster of small grapes,

the quintessential signature of an ancient cargo ship

carrying amphoras.

NARRATOR: Hopes are high, though Ballard is ever wary.

BALLARD: You don't know what's there.

It could be nets, you could get in trouble.

I've had submarines trapped in nets, with people in them,

and I've had ROVs trapped in nets.

So I'm net conscious.

MAN ON RADIO: Argus is in the water.

NARRATOR: The pressure is palpable.

Ballard has less than 24 hours before he has to head home.

BALLARD: I've been on over 130 expeditions,

and it always seems to go down to the wire.

It's the last day and you're still trying to reel in

that really big fish that you know is out there.

MAN: There was something there.

BALLARD: That's got to be it, guys.

Argus bears 266.

You're creating in your mind

a three-dimensional characterization of where you are.

You become Hercules.

There's a bang coming in, 250.

Bears 250, looks like.

I'm generally completely aware of where I am

on the bottom of the ocean, and I'm down there in my mind.

There it is, off to the left.

There we are, folks.

BUXTON: That is a shipwreck.

BALLARD: See what we got.

BUXTON: Everybody who wanted to be woken up

when we got something exciting should be woken up.

MAN: Oh. Winch watch!

NARRATOR: Suddenly, a problem.

BALLARD: We just lost the winch.

NARRATOR: Without the winch,

the vehicles could smash into the bottom.

Worse, there's no way to retrieve them.

MAN: Sheave's 180.

BALLARD: Sheave's 180.

It's counting negatives.

NARRATOR: Before they can even see it,

they're losing the wreck.

MAN: All set, Brennan?

MAN: Yeah.

MAN: Alright, sorry, guys.

Eric and Chris, you should be getting it now.

MAN: Okay, Tom, we're going back down...

BALLARD: It's funny, it was really intense there for a moment.

NARRATOR: With the winch fixed,

the crew quickly gets back to the task at hand.

MAN: Now let's check this out.

This looks like our target, guys.

MAN: Hey, we found it.

BUXTON: My screen's turned off.

MAN: Sweet Argus, you guys.

Good job!

BALLARD: Roll on Argus, please.

Who's there recording video?

BUXTON: We need to get a little closer,

but it looks like it could be a Hellenistic or classical wreck.

BALLARD: Hellenistic.

MAN: Hellenistic is...?

BALLARD: The time of Alexander the Great.

NARRATOR: Alexander the Great lived in the fourth century BCE,

around 2,300 years ago.

This is the first time a wreck from that period

has been found so deep.

BUXTON: Okay, we need to get in close

to one of the ones that's quite well exposed.

Oh, those are very nice.

MAN: Fantastic view there.

BUXTON: Identifying these ceramics is a little bit like wine tasting.

I can tell the difference between a red and a white wine,

maybe a Merlot and a Cabernet.

After that it gets more complex.

Byzantine, Roman, Greek, that's your red or white wine.

The little, subtle differences takes a ceramics expert.

So I'm just giving my triage opinion here.

NARRATOR: But then,

Bridget notices some unusual characteristics on the amphorae.

BUXTON: This is definitely something unusual.

NARRATOR: The style looks Samian,

named after the Greek Island of Samos.

BUXTON: Ships from that era are very rare,

so if this is a classical Samian-type amphora,

this is a very important shipwreck.

NARRATOR: Important, because it would push the age of the wreck

back another 100 years, to the fifth century BCE,

the peak of Greek maritime power.

This ship may once have been filled with fine wine bound for Athens,

when it was home to Socrates and Plato.

BALLARD: It's like Neptune opens a curtain, a veil...

and there it is.

I'm always excited,

but when you find someone that really knows what they're looking at,

and they get excited,

then you know you really did something cool.

[camera shutter clicking]

NARRATOR: Hundreds of pictures are electronically stitched together

into a three-dimensional map of the wreck.

With such a promising find,

Ballard is eager to know exactly how old it is.

But he won't get that answer

until a ceramics expert can analyze the images.

BALLARD: That's the frustrating part.

You can make some educated guesses.

And this one's definitely from the classical period.

But you need to bring in just the right authority

to tell you for sure that you've got it.

NARRATOR: In classical times,

major Greek cities like Athens kept themselves supplied

through a network of trading colonies

all around the eastern Mediterranean

and the Black Sea.

But not all the ships that ferried goods

made it to their destinations.

BALLARD: Sad thing about almost every shipwreck I've ever found,

it's not a question of if someone died or not,

it's how many.

The ships like this would have a reasonably small crew,

five, six people.

But given where we are, far out from land,

more than likely everyone on this ship died.

