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Not on an Even Keel- HMS Fowey
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Transcript
Karen: Good afternoon everyone, and welcome to the NPS Archeology Program Speaker Series for 2015/2016. My name is Karen Mudar and I'm an archeologist in the Washington Archeology Program office. We're finishing the portion of the speaker series devoted to research by NPS archeologists or our National Park units and we'll soon start the part of the series devoted to maritime archeology. Last week we heard two wonderful presentations about archeological research at Wind Cave National Park and at Montezuma Castle National Monument. Anne Vawser gave updates on work carried out at a site at Wind Cave. Two seasons of work at the site have resulted in the discovery of drivelines, rock cairns processing areas, stone tools.
Sorry, stone circles, ceremonial features and habitation areas that are all related to bison exploitation dating from the more recent past to 4,000 years ago. I was really impressed with the way that she was able to tie the site into a more regional landscape and she illustrated her points with some wonderful flyovers of the area. It was most cool. If you weren't able to attend, check out the recording. Our second speaker, Matt Guebard, presented analysis of archeological work at the Castle A site located within Montezuma Castle National Monument. His re-analysis of the ceramic data, coupled with archeomagnetic dating concluded that a large and intentional fire destroyed the community during the last quarter of the 14th century while the site was inhabited, contrary to the standard interpretation that had stood up until that time.
Furthermore, information shared during consultations with Hopi and Apache tribes corroborated his conclusions. Although details varied, a land dispute escalated into conflict that involved a fire, according to oral history. This is another good example of the richness and complexity that oral history can add to archeological data and also demonstrates why it's important to keep and curate museum collections. We are constantly learning new techniques and new methodologies that we can apply to our old data. On November 5th we'll hear a presentation by Jim Dixon, who is Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico.
He has extensive experience in North American archeology, particularly focusing on the human colonization, high-altitude and high-latitude human adaptations and early cultural development of the Americas. He's written several important books on Arctic prehistory. His talk, From Asia to the Americas: Late Ice Age Colonization Corridors, examines recent research on the peopling of the New World. The traditional theory postulates human migration across the Bering land bridge by about 16,000 years ago, and then southward through a late Ice Age deglaciation corridor in central western Canada. His current research, however, strongly supports an alternate maritime route along the southern coast of the Bering land bridge and Gulf of Alaska, and then southward along the Northwest coast.
Resolving these alternative hypotheses, of course, has implications for better understanding of the development of specific cultural groups as well as better comprehension of the parameters influencing colonization formation. Mark your calendar and join us for what is sure to be a very interesting talk. The presentations this week are a nice segue into this year's webcast theme, being a maritime park project. Joshua Marano and David Gadsby are going to talk about investigations in management of the HMS Fowey, an 18th century British ship whose remains are located in present day Biscayne National Park. Josh is an archeologist at Biscayne, and David is an archeologist in the National Park Service Archeology Program Washington office.
They're going to give, actually, three talks today that were part of a session that was presented at the Society for Historical Archaeology 2015 Conference in Seattle. We're very glad to have them organize this and present it again. On June 27th, 1748, the Fowey, a frigate, struck a coral reef and sank near present day Miami, Florida. The wreck remained undiscovered until the 1970s when it was discovered by a local diver. A 2013 archeological investigation documented the surviving portions of the wreck, developed a stabilization plan to preserve the site in situ, and resulted in an international agreement formally establishing the Park Service as a custodian of the wreck. I think that Josh is going to lead off with Not on an Even Keel: Investigation and Interpretation of the Structural Remains of the HMS Fowey. Josh, thanks for being with us today.
Joshua: Thank you for having me. All right, you guys, let's see. Go ahead and make sure the slideshow is up. For you guys who have not met me, again, my name is Josh Marano. I'm working as an underwater archeologist at Biscayne National Park. This was part of a symposium that I helped organize for the Society of Historical Archaeology. It focused on several of the main components of the projects going on between 2012 and, basically, 2014, culminating in attempts to stabilize the site. For those of you guys who have not been to Biscayne National Park, it was established as a national monument in 1968 and was expanded to its current boundary in 1980 and finalized as a national park. It currently encompasses 173,000 acres, 95% of which is underwater. It's about 22 miles long, 14 miles wide, and it's 95% water.
There's approximately, I think I can give you a very specific number of archeological sites as of the end of the last fiscal year, is 157. About 75 to 100 of those are submerged, most of which are shipwrecks or the remains of stranding sites and aids to navigation. The wreck itself, as Ms. Mudar mentioned, was originally a fifth-rate British warship. She carried 44 guns and she wrecked while escorting a Spanish prize while transiting throughout what is now the national park in 1748. It was left relatively undiscovered until it was discovered by a local sport diver by the name of Gerald Klein in 1979. Klein immediately began salvage on what he thought was a "nearly intact Spanish treasure galleon" because, as I'm sure as all of you know, every old shipwreck in the Florida Keys is, of course, a Spanish treasure galleon.
