March 2011 – Page 5 – The History Blog

Sweden’s 17th century warship Vasa gets a tuneup

March 11, 2011

The Vasa was a grand ship commissioned in 1625 by Sweden’s King Gustav II Adolf to be the core of a new fleet of larger, more imposing warships that would dominate the Baltic theater during the Thirty Years’ War. By all accounts the four other royal ships fulfilled their commission ably until the 1660s, but Vasa, poor thing, never even made it a nautical mile from the dock on her maiden voyage on August 10, 1628.

The ship was top heavy and unstable, but the King kept sending letters to the builders urging them to get Vasa on the water, so even though the builders and sailors knew there was going to be trouble, they set sail anyway. As soon as they encountered wind with more force than a light breeze, the ship heeled on the port side, taking in water through the gun ports. Once the water rushed in, it was all over. The ship sank 105 feet to the sea floor, only 390 feet from the shore, in full view of the assembled dignitaries from many countries, including ones that might have reason to delight in this dramatic failure of Swedish sea power. Despite being so close to land and in quick reach of a number of vessels, an estimated 30 to 50 men went down with the ship.

There were several attempts to salvage the wreck right after it sank, but they failed. In 1664, a salvage operation retrieved over 50 of Vasa‘s valuable bronze cannons, tearing up the wood from the deck above the guns in the process. After that, the wreck was left pretty much alone to be scoured by the hard Stockholm bay currents, and abraded and dumped on by subsequent ships for 300 years.

In 1956, amateur archaeologist Anders Franzén found Vasa again, and museums, the Swedish Navy, historical societies all put their heads together to figure out how to raise and preserve the wreck. Ultimately, they used a system not all that different from what they tried to do in the 17th century: tunnels were dug underneath the ship and cables threaded through to pontoons on either side. Over the course of multiple lifts between 1959 and 1961, Vasa was gradually raised, until on April 24th, 1961, again before an audience of thousands present and countless more television viewers, the ship broke the surface.

Here’s some contemporary footage of the salvage:

The ship was kept in a shipyard that served as a provisional museum for decades while archaeologists and conservators cleaned and preserved it. There Vasa was sprayed with polyethylene glycol (PEG), a polymer that replaces the water in wood ensuring it doesn’t warp, crack or shrink when it dries, for 17 years straight.

In 1990, the new Vasa Museum where the ship would be conserved on display opened to the public. Since this year marks the 50th anniversary of the Vasa‘s return to the surface, the museum plans a variety of events to celebrate.

While they’re at it, the staff will give Vasa a thorough tuneup. It will be given an anti-corrosion treatment, and in a project that will take five years to complete, all the 5,000 iron bolts keeping its hull together will be replaced with stainless steel ones, made from a non-oxidizing alloy of chrome and nickel.

“We need to remove the iron and the rust from inside the wood and replace (the bolts) by stainless steel that will not leak into the wood,” Vasa Museum head Marika Hedin said.

The Vasa’s hull was weakened by the pollution it was exposed to during the 333 years it spent on the Baltic Sea seabed after sinking in the Stockholm harbour on its maiden voyage. The pollution, combined with the iron of the original bolts and rust, provoke “a chemical reaction that destroys the wood,” Hedin explained. […]

Magnus Olofsson, who is in charge of the ship’s conservation, explained the Vasa was built with many layers of oak, and that some of the bolts had to be two meters long, “to keep each piece of wood in the right place.”

Behold Marika Hedin being extremely cool and getting to use very large specialized machinery to shoot new bolts into the hull of a 17th century Swedish warship:

Marika Hedin replacing rusted bolts on the Vasa

Only true color pictures of 1906 Frisco quake found

March 10, 2011

Modern(ish), Multimedia

The Smithsonian has discovered color pictures of San Francisco in the aftermath of the 1906 earthquake taken by photographic innovator Frederick Eugene Ives. They are the earliest color pictures of San Francisco ever, and the only true color ones of the earthquake-devastated city (some hand-tinted pictures exist, but they were taken in black and white and then color was applied after they were printed).

Ives took many of the pictures from the roof of the Hotel Majestic on Sutter Street, where he stayed in October of 1906, six months after the April earthquake. Experts think at least some of the pictures might have been taken over an earlier trip because the city is still laid to waste. There are scorched ruins, piles of rubble, whole blocks flattened like pancakes, a skyline full of rickety-looking swiss cheese buildings.

