A Revolutionary War-era boat is being painstakingly rebuilt after centuries buried beneath Manhattan
Albani, New York (AP) – The workers who dug at the World Trade Center in Manhattan 15 years ago discovered an unlikely discovery: Sufi wood from a boat that was built during the revolutionary war that was buried more than two centuries ago.
Now, more than 600 pieces of a 50 -feet container (15 meters) are shrouded in hard -fired in New York State Museum. After years of water and pods under the ground, the boat became exposed to museums.
It is designed like giant puzzles on the museum floor, research assistants and volunteers who recently spent weeks cleaning wood with selection and brushes before they start reconstruction.
Although researchers believed that the ship was a path in 1775 to defend Philadelphia, they still do not know all the places it traveled to or why it appears to have ended along the Manhattan Beach before it ended in the landfill in about 1790.
“The public can come and think about puzzles around this ship,” said Michael Lucas, the museum of historical archeology. “Because like anything from the past, we have parts of the information. We don’t have the entire story.”
From the dump to the museum piece
The rebuilding years of rescue and conservation work that started in July 2010 when a section of the boat was found 22 feet (7 meters) below the street level.
The curved wood was discovered from the structure by a crew working in an underground car parking facility at the World Trade Center site, near the place where the twin towers stand before the September 11 attacks.
The wood was muddy, but it was well preserved after centuries on the poor land of the oxygen. A pre -created mortar wall was gone across the boat, although woods that include about 30 feet (9 meters) of the back and medium sections were carefully recovered. Part of the bow next summer has been recovered on the other side of the underground wall.
Wood has been shipped more than 1400 miles (2,253 km) to the Texas A &M Center for Maritime Archeology and Conservation.
Each of 600 pieces underwent a three -dimensional examination and spent years in preservative liquids before putting in a giant freezing course to remove moisture. Then it was wrapped in more than one mile of foam and shipped to the state museum in Albani.
While the museum is 130 miles (209 km) above the Hudson River from the lower Manhattan, it includes enough space for the width of the ship. Reconstruction work is performed in a gallery space, so that visitors can view the skeleton that is slowly paved the partially rebuilt boat shape.
The work is expected to end at the end of the month, as Peter said, “a research scientist in the Center for Maritime Archeology and Conservation that oversees rebuilding.
On the last day, Lucas took time to talk to the museum visitors around the ship and how it was found.
He said to explain the work that is happening behind, and he said to one group: “Who was thinking in a million years,” one day, will this be in a museum? “
It is still a marine puzzle
The researchers knew that they had found a boat under the streets of Manhattan. But what kind?
Wood analysis showed that they came from the cut trees in the Philadelphia region in the early 1970s, pointing to the ship that is built in a square near the city.
Perhaps it was built in haste. Wood is sophisticated, and the wood is installed with iron nails. This allowed construction faster, although minerals are corrosive over time in sea water.
Researchers are now assumed that the boat was built in Philadelphia in the summer of 1775, months after the first shots of the Revolutionary War in Lexington and Concorde in Massachusetts. Thirteen thermal boats were built in that summer to protect Philadelphia from potential hostile forces in the Dilayer River. Military boats were characterized by cannons indicating their arches and could carry 30 or more men.
“They were really paying, pushing and pressing to get these boats there to stop any British who might start leaving Dilayer,” he said.
Historical records indicate that at least one of these 13 war boats was later taken by the British. There is some evidence that the boat now regained has been used by the British, including the Pyot button with “52”. This is likely to come from the soldier’s uniform with the 52nd football regiment of the British army, which was active in the war.
The ship can also go south to the Caribbean Sea, where the British re -guided thousands of forces during the war. Wood shows signs of damage caused by mollusks known as shipworms, which are the original warmer water.
However, it is unclear how the boat in Manhattan ended and why it seems that he had spent years in water along the beach. By the nineties of the nineteenth century, it was outside the commission and then covered it as part of a project to expand Manhattan further to the Hudson River. By that time, the mast and other parts of the Revolutionary War ship were stripped.
“It is an important part of history,” Lucas said. “It is also a nice artifact that you can really build a lot of stories about it.”
