The Nissia Shipwreck is from the Ottoman period. It is located on the southeast coast of Cyprus. The shipwreck has been known about by the local diving community ever since the 1980s.

The MARELab of the University of Cyprus, in collaboration with the Department of Antiquities of Cyprus, undertook a research project on the site, for a number of reasons:

• the wreck has a high percentage of wooden hull preservation
• the wreck is exposed to natural deterioration processes
• the wreck is subject to looting and destruction.

The fieldwork season took place in September 2014. It consisted of an excavation of two trenches and the recovery of a cannon and many other finds. Students were trained in in situ preservation methods of organic material, and there was also the opportunity for public archaeology engagement with the local community. In all, this project brought together the different aspects of maritime archaeology in practice, including  3D digital recording methods.

Further reading about the Nissia shipwreck

• Dr Stella Demesticha – New underwater archaeological investigation of a medieval shipwreck at Paralimni, Cyprus

• Rare shipwreck excavated off Paralimni

• Paralimni-Nissia shipwreck

• Nissia Shipwreck

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Of the shipwrecks that I have dived, this will always be my favourite shipwreck as studying her opened my eyes to the fascinating world that is Maritime Archaeology! Warwick sank in 1619 in Castle Harbour, Bermuda as a hurricane swept across the islands. The ship broke free of her moorings, at King’s Anchorage, and was dashed against the surrounding reefs and cliffs.

Between 2008 and 2012 the National Museum of Bermuda, working alongside the Institute of Nautical Archaeology and the Centre of Maritime Archaeology and Conservation at Texas A&M, excavated and documented the remains of the ship. I was very lucky to dive as part of the project in 2012 and assist with recording the bow section. This project was my first and hence my introduction to underwater survey techniques. The work on the submerged remains at the wreck site have been concluded, however, analysis of the survey results and conservation of the artefacts are on-going.

Further reading about the Warwick:

• National Museum of Bermuda
• Warwick, 1619: Shipwreck excavation – fieldwork blog from June-July 2012
• The History of the Goodship Warwick
• INA Research Project
• http://nmb.bm/explore/exhibits/

Shipwreck “The Warwick” 1619 from Dr Philippe Max Rouja on Vimeo.

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In this short video, Rodrigo discusses why HMS Invincible is currently his favourite shipwreck. He also discusses his first favourite shipwreck, El Triunfante:

Transcript

Further reading on HMS Invincible:

Current research on site done by Pascoe Archaeological Services and the Nautical Archaeology Society in close collaboration with MSDS Marine. This project is funded by Historic England.

• HMS Invincible Facebook page
• Bingeman, J. 2010. The First HMS Invincible (1747-1758): Her Excavations (1980-1991). Oxbow Books
• Lavery, B. 1988. The Royal Navy’s First Invincible. The ship, the wreck and the discovery. Portsmouth: Invincible Conservations (1744-1758) Ltd.
• Fenwick, V. and Gale, A. 1998. Historic Shipwrecks. Discovered, Protected and Investigated. Stroud: Tempus.
  

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Transcript

Hello! My name is Dani. I’m a student at the University of Southampton and I’m a facilitator on the course. My favourite shipwreck is the SS City of Medicine Hat. It was found in a city called Saskatoon, which is in central Canada – that makes it about three days’ drive from the nearest ocean. It was a paddle steamer used to ferry passengers up and down the river. It sank in 1909 when it hit some underwater telegraph cables. It was found a few years ago, and they found about a thousand artefacts with it. It’s my favourite shipwreck because three days from the ocean and we still find maritime archaeology and that’s pretty exciting!

Further reading about SS City of Medicine Hat:

• Wikipedia article
• Globe and Mail Article on discovery of the wreck

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Vasa is an example of a wreck that was raised first and excavated after. A team led by Per Lundström consisting of ten archaeologists, a photographer and an artist, were charged with the task. Working conditions were exceptionally harsh. The ship had to be sprayed constantly with cold, fresh water to keep it from drying out, meaning that the team had to work in an invariably wet environment. Garden hoses and spray nozzles were used to wash away the black mud covering Vasa’s decks. What was revealed was an astonishing assemblage of artefacts still lying in place.

On both gundecks, the gun carriages stood at their gun ports and the belongings of sailors were still stored in chests toward the bow. In the hold, hundreds of cannonballs were found, but also barrels of salted meat – over time reduced to bones – and huge coils of anchor cable. In the cabins, pewter plates, hunting rifles and a gilt brass table clock were found, the belongings of the officers. Perhaps the most remarkable find were the carefully folded remains of six of Vasa’s sails plus the sails for the longboat, still tied up as they had been delivered from the sailmaker in 1627. The archaeologists registered each artefact, recorded its find place and gave it a unique find number after which the object was placed in water-filled tanks to await conservation.

