Van Tilburg | Northwestern | Captain | maritime heritage coordinator

In addition to housing the predators, coral, and sea turtles, the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands also hold important pieces­ of world history. Historical records make it clear that there may be as many as 60 shipwrecks in the area, along with at least 67 planes - many of them Japanese and American fighters from World War II. "The way the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands stretch themselves across the ocean and the fact that they're [packed with] low reefs and coral atolls with no navigational aids - they're incredibly treacherous. They're like a net, a comb lying across the Pacific. These places are shipwreck magnets," says Hans van ­Tilburg, PhD, maritime heritage coordinator for the NOAA National Marine Sanctuaries Program. "You wouldn't even know it on a dark night. You would be sailing way out in the middle of the Pacific and would run into the reefs all of a sudden. There's no land, no mountains to see ahead of time. We know that there's a lot more stuff out there than even the records reflect."

While the islands' remote location has offered some protection against fishing, it has also helped save the shipwrecks from looters - a problem in other parts of the world. Van Tilburg made one of his favorite finds so far in 2003 at Kure Atoll, the very end of the 1,300-mile island chain. There, he and his team discovered the remains of the USS Saginaw, a Civil War-era ship that crashed into a reef in 1870. After picking up divers who were attempting to clear a channel into Midway Atoll, the Saginaw was sailing home when the captain decided to see if there were any castaways stuck on Kure Atoll - "a pretty responsible thing for the captain to do," says Van Tilburg.