BUXTON: It was a terrifying risk,

because if your body was lost at sea,

you would never receive a proper burial.

Your spirit would never be at rest.

So they must have been very motivated

to make the kinds of voyages they did.

BALLARD: Getting there, captain?

NARRATOR: With time up in this search area,

Ballard bids farewell to the Nautilus

as it heads for the Black Sea.

BALLARD: Oh, you are going to drop anchor?

When we started this expedition,

we had this idea that the ancient mariners

were brave sailors who risked their lives

out on the open ocean.

The discoveries we've made are telling us that we're right.

Now I want to know exactly how old these ships are

and what they can tell us

about the civilizations they sailed from.

NARRATOR: To unlock the secrets of his discoveries,

Ballard will be heading back to the US.

Back on dry land,

Ballard is still tethered-virtually- to the Nautilus.

The Inner Space Center at the University of Rhode Island

has a control room that exactly duplicates

the one on board the ship.

BALLARD: Alright, young ladies, if I could sneak in here.

So, what have they got?

NARRATOR: From here,

Ballard checks in with the Nautilus crew,

now preparing for operations in the Black Sea.

MAN ON RADIO: I think we'll keep moving up

towards the stern of Nautilus,

and then move up to the base of the wall.

BALLARD: Yep.

What we're doing is introducing

a very different kind of paradigm.

We're running it like the emergency room of a hospital.

We have what are called doctors on call.

MAN ON RADIO: ...to give us a better feeling

for the provenance of this pot.

BALLARD: We make a discovery Sunday morning at 2:00 AM.

It's seen on the command centers aboard these two ships.

And at the same moment, it's seen on a big screen.

So we're standing watches linked to the ships.

So when they see something, we see something.

Then we have to say,

"Well, who do we need to bring into the game?"

And we literally get on the phone and call.

Jamie, we have an archaeologist in Haifa on the line, correct?

MAN: Uh, we do.

BALLARD: And to be on call,

you have to be within 30 minutes of a command center.

And then they actually literally take over the ship.

We take all directions from archaeologists, so take it...

We're waiting for a discovery.

We have no idea what we're going to-

what kind of discovery it's going to be.

So this is all about reacting to the moment a discovery is made.

NARRATOR: As the Nautilus begins its mission in the Black Sea,

Ballard continues his detective work from home.

BALLARD: Okay, 'cause I saw night in the middle

of your nav plot is a circle.

NARRATOR: He's brought in Andrei Opait,

world-renowned expert on ancient ceramics.

BALLARD: Hello! Bonjour! How are you?

ANDREI OPAIT: Nice to meet you, finally.

BALLARD: Finally. I'm really looking forward to showing you what we've found.

I thought I would start with the- what I believe to be

the Byzantine shipwreck.

Now, how can you tell that?

Now that's a little different, or is that the same one?

NARRATOR: So, nothing new from the Byzantine wreck.

BALLARD: Well, now let me show you something that-

in the same area not far away is this shipwreck.

Can you tell me how old this shipwreck is?

Seventh century?

OPAIT: BCE.

BALLARD: Oh, my goodness. So this would be...

This is the oldest ship we've found in the Aegean.

NARRATOR: Ballard's exploration has thrown up a truly significant find.

A wreck initially thought to be

from the time of Alexander the Great

is in fact 300 years older.

And it's in deep water,

meaning that just as Ballard suspected,

these ancient merchants were venturing out across the sea,

not hugging the coast.

But what of its cargo and its port of origin?

BALLARD: So what would it have carried?

Wine, wine.

Red wine?

[laughter]

OPAIT: I like it.

But...

BALLARD: So you're talking about a tremendous volume of wine.

Would they be sending it to a distribution center somewhere,

or would they be going along the coast

sort of selling it off a case at a time?

Okay.

NARRATOR: From the Byzantine world to ancient Greece,

each new discovery sheds more light

on how and where our ancestors traveled.

BALLARD: Push back, push back, push back.

Make discoveries that completely rewrite history.

That is what an explorer wants to do.

NARRATOR; With the satellite connection to his ship,

Ballard can now explore 24/7.

BALLARD: I want to discover as fast as possible.

Because in my lifetime, I will not get the job done.

İt'll take generations.

So I'm trying to accelerate the rate of discovery.

I'm selfish.

I want to see it before I die.

NARRATOR: His system works.

As Ballard sits down to a seafood feast with his kids,

he's alerted to an intriguing discovery 5,000 miles away.

WOMAN: And continue.

MAN: Full wide, please.

MAN: Oh, hold on a second, hold on...

Just go left about a meter and then up a little bit.

Actually, stay where you were,

'cause I thought I saw something strange.