However, diving work also continued at the site where Vasa sunk. Many pieces of the ship had fallen off the vessel and lay around it. From 1963 to 1967 divers surveyed the site and recovered the collapsed beakhead, the upper sterncastle, parts of the foremast and mainmast, many sculptures, the ship’s anchors and the longboat, a large vessel in itself measuring 12 m long, which had another smaller boat inside it. By the time the excavation of Vasa and the diving on the site of her sinking was complete, over 40 000 objects had been registered, including almost all of the parts of the ship needed to reconstruct Vasa more or less completely, and to tell the story of the people who made up the crew.

The discovery, raising and excavation of Vasa was one of the key developments in the theory and practice of the – at that point in time – new field of maritime archaeology, primarily in Sweden, but also internationally. Together with other significant finds from the 1950s and 1960s, such as the excavation of the remains of five Viking ships found in Roskilde Fjord, Denmark, under Olaf Olsen and Ole Crumlin-Pedersen, the medieval cog discovered in the River Weser at Bremen in Germany and, on the other side of the world, the wreck of the VOC ship Batavia in Western Australia, the work on Vasa demonstrated the potential of this growing corpus of ‘underwater’ archaeological finds to produce meaningful and significant insights into our past.

The research on the history and archaeology of Vasa and the 40 000 objects found with the ship is ongoing and tackles a wide range of topics including social, environmental, economic, political and technological issues affecting the northern European world of the first half of the 17^th century. Doing this are a team of international researchers and students from – next to the conventional fields of history and archaeology – disciplines such as genetics, ballistics, metallurgy, zoology and economics. Recent projects have focused on the test firing of a replica of one of the ship’s 24-pounder bonze cannon, DNA analysis of the human remains found on the ship and inquiries into the role of woman in the Swedish economy. The research on Vasa is not just the analysis of a particular ship and how it sank, but has demonstrated to have the potential to contribute to wider technological and socio-economic questions, ranging from how the ship was built and sailed to the role of Sweden in the Thirty Years War (1618-1648).

Sources

• Museum website: http://www.vasamuseet.se/en
• Adams, J. 2013. A Maritime Archaeology of Ships, Innovation and Social Change in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Oxford: Oxbow Books.
• Cederlund, C. O. & Hocker, F. 2006. Vasa I: The Archaeology of a Swedish Warship of 1628. Oxford: Oxbow Books.
• Hocker, F. 2011. Vasa: A Swedish Warship. Stockholm: Medstroms Bokforlag.

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Today, it is hard to imagine, but during the 17^th and 18^th centuries, the Kingdom of Sweden was an aggressive entity – one of the great European powers – that asserted territorial control over much of the Baltic region. When Gustav II Adolf (1594-1632) acceded the Swedish throne in 1611 he inherited wars with Russia, Denmark and Poland. Gustav Adolf was the grandson of Gustav I – or Gustav Vasa as he is widely known today – the first of the Vasa dynasty. The Vasa family had a bundle of sticks, called a fascine in English and ‘vase’ in Swedish, as their heraldic symbol and it is from this that the ship Vasa gets her name.

It is in these war-like conditions that Vasa was built. In fact, out of the 21 years Gustav Adolf reigned, 18 were spent at war. The ship was commissioned in January 1625, together with three others. It was a Dutch master shipwright, Henrik Hybertsson and his business partner Arendt de Groote, who secured the contract. Vasa’s keel was laid late in the winter of 1626 at Skeppsgården, the navy yard in Stockholm. By the summer, Hybertsson, who was already sick when construction started, had to hand over supervision of the works to his assistant, Hein Jakobsson. Hybertsson, who had designed Vasa, passed away soon after.

The ship was launched in the spring of 1627 and hundreds of craftsmen worked around the clock to finish it by the summer of 1628. Although vividly decorated with hundreds of sculptures, there can be no mistake that Vasa was a war machine. The ship was 69 m long, 50 m tall from the keel to the top of the main mast, weighed over 1200 tonnes when outfitted with all ten of her sails and carried 120 tonnes of ballast. Most importantly, Vasa carried 64 cannon: 48 24-pounders that fired shot weighing ten kilograms each; eight 3-pounders on the upper deck and six stormstycken, short guns for firing anti-personnel ammunition at short range. All of that firepower added up to a broadside of 250 kilograms, twice as much as the largest ships in other northern European navies at that time.

