The Ship That Held Up Wall Street
112
The Ship That Held Up Wall Street
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Overview
In January 1982, archaeologists conducting a pre-construction excavation at 175 Water Street in Lower Manhattan found the remains of an eighteenth-century ship.
Uncertain of what they had found or what its value might be, they called in two nautical archaeologists—Warren Riess and Sheli Smith—to direct the excavation and analysis of the ship’s remains. As it turned out, the mystery ship’s age and type meant that its careful study would help answer some important questions about the commerce and transportation of an earlier era of American history.
The Ship that Held Up Wall Street tells the whole story of the discovery, excavation, and study of what came to be called the “Ronson ship site,” named for the site’s developer, Howard Ronson. Entombed for more than two hundred years, the Princess Carolina proved to be the first major discovery of a colonial merchant ship.
Years of arduous analytical work have led to critical breakthroughs revealing how the ship was designed and constructed, its probable identity as a vessel built in Charleston, South Carolina, its history as a merchant ship, and why and how it came to be buried in Manhattan.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781623492267 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Texas A&M University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/14/2014 |
| Series: | Ed Rachal Foundation Nautical Archaeology Series |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 112 |
| File size: | 10 MB |
About the Author
WARREN C. RIESS, a research associate professor in the departments of history, anthropology, and marine sciences at the University of Maine, was principal investigator of the Ronson ship site. SHELI O. SMITH was co-investigator of the Ronson project.
Read an Excerpt
The Ship That Held Up Wall Street
By Warren C. Riess, Sheli O. Smith
Texas A&M University Press
Copyright © 2015 Warren C. RiessAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-62349-226-7
CHAPTER 1
A Ship in Manhattan
LATE 1730S, MANHATTAN
On the east side of New York a small group of landowners met, possibly looking out over the East River in front of their properties. The city had recently granted each of them the section of the East River across the street from their lot in order to create a new city block and allow ships and boats to approach a dry quay. If they accomplished the development within ten years they would each own a lot of new land, increasing their real estate. To save money and time they agreed to coordinate their efforts and bring in logs for cribbing and rocks, dirt, and trash-laden soil for fill to build the new land. As an outer wall for half of the block they decided to use a retired ship.
JANUARY 5, 1982, FINANCIAL DISTRICT OF MANHATTAN
On Tuesday, as Fred Harvey slowly removed his backhoe's bucket from Deep Test No. 4, the eastern mud wall of the hole suddenly collapsed, revealing a large wooden structure. Archaeologists George Meyers and Bert Herbert took a close look, expecting to find more log cribbing similar to what they had seen elsewhere on the block. However, this wall was covered with horizontal planks, and the wall curved away from the hole as it descended into the earth. The three men exchanged looks: was this an old ship? If so, it was a wonderful discovery, but it came at a terrible time—the archaeologists were required to pack up and leave the block in just three weeks to make room for construction crews.
Howard Ronson's HRO International, owner and developer of the block on which he intended to construct a thirty-story office building, had hired Soil Systems, Inc. (SSI) to conduct any research and tests that were required by the engineers, city, or state before construction. SSI in turn had hired Dr. Joan Geismar of New York City in 1981 to direct the required archaeological investigation of the block. She began on October 30 with a crew of fifty-three people. Through November, December, and January Geismar's crew carefully excavated and recorded approximately one-sixth of the block, mostly former backyards located in the middle third of the block. For the rest of the block she chose four locations for "deep tests," wherein a backhoe operator excavated four-by-ten-foot trenches that were systematically sampled to recover artifacts and into which Bert Herbert descended to record the landfill levels and artifacts in each wall of the trench. That information would help Geismar understand how the rest of the block related to the one section she could study carefully. It was in the last planned trench, Deep Test No. 4, which she had chosen because it would contain the deepest landfill on the block, that they found the ship.
