All the Best Rubbish

by Ivor Noel Hume

  The final piece of evidence comes again from the St. Mary at Hill register of deaths. On a cold winter’s day, December 27, 1692 (six months after William Deaven’s pewter mug sank into the blue Caribbean), the register listed the burial of William (?)eavon. The writing is barely legible, and I am advised that the initial letter could be an L, an I, or the first stroke of a D. It is true that I have not been able to prove that William Deaven married Margaret North, but her token and his tankard still insist that he did. In any case it is established that he was married, presumably to “M,” before he married “D” for Dorcas in 1684, and therefore the WDM mug was in use at the Ship tavern before that date and had no business to be at Port Royal at the time of the earthquake.

  Objects that ended their lives far from home are, perhaps, the most intriguing, for they are imbued with the charisma that used to adhere to world travelers, permitting us to share in our imaginations the wonders they have seen and the adventures they have experienced. The Ship tavern mug must score high marks on both counts, yet the bones of its story are relatively easily conjectured: stolen from Deaven’s taproom, it was carried aboard a merchantman lying at Billingsgate, then shipped in the thief’s locker to Jamaica, where it may have been sold to another tavern keeper. We can wonder what became of him (and of the thief, for that matter) as Port Royal shuddered, the houses crumbled, and the streets broke apart and slid away. But here we are free-flying on a balloon of romance—which is where the serious student of the past must quit the trip. That is not to say that he is eager to do so, but he knows that his academic credibility will deflate if he goes higher.

  I recall that the first school essay I was ever required to write was entitled “A Day in the Life of a Penny.” So infinite were the possibilities that my small mind boggled, and my first sortie into fiction was received with appropriate scorn. Since then, in many an idle moment, I have looked at coins and have amused myself imagining through whose hands they may have passed and what joys, sorrows, rages, and yearnings they may have engendered along the way. Perhaps because they have passed through so many hands without belonging in a permanent way to any of them, coins do not as a rule speak as clearly to us as does, say, William Deaven’s pewter mug. Besides, they are generally predictable in themselves and their discovery is rarely cause for surprise. There is nothing particularly amazing about finding Roman coins on the foreshore near London Bridge—not when we realize how they got there. When, however, they turn up in Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina, four in the space of six months, that is something else again!

  In 1956 I heard that a reportedly Roman copper coin had been found in the coastal Guinea section of Virginia’s Gloucester County, but unfortunately my informant could not remember the name of the finder and so I never was able to track it down. Needing a rationale to dismiss so improbable a discovery, I concluded that an English farthing or halfpenny with its classical-style portrait of the monarch and Latin legend had been mistaken for something much older. It was a more acceptable explanation than supposing that a Roman ship had crossed the Atlantic, had been wrecked on the Virginia coast, and its crew and contents carried off by Indians. I should add, however, that when I so readily dismissed that proposition, Thor Heyerdahl had not yet demonstrated that it was possible to get here on bundles of papyrus.

  53. Sestertius of the emperor Nero found near Bennett’s Point in Maryland, A.D. 64–66. Diameter 3 centimeters.

  The report of the Gloucester coin remained interred in my “idiot” file until, in 1969, I was shown a large collection of artifacts found at Bennett’s Point in Queen Anne County, Maryland. Among a group of eighteenth-century odds and ends found near an earlier colonial house site was a sestertius of the Roman emperor Nero, a coin minted between A.D. 64 and 66 (Fig. 53). A few weeks later another visitor to my office brought in a box of colonial artifacts found along the west bank of the Machapunga River in North Carolina, and the site of the eighteenth-century town of Woodstock. Among the pieces was a badly worn copper coin of either Greek or South Italian origin, and dating from some time between 300 and 200 B.C. Neither coin is in a condition that would make it desirable to a numismatist, and as the wear seems to be the product of use rather than burial in a corrosive soil, it is reasonable to assume that if they were brought to America in the eighteenth century, they were already in poor condition. Although there were then many European collectors of coins and classical antiquities, excellent specimens were so readily available to them that it is hard to believe that even colonial collectors would have been satisfied with such inferior specimens.

