A revolutionary boat from the era of war is meticulously rebuilt after centuries buried under Manhattan

Albany, NY – The workers digging on the World Trade Center site in Manhattan made an improbable discovery: the distress woods of a boat built during the revolutionary war which had been buried more than two centuries earlier.

Now, more than 600 pieces of the 50 -foot ship are meticulously gathered at the New York State Museum. After years on water and centuries underground, the boat becomes a museum exhibition.

Arraled like giant puzzle pieces on the museum’s ground, research assistants and volunteers have recently spent weeks cleaning the woods with choices and brushes before reconstruction can even begin.

Although the researchers think that the ship was a gunboat built in 1775 to defend Philadelphia, they still do not know all the places where it has traveled or why it has apparently neglected along the shore of Manhattan before ending up in a discharge around the 1790s.

“The public can come to contemplate the mysteries around this ship,” said Michael Lucas, curator of historical archeology of the museum. “Because like all of the past, we have information. We don’t have the whole story.”

From discharge to the museum’s room

The reconstruction ceilings of the life and preservation years that started in July 2010 when a section of the boat was found at 22 feet under the street level.

Curved wood of the shell were discovered by a crew working in an underground car park on the World Trade Center site, near the place where twin towers stood before the September 11 attacks.

The wood was muddy, but well preserved after centuries in the earth poor in oxygen. A previously built suspension wall has passed through the boat, although the woods comprising about 30 feet of its rear and intermediate sections were carefully recovered. Part of the arc was recovered the following summer from the other side of the underground wall.

The stamps were sent to more than 1,400 miles from Texas A & M’s Center for Maritime Archaeology and Conservation.

Each of the 600 rooms has undergone three -dimensional scanning and spent years in conservation fluids before being placed in a giant wording to eliminate humidity. Then they were wrapped in more than one mile of foam and shipped to the State Museum in Albany.

While the museum is 130 miles on the Hudson river in Lower Manhattan, it has enough space to display the ship. The reconstruction work is done in an exhibition space, so that visitors can look at the altered wood skeleton slowly take the shape of a partially rebuilt boat.

The works should end towards the end of the month, said Peter Fix, a researcher associated with the Center for Maritime Archaeology and Conservation who oversees the reconstruction.

A recent day, Lucas took the time to talk to the museum visitors to go from the ship and the way it was found.

Explaining the work that takes place behind him, he told a group: “Who would have thought in a million years,” One day, will it be in a museum? “”

A nautical mystery remains

The researchers knew they had found a boat under the streets of Manhattan. But what genre?

The analysis of the stamps showed that they came from trees cut in the Philadelphia region in the early 1770s, pointing towards the ship built in a courtyard near the city.

It was probably built in a hurry. The wood is knotted and the woods were fixed with iron tips. This allowed a faster construction, although the metal corrodes over time in seawater.

The researchers have now hypothesized that the boat was built in Philadelphia in the summer of 1775, months after the first plans of the revolutionary war were fired on Lexington and Concord in the Massachusetts. Thirteen gunboats were built this summer to protect Philadelphia from the potential hostile forces to come on the Delaware river. The gunboats presented cannons pointing with their arcs and could transport 30 or more men.

“They really pushed, pushed, pushed to bring these boats out to stop all the British who could start to set up the Delaware,” said Fix.

Historical files indicate that at least one of these 13 gunboats was later taken by the British. And there is evidence that the now restored boat was used by the British, including a tin button with “52” written on it. This probably came from the soldier’s uniform with the 52nd foot regiment of the British army, which was active in the war.

It is also possible that the ship will head south towards the Caribbean, where the British redirected thousands of soldiers during the war. Its woods show signs of damage caused by molluscs called towards ships, originating in warmer waters.

However, we do not know how the boat found itself in Manhattan and why it apparently went from the years partially in the water along the shore. In the 1790s, he was out of service, then covered as part of a project to enlarge Manhattan further in the Hudson river. At that time, the mast and other parts of the revolutionary war ship had apparently been stripped.

“This is an important element in history,” said Lucas. “It is also a beautiful artifact that you can really build a lot of stories around.”