All the Best Rubbish

by Ivor Noel Hume

  The most spectacular haul to be sold in America in this century was the loot recovered from the Spanish fleet wrecked off the Florida shore near Cape Canaveral on July 31, 1715. When sold at the Parke-Bernet Galleries in New York in 1967, the treasure realized $227,450 and was described in the catalogue as “the richest haul of sunken treasure ever to appear at public auction.” Carried away by the romance of it all, the usually reserved auction house preceded the sale with a public exhibition—complete with reconstructed captain’s cabin, canned thunder and lightning, and a live macaw, presumably standing in for Long John Silver’s parrot. The lots were primarily specie divided into 240 units, ranging from single specimens to clusters of coins fused together and sold by weight; but for those who preferred their bullion in lumps, buyers could bid for ingots of gold and silver. For my part, I find wealth in these forms about as exciting as fat-and-fortyish barmaids, and having examined one poorly struck Spanish coin, I consider I have seen enough. Fortunately for the salvors, this Philistine’s view was not shared by the bidders.

  By far the most beautiful and, to my mind, desirable object in the Parke-Bernet sale was a Chinese gold whistle fashioned in the shape of an open-mouthed dragon, a thing of exquisite delicacy attached to an equally delicate chain more than eleven feet long and comprising 2,176 gold links (Fig. 27). The whistle is claimed to have belonged to the commander of the fleet, Captain-General Juan Estéban de Ubilla, whose ship was one of those that foundered off the Florida shore. The sale catalogue states that the object was recovered from the wreck of the flagship, and one immediately has visions of the whistle being scooped up from the seabed by a diver who rises to the surface with the gold chain streaming out behind him like the glittering tail of a submarine comet. He breaks the surface in an exuberance of white spray, holding aloft his trophy and eloquently crying “Eureka!” or more probably, “Hey, man, look what I got me!” But in fact that was not the way it happened. This $50,000 bauble was found on the beach.

  27. Found on the Florida shore near Cape Canaveral, this gold whistle and chain is one of the most valuable baubles ever retrieved from an American shipwreck. The remarkable object was made in the Orient for the European market and is believed to have been the emblem of office thrown overboard by Captain-General Juan Estéban de Ubilla as his Spanish Plate Fleet foundered in the hurricane of July 31, 1715.

  Simply picking things up is undoubtedly the ideal method of discovering monetary treasure or assembling a collection of anything from seashells to old bottles. The trick is to know where to look—and to get there first. Seashells, of course, are found on the seashore, but relics of antiquarian interest generally are not—the Spaniard’s whistle notwithstanding. Rivers, on the other hand, were recognized repositories for the detritus of history long before the word pollution found a place in the English language, indeed, before there was an English language. Ever since man emerged from his cave, he has settled either on high ground for self-preservation or on low ground by the riverside for self-propulsion, and for extracting food from the water while replacing it with garbage. Thus the world’s rivers have become storehouses of the past’s unwanted treasures. Because their wet silt preserved organic materials that would otherwise have quickly rotted away, rivers have provided antiquarians and collectors with unparalleled opportunities. Unfortunately, however, these are rapidly diminishing as the destruction of river foreshores is added to the price of progress.

  Here in America, the rivers have as much to offer as do those of the Old World, although, like them, their most productive sites are no longer accessible to the casual collector, buried as they are beneath the waterfront buildings of great cities. Their relics are revealed, therefore, only when new construction calls for deeper digging below previous basements and into silt hitherto undisturbed. Then the remains of boats, barrels, wooden boxes, clothing, leather goods, and countless other artifacts of earlier times are smashed, scooped up in the jaws of mechanical excavators, and dumped where no one will ever find them. Wharfside dredging can have comparable results, as was dramatically demonstrated in the Delaware River in 1948. There, off Woodbury Creek below Philadelphia, a commercial dredger cut into the hull of a wooden merchant ship sunk in the 1770s, perhaps early in the Revolutionary War. As the dredge and the tides continued to pull at the damaged hull, numerous wine bottles and other artifacts were washed ashore. Many more were sucked into the pipe, carried two miles downstream, and spewed out onto a riverside marsh where local antiquaries waded about in a sea of mud salvaging an amazing collection of pins, nails, spikes, shoe buckles, brass buttons, scissors, pocket knives, table cutlery, locks and keys, latches, waffle irons, and tools of all sorts.