The ensuing legal battle over the next couple years ended up culminating in a loss for him. He had put his claim onto this particular shipwreck not knowing that it was actually within the boundaries of Biscayne National Park, so when he had gone to court to try to settle his case, he ended up losing in favor of the National Park Service gaining custody of this, at the time, unidentified shipwreck. The discovery of this wreck by the National Park Service led to a series of archeological investigations in an attempt to identify it. While it's a little beyond the scope of this presentation today to go into every single archeological investigation spawned from its discovery, I will talk about, specifically, the projects that looked at finding its structural components.
When it was originally looked at by the Southeastern Archeological Center in 1983, it was described as "23 meters, or about 75 feet, of partially intact or interpolatable structure interpreted to represent the unsheathed starboard bilges of a vessel with a 36-foot beam from fore- to the mizzenmast, to the galley at the foremast." From this information and from the preliminary site evaluation in 1983, the line drawn through this image represents the approximate keel of what was thought to be the approximate keel of the vessel, with B representing the bow and S representing the stern. You can see several features throughout this image. Several cannons are present. This was the going interpretation in 1983. However, there were some questions regarding the overall layout, the orientation of the vessel.
The initial attempts to document the structure were performed well for the time, but they had left some questions to be answered, so much so, that in 1985 at also a SHA Conference the late Vic Stephy was consulted regarding the structural analysis of the site and based off the limited measurements that the Park Service had been able to gather somewhat thus far he reinterpreted the site with this orientation that you see in this next presentation. The line again representing what they thought was the keel the B being the bow, and the S being the stern. This caused some confusion amongst interpretation of the site and unfortunately because there was a very limited documentation at that time they weren't able to settle it one way or the other and more investigation was needed.
In 1993, following the destruction wrought by Hurricane Andrew, the Submerged Cultural Resource Unit often referred to as The SCRU, is absolutely the best acronym in archeology, is now known as the Submerged Resources Center conducted the condition assessment following the storm and primarily focused on documentation on remaining structural elements because there had been a considerable amount destroyed either by vandalism, additional illicit salvage attempts, or, actually, the storm itself. The extent of the site was considerably less than what it was when it was first documented in 1983 but they did note several gun ports and oar sweeps. Unfortunately, there was never a finalized report produced but they did produce an updated site plan. Because of this we were still operating,
even in 2013, when we originally started looking at this again, we were still operating off of the original structural analysis and interpretation based off a 1983 work which was a little light in terms of the measurements and detailed documentation. As most of you know, Hurricane Sandy passed within close proximity to south Florida as a Category 1 storm late October of 2012. While it wasn't a particularly devastating storm, south Florida in terms of wind and waves, it did produce a considerable current throughout the area that actually damaged a number of archeological sites both here in Biscayne National Park and up and down the east coast. I know there were some issues along the Cape Lookout and Cape Hatteras’ east shore and obviously our neighbors to the north in DC.,
New York, and New Jersey took the brunt of this storm, but just because it passed within close proximity doesn't mean we escape damage. There was noted destruction on the site, these are all images of examples of that. The light amount of sediment that covered the site was scoured away, a number of the artifacts that were previously embedded in situ were now floating across the site. There's a image right here of a plate that is now open on the sea floor. The top left image is actually of an intact saber or a cutlass. The bottom left is actually an image of the ripples that were formed by the currents running over the site. All of these were examples of some of the destruction at this site. Not only during Hurricane Sandy, but routinely sustained. That was obviously exacerbated during these storms and other major meteorological events.
This is a recurring issue at this site. It was initiated back as a result of some of its earliest salvage attempts , where this site was once covered by a bed of protective seagrass, early attempts to salvage it by local treasure hunters actually destroyed a large portion of the seagrass and because it's at the maximum depth of its ecological limits it was not really able to re-colonize the area and is actually progressively died off over time, exposing new previously unexposed portions of the site to erosion and potential looting activity. This was even exacerbated even more after the initial court decision in 1983 was made to hand this site over to then National Park Service local divers unhappy with that decision actually came through and vandalized the site, dragging anchors through the reef and destroying as much of it as they could in an attempt to, "If we can't have it, no one can."
