Md. center studies ship's remains found at World Trade Center site
Once, this was a stout ship, with oak futtocks and floor timbers, fastened with iron nails, built with saw and adz and the calloused hands of shipwrights now long dead.
Two centuries ago, it was a simple coaster, hauling goods around the eastern capes, armed against pirates, and ending its days at a wharf in New York City. As the years went by, it sank into the harbor mud, entombed beneath what would one day become the World Trade Center site.
Shortly after noon Monday, two trucks bearing the ship's unearthed skeleton pulled into a Maryland science complex on the shore of the Patuxent River in St. Leonard, where scores of eager archaeologists and curators waited as if for the bones of a dinosaur.
There, over the next few hours, workers in lab coats and T-shirts unloaded the pieces one at a time, arrayed most of them on tarps and, with hose and sponge, toothbrush and bare hands, scrubbed away the muck of 200 years.
And there, over the next few weeks, scientists hope to discover when the ship was built, where it traveled, exactly how big it was and more about the bygone world in which it sailed....
Read entire article at WaPo
Two centuries ago, it was a simple coaster, hauling goods around the eastern capes, armed against pirates, and ending its days at a wharf in New York City. As the years went by, it sank into the harbor mud, entombed beneath what would one day become the World Trade Center site.
Shortly after noon Monday, two trucks bearing the ship's unearthed skeleton pulled into a Maryland science complex on the shore of the Patuxent River in St. Leonard, where scores of eager archaeologists and curators waited as if for the bones of a dinosaur.
There, over the next few hours, workers in lab coats and T-shirts unloaded the pieces one at a time, arrayed most of them on tarps and, with hose and sponge, toothbrush and bare hands, scrubbed away the muck of 200 years.
And there, over the next few weeks, scientists hope to discover when the ship was built, where it traveled, exactly how big it was and more about the bygone world in which it sailed....