I check the technical information recorded by the head of the wreck's excavation team and e-mail him with questions, hoping to match the archival information and the ship. I visit other specialized libraries in France and elsewhere. I meet with historians and coin dealers. I interview experts on ships, Armenia, and Indian art. I go to museums and look for identified objects that resemble my sketches and photographs of the artifacts.
Months go by.
Gradually I gather bits of information, pieces of the puzzle. The carvings, I find, are from southern India, from a temple dedicated to the god Shiva. They date from the 1500s. The man named on the Armenian gravestone had been a prosperous textile merchant in Madras, India. He died not far away, in Pondicherry, the center of French operations in southern India in the 1700s.