THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, February 22, 1997 TAG: 9702220263
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY TONY WHARTON, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: PORTSMOUTH LENGTH: 92 lines
Ship's ribs, planks, and a keel jut from gray, squelchy clay - not much to look at.
In fact, this 200-year-old skeleton of Colonial America harks back to Portsmouth's shipbuilding glory, and it still has power.
Construction of a new ferry slip was halted when the wreck was uncovered last week on the Portsmouth waterfront. It has astonished archaeologists.
``If that is a Southern-built ship, you could learn a lot,'' said William Kelso, now excavating colonial Jamestown. Though he doesn't work primarily in marine archaeology, he published a study called ``Shipbuilding in Virginia'' in the 1970s.
``There were no ship plans available that I could discover,'' he said. ``All we knew of the ships was their size in tonnage, maybe something of the rigging, and the place of manufacture.''
Often, that was Portsmouth. Named after one of the great seaports of England, the city has been a shipbuilding center in America from its birth, and its vessels have covered the globe.
Gosport, the city's great 18th-century shipyard, could easily have built this ship.
Last week, all anyone knew at first was that they had uncovered, 15-20 feet below the ground, the remains of a sizable ship, lying partly on its side. The oyster shells around it showed the old riverbed.
When several regional experts came to the site to assess, and perhaps eventually excavate, the ship's remains, they reached some tentative conclusions:
It was built in the late 1700s or early 1800s. That's based on construction techniques - wooden pegs joining the timbers are easily visible - and other indications.
It was a good-sized vessel, possibly capable of sailing on the ocean, and may even have been a warship.
There are few signs of marine parasite damage to the timbers, so it probably was fairly new, maybe less than a year old, when it sank.
The timbers are pine and other lumber used in this region. That means it may have been built here.
That last observation, combined with its age, makes the wreck a very rare find, possibly even unique.
``We only have a very few 18th-century wrecks, not more than a dozen, that have been discovered and verified in Virginia,'' said John D. Broadwater, the aptly named manager of the Monitor National Marine Sanctuary off North Carolina.
As a senior Virginia archaeologist, he worked on a state survey in the 1980s that identified about 2,000 shipwrecks in Virginia waters. The vast majority of those known are from the 19th and 20th centuries.
Broadwater helped excavate the wrecks of nine ships at Yorktown associated with that Revolutionary War battle in 1781. From the same period, there are two more in the Chickahominy River.
None of those is known to have been built in Virginia.
But many ships were, even if they haven't been found. As early as 1620, Portsmouth shipwrights were carving out vessels from local forests. Gosport shipyard, the most famous, was burned by the British in 1779, and relatively few details survive of shipbuilding methods in Hampton Roads at that time.
``There was a whole lot more shipbuilding going on in Virginia in the mid-18th century than people realized,'' Kelso said. ``It had been downplayed by the historians.''
The site of the wreck is historic ground, said Portsmouth historian Alan Flanders, who predicted nine months ago the construction would hit pay dirt, archaeologically speaking. He noted that in the last decade, a British cannon was found in the same area, and significant colonial artifacts came up at the site of the old Crawford house.
A schedule of excavation for the ship hasn't been established yet. The Portsmouth regional office of the state Department of Historic Resources will coordinate efforts to evaluate, measure and remove the wreck from the site.
It's underground and not under water because Portsmouth's seawall shut off that area from the river and it was filled. Numerous pilings have been driven through the ship.
It needs to be removed, whether by archaeologists or not, because the city is nearing completion of a new, semi-enclosed slip for the Norfolk-Portsmouth ferry. The area being excavated will be flooded by the Southern Branch of the Elizabeth River, reclaimed by the waters that covered it before. ILLUSTRATION: [Color Photo]
VESSEL'S SKELETON UNEARTHED
LAWRENCE JACKSON/The Virginian-Pilot
Remains of what historians think is an 18th century ship rest in a
construction site where work on a new ferry landing has been halted.
The ship's ribs and planks are visible. The upright pilings in the
center are from later construction.
STEVE EARLEY/The Virginian-Pilot
Workers excavating the Portsmouth waterfront at High Street for a
new ferry landing have found what appears to be an 18th century ship
buried in the mud behind the Seawall. Work on the ferry facility has
been suspended.