Frederick Ives took the pictures using a stereoscopic process of his invention called the Krömgram. The process used mirrors and filters to make separate slides for each primary color in the spectrum. Then the slides were bound together in a specific order, and that package would be seen through a Krömgram viewing device.

Taking the pictures required operating a cumbersome machine and very, very long exposures. The roof of the hotel and the almost empty streets provided him with the city equivalent of a still life, so he was able to take this color pair of pictures which customers would then view in 3D by looking at them through the viewing device. Although it doubtless must have been an arresting visual experience, the Krömgram was doomed by its complexity and huge expense (a viewing device cost $50 back then, $1000 in today’s money).

The pictures were found by Anthony Brooks, a volunteer at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, who was going through a collection of glass plate pictures that Ives’ son Herbert had donated to the Smithsonian. Brooks has a personal interest in early color photography, so he recognized that these pictures were something special.

National Museum of American History restorers were able to piece together the delicate glass plates so we can see the pictures as they would have looked through the Krömgram.

Smoking left notches in Victorian teeth

March 9, 2011

Modern(ish), Museums

The wide prevalence of smoking in Victorian England left smokers’ teeth in as bad a condition as it left their lungs. The Museum of London studied the skeletal remains of people buried in a Victorian cemetery in Whitechapel, east London, in the mid-19th century, and found that the majority had some dental deformity caused by smoking from clay pipes. Two front teeth, sometimes four, had grooves worn into them from long term pipe smoking.

Osteological analysis of 268 adults buried between 1843 and 1854 found that some disfigurement had occurred in 92 percent of adults exhumed, while wear associated with habitual use of pipes was evident in 23 percent.

“In many cases, a clear circular “hole’ was evident when the upper and lower jaws were closed,” said Donald Walker, human osteologist at Museum of London Archaeology Service.

Males were affected far more frequently than females.

Of course many of these teeth were also stained brown on the inside, and the adult skeletons with pipe notches also had a higher prevalence of lesions inside the surface of the ribs, most likely from lung disease. Even children weren’t left unscathed. The skeletons of young adults showed evidence of pipe notches, which since the notches take a few years to develop means they had taken up smoking as children to have already worn grooves into their incisors.

Clay pipes were the primary smoking device for people of all classes from the mid-16th century when tobacco was first introduced to England by explorers like Walter Raleigh, who was himself an inveterate pipe smoker. By 1614, there were already 7,000 tobacconists in London and that number would only increase until the late 19th century. Cheap clay pipes were ubiquitous and disposable, more like cigarette butts than pipes today. The Thames mudlarks find clay pipes by the score.

It wasn’t until 1881 when James Bonsack invented a machine that would roll cigarettes cheaply and in large quantities that the pipe and the teeth notches it caused fell by the wayside.

"The Legal Gentleman named Brass" illustration from Dickens' "The Old Curiosity Shop", 1840

British Museum buys Assyrian ivories Agatha Christie cleaned with face cream

March 8, 2011

Ancient, Museums, Treasures

In 1929, fresh off an acrimonious divorce from her first husband Archibald, Agatha Christie visited the excavations at the ancient city of Ur, in what is today Iraq. Renowned British archaeologist Leonard Woolley led the joint expedition of the British Museum and the University Museum of Pennsylvania over the twelve years (1922–34) of the excavation, and he was not welcoming of tourists. Agatha Christie was an exception, however, mainly because Leonard’s wife Katharine was a huge fan of the writer.

Katharine Woolley invited her back for a follow-up visit in 1930, and sent apprentice archaeologist Max Mallowan to show her the sights, wink, wink, nudge, nudge. When Christie had to return home urgently because her daughter was ill, Mallowan accompanied her back to England. A few months later, Max returned again to England and this time he asked Agatha to marry him. She accepted.

Mallowan decided to make that season of excavations at Ur his last, looking for work on archaeological sites that would let Agatha work alongside him. In 1931 they would work their first dig together at Nineveh. Agatha didn’t just sit on the patio fanning herself. She got her hands dirty working as a junior assistant, cleaning, repairing and cataloging artifacts. For decades after that (with a break for World War II) they would work archaeological digs all over Iraq and Syria, making major discoveries.

In 1949, Mallowan reopened excavations on the site of Nimrud, the city that had once been the capital of the Assyrian Emprire at its peak under King Ashurnasirpal II (883-859 B.C.). Royal palaces had been found on the site in the mid-19th century — archaeologist Henry Layard had famously shipped giant winged stone bulls and lions from Nimrud to the British Museum — but it had been abandoned by archaeologists from 1879 onwards. Mallowan thought there was more to be found, and he was right.

