Graham Nickerson suffers a wicked sword blow to the neck from a pint-sized warrior. With a mighty roar, the swordsman strikes again. This time, Graham manages to raise his arm against attacker.

Alas, his arm is hacked off at the shoulder. Sitting right there at the kitchen table in front of a laptop full of photos from the Mediterranean, he dies a melodramatic death. The warrior is Graham’s four-year-old son, Bailey. The sword is a cardboard tube that once held Christmas wrapping paper. Satisfied, Bailey sheaths his sword… for now.

Graham is the founder and president of a small ocean mapping company called Highland Geo Solutions that uses high tech survey equipment and custom designed software. He’s home from a six-week trip to Japan to catch some much-needed down time.

When he’s not working in the field, Graham can be found at his home office or his living room in Taymouth, New Brunswick, Canada. From there, he finds work, manages projects and plans upcoming trips. More importantly, he does this while spending time with his family.

As he plays dead from the sword blow, Sandra – his Dutch-born wife and business partner – feeds Rhys, Bailey’s baby brother at the far end of the table.

“We’re part of world history.” That’s how Graham sees his involvement in his favourite project, the excavation of ancient shipwreck sites in the Mediterranean. In the summer of 2008, Graham’s company and its partner, RPM Nautical Foundation of Key West, Florida, found a 2250-year-old bronze ram from a Roman-age warship off the coast of Italy near the Egadi Islands. In 2007, they recovered a 2400-year-old Greek amphora or ceramic storage jar off Albania.

Graham employs about a dozen geologists, engineers, surveyors and software experts. He and his crew work on-site at 21 projects in 13 countries: mapping debris after Hurricane Katrina, river channel mapping in the United States to recover chemical contaminants, oil and gas exploration off the Angolan coast, undersea mapping for cable routes in the shadow of Japanese volcanoes.

Of his young company, he says it’s about as challenging to manage as his two young boys. Last year, Graham found himself awake at night, wondering if his company and his family could survive the economic downturn. Within weeks of that low, Graham was working til midnight, sorting out his visa for the latest project in Indonesia, buying airlines tickets and wistfully remembering the down time.

“It’s like having a small baby and wondering if you’ll ever sleep again. Then they grow up and don’t need you as much and you miss it.”

Of the Mediterranean projects, Graham says, “Unlike most of our commercial work, we know we’re contributing to humankind in a tangible way that adds to our understanding of the past.”

Ancient naval rams, forged from bronze and weighing from eight to twenty tons, were common in Greek and Roman battles at sea. Built as underwater extensions to the bow of the ship, they could measure up to twelve feet. Propelled by sail power and then by oarsmen, these beaks could smash holes into the sides of enemy ships. This particular ram is thought to be from the First Punic War of 241 BC, the first of three wars for the supremacy of the western Mediterranean between Carthage and the Roman Republic.

“We know this battle shaped world history,” Graham explains. “By finding and studying this artifact, we are contributing to the story.”

Graham and Highland Geo Solutions made several important contributions to the ram recovery project. Nickerson’s team linked the RPM ship’s navigation system to the surveying equipment so it controlled the direction of the ship’s travel.

“The result is much cleaner data and shorter acquisition times,” Graham explains. They also improved the operation of the remotely operated vehicle or unmanned submarine to make it easier to locate and retrieve targets.

As for the Greek amphora discovered the previous season, RPM mission leader George Robb characterized the find this way in a Boston Globe article: “You’re touching something that was made before Plato was born.” It’s now resting in a saltwater bath at the Durres Museum on the Adriatic coast. Albanian authorities hope to see numerous benefits from such discoveries, including a boost to archaeological research, increases in tourism, protection of precious archaeological sites from looters and perhaps an underwater museum.

More than his work, Graham’s lineage makes him part of world history. He’s a descendant of the Black Loyalists who fled New England in the late 1700s to Shelburne, Nova Scotia where he grew up.

While most of the original settlers returned to Sierra Leone in Africa, some stayed behind, making a life for themselves as best they could.

Graham is keenly aware of his Black Loyalist roots, right from the first winter his ancestors spent in holes they dug in the ground for shelter through a history of systemic racism to efforts today to commemorate such early struggles. In fact, Graham has just volunteered his services to scan the grounds around the original settlement area for more dug shelters.

On a personal level, Graham is also keenly aware that the mixed race family into which he was born had little chance of holding together. The source of Graham’s fierce determination to succeed both as a father with his own mixed race family and as a geologist may well be rooted so deeply in a personal history, shaped even today by centuries-old historical events, he cannot possibly fail.

Suddenly, our conversation is interrupted. Bailey, our modern day warrior, has discovered a break in his sword. When there are warriors afoot and babies to be fed, business can wait. I browse the photos. Mixed with the shots from the Mediterranean work sites are shots from a recent business/family trip to England.

One of the pics shows Bailey and Graham in the mouth of an enormous dinosaur. HGO was there to process data for a hydrographical survey off the English coast. The family took a day off to visit the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. Sandra offers to cut Bailey’s broken sword in half with the scissors and make it into two daggers. This pleases Bailey to no end. Newly armed with weapons in both hands, he mounts an all out attack on his father who doesn’t stand a chance. This meeting is over.

Sources

1. Interview with Graham Nickerson
2. www.highlandgeo.com
3. www.rpmnautical.org
4. Semini, Llazar. “Searching for Underwater Treasurers: Ancient Wrecks Being Hunted in Once Forbidden Sea Off Albania,” for the Associated Press. http://www.owensoundsuntimes.com/ArticleDisplay.aspx?e=1410051
5. Semini, Llazar. “Searchers Find Remnants of 2400 –year-old Shipwreck Off Albania,” The Boston Globe, September 27, 2007. http://www.boston.com/news/world/europe/articles/2007/09/23/searchers_find_remnants_of_2400_year_old_shipwreck_off_albania/

Photo Credits

“RPM’s Remote Operated Vehicle carefully retrieves a 2400-year-old Greek amphora off the coast of Albania” 2008 © Howard Phoenix, RPM Nautical Foundation (permission granted for use.)

“RPM’s Remote Operated Vehicle prepares to retrieve a 2250-year-old bronze nautical ram”

“Graham Nickerson examines ocean mapping data”© Graham Nickerson

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