Before the ship set sail, it was tested. The captain supervising the rigging of Vasa, Söfring Hansson, had thirty men run back and forth across the deck and noted that the ship rolled alarmingly. Despite reporting his worries to Vice Admiral Klas Fleming, who himself was feeling the pressure from the king to get the ship to sea, Söfring received orders to set sail anyway. On the 10^th of August 1628, Vasa did set sail… for 1300 metres. Thousands of Stockholm citizens and several foreign ambassadors watched while a gust of wind made the ship heel to port. Water gushed through the open gun-ports and within minutes Vasa was gone, lying 32 meters below on the sea bed.

Repeated attempts to raise the ship failed. However, 35 years later, in 1663, the divers Albrecht von Treileben and Andreas Peckell, making use of a recently perfected invention, the diving bell, managed to reach the ship, rip up the deck and extract almost all of Vasa’s guns and sold them abroad.

It was Anders Franzén who, in recent history, rediscovered the vessel in August of 1956. Divers explored the wreck and, thanks to the Baltic’s cold and fresh water which makes it inhospitable for shipworms, encountered Vasa in astonishing condition. When it was decided to lift the ship, the proposals on how to do so ranged from filling Vasa with ping-pong balls to freezing it in a giant ice-cube. Eventually, the Neptune Company opted to use a tried-and-tested method: divers spent two years digging tunnels and passing cables under the hull up to floating pontoons. On Monday the 24^th of April 1961, Vasa was again seen by a crowd of thousands when the ship broke the surface 333 years after its fatal first voyage.

Sources

• Museum website: http://www.vasamuseet.se/en
• Cederlund, C. O. & Hocker, F. 2006. Vasa I: The Archaeology of a Swedish Warship of 1628. Oxford: Oxbow Books.
• Hocker, F. 2011. Vasa: A Swedish Warship. Stockholm: Medstroms Bokforlag.

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Gribshunden, also known as Gripshunden, and Griffone, was a large Danish warship employed in the fleet of King John I (Danish: Kong Hans) who reigned in Denmark from 1481 to 1513. Gribshunden appears in some of the earliest Danish fleet records and is amongst the first Danish vessels to be described as a carvel. The vessel, which seems to have served as the king’s flagship, sank in 1495 on an important diplomatic voyage bound for Kalmar, Sweden, where King John was to meet with Regent Stent Sture the Elder and the Swedish council, probably to discuss details regarding the Kalmar Union (Barfod 1990: 80-81). Unfortunately, John I arrived at Kalmar without his mighty Gribshunden

While anchored at the natural harbour off Ronneby on his way to Kalmar, Gribshunden suddenly caught fire and sank, killing several of the men aboard (Barfod 1990: 80-81, 203). By chance, John I was not aboard Gribshunden at this time himself but witnessed the flames engulf his flagship from a distance from within a ship’s boat. The wreck and its location ultimately sank into oblivion.

The wreck was rediscovered by local sports divers in the 1970s but it wasn’t until 2001, when strange artefacts had been uncovered on the site, that archaeologists were made aware of its existence and began to investigate it. The wreck, which was unidentified at the time, was found to be rather disjointed but otherwise well-preserved. A wooden sample was promptly taken from one of the timbers, revealing that the ship had been constructed of oak wood felled in the winter of AD 1482-83.

The Museum of Kalmar County subsequently entered into collaboration with the local dive club to undertake further investigations of the wreck. Several extraordinary artefacts, which had been preserved in the muddy sediment, were salvaged from the site, including nine gun carriages for breech-loading iron guns, mail armour fragments and a capstan (now exhibited in Blekinge Museum).

The collaborative fieldwork efforts, moreover, yielded valuable information about the ship construction itself. Most importantly, it was quickly observed that ship had been built by use of carvel planking, i.e. the hull planks had been laid flushed and fastened edge-to-edge. It is thus the oldest carvel built shipwreck discovered in Nordic waters, standing in contrast to the traditional Nordic clinker built watercraft (in which the hull planks overlap). The technological significance of its construction prompted further investigations into the wreck, which, through careful analysis of ordnance pieces and by the process of elimination, resulted in the tentative identification of the wreck as the Gribshunden.

Although the archaeological investigations are only in their earliest stages, the wreck has already been subject to much mass media attention and research interests, particularly as a consequence of the salvaging of the wreck’s figurehead which was undertaken in the summer of 2015. The figurehead, a menacing dog-like monster, is exceptionally unique, being the only one of its kind in the world.

Much has already been gained from the few investigations of the site and several sets of data collections are currently being processed and treated. With this new knowledge, it will be possible to return to the wreck site in the near future to undertake a larger fieldwork project. Future studies of the site will doubtlessly make significant contributions to knowledge of Late Medieval life, especially in relation to seafaring and naval warfare.

