Destinations: Sailing the Wine-dark Seas

There is a land called Crete …

ringed by the wine-dark sea with rolling whitecaps—

handsome country, fertile, thronged with people

well past counting—boasting ninety cities,

language mixing with language side-by-side …

Central to all their cities is magnificent Cnossos,

the site where Minos ruled and each ninth year

Conferred with almighty Zeus himself.

(Homer, Odyssey 19.195–204)

May 3rd

At JFK we spotted David Reese and his wife, Catherine (Cap) Sease, the scholars who were to lead our trip. My husband, Dick, and I had signed on a Circumnavigation of Crete tour sponsored by the Archaeological Institute of America. We would sail aboard a small ship, the Callisto, stopping at ports around the island. A bus would then take us to sites not accessible by boat.

David and Cap have worked together at Kommos, in southern Crete, and separately at many other sites around the Middle East. David is an anthropologist-zoologist who specializes in the analysis of bones and shells; he lectures on the kinds of information to be found in the detritus of human occupation—in the dregs of pots and in human and animal remains. Cap is an archaeological conservator, who would tell us how digs are run and finds preserved.