  While I was still pondering the significance of those discoveries, I received photographs of two more, these apparently of silver and found on the south side of the James River, close to the James River Bridge (Fig. 54). One looked to be a denarius of the emperor Augustus and of a type minted between 25 and 22 B.C., while the other was of uncertain denomination and had the head of Octavian on one side and that of Mark Antony on the other—which should have dated it between 40 and 36 B.C. It should have; but in fact both coins were forgeries, excellent copies, but plated base-metal fakes nonetheless. I was reminded by Ralph Merrifield, deputy keeper of London’s Guildhall Museum and a specialist in classical coins, that many good quality forgeries were minted by eighteenth-century counterfeiters to supply the growing antiquarian market—forebears of Billie and Charlie.

  How, one wonders, did these forgeries come to be in the bank of the James River, and are they evidence of colonial American interest in coin collecting?

  The one factor common to all these real and faked classical coins has been their discovery close to estuaries, to places where ocean-going ships might have been moored or beached, and where their ballast could have been jettisoned. Because both Roman and forged coins have often been found on the foreshores of England’s river Thames, it might be suggested that fill dug from those shores was sometimes used as ballast and later dumped in American rivers and bays. It seems a most implausible theory, yet it is now evident that on at least one occasion in the third quarter of the nineteenth century a ship bound from London to America did take on Thames riverfront garbage as ballast and eventually unloaded it near the mouth of St. Mary’s River near Jacksonville, Florida. It was found there in 1972 by amateur archaeologists who were amazed at discovering a wide range of English pottery and other odds and ends, some of which dated as far back as the fifteenth century. Much more plentiful, however, were pieces of late seventeenth-century pottery and tobacco pipes, as well as similar material from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, along with pieces of English brick and ceramic drainpipe of obviously Victorian date. But it was not these that so clearly proclaimed the collection’s Thames-side origin. Also included were many fragments of unglazed delftware and kiln equipment dating from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, pieces of glassmakers’ crucibles probably of similar date, and waste products from an early eighteenth-century brown stoneware factory. As far as I know, there was only one place in England that had both medieval origins, and delftware, stoneware, and glass manufacturies at these dates, and that was in Southwark on the south bank of the Thames at Gravel Lane, just east of Blackfriars’ Bridge. But as seagoing ships could not pass above London Bridge, one can only deduce that a barge loaded with foreshore dredgings became the source of ballast for a vessel lying in the Pool of London or at some other dock below the bridge.

  54. Forgeries of Roman silver coins of Octavian and Mark Antony found in the bank of the James River, Virginia. Largest 1.9 centimeters.

  Although I have been unable to find any written evidence that riverside rubbish was used as ballast (sand or gravel were most commonly employed), there can be no other explanation for the Florida discovery. Thus, if it can be proved to have happened once, who is to say that other ships at other times did not bring similar rubbish to America and in it Roman coins, Bronze Age swords, Saxon brooches, even, perhaps, the missing head and leg from Charles Roach Smith’s figure of Jupiter.
The possibilities are endless and appalling, offering hideous opportunities to misread the evidence and turn Leif Eriksson and Christopher Columbus into latter-day tourists.

