Month: September 2011

New discoveries about the WTC shipwreck

Modern(ish), Treasures

Last summer, construction workers on the World Trade Center site uncovered the remains of an 18th century shipwreck. Since then, researchers have identified the ship type as a single mast sloop around 50 feet long with a shallow draft (the section between the waterline and the bottom of the hull which determined the depth of water the ship could navigate without running aground) and rounded stem and stern both.

Scientists from Columbia University’s Tree Ring Lab have studied samples from the ship’s white oak planks and its hickory keel trying to match it to the known record of tree ring history from different parts of the country and world. Since an 18th century ship in New York City could have been built locally or have come from Europe, that makes for a great many possible matches to go through. The use of hickory for the keel narrowed down the search because unlike the white oak that makes up the planking, hickory has been extinct in Europe for two million years.

The team dried the timbers slowly, sanded the samples so the rings would be countable, then got counting. You need at least 100 years of rings to have a viable sample for comparison, which they were lucky enough to secure. They ran their samples through a database of tree ring chronologies from the Hudson Valley, then hit pay dirt when they compared to the chronologies from Philadelphia. One of the samples had come from a Philadelphia tree was at least 111 years old and still growing when it was felled in 1773. The sample had a thick outer section where rivers of sap had flowed through in its last year.

If the hull was part of the original vessel and not part of a refurbishment, the tree ring data point to a launch date for this shallow-sailing sloop that was sometime after the 1773 winter’s Tea Party in Boston, and likely before the signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, in the vessel’s hometown. This is a boat that sailed during the American Revolution with a crew that traded up and down the Hudson River goods, such as leather shoes, they had collected during several long bouts spent in the Caribbean. But the crew were a bit lousy (but, really, who wasn’t back then?) and, in its own way, so was the boat, having picked up tiny wood-boring Teredinidae mollusks, “the termites of the sea.” But as Kevin Eckelbarger of the University of Maine’s Darling Marine Center, who identified the shell morphology in the bored-out timbers, told Scientific American, “They are really aggressive. They make termites look like amateurs.”

The ship had other structural problems caused by a luxury fitting. The builder used iron fasteners to common the planks of the hull. Iron was far more expensive than wood, and, as it happens, far less efficient. It was both a luxury and a sloppy construction shortcut. It takes a lot less effort to put parts together with an iron fitting than to drill a hole through the inner and outer planks then jam an oak trunnel through it. Those wood trunnels expanded and contracted along with the planking, however, so even though they were a cheaper and more time-consuming material, they kept the ship together better than the iron that would tear, rust and friction-burn wooden hulls.

Historians speculate that the shipbuilder must have gotten his hands on a cheap source of iron, perhaps captured from the enemy during the Revolution, and decided to use them to put the ship together quickly.

As far as what the ship might have carried, what role it might have played in the American Revolution, there are tantalizing clues but nothing we can pin down. It was a mercantile sloop so could have just carried foodstuffs and consumer goods up and down the Atlantic, but it could also have been used in the war. Similar ships served on both sides, carrying ammunition, evacuating Royalist noncombatants during the war and British troops after, even attacking enemy vessels and ports.

One of the puzzle pieces into the history of the discovered World Trade Center vessel includes a pewter button with the number 52, a regiment of the British Army. Whether this is from a captured British soldier or something a superstitious sailor found remains unanswered. Perhaps the British were the last to claim the vessel. As Riess said, the British held New York City throughout the war, and evacuated in 1783 after the treaty in Paris. The last humans on the sailboat left it to sit on the shores of New York harbor where other occupants endemic to saltwater marshes such as horseshoe crabs, sponges, oysters, and snails made the oak planks home.

Bungling art thieves bungle again harder

Modern(ish), Museums, Renaissance

Ten years ago, three masked men broke into the Fine Arts Museum of Ghent in Belgium and tore two works by Flemish Old Master Peter Paul Rubens off the wall. While beating a hasty retreat, they dropped one of them, “The Flagellation of Christ,” but made away with “The Calydonian Boar Hunt.”

They picked the wrong piece to be clumsy with because as it happens, “The Flagellation of Christ” is a 1614 preparatory oil sketch for a painting that is part of an important series made by 11 luminaries of 17th century Flemish art like Rubens and Antony van Dyck. The completed painting is in St. Paul’s Church in Antwerp, but even the sketch is extremely significant because it shows Rubens’ process and because he himself gave great importance to his sketches, keeping them until his death. It’s far more valuable that “The Calydonian Boar Hunt” which is a common theme that Rubens returned to often.