This has been a very a long term problem at this site going on for probably the last 20 years. Hurricane Sandy just happened to provide us with the most recent example and some other … the most extreme examples within recent memory. The aftermath of that was we had actually gone out as a Cultural Resource Department here at Biscayne went out and conducted initial damage assessments and basically determined that if nothing was done at this site, it was not going to be preserved for the betterment of future generations, it was most likely going to be completely destroyed either through the natural effects of major meteorological events or, in combination with looting events, was going to destroy this site. We ended up coming up with a research design for a documentation in advance of a mitigation project to try to stabilize this site
And try to armor it and preserve it in situ to prevent it from being destroyed by future natural storm events. This was actually funded by the Hurricane Sandy Relief Bill. And was funded as of very early 2013. This was a multi-component project, the first component of which was obviously going to be an archeological documentation prior to stabilization of the site and the goals of this was to document the loss of in situ archeological material noted on the site, determine the maximum overall extent of the site because we weren't sure what was all there in terms of what was buried. We knew what we could see, it was pretty much similar to what was recorded in 1993 minus a little bit more of the major structural elements that had been destroyed between those two times
We weren't 100% sure what was there buried beneath the sediment so we actually wanted to work to try to determine the maximum overall extent of the site including what was buried and identified as a central predominate component of the wreck. Then obviously we wanted to gather as much environmental information on the site that was deemed necessary to refine and finalize the means and extent of future stabilization efforts. Well talk a little bit more about the after effects in terms of the actual burial of the site and the effects of doing that and then trying to interpret what is now a closed and inaccessible site to the public. That will be our third and final talk for this day. What I'm going to focus on now is the actual discussion of what we found in terms of the remaining surviving structural elements of the ship itself.
As I'd said earlier, the wreck itself - structural analysis of the wreck - was lacking in terms of the actual ship architecture is what the people often refer it to, but it's the frames, the timbers and all that that actually go into making the structure of the ship. The documentation of that back in 1983 was a little light, whereas at that time those archeologists were working to identify the wreck, so they were looking at more of the material – cultural assemblage - and recovering certain artifacts that may have been diagnostic in order to identify a period of use and nationality and all that good stuff and they did a very good job of doing so but the actual structure itself was not as well documented, so that was my focus, coming from my background in ship construction, I wanted to take a look at this and then prepare and disseminate it to the public as best I could.
From what we were able to determine from the 2013 documentation there was no keel or keelson assembly present. The framing assembly was difficult to examine. There was a lot of intact ceiling planking covering the vast majority of it but we were able to identify 38 individual framing elements and the measurements are listed here between 10.2 and 12.9 inches sided, which means across. We weren't able to get very many molded dimensions of thickness just because how intact they were and how closely spaced they were, also the nature of our project here. We had exposed the site just enough that it was exposed to the same extent that it was in 1992 after Hurricane Andrew. We didn't necessarily want to dig down into the site, we didn't want to disturb previously undisturbed in situ artifacts.
We just wanted to uncover just enough that had been uncovered in the past and then look for what we had seen. Just given - based off of the individual framing elements that we had noted, the sizes, the placement and all of that, these are most likely the remnants of a second, third, and possibly the fourth futtocks with top timbers. To continue, you see some pictures here. The top left is just an image looking over the ship, you can actually see some of the curvature that is still associated with the curvature of the hull tumblehome. There's a picture to the right, showing the disposition. What we're looking at is right in the middle, between the top of the very first gunport and the turn of the bilge. The lower left photo is actually a chock which was particularly diagnostic, just because they didn't start using these until after a certain date in the British Navy.
While we knew that this was the HMS Fowey, it's interesting to record these features in situ from a professional standpoint to identify features that you can provide some kind of comparative analysis to, so, hopefully, some of you guys in your parks and your experiences, when you come across stuff like this you can refer back to our report or other reports like it, obviously. It just provides some comparative data and that's really important with a lot of these resources just because these are wooden shipwrecks they are prone to deterioration over time they will not be around forever they are a finite resource so as detailed documentation as possible, obviously, with the view to capture as much relevant cultural information as possible was the key to all of this. Moving on to the ceiling planking for those of you who are maybe not as maritimey as myself.
Ceiling planking is actually referred to as the wall. It's the inside planking, it's what you would consider the inside wall of the vessel. There are nine surviving strakes. A large gap that was originally thought to be a ripped up piece of ceiling or actually what a lot of people would misinterpret it in the past as the location of the keel and keelson assembly, was actually a gap for the vessel’s lower gun deck. The topmost strake of the gun deck clamp was notched to fit around the lower gun deck beams, the smaller gap in the ceiling plank into the… I guess it would be grid west on the site it was actually for an airstrake to provide ventilation between the framing elements. The reason I point all this out is just because it's these minute differences and just some the intricacies in identifying certain elements of this wreck that help identify where we are at within the vessel.
