Tracy Bowden

Abington High School

Class of 1957

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Tracy Bowden - Class of 1957 - Abington High School

First Name	Tracy
Last Name	Bowden
Graduation Year	Class of 1957
Gender	Male
Current Location	Ga
About Me	In the later 1960s, Bowden's first underwater excavation project was HMS DeBraak (1798) in Lewis, Delaware. Al Schall, Charlie Knopf, and Steve Durst were associates in the HMS DeBraak venture. Next came two projects in Puerto Rico: a Spanish galleon from the Bobadilla Fleet (1502) and an eighteenth-century Spanish galleon. All the while, Bowden kept a keen eye on the Dominican Republic, with its prolific Colonial Period shipwreck history. In 1976, after a year of intense negotiations, Bowden was granted the first-ever-issued underwater historical exploration and recovery contract with the government of the Dominican Republic. Hispaniola, the first European settlement in the New World, today known as the Dominican Republic, was founded by Christopher Columbus on his maiden "Voyage of Discovery" in 1492. Bowden's Dominican Republic excavations include the Spanish galleons Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe and El Conde (Count) de Tolosa (1724), featured in the December 1979 National Geographic magazine article "The Graveyard of the Quicksilver Galleons," and the seventy-four-gun French warship Scipion (1782), a participant in the naval blockade of Chesapeake Bay, which repelled the British fleet sent by England's King George III. Historians say this blockade was the pivotal point in the fight for American Independence. The Spanish galleon Nuestra Senora de la Pura Y Limpia Concepcion (1641) was featured in the July 1996 National Geographic magazine article "Gleaning Treasure from the Silver Bank", authored by Tracy Bowden. The Concepcion wreck site is 80 miles offshore. The French warships include the 74-gun Diomedes and the 130-gun Imperial (1806), which were sunk by the British fleet during the Napoleonic Wars. Captain Joseph Bannister's pirate ship, the Golden Fleece, sunk in a scathing battle with the British warships HMS Falcon and HMS Drake in 1686. His excavations also include other-lesser known Colonial Period shipwrecks. For one year, the National Geographic Society exhibited the artifacts of the "Quicksilver Galleons" in their Explorer's Hall in Washington, DC before they were taken on a twelve-city US national tour by the Smithsonian Institution. The artifacts were also on display in Barcelona and Madrid, Spain, and in other countries. The shipwreck recoveries were featured on CBS, ABC, and German National TV, among other international and national exhibits, periodicals, and films. ABC's 1980 film Mysteries of the Sea, narrated by William Holden, won the Emmy award for the best documentary. In a segment of the film, the Conde de Tolosa excavation represented what man has recovered from the sea. Bowden states, "Through the years, I have accumulated twenty thousand hours diving in the sea with high adventure, but being a student at Abington,with many g...(read more)