Master Bullitt, Marlboro Country Man: He Searches for New Fields to Explore

A mile off Taranto, a fishing village on the instep of the Italian boot, the water was opalescent last July, as it always is when the Mediterranean sunlight hits the white bottom ooze and is reflected and refracted up to the surface. Thirty feet down, John M. Bullitt '43, professor of English, Master of Quincy House, sometime archeologist, onetime boxer and parachutist, and would-be aviator, was scuba diving.

His face was shielded by a mask; he wore a quarter-inch-thick black neoprene wet suit and two air tanks. Face down, he moved along, propelled by his boxer's legs. On the bottom were remains of three ships which sank there sometime during the fourth century. The ships' cargo, thirty stone coffins, was scattered around the site.

Local fisherman had told Bullitt's party of a line of clay fragments which stretched from the shore out into the sea. They followed it out to the wrecks, where they had spent a week testing new techniques in under-water archeology.

At that moment last July, Bullitt was so absorbed in his underwater survey that if someone had tapped him on the back, he probably wouldn't have looked up. He is like that--always immersed in what he is doing, and always dividing and redividing his time so that he can do things. He is the kind of man would like to taste every dish on every menu in the world; the kind of man who is so indefatigably curious that he would almost stop people on the MBTA to ask them what they had done that morning and what they were planning for the afternoon. Walking up to a card catalogue must be torture for him.

The wreck site ten feet below him had been carefully staked out to test a new method of underwater mapping, photogrammetry. A series of photos was taken of the area, using carefully positioned stakes as reference points. The pictures were then placed together to form a composite map.

There was some ship's planking on the bottom, and Bullitt must have smiled as he scudded down to pick up a piece. He has a contagious smile that starts at his lips and then conquers his entire face, smoothing lines and erasing half of his 44 years. It is a solid smile, like the solid stuff he likes. Bullitt always wants to get the measure of things, to put a ruler to them and look at them under a magnifying glass. Perhaps this is why he doesn't like abstract art, where such measurements don't have meaning, while he is fascinated by marine archeology, where they do.

Characteristically Spartan

Characteristically, his office in Quincy House is spartanly furnished: there are a few modern chairs and a grey metal desk, strewn with pamphlets on archeology and a tattered copy of Webster's. A framed map of Harvard is on the wall behind him.

There was something of that starkness in the two-foot-long pieces of lumber on the ocean bottom. The planking had been preserved under the mud--toredo worms eat any un-protected organic material--and uncovered with an air lift, a sort of under-water vacuum cleaner. The planks were well turned-out, and some were joined in a V with wood dowels.

Bullitt, still surveying the clay fragments and wood, saw something that looked round, and, well, complete. He scooped it up and headed for the surface.

His discovery was a small ceramic oil lamp, brown and contoured so that it fit his hand. It looked like a teapot without a cover and with the spout fashioned to hold a wick. Two jagged lines on the outside marked the places where a handle, the most fragile part of a ceramic piece, had been fastened. By studying the shapes of the lamp and comparing it with another lamp taken from a local tomb, archeologists were able to date the wreck--at about 300 A.D.

Bullitt smiles when he talks about that lamp. When he does anything, whether it is studying eighteenth century literature or spending hours aloft in a rented Cessna 150 working for a pilot's license, or playing a weekly game of tennis with John H. Finley '25, Master of Eliot House, he does it whole-hog, with an eye to getting good results.

He loves to discover things--anything; he collects new skills the way some people collect matchbook covers. He is the Ballantine Ale Man, a man whose smile is an expression of self-content and yet an acknowledgement of just how much there is left to do. He is the Man from the Marlboro Country--in black loafers instead of boots and straddling a seat in Widener, not a pinto on the lone prairie.

Next year Bullitt sets forth from his Widener cubicle for a one-year stint with the Peace Corps. In June, he leaves for Washington to polish up his newly-acquired Spanish--he is taking Spanish Bab and working at it--and to learn about Latin American culture. That done, he will leave for a South American country, probably Peru, to become Peace Corps Deputy Representative there. In that position, he will be helping volunteers get settled and happy in their work. But, for all its forms and tests, the Peace Corps is pretty much a catch as catch can affair, and Bullitt isn't sure exactly what he will be doing.

His experience as House Master will help him with the administrative work, and the volunteers are about the same age as the tutors in Quincy House. But whatever happens, Bullitt will be looking for new things to discover--and there is, after all, that fabulous lost Inca treasure.