Within a week of the discovery Sheli Smith and I received a call from Jim Ahlberg, regional manager of SSI. "Can you come to Manhattan?" he asked, "We found an old ship." While both of us specialized in the nautical archaeology of colonial ships, I was the one available for a quick trip. Colonial merchant ships were my special interest, and less than a month earlier I had finished an in-depth study in graduate school of Atlantic ships and merchant shipping in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, so I felt well prepared.
I was only going to be in Manhattan for a day or two, so I packed a small bag with a notebook, camera, one change of clothing, and rubber boots. The next morning I drove to the Portland Jetport before dawn and flew to JFK airport outside New York City. I was excited about the opportunity to see remains of the newly found colonial ship, if that was what had been found.
In San Francisco a few years earlier, construction excavators had unearthed a gold rush era ship. Because each day would cost the developer thousands of dollars for the construction crews and machinery to remain idle, archaeologists had been given less than a week to make a quick survey and save a section of the vessel before the rest was torn to pieces with construction machinery. I hoped to get a more detailed look at the New York ship but was prepared to make a quick survey if necessary.
From our phone conversation I was not sure where the site was in the city; I only had an address, which I gave to the cab driver at the airport while I regretted forgetting to bring a Manhattan street map. As I rode into the city, snow from a pending storm started to fall; while snowflakes would linger pleasantly on the fields and trees in Maine, I thought they would probably become a gray nuisance in one of the world's busiest cities. Two blocks inland from the East River in the Wall Street area the taxi stopped at a block surrounded by a twelve-foot-high plywood fence that was dwarfed by skyscrapers on three sides. I paid the cabbie and walked halfway around the block to find an insignificant door through the fence. Inside was a one-acre scene of many people industriously involved in archaeological tasks: digging, measuring, sketching, and photographing historic foundations and walls of logs. It reminded me of a Hollywood archaeology set, but this was not a sand-covered, sun-drenched Egyptian waste-land. The archaeologists here toiled in shin-deep mud, shadowed by office buildings, their clothing smudged with frozen mud.
Joan Geismar and Jim Ahlberg were there to meet me, but introductions had to be quick. Within five minutes I stepped into a backhoe bucket that slowly lowered me into the Deep Test No. 4 hole. Heavy clouds and falling snow blocked the sun, making the interior of the wet trench quite dark. While my eyes adjusted, my face broadened into a smile as the outside of an old wooden ship's hull became apparent. From the type and size of the timbers, the position of a small gunport, and the fact that the planks were partially covered with animal hair, pitch, and wooden sheathing, I realized that this was a large eighteenth-century merchant ship. One of the first such ships to be found in the world, and possibly the best preserved, it appeared to be intact from a few feet above the lower deck down to the keel at the bottom of the ship.
Debbie Brodie, an archaeologist working on the site, joined me in the trench and we quickly measured and sketched what we could see of the vessel. Always conscious of being surrounded by ten feet of soft wet mud that could collapse at any moment, we worked rapidly. Debbie drew the overall structure, while I found and recorded details that were clues to the ship's identity and previous use. Among other things, I noticed that only a few boards of its thin outer sheathing remained, suggesting to me that after its sailing days the ship had been laid up, possibly for years in the harbor, before being entombed.
My excitement grew as I contemplated the significance of the ship's remains. In December I had submitted a semester research paper in graduate school about the development of the British Empire in the first half of the eighteenth century. One of the key reasons for the empire's economic success was the halving of the expense of transatlantic shipping between 1713 and 1754. Several factors led to the lower cost, possibly including more economical ships; but until someone found and studied an early eighteenth-century British merchant ship, that remained only a hypothesis. Now, one month later, it appeared that I was looking at the outside of just such a ship. But what was it doing here?
Back at street level after two hours in the deep-test trench, I learned that Norman Brouwer, historian at the South Street Seaport Museum, had also identified the ship as a 1700s merchantman. This jogged my memory—Brouwer had written an article four years earlier about discovering that one of the museum's buildings was constructed directly on the remains of an old wooden ship. Unfortunately archaeologists were unable to investigate much of the ship without destabilizing the building's foundation. "Where is the museum from here?" I asked. It was only one block north of us. Joan, Jim, and I retreated to a warm, dry deli across the street to discuss the history of the site, the importance of the ship remains, and what should be done about this amazing find.