A lot of these measurements are almost minute in nature. It could be a difference of as little as a couple inches or a couple of purposely done cuts as opposed to breaks that can help identify where we’re at in the vessel. The large picture underwater here is actually another detail that was actually telling in the location of the gun deck as you can see all this concretion branching off the one side and then it just stops. Now that's the location of the deck. The deck itself is long gone but where the artifacts inside had rolled into the corner there and then concrete together is indicative of where the actual deck once was. We also were able to identify a number of fastener patterns that were indicative basically telling us that this is not in fact the keel but most likely the side of the vessel.
The ones that are outlined in red here are long - what they call hanging knees and this would have gone to support the upper gun deck. The ones that are outlines in green would have been standing knees and they would have actually been used to support the oarlock deck which was an intermediate deck below in the hold that was used as general storage. Here's an actual reconstructed image to show that layout and again, this is literally just taking a look at the concreted blobs that are left on this. If you map them out while you're looking at them underwater, they don't necessarily mean that much but when you map them out you can actually tell patterns that are not otherwise apparent. In this case, these particular fasteners are visible due to a formation of concretions obviously, so the actual rust associated with the iron fasteners and also a term known as "ghosting". I'm not sure how that term came about.
I've used it in a lot of my projects but what I mean by that is for wood that has been submerged for a long period of time with iron running through it, either through bolts or something along those lines, saltwater has a tendency as the iron is rusting underwater, the actual iron itself will leach out into the wood surrounding it. What that does is it makes the wood extremely hard and therefore resistant to erosion. Therefore in a 100 years, when the iron fastener is long gone, might just be a stain or a maybe a little bit of concretion, the raised wood around that fastener indicates that there was in fact an iron fastener there, again while you're underwater documenting this, it's not necessarily as easy to spot, but just mapping these little intricate details while you're underwater and mapping them out you can start making some of these observations.
In this case, like I said, we have the hanging knee which is the one that comes down from the top deck, and then the standing knee which leads down to the lower deck, and this is pretty much the setup that would have been on Fowey. The size, shape, and position of both the hanging knees and the standing knees could be identified and then the hanging knees were cut to fit flush with the clamp. That might not seem like it's all that important, that's actually cut to fit over the ceiling planking, the thicker strakes of ceiling planking, but these are all indicative of particular construction techniques. We know what ship this is, this was the HMS Fowey, but just the fact that we can identify this stuff, if this was not an identified wreck this would provide some indication a little bit of extra evidence pushing maybe one way or the other in terms of the nation of origin or at least construction, maybe not necessarily origin.
The spacing between these knee sets consistently increase moving from northwest to southeast across the site, i.e. towards the bow and that's also very common in terms of wooden ship construction and this one of those little minute details that place you in the ship and enable you, if you know what to look for, you can identify where you are on the vessel. There were 2 gun ports, they were identified during the 1993 project. These would have originally been located on the lower gun deck, just because it was the highest gun deck we have preserved in situ and it would have been a station for a 12 and later when HMS Fowey sank, an 18 pound cannon. They're approximately 34 inches square, the sills are still in place so the actual lids, the doors are still in place. They're hanging a little ajar and are buried in the sediment down below.
We did not excavate to get access to the entire sill, just because of the scope and the limits of our project, but you can see in these pictures - these are both of the two surviving gun ports on the vessel - the two small squares in the photo on the top indicate the mounting hardware, the location for those and the two larger rectangles below are the mounting hardware for the tackle for the guns. Just another measurements from the sill of the gun port down to the deck was approximately 22 inches. Again, if this was not identified as a - if we didn't know this was HMS Fowey - this could help us get a little bit more information. There were guns associated with this wreck and there are still guns on the site. There were originally five that we knew of. There are now three on the site today. Two of them were raised in the 1983 project. One was raised by archeologists.
The second was raised by the park without archeological controls. One of the good things about this project was it prompted a re-examination of a lot of the previous work. We were able to identify where that second gun came from. It's interesting to see this as an attempt to, not necessarily correct the archeological record, but to make it more complete. The image here that we're showing is particularly interesting because you can actually see the vast majority of the wreck in the background, but this gun is just sitting there. The ball at the far end is the cascabel and the muzzle is actually pointed down underneath then vessel. This gun is upside down, whereas you would think it might have just settled out as the ship broke apart, the location of this particular gun is actually indicative of some of the events detailed in the wrecking event, how this vessel actually came to rest.
