I was watching the Discovery channel the other night and they were showing a wooden ship sunk for centuries in the North Atlantic somewhere (I believe it was up around Finland IIRC). The ship sunk during the reign of Catherine the Great I believe. Anyway, the really cool thing was…the ship was completely intact. Even the masts were still there. And the cargo also was right there in the hold (they are hoping some priceless paintings are still onboard…I’m thinking thats this is a pipe dream but what the hell).
This got some of us to discussing what other prizes might lie on the bottom of the sea. My question is, what would happen to a wooden ship sunk in one of the really deep spots of the ocean? Would the ship still be pretty much intact? Would the pressure crush the wood? My understanding of why some ships remain more or less intact on the bottom and others disintegrate rapidly is that its the oxygen content of the water, the salt content and the sea organisms (like worms). It seems that at great depths there wouldn’t really be a lot of oxygen…or worms. I’m not sure about the salt levels. So…can we expect to find intact Spanish treasure galleons, perhaps even older ships when we get around to fully exploring the depths?
As a slight hijack of my own thread does anyone know what the oldest intact ship ever discovered on the bottom of the sea is? How about the absolute oldest ship ever discovered anywhere?
Here’s a page of links to underwater archaeology museums. I found it while looking for a reference to the Vasa, “the only remaining intact 17th century ship in the world,” which your OP reminded me of. I went to the museum on a visit to Stockholm a few years ago. It’s pretty cool.
Remember that the really deep parts of the ocean are really deep. So a ship sinking in them would build up a pretty high speed by the time it hit the bottom. There would tend to be a lot of damage just from that crash alone.
Think of the Titanic, which is in one of the deep spots in the ocean. It is likely that it was traveling at the fastest speed it ever achieved just before it hit the ocean floor. You can see in photos how the whole front part is buried fairly deeply, and all the decks are pancaked into one another. It suffered more damage from hitting the ocean floor than the iceberg caused. Now a wooden ship probably wouldn’t sink as fast as the steel Titanic, but also a wooden ship would probably break up more easily when it hit bottom.
But would the wood still be there? I can see that there would be a scattered debris field but how long would the wood last down there…and the other artifacts?
Every material compresses some as it descends to the bottom of the ocean. How much it comresses depends on the material.
If a wooden ship were to go down in the marianas trench region, and lets just say it goes down to the deepest part of the region, then that material would compress some.
A wooden ship could concievably compress enough to loose all structural integrity and fall apart into its components. Hence the bottom of the marianas trench that we are considering, would be littered with raw lumber, planking, and beams. Metal pieces like nails or bolts, do not compress as much, but the wooden members surrounding them could compress enough to render the metal pieces useless.
There is the impact to consider.
There is the structural integrity of the cargo to consider. Even the deepest water may not preserve a bolt of silk, for example, but a bar of gold will certainly survive.
You have to consider the sediment buildup, which even the marianas experiences over time. That bar of gold could be underneath a respectable amount of mud.
My experience with salt water is that corrosion is always working, maybe not as now as it was earlier, but it is always working. Hence I believe that corrosion is a factor in any ship-wreck. Corrosion only affects metal parts though, and since it is a wooden ship in question the effects are going to be minimal.
So, I think that any significantly valuable cargo will be intact on the bottom of the deepest ocean, even if the ship that it sank in was destroyed completly. You might want to go out and start surveying the bottom of the oceans for treasure.
Some very desirable wood is to be had from timber and logging operations where the wood became waterlogged and sunk in the Great Lakes. Salvagers are bringing up wood that has been underwater for a century and it sells at a premium. It’s old-growth wood that can’t be had anymore.
The cold oxygen-poor environment in the lakes preserves the wood very well.
Of course, it’s not as deep as the ocean, nor is it salty, so I should probably expect a pitting over the irrelevance of my comment.