He found thousands of ivory carvings in storage rooms and at the bottom of wells, many of them with scorch marks from the destruction of the palace by the Medes and Persians in the late seventh century BC.

Agatha appears to have played an important role in the conservation of these ivory carvings. Mallowan said in his memoirs that it was Agatha’s idea to keep the pieces that had been found in the sludge at the bottom of the well moist and only gradually introduce them to the dry desert air. She described her cleaning process in her An Autobiography published in 1977, the year after her death:

I had my part in cleaning many of them. I had my own favourite tools … an orange stick, possibly a very fine knitting needle – one season a dentist’s tool which he lent, or rather gave me, and a jar of cosmetic face cream, which I found more useful than anything else for gently coaxing the dirt out of the crevices without harming the friable ivory. In fact there was such a run on my face cream that there was nothing left for my poor old face after a couple of weeks!

Obviously curators today don’t recommend the face cream and knitting needle approach to cleaning ancient ivory, but it doesn’t seem to have harmed the very delicate pieces which still show signs of the gold foil and precious stones that used to festoon them before they were stripped and tossed in storage at some point in their ancient past. They are considered the finest collection of decorative ivories ever discovered in the Middle East.

Most of the ivories returned to storage after their excavation. The finds were divided between Iraq and Britain, with the British share of the spoils ending up in storage first at the British School of Archaeology in Iraq (now the British Institute for the Study of Iraq), then at the British Museum. They were never put on display.

Now thanks to a fundraising drive that raised £750,000 ($1.2 million) in six months, plus grants from the National Heritage Memorial Fund and the Art Fund, the British Museum has paid £1.2 million ($2 million) for 6,000 of the Nimrud ivory pieces. One thousand is numbered individual pieces; 5,000 are fragments of larger pieces.

The best of the collection will go on display in the British Museum’s Middle East section starting next week.

Stolen Chinese antiquities seized at Newark Airport

March 7, 2011

Ancient, Looting, Social policy, Treasures

Federal agents from Homeland Security and Customs and Border Protection officers confiscated two ancient Chinese artifacts that were being smuggled into the country through Newark Liberty International Airport. One is a 5,000-year-old prehistoric pot, the other a Tang Dynasty (618-907 A.D.) horse-and-rider figurine. Both are in excellent condition.

“The illegal trade of cultural antiquities is one that affects us all,” U.S. Customs Director Robert E. Perez said in the statement. He said the joint team is “dedicated to intercepting these items and ensuring their safe return to their rightful owners.”

Prehistoric Chinese pot, ca. 5,000 years old

Customs and Border Protection have seized five other stolen Chinese artifacts in New York and New Jersey just over the past year. The Chinese antiquities market is very hot right now thanks to the recent proliferation of moneyed Chinese buyers looking to reclaim cultural patrimony looted during foreign invasions and revolutionary fervor. It makes sense that the black market trade in smuggled stolen goods would be hot right now too.

Also, last year the United States and China signed a Memorandum of Understanding agreeing to step up efforts on both sides to stem the illicit trade in Chinese antiquities.

The trade agreement restricts the importation to the U.S. of cultural and archaeological materials from the Paleolithic through the Tang Dynasty (75,000 B.C.–A.D. 907), as well as monumental sculpture and wall art at least 250 years old. (A detailed list was published by the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of the Treasury in the Federal Register on January 16, 2009.) Such archaeological material originating in China can only come into the U.S if accompanied by a valid export permit or other appropriate documentation from the Chinese government.

In addition to the import restrictions, the MOU requires that both countries take a number of steps. China, for example, pledges to expand efforts to educate its citizens about the importance of safeguarding its rich cultural heritage, to increase funding and other resources for protecting cultural heritage, and to block looted artifacts from entering the Hong Kong and Macao Special Administrative Regions, where much of the material currently comes onto the art market. The U.S. pledges technical assistance to China in protecting its cultural heritage. The agreement also outlines steps to foster loans to museums in the U.S., scholarly collaboration among archaeologists from both countries, and exchange of faculty and students. Both countries commit to educating their customs officers about cultural heritage and Chinese archaeological material. Both agree to share information that helps enforce applicable laws and regulations to reduce illicit trafficking in cultural property.