Still, they managed to steal at least one Rubens and even if it only garnered them a few hundred thousand dollars rather the millions “The Flagellation of Christ” is worth, that’s an entirely respectable payday for butterfingered burglars. Of course, you actually need to sell it to make any money at all. Fast-forward ten years and Athens police get a tip that two people are trying to sell a Rubens stolen from a Belgian museum 10 years ago. On Thursday, September 1, police set up a sting operation during which one women — a 40-year-old Greek TV host — and one man, a 65-year-old former antique store owner — attempt sell the painting to undercover officers for six million euros ($8.4 million).

The couple are arrested, loudly declaiming their innocence. The woman received it from an Italian lover in 2003, she says. He told her it was a copy, she says. She insists neither she nor her antiquarian accomplice had any idea it was a real Rubens or any idea that it was stolen. There’s a wee problem with this story, though. These doofuses left the “SKETCH BY RUBENS – PROPERTY OF FINE ART MUSEUM OF GHENT” label on the back of the painting. Greek National Art Gallery director Marina Lambraki-Plaka described this crack crew best: “amateurs — unless they had some other reason for keeping the identification details on the back of the painting.”

But wait! There’s more! It turns out the painting probably isn’t a Rubens at all. Since its theft, museum experts have reevaluated its provenance and think it’s more likely a copy, the handiwork of one of his students based on the master’s design. It’s like a Guy de Maupassant story, I swear.

The couple have been arrested and charged with attempted money-laundering. Authorities don’t think they were involved with the theft at this point and they’ve released them on bail with a travel ban. Belgium hasn’t filed the official reclamation paperwork yet, but the Belgian ambassador to Greece announced that the Ghent museum will be delighted to have their Rubens-ish painting back and that they will proceed with the business through normal diplomatic channels.

Marine archaeologist buys fierce Oxford emperor

Renaissance, Treasures

Oxford marine archaeologist Mensun Bound has purchased a bust that once stared, mouth agape, at people outside the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford University’s ceremonial hall designed by Christopher Wren in the late 1660s. It was only his second public building (the first was the chapel of Pembroke College in Cambridge), designed when he was Savilian Professor of Astronomy at Oxford. (Yes, in addition to being a pioneer and luminary of English architecture, Wren was also a math and science genius.) The D-shape of the building was inspired by Rome’s Theater of Marcellus.

Once the building was close to done, Wren commissioned local stonemason William Byrd to carve busts of 13 figures to glare at passersby from the Broad Street boundary wall. Known alternately as “emperors,” “caesar’s heads,” and “philosophers,” the sculptures’ real identities are something of a mystery.

They took a lot of punishment over the centuries. Byrd’s originals were replaced with copies in 1868 after 200 years. The Victorian copies were then treated to the drunken exuberance of the students who splashed paint on them. The cleaning did more damage than the paint, leaving the replacements already in need of restoration by the end of the century. They were finally replaced again with copies carved by Michael Black in 1970 – 1972. Those are the ones you see outside the Sheldonian now.

The auctioneers estimate that it was made in the 1860s, so that would make it one of the Victorian copies. An unnamed source has told Bound that it might actually be one of the 17th century originals and it certainly looks beat up from the picture. Bound spent £3,000 to secure the piece.

[Bound] said: “They are known as the emperors, but I have seen them referred to as philosophers and even the apostles. I thought it would be good for the bust to remain near Oxford.

“I am, of course, interested in busts and archaeology and the courtyard here is an ideal place to put it. The Worcester College choir will be here singing at the unveiling, which will hopefully raise money for the village church.”

The unveiling will be carried out by the poet and dramatist Francis Warner, of St Peter’s College.

Mr Bound said he was hoping eventually to discover which of the emperors he had acquired.

The three-ton hunk of limestone has already been hoisted onto a pedestal, thanks to a local farmer’s forklift, in its new location, a courtyard on Bound’s estate, historic Horspath Manor.

Fourth “Great Escape” tunnel found under Stalag Luft III

Modern(ish)

Archaeologists excavating Stalag Luft III, the Luftwaffe POW camp in Lower Silesia made famous by Steve McQueen in The Great Escape, have found a fourth tunnel dug after the failure of the attempt immortalized/fictionalized on film. Although historians knew about the existence of this fourth tunnel, named George, and that it was dug underneath the camp theater, its exact location was a mystery.