Over hot coffee and a pastry, Joan explained that the site had been a shallow portion of the East River that New Yorkers had filled in the mid-1700s. It became a commercial block supporting three-story buildings until the twentieth century, then served as a parking lot for a few years, and now HRO was sponsoring her archaeological investigation in preparation to construct a modern office building. She assumed the ship was part of the eighteenth-century filling process, but no one could be sure until someone took a more thorough look at it. Their contract with HRO, approved by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, required all archaeology to cease on January 31. Since it would be necessary to construct the planned office building on hundreds of sixty-foot-long pilings, all archaeological remains, including the ship, would be quickly destroyed, removed, and trucked away. Joan and Jim asked me how important I thought the ship's remains might be.
IN AMERICA'S COLONIAL PERIOD numerous merchant ships were plying the oceans as the foremost means of communications among the peoples of the world. From the beginning of civilization to the mid-twentieth century, merchant ships were the carriers of people, culture, raw materials, manufactured goods, food, news, and disease between communities separated by large bodies of water. Even for communities connected by land, travel and communication by ships and coastal boats was often faster, safer, and less expensive than by land.
To a developing colonial empire, merchant ships were the equivalent of red blood cells in an adolescent human. Red blood cells move to all living cells of a body to provide nutrients and oxygen in exchange for waste or surplus material. Efficient red blood cells help a young body stay healthy and grow. In the eighteenth century, the more efficiently merchant ships could transport necessary cargo to various parts of an empire, the healthier would be the empire and the faster it could expand.
A better understanding of the transatlantic vessels' designs and an evaluation of their efficiency would provide important insight into the colonial period, for overseas trade helped shape the economic history of the British Empire, including its American colonies. Unfortunately however, merchant ships lacked the glamor to capture the imagination of either eighteenth-century or modern readers and writers. As a result we knew little about them.
Historians have rarely considered colonial era merchant ships as anything other than wooden containers that ferried people and cargo to and from various places. This superficial treatment comes more from a lack of surviving records than from a lack of professional interest. The paucity of surviving documents is probably due to the low priority eighteenth-century clerks gave to creating and preserving records on such a mundane subject. Even with today's interest in the preservation of records, only a few repositories preserve information concerning modern merchantmen.
Archival information on early eighteenth-century transatlantic ships was limited to registration records of port officials, a few visual representations that show the upper works and hulls of various ships, and few written descriptions. The only known detailed illustrations of eighteenth-century merchantmen were published in Sweden by Fredrik Chapman in 1768.
Archaeological evidence in 1982 also was meager. Due to a lack of protective legislation, would-be treasure salvors were destroying many colonial ship sites underwater and previous construction had destroyed a few in harbors. Nautical archaeologists, by chance and preference, had investigated only a few colonial era merchant vessels worldwide, mostly underwater with a few buried in ports, and none were the common British transatlantic cargo carriers of the early eighteenth century.
The ship that lay buried at 175 Water Street was a possible source of heretofore unknown information about eighteenth-century commercial vessels and the people who designed, built, owned, sailed, and used them. I felt certain that we could extricate information from the site that would help us understand the design, construction, and utility of merchant ships; we might also gain insight into the colonial merchant trade in general. Were we to determine this ship's identity, we could learn more precisely the role it played in America's early trade and the British Empire's expansion.
I replied to Joan and Jim, "Very important." They listened to my reasoning, discussed my comments for a short time, and then agreed. Given that at this point no one knew how much remained of the ship or possible cargo within it, they requested, and quickly received HRO's and the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission's permission to carefully conduct a ten-by-ten-foot reconnaissance excavation within the hull of the ship during the remaining two weeks of January, before construction crews were due on the site. Our hope was that we could learn enough to determine properly whether a more thorough investigation of the ship would be worth the necessary resources. I called home for Sheli to join us as soon as possible, repeating, "It's the whole side of the ship!" Then I checked in at the Vista Hotel at the World Trade Center.
