On Tuesday, July 13th, workers excavating 30 feet under street level on Lower Manhattan, New York, discovered the remains of a mid to late 18th century wooden ship. The building site is to be the future underground vehicle security center for the proposed World Trade Center.
The 30 foot length of the ancient vessel is the largest archaeological discovery along the lower Manhattan waterfront since 1982, when the remains of another 18th century cargo ship was discovered under 175 Water Street.
The area under excavation between Liberty and Cedar Streets is thought to be the site of an old 18th century land fill. It is thought that the wooden vessel was an abandoned piece of the landfill material. Then as now, Lower Manhattan was undergoing land expansion into the Hudson River. Any convenient detritus and debris, including an unfit ship could be employed as an extension of the river shoreline.
One of the few artifacts recovered from the hull of the ship is this leather shoe, which seemed to fit a right foot.
Archaeologists stand on what appears to be the lower most deck of the excavated vessel.
Standing on a fan like structure, archaeologist have not determined if this is the bow or the stern of the old vessel. Trying to find the excavation site on old city maps, historians have surmised from a 1797 map, that the site could very well be between Lindsey’s Wharf and Lake’s Wharf that projected into the Hudson River. Questions arise why this location would be for a land fill back in the late 18th century, as docking sites were important to the city’s commerce.
Even though the archaeological site is protected, construction work still continues around the excavation. Since construction work could not be interrupted, archaeologists hurried to begin preservation work before the old ship starts to deteriorate upon exposure to air.
Montani semper liberi ! Happy modeling to all and every one of you.
We had a lot of the same thing in the 1970’s when the waterfront was expanded to include much of the current Financial District. As an Architect I had two such projects.
A really normal pattern of development , particularily in the 19th Century, was the use of ships as warehouses in place on the waterfront.
Sometimes the contents turn out to be as interesting as the ship herself.
We had whiskey, chinese porcelain and medicinal opium under this building I designed.
Bondoman- Early San Francisco, during the Gold Rush era, had some of its buildings from abandoned ships that were run ashore after their crews deserted for the gold fields. Its major department store was founded inside the hull of one such ship. I think this department store is the Emporium. I may be wrong.
Montani semper liberi ! Happy modeling to all and every one of you.
Much of present day Market Street in San Francisco was underwater with a long pier. There are maps out there showing the fill process over time. I couldn’t find a link to one quickly. Manhattan Island had a similar history of cove filling to “straighten out” the edges.
From what I’ve read, the vessel was supposed to have been a thirty footer, not really what I would call a “ship”, even Columbus’ la Pinta was a fifty footer. I ask this; Could a thirty foot vessel be called a ship?
The hull of the excavated ship is 32 feet long, because experts believe that is not the complete vessel. It has yet to be determined which end is the bow or stern. Historians and archaeologists who have examined the relic, believed the old ship was deliberately sunk on or about 1810, and used as cribbing to extend the shores of Lower Manhattan. A 100 pound iron anchor was found a few yards from the hull. This anchor, may or may not be from the excavated vessel.
Mr. Norman Brower, a historan and expert on past American marine history, and who works at Mystic, Connecticut, told the assembled archaeologists, that the ship was an ocean going carrier that might have sailed to the Caribbean. He made this assertion after a complete examination of the bottom hull timbers which had tunnels made by warm water marine organisms, such as the torredo worm. The ship might have been part of the Triangle Trade, where vessels departed North American ports for Europe, purchased finished goods there, sailed to Africa, exchanged these goods for African slaves, then sailed to the Caribbean to sell the slaves for sugar, molasses and rum, then back to their home ports in North America.
Future tests for dating the vessel by dendrochronologists, the science of tree ring dating, and close examination of the species of wood used for the ship construction will be issued at a later date. How and if the ship remains will be preserved has yet to be determined.
The 16 acre site where the ship was found, will be a future 1776 foot skyscraper with a multi-million dollar transit hub and performing arts center.
Montani semper liberi ! Happy modeling to all and every one of you.
But all Eighteenth Century ships were smaller. Not many ships of that period could carry a thirty foot “boat”. And, we don’t know its displacement yet. If it had low fineness ratio it could still be large enough displacement for it to be very hard to carry on another ship.
BTW, my favorite ships are Great Lakes bulk carriers. There, even a thousand footer is referred to as a “boat”.
Archaeologists Elizabeth Meade (top) and Molly McDonald take measurments of the exposed hull of the WTC ship. Still no decision has been make as to what efforts will be taken to preserve the remains. Time is not on the side of the archaeologists, as more exposure of the timbers to air will dry out the wood to deterioration. Construction demands will continue, because the ship timbers is seen as an obstruction to work on the new WTC.