We'll go into a little bit of that a little bit later but suffice it to say it was not the gentle wrecking that was historically portrayed in the court martial that ensued after its loss but was more likely a little bit more hectic and chaotic, based off of the archeological evidence that we have and are presenting here. There was another interesting feature that we did identify: oar sweeps. These are usually associated with galleys. HMS Fowey was a sailing ship, it didn't have engines or any other means to propel itself other than its sails so if it was becalmed i.e there's no wind to propel it or if it was in port and needed to make tight maneuvers, the sailors would actually row this 136 foot long vessel to where it needed to go. These retriques construction in English naval vessels are in the latter half of the 17th century were common and particularly in smaller vessels but not necessarily on vessels as large as Fowey.
HMS Fowey was a fifth rate war ship. It was 136 foot long, 36 foot wide an approximately 783 tons. It was a large vessel for that time period, not the biggest, the rating system went from 1 to 5, 1 being the largest but you would expect to find oar sweeps on sixth rate oar ships or smaller even little gun boats and stuff like that, not necessarily on vessels as large as this. It's interesting the top image here is a detail of the blueprints for Fowey, the lines, the drawing and they do very clearly exhibit the location of the oar sweeps but it's interesting when you read the accounts that they weren't supposed to have oar sweeps on vessels this large, so it's one of those things where you have discrepancies in the historical record. The archeological record can be utilized in a - and consulted to determine whether or not it's true or not.
Now it's very interesting with these oar sweeps there's a picture of one just below it, there were four intact. There were several of the lids associated with these found on the site as well, but what was interesting was how they were built. These are very small holes and they measure approximately 7.5 inches wide, 9.5 inches high, but they were deliberately placed between framing elements, these weren't just haphazardly cut into the vessel. They were cut between framing elements in a way that the frames themselves made two sides of the oar sweep and then the top and bottoms were actually very tightly fit pieces, almost like a puzzle placed in between the frames and it was interesting just because there were no fasteners noted.
This was such detailed work that they didn't even need any treenail or any iron fastener. It just held in place, which also tells us that these features were completed prior to planking. It gives us a little bit more information in terms of how this vessel was built which, again, relates to if we didn't know what kind of ship this was or who built it or anything like that it gives us another piece of evidence pointing in one direction or another. Moving on, these are some of the lids associated with the oar sweeps. The picture at the left is a recreation of those and then both the images to the right are actual in situ images of oar sweeps. One is still in the sweep itself, the other was dis-articulated and elsewhere on site. We have some in situ rigging elements as well. This is a unique feature that was located at the southwestern terminus of the site.
Then, literally it was a large piece of timber, flat that had stranded up from the sea floor and it was originally thought that it was a part of the water wear of the deck where you walk around based on its location on the vessel. After some extra excavation we exposed what you can see here in this image is a large deadeye, just going with the prevalent theory that this might have been a deck to walk on, we dug down more thinking that this may be a dis-articulated deadeye that may have fell and was located there as part of the wrecking process but what we ended up finding out was after digging down was that was attached to its chain plate and runs through the timber that you're looking at.
This is not a part of the gun deck planking. That little piece of evidence plus the actual joinery that was exhibited in that timber is not conducive to how you would build a deck. It was much more tightly locked, it had iron through-bolts. This is actually a drawing done by yours truly showing the bolt structure and how it all fits together. This is not part of the deck itself but what we ended up determining was that it was part of what's known as the channel wale, which is, if you guys have ever watched Pirates of the Caribbean or something like that, it's typically where the sailors will go out and hang on the lines and hang off … what it is the means for the standing rigging to be held off away from the hull of the vessel sides. The sailing vessel is sailing and it's flexing. It's not rubbing up against the hull.
This feature is unique because it's very rarely preserved on submerged archeological sites. In fact, I really couldn't find another example of it. The only example of its construction comes from the image on the right, which is just the various methods that they used to support the channels. There's a number of different ways to do this. We couldn't necessarily tell exactly how it was all put together just because what was left in situ, it looks like the closest example is the one in the very top. This was A.) just an interesting find archeologically, we tend not to find these preserved in the archeological record, but it's also indicative of how this ship sank and we'll get to the overall site formation process in just a few slides here, but it's, again, another piece of evidence that gives a little bit more about the story of exactly how this vessel sank.
Here I have outlined the portion of the rigging element that's preserved at the particular channel wale would have been associated with the foremast, so closer to the bow. The red box here is the exact location on the vessel and you see it's pretty high up. This is where the anchors would have been hung, the weather deck where sailors would have been walking around so this is really high up on the vessel. This is the reason that traditionally we don't see this in the archeological record. When you're comparing this and other construction features and material, this feature is particularly diagnostic determining both what portion of the vessel is preserved and also what direction, so you're getting the orientation. This is not necessarily something that considered structure but we like to throw it in anyway because it's cool, was we found its anchor, its last anchor.