Using ground-penetrating radar and information from POWs who survived internment, archaeologists spent three weeks looking for George. Now they’ve found it and it still contains a number of artifacts left behind when the Germans hastily evacuated the camp in the middle of the night on January 27, 1945, forcing the 11,000 remaining POWs to march 50 miles in below freezing temperatures deeper behind German lines.

[Artifacts] include yards of wire that inmates stole from the Nazi searchlight power-lines to make electric light in the shaft and tunnel. Also found were numerous “klim tins” – powdered-milk containers – which were hollowed out and used as fat lamps stuck into the side of the tunnel walls when the electricity failed.

Others were joined together to form tubes along which air was pumped for the men digging at the face. Numerous bedboards were used to shore up the workings, and many jagged hinges, bits of old metal pails, hammers and jemmies, used to scour away the sandy soil of the camp, were also excavated.

“It is hardly a treasure in the conventional sense,” said Marek Lazarz, director of the museum that has been built to honour the men of Stalag Luft III. “But it is priceless to us and a time capsule of what life was like back then.

The location turns out to be on the other side of the theater from where experts thought it would be. It ran from under the theater towards the section of the camp where the guards were housed. That’s a counterintuitive choice if your plan is escape, but they could have been aiming for a wooded area between the prison camp and the guard camp. Historians also speculate that perhaps the prisoners were planning to break into the guard barracks to steal weapons to fight their way out and/or to defend themselves from a massacre should Allied troops be closing in.

Since 50 of the 76 prisoners who were able to escape had been executed at Hitler’s personal command, the remaining POWs had very good reason to fear that their jailers would kill them all if it looked like the camp was close to liberation. After the Great Escape, British Intelligence was able to convey orders to the POWs that they were to cease all escape attempts.

According to Squadron Leader Ivor Harris, a prisoner at the camp who ran the makeshift air pump they used to ensure the diggers at the end of the tunnel had breathable air, George was apparently not meant to stage another escape, but rather to be used as “for emergencies only,” which sounds to me like a last resort either for running like hell, fighting or for hiding until Allied troops freed them.

These tunnels really were astonishing pieces of ingenuity and engineering. Underneath the blackish topsoil of the camp was golden sand. The German command had specifically chosen the area because of this contrast, so that if anyone was digging the color of the sand would expose them. Sand is also easy to dig through but very hard to shore up; if you’ve ever dug a tunnel with your hand on the beach you know how it just collapses when you pull your hand out. The Germans also put all the prisoner barracks on stilts to make digging more visible and they put microphones underground so they could hear any excavation noises.

In March of 1943, POWs decided to attempt the impossible. They started digging three tunnels, Tom, Dick and Harry (Nova has a neat interactive map of Harry). They hid the entrance to the tunnels under a chimney, a sewage outlet and a stove in three different barracks. To bypass the microphones, they dug a vertical shaft down deep enough — 9 meters or 30 feet — that the actual tunnel would be dug outside of mic range. They shored up the walls with wooden planks from their bunk beds.

At the base of the shaft, they built three small rooms, a storage chamber for tools and bags of excavated sand, a workshop where they MacGyvered up equipment they needed, and an air pump room where a man constantly pushed a handmade bellows on runners back and forth to send air to the remote digger. The ventilation pipes were made out Klim milk cans, tops and bottoms removed then stuck together.

Those milk cans were also used as lamps initially, filled with mutton fat with a pajama fabric wick. They were so rank and noxious in the confined space of the tunnel, however, that they were soon replaced by actual electric wiring, stolen from German workers who had left it unattended. (The Gestapo executed all those workers after the escape.) The wires were then tapped into the prison circuit board.

Once the POWs started digging the long tunnels, they devised a rope-pull trolley cart system so the digger could send back all the sand he was excavating. That trolley system would also be used to transport the diggers as the tunnel got longer, and transport men the night of the escape. Since the entire tunnel was just two feet by two feet — the size of bed boards used to shore up the walls after digging — and since Harry ended up being the length of a football field, that trolley system was key to the escape plan.

Six hundred POWs worked on the tunnels, but only 200 of them would get a chance to use Harry. The men who were judged to have worked the most, ones who could speak German, ones who had a history of escape were all given priority. The rest drew lots. Once the 200 were selected, they waited for a moonless night to make their attempt. March 24, 1944, was that night.