  After it became known that the dredging had disturbed something of importance, a telephone-equipped government diver went down to examine the wreck and reported what he saw to the surface. He found, none too surprisingly, that the ship was filled and covered with mud. “From what I can see of it,” he added, “it appears to be about two hundred feet long and made completely of wood. There are two-inch plank frame boards, supported with four-by-fours around the hull. From where I am now standing,” he went on, “I can see into part of what must have been the ship’s hold. In it there are what appears to be scores of kegs of nails. I am now gathering a number of grubbing hoes, and I’ll bring them to the surface with me.”1 The diver apparently did just that, for some of the hoes were subsequently given to the Philadelphia Historical Society and to other local antiquarian groups.

  The artifacts from the Delaware wreck were quickly dispersed among the finders, and as far as I can determine no careful study was ever made of either the vessel or its cargo. It is evident, nevertheless, that the dredging had brought about the destruction of a “treasure” whose historical value was far greater than that of the Spanish Plate Fleet’s bullion. Monetarily, of course, the yield from the Florida wrecks was infinitely larger; gold and silver coins have an easily determinable worth; iron padlocks and brass buttons do not. But apart from a group of Chinese porcelain cups which provided direct evidence of Spanish trade with the Orient through Manila and the East Indies, the Florida treasure had little to tell us about eighteenth-century life or even anything very important about the ships whence it came. The vessels had been beaten to pieces on the offshore shoals, the cargo had been dispersed, and most of the wood and other organic materials had been eaten by the teredo worm, leaving only ballast stone, and iron fittings and cannon to rust and become cased in coral. The Delaware wreck, on the other hand, had settled into mud and remained more or less intact; the iron had not rusted, the brass still shone, and there was life in the leather. It was an unparalleled American time capsule which, had it been saved, would today provide Philadelphia with a historical attraction that might rival Stockholm’s Vasa, the ship which sank on her maiden voyage in 1628 and which was raised in 1962 and successfully towed back to port.

  Raising ships, or even mounting expeditions to recover their treasures, is a dream out of reach of the average collector. In spite of the availability and efficiency of modern metal-detecting devices; searching for treasure on the seabed is much like looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack, and once in a while even that is easier to find. In 1971, divers working off Marathon in Florida discovered a sealed wooden box weighing 410 pounds and elaborately marked with its owner’s initials. The press quickly dubbed the box a “treasure chest” and concluded that it came from another Spanish fleet lost in a hurricane in 1733 (Fig. 28). The finders, the Doubloon Salvage Company, Inc., duly turned over the box to the Florida Department of State to be appraised and the product shared (as their contract demanded), and between the time of its discovery and the day it was to be officially opened speculation as to its contents ran a mouth-watering gamut. When that day came, two months later, an audience of divers, stockholders in the salvage company, historians, archaeologists, and state officials held its breath as laboratory technicians slowly revealed “the tips of what appeared to be comb teeth or nee
dles.”2 They later turned out to be steel awls, and although they came in different types, awls was all the box contained. Needless to say, the Doubloon Salvage Company and its stockholders were none too pleased with their treasure.

  The Marathon box had been found by a metal detector “some four to eight feet beneath the ocean floor” and was retrieved at considerable expense and no little effort. Now and then, however, as in the case of the Captain-General’s whistle, “sunken” treasure can be delivered to us without setting so much as foot or snorkel in the water.

  28. Every diver dreams of finding a treasure chest. This one was recovered near Marathon, Florida, and is seen here being opened in the University of Florida’s archaeological laboratory. Unfortunately its contents were not all that the finders had expected.