The historical record denotes that HMS Fowey first ran aground it tried unsuccessfully several times to re-float itself, lost several anchors in that process eventually did succeed in re-floating only to ground again. In an act of desperation after losing all but, I think, one of their anchors they attempted to set their sails and push the vessel up over the reef in order to push it higher, lower water would have provided better opportunities to salvage the vessel. To all of their amazement the vessel survived and pushed itself right over the reef and back into deeper water after it did that it lost its rudder, lost most of its propulsion, and lost its means to control itself. In an act of desperation they dropped their last bower anchor in an attempt to try to gain control of the vessel. They did drop that anchor and what it did was the vessel swung once it had paid out enough line.
It swung on its anchor to where it eventually settled and came to rest on its starboard side. This anchor which, by size and design, is contemporary to that of HMS Fowey it was found exactly pointed in the direction of the vessel, which was approximately 250 feet away. In terms of how much scope that anchor line would have paid out, the direction that the anchor was pointing everything points that this is, in fact, the last anchor that Fowey attempted to drop to gain control of an otherwise out of control vessel. This is just a really interesting example of what can be done while you're reprocessing old data. This area was covered by magnetometry surveys in both the '80s and the '90s during projects associated with Fowey and was never found.
That's just another example how changing technology and archeology can lead to new discoveries and how these resources are important to preserve even after we think that we've documented them to the fullest extent that we can. It's still important that we preserve these things in situ and preserve them as much as possible because we never know what new technology in the future will provide. In terms of culminating all of this what does all this mean? In 1983, the SEAC project focused primarily, like I said, on the identification, classification, and documentation of material culture. They were looking to identify the period of use, nationality, all that stuff because at the time they were just operating off of what Kline had stated was that this was a intact Spanish treasure galley, and even though he had found no treasure, he was sure of it.
That was the original assumption of the '83 project, but what they found was that didn't really match - the artifacts, everything they were finding didn't point to a Spanish treasure galleon it was pointed toward a British warship and additional historic and archeological research ended up coming up and proving that these were most likely the remains of the HMS Fowey. However the archeological evidence in terms of the structure was still a little shaky, just like the images I presented first in this presentation showed there was a lot of discussion as to which way it was pointing, the extent what was left of it. This is what we wanted to prove, at least this portion of the project wanted to prove. This current image is a 3D overview of where we took the historic plans of HMS Fowey and laid them over a 3D image of what Fowey would have looked like based off of the slides and I have overlayed …
The red is the overlay of what is currently in situ and what remains of this once mighty vessel. Again, just for scale, this vessel was originally 136 foot long, 36 foot wide. It was a large vessel. What we have now … I'm sorry, let me go back. What we had described in 1983 was that the structural remains or the structure were about 23 meters long, about 75 foot wide. Today, it's about 50 feet long and approximately 16 feet wide. There's not much left of it and it's a considerable drop in what we had even compared to 1983 and what we know about it in 1993. This site was actively being destroyed. Now what's interesting is I've laid this out but you might ask how I went about actually identifying where on the wreck this lies. This is the exact placement of where the whole structure would have came from.
The way that we determined where this was again, noticing a lot of those minute details in a lot of the ship's structure and noticing where the decks were, noticing where the structural elements were, the knees, stuff like that, but also from the material culture. We got the large, black box in the middle of the screen. The exact location of two 9-pound guns. These 9-pound guns would have been located on the weather deck which would have actually been above the area that we're documenting. What they did is … The picture a couple slides back, the one with the cannon, I had talked about how the cascabel was pointed out. It was in an odd direction. That's because they're end over end.
As the vessel rolled on through its starboard side rather than staying in place, these guns actually rolled out of the gun ports they were held in front of and rolled end over end out of the vessel with their muzzles now pointed underneath the ship. That's why today we see the casabel sticking up out of the sand and the muzzle is pointed down underneath. The blue box represents the area … and the foc’s’le, also referred to as a forecastle, but this during this time period was where the galley would have been located. There was a predominance both in 1983 and during this project in 2013, a large amount of bottles, food items, just a lot of material culture associated with the galley, bricks, stuff like that, was all found in this location that was strongly pointed toward that this was the location of the galley on the vessel.
Historically, that's where it would have been, is in this foc’s’le . The brown box is actually representing the rigging elements that we found, so the channel wale and all that. The black … I'm sorry, the yellow box right underneath that black blob represents the main shot locker on HMS Fowey which was still in place and is probably the most predominant feature on site. If you were to go and swim over this wreck … I'm not sure how many of you guys out there in the Web have actually gone out to historic shipwrecks, but a lot of … It's not the Scooby Doo version of shipwrecks. You don't go out there and see sails flapping in the wind, skeletons at the wheel.