It didn’t go well from the beginning. The trap door to Harry was frozen shut. It took them an hour and a half of precious time to get the damn thing open. Harry ended up just a little short, 30 feet from the forest, 45 feet from the guard tower, so even once they were able to start sending POWs through, they had to slow down the process drastically to avoid sentries spotting them. Then an air raid killed the power and part of the tunnel collapsed and had to be rebuilt. That’s why the planned 200 escapees ended up being just 76.

Seventy-three of them were promptly recaptured, 50 of them executed, 17 returned to Stalag Luft III, four were sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp where they promptly proceeded to dig a tunnel and escape four months later. Sadly, they were again recaptured. Two Norwegian RAF pilots made it to neutral Sweden after three and a half months in Nazi territory. One Dutch RAF pilot escaped through France to the British Consulate in Spain.

In the aftermath of the escape, the Germans took inventory and discovered just how much material had gone into this daring plan: 4,000 bed boards, 90 double bunk beds, 635 mattresses, 192 bed covers, 161 pillow cases, 52 20-man tables, 10 single tables, 34 chairs, 76 benches, 1,212 bed bolsters, 1,370 beading battens, 1219 knives, 478 spoons, 582 forks, 69 lamps, 246 water cans, 30 shovels, 1,000 feet of electric wire, 600 feet of rope, 3424 towels, 1,700 blankets and over 1,400 Klim cans.

It’s a testament to the massive testes on these guys that as soon as the heat died down a little, they started all over again with George even though the guards were now counting bed boards every day.

Unique 1775 broadside asks pacifists to pay for war

Modern(ish), Museums

Lehigh University professor Scott Gordon found what he believes to be the only copy left in existence of a Revolutionary War broadside in the Lititz Moravian Church Archives and Museum in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Broadsides were printed posters hung in public places or read aloud to get the word out in the days before mass media.

This particular one was published on July 11, 1775, by the Committee of Correspondence and Observation for the County of Lancaster on behalf of the Continental Congress. It was an appeal to people who had religious objections to volunteering to taking up arms against the British that they might instead contribute money to the war effort. At least 200 copies were printed, some in English, some in German. According to the Professor Gordon’s extensive research, this is the only surviving English copy, and the only surviving intact copy. The Library of Congress has a fragment of the German version.

There were a great many German immigrants in Lancaster County. The town of Lititz, where the broadside is on display, was founded in the 1740s as a closed Moravian Church community. The Moravian denomination was pacifist (which didn’t stop William Henry, Esq., the first committee member listed on the broadside, from becoming a very successful gunsmith), as were other Christian denominations prevalent among people of German extraction, like the Amish and Anabaptists. The broadside basically goads these conscientious objectors to give money, strongly implying that their pacifism might be seen as a cover for stinginess rather than a dearly held principle.

The Committee do therefore join in earnestly recommending it to such Denominations of People, in this County, whose religious Scruples forbid them to associate or bear Arms, that they contribute towards the necessary and unavoidable Expences of the Public, in such Proportion as may leave no Room, with any, to suspect that they would ungenerously avail themselves of the Indulgence granted them; or, under a Pretence of Conscience and religious Scruples, keep their Money in their Pockets, and thereby throw those Burthens upon a Part of the Community, which, in a Cause that affects all, should be borne by all.

The broadside has been on display at the Lititz Moravian Church museum since at least the 1970s; it’s just that nobody realized it was so rare as to be one-of-a-kind. Dorothy Earhart has been giving tours at the museum since the 1960s and she thinks the paper has probably been kept at the church ever since the minister received it from the committee in 1775. He would have read the German translation aloud to his congregation and passed it around. Earhart thinks that since the German-speaking congregants had little use for the English version, the minister just filed it away and forgot about it.

The message “is of special significance to us as Moravians, as noncombatants,” [Earhart] added. “It’s very special to our community … and it’s kind of neat to have the only surviving copy.”

Moravians supported the Continental Army — “not the war, the army,” Earhart stressed — with food, clothes and medicine. In fact, another document in the showcase is a copy of a letter from Washington to Moravian Bishop John Ettwein regarding a military hospital in Lititz.

The museum will keep the broadside on display. It’s in excellent condition so whatever they’ve been doing for the past 236 years they just need to keep doing.