This year MSDS Marine have been able to host three internships thanks to funding from Historic England as part of our Landlocked and Looking Out project. The internships offered early career professionals and students the opportunity to gain valuable experience in the heritage sector – and the best bit is they were paid! In this blog Jack Doyle, reflects on his experiences with MSDS Marine this summer.
This summer since graduating university I’ve probably been in one of the strangest situations in my life so far, for the first time being without a sense of direction about what came next. When I got that email with my internship offer from MSDS Marine I can’t tell you how excited I was. For me maritime archaeology was mostly a new horizon. I was born and raised in Bristol so I grew up learning about our local maritime history. I learned bits and pieces at university and then I learned a lot as I read about marine archaeology to get ready for the internship. I definitely wasn’t even close to imagining just how expansive and exciting maritime archaeology is until I started this internship though, and this internship has been a massive learning curve for me.
Over the course of this internship I’ve seen how much what’s in the sea and under it can contribute to our understanding of the past as much as what’s on the land. I’ve met a small sample size of what’s a vast variety of people who take part in marine archaeology and I’ve come to understand just how important shipwrecks and protected wrecks can be to our understanding of the past. I’ve learned a whole new side of archaeology and history than what I’ve done before and I’m so excited to see what more I can learn in the future now that this door’s been opened.
This internship has helped me learn and develop social skills and communications skills as we’ve been talking to massive numbers of people over the course of our events. The nature of the project being based around public outreach has forced me to leave my comfort zone frequently and doing this campaign I’ve realised just how fun public outreach projects are and how vital they are to creating national interest in our history. I think doing a virtual reality dive on a shipwreck or getting to touch a 300 year old silver coin, like people have been able to do at our events, is pretty effective at generating this interest, but it’s been extremely fulfilling seeing people excited when I talk to them about maritime history. This project has definitely made me feel more comfortable in myself and that even someone like me, who gets anxious in social situations, can do this kind of people-orientated, outreach work.
Even though I’m a Bristol boy through and through I do have a pretty long line of family through my dad that have lived in or around Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire for generations, giving me a personal connection to this project. During the project we went to Calke Abbey, where my grandma used to volunteer and Sherwood Forest, where her dad trained as part of the army reserves. This has been my extra bit of motivation to do justice by the locals. Time and again over this project as I’ve talked with people from Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire we have talked about what kind of links two counties without any coastline have to maritime history, which at times has been quite joking because it seems like the landlocked counties and maritime history don’t belong in the same conversation.
Jokes aside though this is a problem. We need to show people why marine archaeology and maritime history should matter to them. Just because you don’t live near a coast doesn’t mean marine archaeology can’t impact you or interest you and, anyway, Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire have a whole host of maritime links which we know about and still can learn about. As we’ve tried to show it hasn’t mattered to people in the past if they were born away from the sea as to whether they felt the call of it. If you’re interested in what the sea has to offer it’s waiting for you and in a country like the UK which has always been so linked to the sea there’s all manner of ways people have been involved in maritime history.
I’ve definitely felt that call as I’ve been doing this internship and I feel extremely privileged that I was given this opportunity having started from the base idea that ‘I like archaeology and I like being by the coast, so how do I put those two together?’. I hope I’ve been able to repay the faith that was put in me to help make this project a success. I loved getting to make a video about the project (you can watch this below) and I’ve loved getting to share my newfound passion for marine archaeology with so many people. This project helped me realise just how deeply I love archaeology and how much I want archaeology to be my future, as well as how central people are to why I love it.
There’s something so inherently exciting about the idea of going to sea and exploring it and I hope we’ve been able to get even just a few people as excited about marine archaeology as we are. Protected wrecks are so important to marine archaeology because they fuel that desire to explore, to discover and to discuss. They need to be protected and after 50 years of the Protection of Wrecks Act there’s still so many wrecks to find and protect. We need a variety of people involved in the discussion around these wrecks because archaeology is about people in every sense and the greater variety of voices involved in discussions around the past, the more interesting, diverse and fun that discussion becomes. My hope then is that marine archaeology has a few more people from Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire inspired to get involved and how that inspiration might bring them to one of these wrecks at some point not too soon.
