by Albany, NY (AP) – employees who dig 15 years ago on the World Trade Center site of Manhattan, made an unlikely discovery: soaked wood of a boat built during the revolutionary war that was buried more than two centuries earlier.
Now, more than 600 pieces from the 50 -feet ship (15 meters) are carefully put together again in the New York State Museum. After years on the water and the centuries underground, the boat becomes a museum exhibition.
Tidy as giant puzzle pieces on the museum floor, research assistants and volunteers recently spent weeks cleaning the wood with picks and brushes before the reconstruction could even start.
Although researchers believe that the ship was built a gun in 1775 to defend Philadelphia, they still do not know all the places to which it traveled or why it was apparently neglected along the coast of Manhattan before he ended up in a landfill around the 1790s.
“The audience can come and consider the mysteries around this ship,” says Michael Lucas, the curator of the Museum of Historical Archeology. “Because we have, like everything from the past, we have pieces of information. We don’t have the whole story.”
From landfill to museum piece
The reconstruction of caps years of rescue and preservation work that started in July 2010 when part of the boat 22 feet (7 meters) was found below street level.
Curved wood from the hull were discovered by a crew that worked on an underground parking facility on the World Trade Center site, near where the Twin Towers stood before the attacks of 9/11.
The wood was muddy, but well preserved after centuries in the oxygen earth. A previously constructed slurry wall went straight through the boat, although wood consisting of approximately 30 feet (9 meters) of the rear and middle sections was carefully recovered. Part of the arch was found on the other side of the underground wall the next summer.
The wood was shipped more than 1,400 miles (2,253 kilometers) to the center of Texas A&M for maritime archeology and conservation.
Each of the 600 pieces underwent a three -dimensional scan and spent years in preservative fluids before they were placed in a gigantic freezer dryer to remove moisture. Then they were wrapped in more than a mile foam and shipped to the State Museum in Albany.
While the museum is 130 miles (209 kilometers) The Hudson River is from Lower Manhattan, it has enough room to show the ship. The reconstruction work is done in an exhibition space, so that visitors can see the weathered wooden skeleton adopt, slowly accept the shape of a partially reconstructed boat.
The work is expected to end around the end of the month, said Peter Fix, an associate research scientist at the Center for Maritime Archeology and Conservation that supervises the reconstruction.
On a recent day, Lucas took the time to talk to passing museum visitors about the ship and how it was found.
He explained the work behind him and said to a group: “Who would have thought in a million years:” One day this will be in a museum? “”
There remains a nautical mystery
Researchers knew they found a boat under the streets of Manhattan. But what kind?
Analysis of the wood showed that they came out of trees in the Philadelphia area in the early 1770s, which points to the ship that is being built in a garden near the city.
It was probably built in a hurry. The wood is knotting and wood was attached with iron spikes. That caused faster construction, although the metal corrodes in seawater over time.
Researchers now assume that the boat was built in Philadelphia in the summer of 1775, months after the first shots of the Revolutionary War were fired at Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts. Thirteen guns were built that summer to protect Philadelphia against potential hostile troops that come up with the Delaware River. The gun boats had cannons that show their arches and could transport 30 or more men.
“They really pushed, pushed, pushed to get these boats there to stop the British who might start the Delaware,” Fix said.
Historical data indicates that at least one of those 13 cannon boats were later taken by the British. And there is some proof that the boat that is now being restored was used by the British, including a pewter button with “52” registered on it. That probably came from the uniform of soldier with the 52nd Regiment of Foot of the British army, which was active in the war.
It is also possible that the ship went south to the Caribbean, where the British treated thousands of troops during the war. The wood shows signs of damage caused by molluscs that are known as shipworms that are native to warmer waters.
Yet it is unclear how the boat ended up in Manhattan and why he apparently spent years partly in the water along the coast. By the 1790s it was out of use and it was then covered as part of a project to further expand Manhattan to the Hudson River. By that time, the mast and other parts of the revolutionary warship were apparently stripped.
“It’s an important piece of history,” said Lucas. “It is also a nice artifact that you can really build many stories.”
