ALBANY, NY – The workers digging on the site of the World Trade Center of the Manhattan 15 years ago made an unlikely discovery: the wood soaked in a boat built during the revolutionary war that had been buried more than two centuries before.
Now, more than 600 pieces of the 50 -foot container are gathering carefully in the New York State Museum. After years in the water and centuries underground, the boat is becoming an exhibition of museums.
Arrayed as pieces of giant puzzles on the museum’s floor, the research attendees and the volunteers recently spent weeks cleaning the wood with selections and brushes before the reconstruction could begin.
Although researchers believe that the ship was a gunbar built in 1775 to defend Philadelphia, they still do not know all the places they were traveling to or why it ended up apparently neglected along the Manhattan coast before finishing in a landfill around the 1790s.
“The public can come and contemplate the mysteries around this ship,” said Michael Lucas, a curator of historical archeology of the museum. “Because as anything from the past, we have information. We don’t have all history.”
From the landfill to the museum piece
The reconstruction of the years of rescue and preservation work that began in July 2010 when a section of the boat was found 22 feet below the street level.
The curved woods of the helmet were discovered by a crew that worked in an underground parking installation on the World Trade Center site, near where the twin towers were before the September 11 attacks.
The wood was muddy, but well preserved after centuries in the poor land of oxygen. A previously built grout wall crossed the boat, although wood that comprise about 30 feet of their rear and intermediate sections were carefully recovered. Part of the arch was recovered next summer on the other side of the underground wall.
The woods were sent to more than 1,400 miles to the center of Texas A&M for archeology and maritime conservation.
Each of the 600 pieces underwent a three -dimensional exploration and spent years in preservative fluids before placing itself in a giant freezer to eliminate moisture. They were then wrapped in more than one foam mile and sent to the State Museum in Albany.
While the museum is 130 miles along the Hudson River from bass Manhattan, it has enough space to exhibit the ship. The reconstruction work is being carried out in an exhibition space, so visitors can see the slowly worn wood skeleton take the form of a partially reconstructed boat.
The work is expected to end around the end of the month, said Peter Fix, an associated research scientist at the Maritime Archeology and Conservation Center that supervises reconstruction.
On a recent day, Lucas took time to talk to the visitors of the museum that passed on the boat and how he found himself.
Explaining the work that takes place behind him, he told a group: “Who would have thought of a million years:” Someday, this will be in a museum? “
A nautical mystery remains
The researchers knew they found a boat under the streets of Manhattan. But what kind?
The analysis of the woods showed that they came from cut trees in the Philadelphia area in the early 1770s, pointing out the ship that is built in a patio near the city.
It was probably built hurriedly. The wood is noda, and the woods were held with iron peaks. That allowed a faster construction, although the metal is corrode over time in seawater.
The researchers now pose the hypothesis that the boat was built in Philadelphia in the summer of 1775, months after the first shots of the revolutionary war in Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts were fired. That summer thirteen worms were built to protect philadelphia from potential hostile forces that approach the Delaware river. The guns had cannons pointing from their arches and could transport 30 or more men.
“They were really pushing, pushing, pushing to get these ships to stop any British who can begin to emerge the delaware,” Fix said.
Historical records indicate that at least one of those 13 cannons was later taken by the British. And there is some evidence that the boat that was now restored was used by the British, including a peel button with “52” inscribed in it. That probably came from the soldier uniform with the 52nd Foot Regiment of the British Army, which was active in the war.
It is also possible that the ship headed to the South to the Caribbean, where the British redirected thousands of troops during the war. Their woods show signs of damages known as boat worms, which are native of warmer waters.
Even so, it is not clear how the boat ended in Manhattan and why it apparently spent years partially in the water along the coast. In the 1790s, he was out of service and then covered himself as part of a project to expand Manhattan to the Hudson River. At that time, the mast and other parts of the Revolutionary War ship had apparently be stripped.
“It’s a piece of important history,” Lucas said. “It is also a good artifact in which you can really build many stories.”