That night I had dinner with Jim and afterward, in the midst of the snow storm, we enjoyed ourselves taking in the sights and having a couple of drinks along Manhattan's then notorious 42nd Street. To relieve daytime tension, businessmen like to keep "off the clock" conversations to anything but business, which is what we did too. But it was not easy, for as our daughter would say, archaeologists are both blessed and cursed with a passion. We have no off hours. We want to talk about interesting finds, research, and analyses all the time. A buried ship was taunting me with a probable treasure trove of significant information, and I was eager to make the site the topic of conversation. I had to bite my tongue through the entire evening.
Snow blanketed Manhattan the next morning, yet everything in the city seemed to be running on schedule. Not much could slow the industrious New Yorkers. I arrived at the site to begin excavating inside the ship's hull. Eight feet of twentieth- and nineteenth-century rubble covered the ship's remains, and we needed to remove it quickly to study the ship. Joan told me she would have Fred Harvey, one of the heavy equipment operators at the site, do so with his backhoe. Having only experienced backhoes being used to dig crude irrigation holes and trenches quickly, I shook my head and told her no backhoe should get within four feet of the ship's fragile timbers. Without saying another word to me, she asked Fred to use his backhoe to pick up a particular ceramic shard off a foundation wall twenty feet away and put it in my hand. With consummate delicacy he picked it up with one of the bucket's teeth, swung his machine's arm in a graceful arc, and gently placed it in my open palm.
An hour later Fred had cleared away the surface layer of pavement and the underlying eight feet of rubble with his backhoe, just to the east of Deep Test No. 4, where I thought we would be within the ship's hull. Bert Herbert, George Myers, and I initiated our excavation with shovels and trowels using standard archaeological methods. We quickly found four large oak deck beams and a supporting oak hanging knee (see glossary). Below them was a layer of white coral sand and below that was a layer of granite cobblestones. It looked as if we were indeed within the hull, which had possibly been filled with excess ballast from other ships. Just a few small eighteenth-century ceramic shards were mixed in the sand and cobble layers.
During the second day of excavating the reconnaissance pit, just as Sheli arrived from Maine, we uncovered a deck within the ship, twelve feet below the present street level. We were elated. The deck was made of hard pine planks, eight to ten inches wide. It appeared to be the lower of two decks on the ship, for it was approximately four feet below the deck beam and knee found on the first day. We estimated that this vessel was probably intact from five feet above the waterline to the keel.
Within the first week of excavation the square pit revealed much more of the hull. A small gunport, designed to allow a cannon to fire through the hull, was on the western side. An iron ring was fastened to either side of the gunport with a large wrought iron staple. Sailors used these rings to anchor the retaining lines and tackle for the cannon. On the east side of the pit was a stanchion protruding from a large cargo hatch in the deck. This stanchion, sometimes called a monkey pole, was used both to support a deck beam at the hatch and to provide a climbing pole for the crew. It was notched approximately every fifteen inches for steps. Also on the deck was a smaller hatch that had been planked-over some time before the ship had been buried.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Ship That Held Up Wall Street by Warren C. Riess, Sheli O. Smith. Copyright © 2015 Warren C. Riess. Excerpted by permission of Texas A&M University Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
PREFACE,ACKNOWLEDGMENTS,
1. A Ship in Manhattan,
2. Atlantic and Manhattan History,
3. February, Major Excavation Operations,
4. Preservation for the Future,
5. A Close Look at the Ship,
6. Identifying the Ship,
7. Princess Carolina,
8. Development of 175 Water Street, Manhattan,
Postscript,
NOTES,
GLOSSARY OF SHIP AND ARCHAEOLOGY TERMS USED,
INDEX,