  SEVEN

  Of Mud, and Pots, and Puppy Dogs, and Mistakes that Come Back in the Night

  THERE MAY WELL BE more collectors of pottery and porcelain than of any other antiquarian category—providing you exclude the people who buy antique furniture as furniture and include those who acquire “bits of china” because they are pretty to have around. It is a relatively safe bet that six out of every ten American and European homes contain at least a couple of old and decorative ceramic items that are classed among the family treasures, even if they are no more ancient than a porcelain model of the Eiffel Tower commemorating the Paris Exhibition of 1889 or an 1897 souvenir mug from Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee. Although it may be hard to dredge up words to praise the aesthetic qualities of such mass-produced collectors’ items, it would be foolish to deny them their historical interest or their eventual value as antiques. Once over the hurdle of obsolescence and the attrition of careless familiarity, any ceramic object can be expected to aspire to antiquarian respectability and to being described by dealers, auctioneers, and collectors in terms that would astonish the original potters. It is because it is so easy to be beguiled by such laudatory garbage that we must learn to see whatever it is we collect not only in the context of the time in which it was made, but also within the artistic and technological framework of what went before and came afterward. Just as the architectural historian who praises the achievements of colonial American builders should first have seen the temples at Karnak, the Parthenon, and Blenheim Palace, so ceramic collectors who enthuse over the artistry of hand-painted British earthenwares of the eighteenth century should do so in full awareness of the accomplishments of Corinthian, Attic, and Athenian vase decorators more than two thousand years earlier.

  Unlike objects fashioned from most metals or from wood and other organic materials, those of baked clay will survive in the ground more or less indefinitely, providing the archaeologist with his most ubiquitous and reliable yardstick by which to gauge the sophistication of past civilizations and cultures. Almost from the birth of pot making (which occurred independently in different parts of the world at different times), regardless of whether the shapers were creating storage jars and cooking pots or modeling likenesses of potbellied mother goddesses, the craftsmen were appealing not only to the needs but to the taste and interests of their customers—just as were the casters and throwers of Eiffel Towers and jubilee mugs.

  Once we are able to recognize the artistic taste of our ancestors (which, of course, means comparing it favorably or, more often, unfavorably with our own), we are halfway to understanding them as individuals and, collectively, as tribes, nations, or cultural blocs. The archaeologist’s reliance on pottery to help him do this decreases the closer we get to our own times, and as the availability of written sources takes the fun out of educated guessing. Even so, the surviving ceramic tablewares of our grandparents’ day are capable of providing a more graphic understanding of then current popular taste than can any assortment of written words.

  My own interest in ceramics was initially that of the conventional British archaeologist, by which I mean that I could not see beyond the decline of Roman Britain. I had no broad-based knowledge of earlier Mediterranean cultures, and I was blissfully unaware that just about everything Roman had been done before—and better. Consequently, I naively concluded that the pottery used in Britain in the first century A.D. represented the zenith of artistic achievement. I say the first century, rather than the Roman period in general, because it was very evident that by the end of the reign of Hadrian in A.D. 138 at the latest, the glory was fading. The term Roman is itself misleading, for very little of the Roman period pottery found in England (or elsewhere in the empire) was manufactured in Italy. Most of the wares used in Britain came from France, from the Rhineland, or were homemade—the same sources that were to provide the Englishman with most of his pottery designs and techniques for another fourteen hundred years.

  Although the majority of ceramic enthusiasts in North America are collectors of British pottery and porcelain, or of wares introduced into the United States and Canada through British trade, very few have pursued their interests back into ceramic history before the rise of the Staffordshire industry. Romano-British pottery is rarely seen in American shops, in part because there is not enough around to encourage anybody to collect that alone, but partly because most collectors specialize rather than assembling specimens illustrative of the whole story. Nevertheless, most of the firing and decorating techniques for which Staffordshire was renowned in the eighteenth century were known and used in the Roman world, and therefore these early wares should not be ignored.