I’m pretty skeptical of ships surviving underwater intact, masts and all. As an undergrad, I worked a bit in Doc Edgerton’s lab. Doc did a lot of undersea work, in collaboration with Cousteau and others, and he had a poster on his wall about Caribbean wrecks. It contrasted peoples’ popular idea of pirate wrecks – old shiops, masts intact but draped in seaweed and encrusted with barnacles – withy the reality. The reality was that the timbers were usually broken up and often decayed away. The wreck didn’t look like a ship at all, but was represented by a ship-shaped pile of ballast, a few non-wooden items like cannon and fittings, and a few random bits of sealife-encrusted wood. Some wrecks, I’m sure, are a little less decayed, but I suspect that the resemblance between most wrecks and the original ships is the same as the resemblance between the remains of colonial houses and their remains – mostly gone, and needing an expert eye to pick them out. (And house foundations, after al, are on land, without barnacles and all to degrade and cover them.)
I recall hearing about how the Titanic would be perfectly preserved down in the Noerth Atlantic because of the low oxygen and cold temperatures, just as it was when it went down. Everyone writing about it seemed to believe this – it’s in Clive Cussler’s Rauise the Titanic! and arthur c. Clarke’s Imperial Earth and The Ghost of the Grand Banks, and in others. I was skeptical, and rightly so. Nobody seems to have foreseen the “rust icicles” that covered the ship – far from a pristine appearance. And no one seemed to beliebve contemporary accounts of the ship splitting in half, for some reason, or to have considered that the sinking ship would have hit the bottom at a conmsiderable velocity, causing plenty of damage. So even metal ships in the North Atlantic are prettty broken up and decayed.
as for the wood, at pressure at depth the air in the wood gets squeezed out and water infiltrates everywhere, keeping the wood from floating and hastening decay (C.S. Forester pointed this out in his novel Hornblower and the Hotspur, which features descritions of early 19th century unjderwater salvage methods. Take that , Patrick O’Brian!)
It was Hornblower and the Atropos where they recover the sunken treasure in the Mediterranean, while trying to convince the local Turks that they’re simply visiting on some mundane matter or another (they don’t want the Turks to get the gold and silver). Actually, the battle between HMS Atropos (and another British ship) and the Spanish frigate Castille in that book inspires another question which I think I’ll go pose in a moment: Did Spanish warships really have a giant cross raised on their foremast when going into battle?
Well, you saw the link to the Vasa…and it was more or less intact including masts IIRC. Here is a link to the ship wreck I mentioned in the OP…the Vrouw Maria sunk 230 years ago. I can tell you from the Discovery channel show the ship looked pretty intact to me…even the hatch covers were still on it. Of course there might be something about the North Sea that is unique for keeping wooden ship wrecks more or less intact. If thats the case perhaps they will find an intact Viking longship someday.
I won’t - you’re absolutely right. My mom’s got a small box made from some of these timbers pulled from Lake Superior. Not only is it old-growth wood, a good deal of it is from species that aren’t around anymore. The timbers are from red pine (? - I may be misremembering here; I always get them mixed up), which was once overabundant in the north woods but has since all been cut down and logged off. Current forests are mostly white pine (? - again, I may have them vice versa here).
While the Great Lakes are very cold, I’m assuming the depths of the ocean would be equally as cold. Not sure if the ocean’s as oxygen-poor as the bottom of Lake Superior, and that might be key.
I don’t know how deep they range (I see one source indicating they can be found at the 5500 foot level), but in salt water, they’d eat holes in anything made of wood. It would break apart in a few years.
In the case of the Vasa, it was buried in mud, which protected it. And freshwater wrecks are immune, since shipworms are saltwater creatures.
I doubt a wooden ship would reach the bottom at a speed that could cause much damage – it’s made of buoyant material that will slow its fall. As for pressure, the ship is sinking because it has a hole in it, which would tend to equalize pressure as it falls.
Hornblower didn’t have a diving bell as I recall, nor precussion cap anti shark weapons.
Besides, who would you want to sail with, Hornblower who would take on the entire French navy from a rowboat with those double barrelled pistols his wife gave him, or Lucky Jack Aubrey who threw his guns overboard to outrun the Swedish ship of the line in the arctic?
OK, for clarification, it wasn’t the entire French navy, it was three longboats, and he wasn’t in a row boat with his pistols, it was a cutter with a swivel gun. :wally
When did he do that? The closest thing I recall (from Desolation Island) is a stirring engagement with the Dutch ship Waakzamheid, which ran Aubrey’s Leopard far south of the Cape of Good Hope before he was able to sink her with a shot from his stern chaser.