  British beachcombers walking the Kentish shore near Sandwich following the great gale that swept across England in January, 1953, found broken and intact glass wine bottles of the early eighteenth century strewn along the high-water line (Fig. 29). Some of the bottles were still corked and full, and a few were opened and sampled by the finders; others were deliberately broken. A local antiquarian suggested that they had contained whiskey or brandy and came from a smuggler’s hoard that had been uncovered and scattered by the storm-driven waves; but although later analysis proved the contents to have been only beer, the explanation for the bottles’ presence on the beach turned out to be distinctly less mundane.

  29. Bottles of early eighteenth-century beer found on a beach near Sandwich, England, in 1953. They are believed to have passed the intervening years sealed in the hold of a ship sunk in the Great Storm of 1703.

  On being invited to examine some of the specimens picked up by Major-General and Mrs. I. D. Erskine of Sandwich, I found that all were of the same squat type datable within the time bracket of 1700 to 1715, and highly desirable additions to any bottle collection. The stretch of beach on which they were found was about 150 yards long, and as both the intact and broken bottles were all found close to the high-tide mark and did not stretch out to the low-water line, it at first seemed unlikely that they had washed in from some submarine repository. Furthermore, the lack of abrasion on the sides of the whole bottles precluded their having bowled any great distance over the sandy seabed. Had the bottles contained dutiable liquor, the smuggler’s cache theory would have been entirely reasonable. But they didn’t, and it wasn’t.

  The town of Sandwich lies inland a distance of about a mile and a half behind a tonguelike spit, and it was on the sea side of that projection that the bottles were found (Fig. 30). Seven miles offshore lies the long and treacherous bar of the Goodwin Sands, while to the north the projecting hook of the Isle of Thanet protects the waters between sand and shore from the furies of the North Sea. This sheltered bay is still one of the world’s most celebrated anchorages. It was there, in the Downs, that English convoys bound for America and the Orient assembled through the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries. But just as the Downs were known for their safety, the Goodwins, and their inshore cousin the Brakes, had a reputation as one of the most dangerous shoals known to mariners. Called the “shippe swalower” in the Middle Ages, and described by Shakespeare as “a very dangerous flat, and fatal, where the carcasses of many a tall ship lie buried,”3 the Goodwin Sands continue to merit their ill repute, matched only by that of the banks off Cape Hatteras. The Goodwins differ, however, in that they are largely exposed at low tide and stretch in an ever-shifting strip up to five miles long, and ships driven onto them are gripped, dismasted by the surf, and finally buried in the sand. There they remain until wind and currents move the Goodwins in another direction, causing the carcasses to be disinterred. It seems possible, therefore, that in the 1953 storm, a long-buried hull had been breached and its cargo suddenly decanted. Reasonable though that explanation was, and even if the ship lay in the sands of the Brakes, the bottles would still have had to travel three miles across the seabed in a storm so wild that they would have been abraded all to pieces. Instead, the bottles all arrived together on a short stretch of shore, some in such mint condition that even the thin brass wire securing the corks remained undisturbed. There was an answer, however, and it had resided in a leather chest in a windowless room at the Manor of Cleeve Prior, near Evesham in Worcestershire, where it had been since 1713.

  30. Chart of the Kentish coast and the Goodwin Sands in 1736. The bottled beer was found on the shore opposite the anchorage called the Small Downs.

  Exactly two hundred years later, the chest was found and its contents examined; they proved to be the papers of Captain Thomas Bowrey, a London adventurer in the East India trade in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and a man who kept every last record of his business transactions. Among his papers are the accounts, invoices, inventories, letters, and journals relating to Bowrey’s ship the Rising Sun and her voyage from Greenwich to India and back in 1703–1704. It was a journey that got off to a bad start, for on the night of November 27, 1703, while lying with the assembling fleet in the Downs, the ship faced what was to be one of the worst storms ever to rage across England. Dawn found the convoy scattered, wrecks littered the Goodwins, many large vessels had vanished without trace, and others, dismasted and helpless, were driven onto the Holland shore or were carried up the North Sea to Scandinavia. The Rising Sun was luckier than most; she lost her masts but wound up at Texel with her hull so little damaged that after refitting she was able to continue and complete her voyage. The Bowrey Papers show, however, that had she foundered on the Goodwins, she would have gone down with no fewer than 2,500 bottles of beer in her holds. In all, the Rising Sun carried in excess of 5,000 glass bottles of beer and wine, all of it packed in wooden chests. So complete are the Bowrey Papers that they include invoices not only for the beer, the bottles, the corks, and the wire to hold them down, but also for the chest and the iron hinges and locks to secure them. The ship’s inventories show that the chests were of two sizes, the larger holding up to 176 bottles, and the smaller around 116 bottles. Thus the ship’s documents not only describe an occasion when ships carrying appropriate cargoes were wrecked on the Goodwins in the 1700–1715 period suggested by the salvaged bottles, they also show how such bottles could have traveled from wreck to shore and have arrived together and unbroken.

