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notes
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Water Street Wreck:
An 18th-Century
Merchantman in Manhattan
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Co-Directors: Warren C. Riess and Sheli O. Smith.
Excavation date:
Winter 1982.
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During an archaeological investigation of a construction site in
January, 1982 at 175 Water Street in lower Manhattan, the hull of an
merchant ship was discovered in colonial era landfill. The
developer of the site, Howard Ronson, for whom the wreck has also
been named, made possible a recording of the hull by personnel from
INA, the Nautical Archaeology
Program at Texas A&M University, New York-based archaeologists,
and a number of volunteers.
The hull dated to
the 18th century, the first such find of a merchant ship from that
period. The ship, 25 m. (82ft.) long between perpendiculars,
was constructed oak with a sheathing layer of softwood overlaying a
mastic of animal hair and pitch.
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Inside the hull.
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The ship was a
British merchant frigate, built to sail in shallow as well as deep
water, and probably constructed in Virginia or the Carolinas between
1710 and 1720. She possibly served as a tobacco carrier
between the Chesapeake colonies and Britain. Artifacts in the
hull suggest she was buried in Manhattan in mid-century. The reasons
why this southern vessel wound up in New York are unclear, but she
may have spent her last years as a storage hulk before being turned
into cribbage.
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The hull during excavation.
View forward to aft.
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As the entire hull
was too expensive to remove, conserve, and display, the bow of the
ship was saved for conservation. It is now housed in the
Mariner's Museum in Newport News, Virginia.
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A view of the bow inside, and out.
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See: "Rosloff
Model Displayed at Mariner's Museum," INA Newsletter, 13.4
(1987): 9. |
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Photographs from the Peter Throckmorton Collection, INA Archives.
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For further reading:
Warren Riess and
Sheli O. Smith, "The Ronson Ship,"
Sea History (Summer 1983): 20-22.
Warren Riess,
"The Ronson Ship: The Study of an Eighteenth Century Merchantman
Excavated in Manhattan, New York in 1982," Dissertation,
University of New Hampshire, 1987.
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Jay Rosloff, "The Water Street Ship: Preliminary Analysis of an
Eighteenth-Century Merchant Ship's Bow." Master's Thesis,
Nautical Archaeology Program, Texas A&M University, 1986.
J. Richard Steffy,
"The Thirteen Colonies: English Settlers and Seafarers," in
Ships and Shipwrecks of the Americas, ed. G. F. Bass (Thames
and Hudson, 1988), pp. 107-128.
J. Richard Steffy,
"The Ronson Ship," in
Wooden Ship Building and the Interpretation of Shipwrecks (Texas
A&M University Press, 1994), pp. 168-70.
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