They’re usually beaten down by the site formation processes. They’re almost flat in appearance a lot of times. There’s very little relief on them. In this particular case, the most relief on the site actually comes from the shot locker.
To the untrained eye, this actually looks like a coral reef, because what it is is a large complement of cannon balls that was once Fowey’s primary armory have since gone down with the vessel to create together and become the environment for a budding coral colony. That is an interesting sight, but it helps us in that it places the one shot locker on site about mid-ships.
It’s useful in that it shows us where that is because it’s a large and heavy collection of artifacts but it’s not really mobile. It’s not going to go anywhere. The green box to the stern is actually the remnants of the naval stores, the stores on the vessel. All the barrels, the salted meat, the water, bread all that stuff. There’s a massive artifacts scatter going off the stern of this vessel. It’s just a little bit reflected here just because this is also an overlay of a site plan. This debris field associated with Fowey goes on for at least 500 meters. That’s about as far as we took it, but there’s still a lot out there.
This is what we have left of HMS Fowey today. It’s very little compared to what we had even 20 or 30 years ago, but it’s interesting that it has pretty much taken us this long to determine this. From a management perspective, it’s interesting to know how much is there but also how much is gone. Now that we have determined this stuff, a lot of these features, we just don’t have a whole lot of British warships archeologically in the Florida Keys. It provides some interesting comparative data to provide for other researchers. You’ve got to ask yourself why this little bit of shipwreck is preserved, why just this tiny little bit? It’s a very good case of selective preservation.
Traditionally speaking, for those of you guys who are not into maritime archeology, only the bottom most ... portion of vessels, ships are well preserved. If you flip through the archeology books and its usually the very bottom, the keel ends right down the middle. There are some notable exceptions, obviously, the Mary Rose in England, the Skuldelev vessels up in Scandinavia, the Vasa, obviously, but we have very few examples of something as extreme, possibly, as what we have here. There’s an explanation for this and what I have down here at the bottom are again the lines of the Fowey but you can see on the far left how much curvature, that’s referred to as tumble home, but how much curvature this vessel had.
It was kind of bulbous toward for the bottom, and it sticks out really far. The dense coral sands here in Florida, they don’t … vessels don’t really sink down into that, so what we think had happened was that the widest point on Fowey, which is commonly referred to as the mid ships, it’s not actually the middle of the ship, red line here is actually dictating where that is. It’s usually just forward of the main vessel. It’s been noted on the ships plans, but this is the widest portion of the vessel, basically where it sticks out the most. What I’ve done here is you take that, the widest portion - where it is at the widest, and look at it on the water line -
The blue line is actually where the water would have been and the black line is what we pretty much have preserved in the archeological record. That little red line that’s sticking out is where the channel wale would have come in. You see, this is what is actually preserved here. What has happened is the coarse carbonate sands in Florida are not particularly conducive to bearing and preserving an archeological remains. You might go up to North Carolina where I actually started off in my career and there’s mud, and vessels would typically sink down until it reaches an anaerobic environment and then it can be preserved, indefinitely.
In Florida, that’s not the case. What we’re finding is a lot of times people will go out and they’ll look at shipwrecks and they’ll see a group of concretions and structure in the middle of a group of wreckage and they’ll assume, based off of their teaching that the bottom-most portions of vessels are usually the most well preserved. They assume that’s the keel, and that’s pretty much what happened here, well, that’s not necessarily the case and what we’re finding here, at least in Biscayne National Park, is that more often than not it’s actually the upper works of the vessel that are preserved because when the vessel sinks, it doesn’t sink down to the mud, but will rather roll almost onto its side.
Then the outer most portions of the side of the vessel is what’s more often preserved. You can see in these final photos, you can see just a little bit of the curvature. You can actually see the dip down into the mud. Now mind you this is in 30 feet of water. HMS Fowey had a beam of 36 feet. The vessel itself, at least the hull , would still have been visible above the water, even the mast and all that stuff that extended a dozen feet above the deck. This vessel would not have been completely gone by any means when it sunk historically, but you can kind of see that the curvature, even of the remains today, even though they’re mostly flattened, you can still a little bit of curvature.
That’s what pushed it down to the mud just enough to be preserved and that’s why we have what we have today. Obviously this presentation here is not meant to be exhaustive in any way, shape or form. We do have research and monitoring continues on the site. These findings here have actually been presented. They were originally presented in SHA. They were going to be submitted for publication in ACUA but I think we’re actually going to lead with possibly going another route and actually printing this in IJNA, but we do have a full technical report that’s currently done. Anybody who’d like a copy of that, feel free to reach out to us and we’ll give that to you.
These results were incorporated into the account of the development of the overall 2013 stabilization and mitigation project, which I’ll talk a little more about when I return to you after David’s talk.
