We don't know what's more delightful, that a shipwrecked 19th century Maine clipper is making one of its periodic reappearances from the sand in which it's been interred along the San Francisco coast for more than a century, or that the incident has allowed a maritime archaeologist who's studying the wreck to engage in the most wonderful flights of 19th century-sounding language.

"She could have sunk deep or she could have been burned," said James Delgado, executive director of the Institute of Nautical Archaeology, sounding either like a good scholar, or folk singer Gordon Lightfoot. "But because ... she buried herself, we have an exciting and tangible reminder of ships long past and the days of wooden sail."

Do people really talk this way? If they spend their days romancing the 19th century, we guess.

Continues Delgado: "We have a well-preserved example of naval architecture at a time when Maine led the nation in shipbuilding and ships like this waved the American flag all over the seven seas."

Well, avast, me hearties!

We'll wave that flag all over the seven seas, too, if we get a job as a nautical archaeologist!

We could get paid -- in doubloons and rum, we're sure -- to spend our time on www.talklikeapirate.com, where we'd meet up with fellow wenches, scallywags, rogues and rascals and also, should we be a wee bit interested, learn to talk like a pirate in Swedish!

When you get a Ph.D. in nautical archaeology, life sounds like it's full of weighing anchor and shots of grog and sending the bilge rats down to the bunghole to get some hardtack. Arrrrr!

And in the meantime, while we're engaging in our own flights of piratical fancy, the timbers of the sad and sorry ship, the King Philip, continue to emerge from their sandy grave. Once high-born when launched out of Alna, but fallen on hard times and carrying bird manure when it foundered off San Francisco's Ocean Beach, the ship is now a waterlogged ghost. She reminds us of a more colorful time when pines were felled in Maine to serve as masts on ships that sailed across the oceans, when holds carried fortunes, sailors mutinied and vessels were scuttled. And if the King Philip's timbers, now exposed to the cold Pacific wind, are shivering -- well then, so are ours.