I found a chunk of something washed up on a beach in Oregon. My internal optimist wants to think it’s part of some old pirate ship. The realist part of me figures it’s just some old rebar from a pier. It’s 7 inches long, has a metal spike about 3/4" diameter, partially covered by something. The metal is very corroded and almost looks like old wood.
So how old is this potentially? How could I go about getting a better identification of it?
Concrete? If so, Portland cement was not available in the area until after 1900.
Without seeing it in person it’s hard to tell, but it could be a piece of rebar that was part of a pier, dock or even a ship. Iron corrodes quickly in salt water, so it’s no surprise that it looks like that.
You can send it to someone to be analyzed in order to determine what it’s made of, but that wouldn’t necessarily point to where it originally came from.
The iron/steel part appears to be cable, fused together by rust.
If so, this may be a barrier cable anchor:
I’d also assume it is a steel cable of several strands fused by concrete, probably from a pretensioning system. In any case I wouldn’t assume that it is very old, might be some decades but not much more, as the system was developed in the 1930’s. It may actually come from a long pier or bridge.
Metal, specifically iron from the “pirate age”, whenever that was, is highly likely to be fully corroded today if it wasn’t protected by a crust of barnacles or embedded in oxygen-free mud. I once found an obviously hand-forged ship’s nail while snorkeling in the Cape Trafalgar area in Spain, fully covered with a 2 " layer of barnacles and only visible because it had freshly broken off a rock and parts of the rusty metal was showing. I sometimes imagine it might be from a ship of Nelson’s fleet or the Spanish-French Armada sunk in 1805, but I realistically assume that it is from an around 1900 fishing boat. Hand-forged nails were used until the 1920s.
Looks like a fossilized piece of beef jerky to me. I think you found the world’s oldest Slim Jim.
Do ships use concrete?
Looks like a hunk of seafront metal railing that’s been broken up in a storm.
The Liberty ships used in WWII convoys were constructed of concrete.
Liberty ships were steel.
Indeed they were.
But there were Concrete Ships:
Only a handful of them were actually used, mind you.
I would bet pier part.
I stand corrected.
The Liberty Shipbuilding Company built concrete ships during and after WWI.
There was a lot more liberty going on back then.
OK, I can at least dream that it’s from an old WWI liberty ship. But the chunk of a pier theory is making the most sense. I was questioning if the concrete was actually concrete or solidified mud/sea bed gunk (the rocks are all much smoother than aggregate I’m used to in concrete). But anything other than concrete is seeming unlikely.
Ships do hit piers now and again, knocking chunks off.
A piece of concrete rolling around in the current would come to look like that after a few years.
Cable would be twisted. I’m thinking something knocked off the end of a pier.