Another shoe for a right foot was discovered on the wreck. Since the old vessel was used as cribbing for extension of the Manhattan shoreline, any artifacts of value has long since been removed when the ship was scuttled.
Montani semper liberi ! Happy modeling to all and every one of you.
Interesting stuff, especially if she proved to be of American construction. Wasn;t another ship extracted from the mud under the WTC in the original build? I can’t find reference to it anywhere- was it preserved?
BUZZ : REMAININGS OF THE MAYFLOWER FOUND AT WORLD TRADE CENTER
And if this ship was in fact a part of the Mayflower remainings ( That were never found so far), only 30 foot lenght of the most famous 100 foot long ship of our American History, used as landfill material and ressucitated after the WTC’s attack… The location is certainly a landfill from the 18 century but the analysis of the timbers of this ship might be older…Think about it , what a great topic for a book !!!
Billyboy-- The ship remains that were found at the World Trade Center site after groundbreaking in 1966 was the TYGER, a Dutch merchant ship under the command of Captain Adriaen Block. Captain Block arrived in North America during the summer of 1613.with the intention of exploration and trade. After a brief survey of the Hudson River, trade for pelts and furs with the local Lenape Indians was concluded by the fall 0f 1613.
In November 0f 1613, a fire destroyed most of the TYGER, pieces of which were found when digging the foundation of the World Trade Center. With help from the Lenapes, Captain Block and his crew were able to salvage some parts of the TYGER and construct a small yacht like vessel from January to April 1614. The new ship was named the ONRUST ( Dutch for restless), the first decked vessel built in America.
During the early summer, Captain Block, sailed the East River to Long Island Sound on a voyage of discovery. He became the first European to sail the coastline of present day Connecticut, sighted Block Island and ventured as far as Rhode Island.
On October 1, 1614, Captain Block sighted a Dutch vessel which took him back to Holland, where he died in 1629. The ONRUST was last reported on a voyage of discovery of the Delaware River in 1616.
From 2006 to 2009, the New Netherland Routes built a replica of the ONRUST, using 17th century ship building tecniques which can be seen on the above photo.
Montani semper liberi ! Happy modeling to all and every one of you.
The last time the remains of a ship turned up below the Manhattan waterfront was, I believe, in 1982. I was working at the Mariners’ Museum (in Newport News, Virginia) when news of the “Water Street Wreck” broke.
The remains of that ship went to the Mariners’ Museum. I wasn’t much involved in the project myself; I left in 1983. But I can remember the genesis of it fairly well. The state of New York has pretty stringent laws protecting landmarks and other historic resources. When the crew excavating for the foundation of the building bumped into the shipwreck, the project had to stop for a certain amount of time while the archaeologists did their thing. I don’t remember the specified amount of time, but it wasn’t much - a couple of weeks at the most. Interrupting a construction job in Manhattan is an extremely expensive prospect - to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars per day. (The developer who was financing the new building on Water Street, as I recall, actually was quite reasonable about the whole thing - probably moreso than I would have been if my money was paying for all those idle pile drivers, power shovels, and bulldozers.) The net result was that the archaeologists were able to yank the components of the ship’s bow out of the mud before the time limit expired. The work on the building then proceeded; I guess the rest of the old ship is still down there, buried permanently under the building.
The parts were loaded into a watertight steel dumpster, which was then filled with some sort of preservative (or maybe just fresh water; I don’t remember) and shipped to the museum - which then had to come up with the money to do something about the problem. When I left, in August of '83, the remains were, as I remember, still sitting in the dumpster. But shortly thereafter some grant money came through. Over the next several years a crew of conservators, working under contract in the museum’s basement, treated the individual pieces with preservatives and reassembled them. The last time I went to the museum, which was quite a few years ago, what was left of “The Water Street Ship” was on prominent exhibition.
Fascinating stuff - especially in view of how little (relatively speaking) we know about eighteenth-century merchant shipbuilding.
Professor Tilley, you are correct. The last ship found during Manhattan construction was in 1982. It too was an old vessel that was scuttled to be used as cribbing where dirt fill or any debris is dumpted inside to extend the Manhattan shoreline.
Preservation of wood after it has been emersed in water for long periods, is time consuming and expensive. The enemy of a soddened wood artifact is exposure to air. The wood dries out and crumbles to dust. Just like the MARY ROSE, above, which sank in the Solent in 1545. the wood must be sprayed with a mist to avoid drying.
Salt water is an enemy to wood artifacts. The first step is to remove the salt. The item is soaked in a 5% muriate acid for several weeks, then rinsed with distilled water. Next, the item is soaked or sprayed with polyethylene glycol solution from one to 12 months depending on the size of the item. The glycol forces out any water molecules imbedded in the wood. The item is rinsed to remove any residue, then allowed to dry.