Karen: Wow Josh, thanks for a great talk. Do people have questions or comments?
Joshua: Or complaints, any of the above.
Karen: If they have complaints, they should talk to me and not to you!
Joshua: Excellent.
Karen: Josh, I wondered if you could talk for a minute about how you knew that this was the Fowey.
Josh: I didn’t because I was not born when they actually made that determination. That was a little joke on my age. The way they did this was they looked mostly at the material culture coming up. The first guys to really look at this was George Fisher and Russ Skowronek. He did a really good job at documenting the material culture that they were observing on the site and from that material culture, even though they’d gone into it thinking that this is a Spanish treasure galleon, they can look at it archeologically and pretty much made the determination that that was not the case.
What they did was they looked at it and said, “Well, this doesn’t really fit with the material culture we’d be finding on a Spanish treasure galleon. It does, however, fit just because the number of the weapons armament,” there was a lot of armament associated with the site, the guns, the amount of cannon balls that they were observing. Once they brought it up, it was almost all, typologically speaking, English or British in nature. The ceramics obviously had some amount of variation. There was a lot of faience and French and other kinds of ceramics associated with it, but
predominantly, it pointed toward a military vessel, most likely British in origin. With that information in mind they went and conducted a pretty exhaustive historical survey where they had identified that, at least in that area, HMS Fowey was the most likely candidate given the size of the vessel, the size of the guns, the cannons that they were finding, the number of cannon. Everything pointed toward Fowey now. The interesting thing about HMS Fowey is, obviously, here in south Florida and for anybody that knows the cognitive landscape that’s been developed because of the wrecking here is pretty complex, but a number of the wrecks that occurred in south Florida, particularly along the reef, are kind of immortalized in the toponymy of the area, in that a lot of the rocks and reefs that have caused wrecks, are at least are believed to have caused wrecks, get bestowed the vessel, the principle vessel that wrecked there.
In the case of Fowey, there is a group of … a rock ledge called Fowey rocks, and it was named for this vessel when it wrecked there in 1748. Interesting to note, it is not actually where the shipwreck is. The shipwreck is much further to the south, but because of discrepancies and mapping at the time and lack of knowledge of the area, that was the approximate area that the ship was known to go down and that was the name that was given to that area. There’s a lot that can be learned from just the study of the wrecks in the area, both in terms of site-specific, more processual stuff like the detail recording of shipwrecks and also on a larger scale looking at it from the macro-, and if you want to talk about maritime cultural landscapes or something along those lines.
There’s a number of different ways to approach it, but that, to answer your question, that was how they determined, was just given the size, nature of the vessel and all that. There were pretty much wasn’t another viable alternative. In archeology, shipwreck archeology in particular, is not something like, like I said it’s not like Scooby Doo. You’re probably not going to go down there, at least with a historic wooden shipwreck, you’re probably not going to go down there and find a name plate on the side of the vessel telling you what it is. It’s going to be almost … it has to be archeology.
It has to be good archeology to really come down to make that determination, but you almost never hear someone say, “It’s beyond doubt; without a reasonable doubt, this is the ship.” They’ll never come out and say definitively. They’ll say beyond a reasonable doubt. The best example I can think of here recently with that was probably the A.) The Queen Antoinette, Blackbeard’s shipwreck in North Carolina coast, which I’ve worked on for a number of years. Also, the more recent ship that was found in the Dominican Republic that was believed to be Christopher Columbus’s vessel.
But according to … after looking at it, after having actual archeologists go down there and looking at it they were finding cooper’s fasteners and Muntz metal, which was not invented until the 1830s. There’s a permanent post quem for that site, it obviously was not the Columbus’ vessel but that’s … it takes a little bit of work to make a determination even if it’s tentative on identification.
Karen: I would think that the Fowey is a pretty good candidate for a good match, especially since you’re able to compare it to the blueprint, the original blueprint.
Josh: Absolutely. It’s also just the amount of work that’s been done and the fact that there’s still material culture available at the site. It’s the one thing about the site that really makes it unique in Biscayne National Park, is that it is … it has material culture on it, whereas I’d say 90% of the other wrecks in the park are … have been absolutely stripped through treasure hunting and looting and salvage and all that, both historically and more recently. It’s rare to find a shipwreck anywhere in the Keys with any kind of considerable material culture, some of which attributed to it,
in the case of HMS Fowey this was definitely a rare example, whereas usually I have to look at - this is maybe why I looked at chief structure so closely - is the only thing we have usually. The HMS Fowey is a rare example here in the park.
Description
Josh Marano, 10/22/2015, ArcheoThursday
Duration
46 minutes, 36 seconds
Credit
NPS
Date Created
10/22/2015
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