NARRATOR: 30 minutes after getting the call,

Ballard arrives at the Inner Space Center.

BALLARD: Nautilus, this is Inner Space Center,

do you copy, over?

WOMAN: We copy, Bob.

BALLARD: Yeah, can you give us a status report?

NARRATOR: The crew aboard the Nautilus

has made a remarkable discovery.

BALLARD: Wow.

So what have we got?

MAN: Looking at footage from the ancient ship

that we found in the Black Sea, the Eregli E.

BALLARD: So this is what depth?

MAN: This is a little over 100 meters depth.

BALLARD: Looks like there's been trawl damage here.

MAN: Yeah, right through the center there,

you know, all the broken artifacts,

looks like it's definitely been trawled.

NARRATOR: The wreck lies near the Turkish town of Eregli,

part of the ancient Greek trading empire.

MAN: What's all this?

You see that?

WOMAN: Yeah.

MAN: Is that wood on the left?

See the regular spacing of the wood?

WOMAN: Yup, we want to zoom in on all the wood.

MAN: Okay.

BALLARD: But wait, we're 100 meters and we've got wood.

MAN: We have wood.

BALLARD: We shouldn't have wood, right?

NARRATOR: Ballard has been searching here for years

in the hopes of making a find like this.

The deep waters of the Black Sea contain little or no oxygen...

perfect conditions for preserving shipwrecks.

BALLARD: Something's crazy then.

There's nothing, you look at the bottom, you don't see any crabs,

you don't see any boring organisms.

NARRATOR: Usually the oxygen-free layer

begins at 500 feet.

But this wreck lies at just 300.

BALLARD: I mean, we're opening Pandora's box

when we tell the world about this,

because we were assuming you had to have

the deep water technology,

and only a few people have that technology,

but you could dive on this.

MAN: Pretty close.

BALLARD: It means that our chances of finding

really important ancient history just went up dramatically.

The question is who's going to find it?

Treasure hunters or archaeologists?

NARRATOR: For now, at least,

archaeologists have the upper hand.

And what they're finding is blowing them away.

MAN: So that plank here,

look at slots along the edge of it.

That's mortise and tenon joinery.

BALLARD: I mean, look at the, look at the state of preservation.

MAN: Yeah, you can see every notch.

BALLARD: My goodness.

Wow.

NARRATOR: Ancient shipbuilders used mortise and tenon joints

to fasten the hull planks of their vessels.

BALLARD: So what age is this?

MAN: I think we're talking, based on the ceramics,

fifth to fourth century BC.

NARRATOR: At 2,500 years old,

it isn't older than the ship Ballard discovered in the Aegean,

but it's far better preserved.

MAN: Uh-huh, yeah, you're right!

NARRATOR: And, there's more.

MAN: These are signs of sewn triangles,

or triangles that are carved in.

The timbers would have been sewn together.

That's wild!

NARRATOR: It's a technique even older than mortise and tenon,

which also dates back to the ancient Egyptians.

BALLARD: It is incredible.

This is the technique that was developed over 4,000 years ago.

The wooden boats buried next to the Great Pyramid

were sewn together the same way.

I mean, anyone that's into shipbuilding,

they would be really happy to see what I'm looking at.

WOMAN: Alright, that's great, let's back out and continue.

MAN: Full wide, please.

NARRATOR: But the biggest surprise is still to come.

MAN: Oh, wow!

That's a good spot.

MAN: So one of the most amazing things of this wreck,

if you look right there...

BALLARD: Yeah, human bones.

MAN: Yeah, it looks like there's a leg bone here.

And we had an osteologist look at it,

and there may also be a human tooth.

BALLARD: Femur here, and tibia here,

and a molar right there.

Wow.

I mean, even on the Titanic there weren't any bones.

MAN: Right.

BALLARD: I mean, you- human remains go fast.

I've always dreamed about coming to the Black Sea

and finding human remains.

In human remains is the record of who they were,

not what they carried, not how they built their ship,

but who were they?

And these bones should have DNA in them.

You should now be able to know who commanded these ships.

NARRATOR: The Nautilus has found the most well-preserved shipwreck

from this civilization.

The alien deep is at last surrendering

what lies hidden in its depths-

a treasure trove of man's earliest history.

BALLARD: The film began with me wandering

in my backyard in the middle of the night,

with a flashlight,

because the world I live in is a world of eternal darkness.

But now, thanks to modern technologies,

I can turn on the lights and see the deep sea

and the lost chapters of human history waiting for me.

I just want to go back as far as you can go back.

People say, "What's the greatest discovery you've ever made?"

It's the one I'm about to make.

I'm not done yet.

Come on, Ally. Come on, Riley.

Come, come!