  A chest better preserved than the rest could have been sucked out of the broken hull when the 1953 storm eroded the sand around it, have been carried across the Downs and cast onto the Kent shore where it burst, ejecting the bottles. That no sign of the chest was found is easily explained; beachcombers reported that the gale had left the shoreline littered with driftwood, and as no one was on the lookout for the remains of an eighteenth-century chest, it is unlikely that they would have seen any difference between its boards and the rest of the flotsam. Unfortunately it was some weeks before I was able to visit the site, and by then, tides and beachcombers had swept it clean. I did learn, however, that more bottles had been trawled up by fishermen in the area shown on the chart (Fig. 30) as the Small Downs, and I was able to acquire one of them from a Ramsgate antique dealer. Subsequent analysis revealed that this, too, contained beer. It seemed likely, therefore, that the bottles from the Small Downs came from another chest that broke open in deep water, and that hundreds more bottles like them were rolling about on the bottom of the bay. As far as I have been able to determine, these salvaged bottles, probably no more than half a dozen in all, can claim to hold the oldest surviving specimens of bottled beer.

  Although I shall have more to say about bottle collecting in a later chapter, it is worth noting that some of the best examples have come back to us after spending the intervening years under water. In America, the classic bottle haul was landed in 1934 when Virginia’s Mariners’ Museum and the United States National Park Service went prospecting in the York River for souvenirs from ships sunk at the Battle of Yorktown. Using both divers and a mechanical “clam-shell bucket,” at least three vessels were foun
d and explored, resulting in the recovery of many artifacts that included scores of glass wine bottles. The methods then employed would now be considered vandalism of the worst kind, but one has to remember that in 1934 the aqualung had not been invented and the discipline of historical archaeology was in its infancy. Nevertheless, one still blanches at the sight of a National Park Service photograph captioned “The clam-shell bucket comes up with an assortment of material from within a wreck.”4 Another equally graphic picture (Fig. 31) shows wine bottles being hauled aboard the salvage barge by means of a line looped around their necks like a necklace for a bibulous mermaid. So plentiful were the bottles that a later director of the Mariners’ Museum decided to sell them off to collectors. Not knowing their worth, he struck on the novel approach of doubling the price every time he sold one, commencing at two dollars and quitting when he could find no customer at two hundred. Today, of course, collectors would fall all over each other to secure a genuine Yorktown bottle at that price.

  31. Bottles being hauled from the York River in Virginia during the search for the hulls of British ships sunk in 1781 at the Battle of Yorktown.

  In the years that have passed since the Yorktown salvage project, many more eighteenth-century bottles have been recovered from the York River, most of them by fishermen dredging for oysters and clams. However, one of the best-preserved specimens was simply picked up by a local resident who, in 1970, found it sticking out of the mud farther upstream on the north bank. Be that as it may, the principal source of colonial and later bottles for the American collector has not been the, York, but the mangrove swamps of the Florida Keys. Thrown overboard from passing ships, washed ashore from countless wrecks, or left behind by hunters and fishermen, the bottle relics of three centuries lay amid the roots awaiting the day when collectors would recognize their age and value. That recognition came about fifteen years ago, and since then the Keys have been picked over again and again by an ever-growing army of collectors and by entrepreneurs anxious to supply them. There may still be bottle treasures to be found there, but now the more enterprising seekers are moving farther afield, to the less well-trodden islands of the Caribbean and to South America.