The Gudgeon Did It: A Small Detail Settles a Maritime Mystery
Forget whether it was brig or brigantine. The archaeologists who are trying to decipher the 18th-century ship recovered this summer from an old landfill at the World Trade Center site had to agree first on whether they were looking at its bow or its stern....
It wasn’t until the wooden elements of the hull were gingerly removed by AKRF, a consulting firm, from the excavation site in Lower Manhattan, cleaned up at the Maryland Archaeological Conservation Laboratory and inspected by shipwrights from Mystic Seaport in Connecticut and other nautical archaeologists that the question was settled.
A gudgeon helped seal the case....
The overall dimensions of the vessel allowed Dr. Riess, with some confidence, to tell the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation on July 29 that the vessel was most likely a brigantine, the two-masted workhorse of the coastal trade....
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It wasn’t until the wooden elements of the hull were gingerly removed by AKRF, a consulting firm, from the excavation site in Lower Manhattan, cleaned up at the Maryland Archaeological Conservation Laboratory and inspected by shipwrights from Mystic Seaport in Connecticut and other nautical archaeologists that the question was settled.
A gudgeon helped seal the case....
The overall dimensions of the vessel allowed Dr. Riess, with some confidence, to tell the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation on July 29 that the vessel was most likely a brigantine, the two-masted workhorse of the coastal trade....