This is why conservationists are loathe to preserve whole wooden ships, due to the time and expense. When not preserved in this process, the result is the fate of the ALVIN CLARK, which was raised from the depths of the Great Lakes and ended up as a land fill when the vessel decayed.
Montani semper liberi ! Happy modeling to all and every of you.
I was mistaken about much of what I said- It was actually the Water Street ship I was thinking of! I remember reading an interesting archealogical report on the ship somewhere, which after a bit of googling I managed to find once again. The Water Street ship seemed to be much better preserved- right up to the head timbers, jeer capstan etc etc. I assume a lot of the vessel was left down there.
It is frustrating that whilst other remains were left in the ground, I cannot seem to find any drawings of what was there- would have helped interpretation of what was left a lot more. I look forward reading the results of more mordern recording techniques for the 2010 discovery!
Preservation of artifacts that have been immersed for a long time in virtually anything (salt water, fresh water, mud, or anything else - including air) presents challenges to the conservation profession, and its response to those challenges is constantly evolving. For a long time conservators figured that polyethylene glycol was a general-purpose solution to just about every problem. In the past few years they’ve reconsidered. Ship remains that were saturated in PEG years ago are demonstrating some new problems. (The worst horror story along those lines that I’ve heard involved the Wasa, but I have the impression that that one turned out to be a false alarm - at least to some extent. The substance that was observed to be leeching out of her hull timbers apparently turned out to be the remains of seventeenth-century tar, rather than decomposing PEG as had been feared.) The preserved shipwreck that’s closest to my own particular bailiwick, the Confederate ironclad ram Neuse, got the PEG treatment several decades ago and isn’t doing so well. The conservators are now advocating a substance that has borax and distilled water in it instead.
Whether that treatment will actually replace PEG universally I have no idea. (I don’t have formal training in this subject; my colleague and friend Professor Brad Rodgers does, but as soon as he starts talking about it he lapses into a foreign language, Conservatorspeak, in which I am not conversant.)
I haven’t seen the Water Street shipwreck (aka the Ronson Ship) in a good many years; I can’t comment on how it’s holding up. I suspect the current generation of conservators is having reservations about what the last generation did to it. That’s what conservators do. They spend a large percentage of their time undoing the damage done by earlier conservators - and an equally large percentage arguing about what to do next. The good news is that, over the long haul, the art of conservation unquestionably has improved. We are now able to study and enjoy artifacts and works of art that, without those good people, would be unavailable to us.
I visited the Wasa in 1979 and to say that the scene inside it’s shed was nightmarish would be to put it mildly. There was what amounted to a building sprinkler system dousing it in chemicals. We dressed up like Grand Banks fishermen and looked down on her from catwalks. Very impressive ship of course.
Our ship delayed our project a few days. One flaw in the system was that the archeologist was a consultant to us, who were of course on the Owner’s dime. My directive was to give every outward sign of cooperation regarding the find, it’s cataloging, and removal, while the Owner worked at City Hall to get approval to proceed.
Imagine in the 1970’s when interest rates were % 10- %15, what the payments daily on a $ 250,000,000.00 construction loan would be?
There is always the debate whether a discovered bottom ship wreck is worth the effort and expense to save for study. This debate is in progress when the Swedish engineering company, Nord Stream, in conjunction with the Russian energy giant, Gazpron, are building, a 763 mile long and 375 feet wide under sea pathway for a natural gas pipeline from Russia to Germany.
Nord Stream salvage crews have identified 70 bottom ship wrecks from the Viking era to modern times. 20 of these wrecks were sunk at the enterance of the Bay of Greifswold during the Great Northern War ( 1700-1721) between Russia and Sweden.
The most important of these 70 wrecks, was the discovery of a 14th century cog of the Hansiatic League, an economic monopoly of trading cities on the Baltic Coast. Just like the excavated cog now on display at the Deutsches Schiffahrtsmuseum in Germany (above), the cog is considered important because it is a transition vessel that replaced the Norse knarr, the main trading vessel of the Viking era. The main feature of this replacement, is the starboard steering oar to a true rudder on the stern center of the ship. The cog has the first identifiable deck for cargo storage, rather than the open deck of the knarr. The cog was the first to have a stern castle to shelter the helmsman. Archaeological evidence suggests the cog originated in Jutland on the Danish Coast.
The cog, in turn transformed into the carrack, the type of ships in which the Spanish and Portuguese explored the 15th and 16th century world.
Montani semper liberi ! Happy modeling to all and every one of you.
I like this thread - such an unusual subject! If it wasn’t for the archeologists, the wooden ship builders wouldn’t have almost any reference material![;)] Anthony, keep your writing up, have a nice day
