Tusker waved to Raj. “Go home! We can finish up here!” Upali nodded and repeated it in Sinhala. Raj looked at both of them, then pressed his palms together, gathered up his sarong, and headed off down the roadside into the gathering dusk. He had three bus connections to make before he’d be home to his wife and two sons, up in the hills behind Galle town, at least an hour’s commute.

Tusker switched the compressor manifold to two more tanks and settled onto a flimsy folding chair. He pulled two warm Lion lagers out of the cooler and passed one to Upali. They both sat, not talking over the din of the compressor, and watched the evening traffic pass by.

Tusker thought about the artifacts they’d pulled out of the sea bed and dragged the water-filled bucket close to him. He fumbled for the camping headlamp he kept in his backpack and switched it on. He pulled the largest object, a curved piece of dark wood that had a small rusted metal hasp on one end, carefully out of the saltwater bath. It looked to be a piece of a larger ring and was quite heavy.

“What do you reckon?” he said to Upali. “Sail hoop?”

The object reminded him of the hoops used to raise canvas sails on the masts of tall ships. Tusker had seen plenty of them, still intact, on the schooner wrecks of Lakes Huron and Michigan. He knew he shouldn’t fiddle too much before sending these to the lab for proper preservation and analysis, but he couldn’t resist a closer look.

“Don’t mess with it too much, machang,” Upali said, knowing that Tusker, while a skilled archaeologist, was also impatient. “We can get it cleaned up in the lab when I’m back in Colombo.”

“A little cleaning won’t hurt,” Tusker said, grinning. He examined the hoop more closely in the white light of his headlamp. He was convinced it was a piece of sail hoop now, but how old? It was hard to tell. The level of degradation on this one, even in the salty, polluted harbor, made it seem much older than that. On the reinforcement near the hasp he thought he could make out a pattern beneath the rust.

Tusker pulled a folding knife from his soggy cargo short pocket and flicked it open. He lightly scraped the rust away and re-aimed his headlamp’s white beam. Was that…?

“Yup, crow’s foot!” Tusker exclaimed. The marking on the metal hasp was a pheon, the so-called crow’s foot or king’s mark, indicating Crown property. The symbol had been engraved or painted on everything from fasteners and cannonballs to rifles and watch dials since the 1300s.

“This is British Royal Navy all right,” he said and handed it to Upali, who studied it.