  A need to know is the best reason for learning about anything, and to interpret what I was finding on London’s bombed sites I needed to know all that could be learned about the evolution of Romano-British pottery. Many of the wares used in Roman London were identical to specimens found on marshland sites on the south shores of Kent’s Medway estuary. This allegedly Kentish pottery had been termed Upchurch ware after a village of that name on the edge of the marshes; but it was an identification that had been used by different writers to describe pottery of widely differing styles, shapes, and even colors. To add further confusion, one glossy black type decorated with incised geometric lines which some authorities called Upchurch ware, others classified as “London” or “Weymouth” ware (Fig. 55). It was evident, therefore, that in the late 1940s no one had a very clear idea of what Upchurch ware really was, and there was even some doubt as to whether it was anything at all. While one school saw the Medway marshes as the site of a once great Romano-British potting industry (a kind of mini-Staffordshire of the first and second centuries), another was contending that the vast quantities of pottery found on the mud flats came not from local factories, but was merely rubbish from extensive domestic occupation. I did not know whom to believe, but it seemed important that somebody should take a crack at sorting it out, for if all these pots, jars, bowls, flagons, and dishes were not made on the marshes, it was time we discovered who had produced them, and where.

  The ubiquitous Charles Roach Smith, who had been so lucky in his salvaging of antiquities from the Thames, had been equally successful in his quest for Roman pottery amid the Medway marshes. He and three other nineteenth-century antiquaries, George Payne, the Reverend C. E. Woodruff, and his son, Cumberland H. Woodruff, between them salvaged literally hundreds of more or less complete vessels, many of which are now in the collections of the British Museum and of the Rochester and Maidstone museums in Kent. Although these men were educated antiquarians and well able to catalogue the things they found, their interpretation of archaeological evidence left more to be desired. All too often the mere finding of pots was considered a sufficiently rewarding end product, and I confess that when I began to follow in their footsteps I soon discovered how easy it was to be similarly suborned.

  55. A Roman period bowl found at Upchurch in England. The black-surfaced pottery with its incised geometric decoration has been misleadingly termed “London” or “Weymouth” ware. This example in the British Museum may have been the one seen in the right foreground of the engraving shown in Figure 56. Early second century A.D. Surviving height 4½ inches.

  Roach Smith and his antiquarian friends lived in an age of gentle contentment for the gentry, when nothing needed to be pursued to the point of fatigue. The contemporary engraving (Fig. 56) of laborers floundering about in the Upchurch mud in search of specimens is in graphic contrast to George Payne’s account of one such research project as seen from his vantage point on the bank. On the morning of July 21, 1882, he and his friends set out to “rough it” on the marshes. The fresh, salty smell of the estuary hung in the air, the sun shone, thrushes sang in the apple orchards, crickets chirruped (or whatever it is crickets do) in the long marsh grass
, and the sea gulls soared and glided over the water as it ebbed from the creeks. That it was a Friday, when the world’s workers were stacking hay, loading coal, or pushing pens, was of no concern to the Payne expedition. “Our party on this enjoyable day,” he would write, “also included Mrs. Payne, Miss Claypole, and Mr. Roach Smith. Luncheon was served at the mouth of the creek upon a green sward, as the tide was rising, and afterwards our distinguished friend entertained the ladies with anecdotes of past experiences, and sang to them from one of Planché’s extravaganzas, while Mr. Dowker and the writer prosecuted further research.”1

  56. Groping for Roman pottery in the mud of Otterham Creek, Kent, in the mid-nineteenth century.

  As a result of these forays, both Payne and Roach Smith claimed to have found the actual remains of potters’ kilns, Payne going so far as to declare that “in this obscure corner of Kent existed one of the most important industries of Roman Britain.”2 Another contemporary, Thomas Wright, went even further:

  If we go up the little creeks in the Upchurch marshes at low water [he wrote] and observe the sides of the banks, we shall soon discover, at a depth of about three feet, more or less, a stratum, often a foot thick, of broken pottery…. This immense layer mixed with plenty of vessels in a perfect, or near perfect state, has been traced at intervals of six or seven miles in length, and two or three in breadth, and there cannot be the least doubt that this is the refuse of very extensive potteries, which existed probably during nearly the whole period of the Roman occupation of Britain, and which not only supplied the whole island with a particular class of earthenware, but which perhaps also furnished an export trade.3