The Revolutionary War-Era Boat: A Tale of Discovery, Preservation, and Mystery
In the heart of Manhattan's World Trade Center site, a remarkable discovery was made 15 years ago: the remains of a boat built during the Revolutionary War that had been buried for over two centuries. Now, over 600 pieces of the 50-foot (15-meter) vessel are being meticulously put back together at the New York State Museum, where the boat is becoming a museum exhibit after years on the water and centuries underground.
The boat's timbers were discovered by a crew working on an underground parking facility near the site of the former Twin Towers before the 9/11 attacks. The wood was muddy but well-preserved after centuries in the oxygen-poor earth. A slurry wall that had been constructed went right through the boat, but timbers comprising about 30 feet (9 meters) of its rear and middle sections were carefully recovered. Part of the bow was recovered the next summer on the other side of the subterranean wall.
The timbers were shipped to Texas A&M's Center for Maritime Archaeology and Conservation for further analysis and preservation. Each of the 600 pieces underwent a three-dimensional scan and spent years in preservative fluids before being placed in a giant freeze-dryer to remove moisture. They were then wrapped in more than a mile of foam and shipped to the state museum in Albany, which is 130 miles (209 kilometers) up the Hudson River from lower Manhattan but boasts enough space to display the ship.
The reconstruction work is being done in an exhibition space, so visitors can watch the weathered wooden skeleton slowly take the form of a partially reconstructed boat. Work is expected to finish around the end of the month, said Peter Fix, an associate research scientist at the Center for Maritime Archaeology and Conservation who is overseeing the rebuilding.
Researchers believe the ship was a gunboat built in 1775 to defend Philadelphia, but they still don't know all the places it traveled to or why it ended up apparently neglected along the Manhattan shore before ending up in a landfill around the 1790s. "The public can come and contemplate the mysteries around this ship," said Michael Lucas, the museum's curator of historical archaeology. "Because like anything from the past, we have pieces of information. We don't have the whole story."
Analysis of the timbers showed they came from trees cut down in the Philadelphia area in the early 1770s, pointing to the ship being built in a yard near the city. It was probably built hastily, with knotty wood and iron spikes used to fasten timbers, allowing for faster construction though the metal corrodes over time in seawater. Researchers now hypothesize that the boat was built in Philadelphia in the summer of 1775, months after the first shots of the Revolutionary War were fired at Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts. Thirteen gunboats were built that summer to protect Philadelphia from potential hostile forces coming up the Delaware River. The gunboats featured cannons pointing from their bows and could carry 30 or more men.
"They were really pushing, pushing, pushing to get these boats out there to stop any British that might start coming up the Delaware," said Fix. Historical records indicate at least one of those 13 gunboats was later taken by the British, and there is some evidence that the boat now being restored was used by them, including a pewter button with "52" inscribed on it, likely from the uniform of a soldier with the British Army's 52nd Regiment of Foot, which was active in various battles during
