Back in the Big Easy

It’s great to be home after more than a month on Cape Cod teaching, writing, researching and visiting friends and family. (Good luck S-241! I’ll be following your blog–fair winds and following seas.) There’s a mountain of new shipwreck fodder in my inbox waiting to get posted, and I’m almost through a fantastic new shipwreck book. Look for the review later this week.

This weekend I actually dove on a wreck–well, more properly a derelict–long abandoned in scenic Greenwich Bay, Rhode Island. I’ve spent a lot of time there over the years working moorings and such with my old man, and it was a treat to spend a few days on the water with him. We inspected and repaired a bunch of moorings; used mooring barge 2.0; and moved a old wooden derelict out of the way (yes, the harbormaster knows). Cameras don’t fare too well on mooring boats, so I pulled the pic above from the archives. It’s the best time of the year to be on the water–drizzly New England spring mornings on a verdant bay devoid of boats. What could be better?

I already miss the salt air but a night out in the Big Easy will cure that. Today, however, it’s back to that dissertation. The clock is ticking…

Forgotten wrecks: Schooner Pomona (1878)

This series of posts is fast becoming my favorite. Pick a random date, salvage a wreck from the records.

The following blurb appeared in the “Maritime Miscellany” column of the New York Herald on May 5, 1878. It tells a captivating story. It was also one of six wrecks reported in that day’s Herald. And while this wreck left a man destitute and a once sound schooner dashed to pieces, the Pomona was just another shipwreck on the American coast.

SCHR POMONA, [Captain] Chute, from Boston for Bay River, NS [Nova Scotia], before reported wrecked on Bult Cove Ledge, Ragged Island, Me, was a vessel of 98 tons, and she had on board a freight consisting of 90 bbls [barrels] flour and a small quantity of dry goods and hardware. The wind was blowing fresh, there was a think fog and a the night was dark. The crew all succeeded in making their escape safely to the shore. Capt Chute says, at 7:30 o’clock AM, there was not a piece of the wreck left large enough to float a man. There was no insurance on the vessel, and Capt. Chute loses everything he had by the disaster.

Today’s “forgotten wreck” was picked by Ships on the Shore devotee Marianne Wells-thanks!

Wanted: Cannon-toting Shipwreck Archaeologists

Now this was a project to get on! Archaeologists working off the Israeli city of Akko (Acre to the Victorians) found a 12′ by 75′ remnant of an Egyptian vessel connected to a historic 1840 battle. They also located, among other items, 11 cannonballs, several lead bullets and six muskets. Someone apparently got the experimental  itch. According to this article:

The sides of the ship were made of solid oak about 6.7 inches thick, raising the question of what protection they offered against cannon fire. To find out, researchers created a scale model to shoot at, assuming that a roughly 12-pound cannonball found in the shipwreck site was a typical projectile.

They found that a 12-pounder cannonball would have easily penetrated the side of the original ship, causing much internal damage. Their experiments also showed in gunners truly wanted to be nasty, they made sure cannonballs traveled slower — that increased the number and size of splinters generated, potentially inflicting more casualties.

Sounds like a good time. Unfortunately, a quick search didn’t reveal any youTube videos, but I’ll keep my eye open.

You can read their full report here at the Journal of Archaeological Science.

The Shipwreck: A Comic Opera (ca. 1800)

Americans have always loved a good shipwreck story. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, shipwreck narratives inundated the new nation. By 1806, nearly 200 book-length shipwreck narratives were available to the American public, including the first American edition of Archibald Duncan’s seminal anthology, The Mariner’s Chronicle. Some of my favorite turn-of-the-century shipwreck stories were told on the stage. The Shipwreck: A Comic Opera, arguably the most popular shipwreck-themed play of the time, first appeared in London in December 1796. The Shipwreck became an instant hit, crossing the Atlantic within a year. It was routinely performed as an aperitif to longer five-act plays performed on American stages between Boston and Charleston.

The opening is worth quoting at length:

CHORUS

Sturdily the tempest howling,

Calls us forth to watch our prey,

Thus upon the rocks we lay,

Through the storm so cautious prowling.

[thunder and lightning]

Mary, by the lightening’s glare, while thunders roar,

The foaming surges break, that lash the shore;

There we steal with cautious care,

And the booty freely share,

While round our heads the storm does blow,

And shipwreck’d sailors to the bottom go.

[distant thunder]

[During the chorus a ship appears tossing on the sea, and is wrecked--the plunderers, smugglers, &c. then leave the rocks, and crowd down to the shore, watching the waves, and taking up goods, &c. that are supposed to be thrown ashore from the wreck.]

Think that’s good? It only gets better. There’s cross-dressing maidens, nefarious wreckers, drunken parsons, loose women and chaste maidens. It ends, as all things should, with multiple marriages and a finale for the ages. Any troupes out there interested in staging this shipwreck classic?

Recent Shipwreck News

Truth be told, I’ve been pretty distracted the past couple of weeks. But ships continue to wreck and shipwrecks continue to inundate our daily lives. So here’s some of the shipwreck material that’s been piling up in my inbox.

The Huffington Post ran an article about the possibilities and problems facing the approximately 10,000 wrecks scattered around Indonesia. The age-old debate over salvage rights and cultural heritage is playing as the Indonesian government “wrangles over a new policy on underwater heritage.” The archipelago is one of the world’s great wreck traps and the nation allows for-profit excavations, to the pleasure of treasure hunters and the horror of historians and archaeologists. I for one hope the government begins to treat shipwrecks as the finite cultural resources they are rather than just “another resource to exploit.” It’s a fascinating article and well worth a read.

On a lighter note, it appears Alexandra Roach, a “rising Welsh star,” will be playing a shipwreck survivor washed ashore near a small English town in the new historical series Hunderby.