Further information about Gribshunden:

Last year, Rolf wrote a more detailed blogpost about the Gribshunden before the figurehead was salvaged: http://combatarchaeology.org/gribshunden-significance-and-preliminary-investigations/

The figurehead is now being conserved at the National Museum of Denmark, but will be returned to Blekinge Museum witin 2-3 years after having been conserved by PEG and freeze-dried.

The Gribshunden research project is a work in progress, so here may be other exciting developments in future.

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The ever-changing nature of the inter-tidal zone means that is presents its own unique set of challenges as a working environment. This is especially true in countries such as the UK where there is a very large tidal range. The extent of the inter-tidal zone is increased, but the time-window during which archaeological remains are accessible can be very limited. The nature of the inter-tidal zone around the UK is also very mixed, ranging from vast expanses of hard sand, to estuarine silts and mud. Working on sites in the latter is like working in a vat of treacle or thick syrup, but with a much worse taste and an enduring smell that clings to you long after you have left the site!

Accessing sites in these areas can be fraught with difficulty and real danger of literally becoming stuck in the mud in the face of a rapidly incoming tide. Knowledge of the local conditions is therefore of critical important, as is a pair of tight fitting wellies, or even a dry suit. Reaching a site might involve a significant walk, carrying all equipment, although options to make life easier include hovercraft or even arrival by boat on estuarine islands. Developing technology using drones for remote surveys and photographic recording is also making life much easier.

Finally, when the site is reached, its location within the tidal regime might dictate that work is limited to a very short window, perhaps 45 minutes if located near to the low water mark. I was lucky enough to work on a newly exposed site on the East Winner sandbank, Hampshire, which was a well preserved 19th century shipwreck, but where we could only access the site for one hour, every two weeks, not at all convenient. On other sites that are situated closer to the high tide line work can carry on for hours. The location of the site in the tide can also mean that access is only available every few weeks at the lowest tides, which can be a further impediment to regular work.

Given all of these problems, the question might be asked as to why we bother to work in such an area. The answer is simple – because the archaeological remains that are contained there are often fantastically preserved by mud, silt and sand. By extension, they are often remains that have never been recorded before (because of being covered) and so offer new information to add to our overall record. At a more visual level, such sites can be incredibly evocative as they emerge from the receding waters, and exist in our world for a limited period of time before they are reclaimed by the incoming tide. This constantly changing physical context offers the final reason for working in the intertidal zone – that many of the sites that are found, are under immediate threat when they appear, from sediment erosion or being swept away by the sea.

The importance of archaeological remains in the intertidal zone is being increasingly recognised within the UK. The nature of the sites means that it is often possible to visit them in person, or to volunteer to help with the survey and recording of them. Much of this work takes place in a very reactive way, because sites are often uncovered and exposed without warning, and so work cannot be planned in advance. So if you are interested in learning more about intertidal archaeology please visit the websites of the Maritime Archaeology Trust, or the CITiZAN Project.

You may also be interested in What are the environments that maritime archaeologists work in? which is a step in Week 1 of Shipwrecks and Submerged Worlds: Maritime Archaeology.

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The Belgica,  built as the whaler Patria in 1884 in Svelvik, Norway, became Belgium’s most illustrious research vessel after it was bought and refitted by Adrien de Gerlache.

The ship and its crew were the first to spend the winter on the ice of Antartica when the ship got stuck on the 28th of February in 1898. Only 13 months later, the crew managed to dig a canal to free the ship from the ice. The Belgica arrived safely in Antwerp on the 5th of November 1899.

Transcript

Hi! I’m Thomas Dhoop and my favourite wreck has to be the Belgica. She was a Belgian research vessel.

She was built in 1883 in Norway as a whaling ship, but she was bought by Adrien de Gerlache to go on an Antarctic expedition. She left Antwerp in 1898 and successfully reached the Arctic. At the Arctic, the mission was very successful. They discovered several new biological species, discovered several new islands which they named… but she got, at a certain point, stuck in the ice and it took them 13 months to dig a canal to get them back free of the ice and so she became the first ship to spend the winter on the Antarctic. After this she was bought by the Count of Orleans and she went on several more expeditions.

During the First World War she was used as a floating fish factory and during the Second World War she was used as a floating munition depot for the British in Harstad in Norway. And this is where she met her end. She was sank by a German air attack and now she is one of the most beautiful diving spots in Norway.

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After a lot of hard work by a huge number of people the Shipwrecks and Submerged Worlds course goes live tomorrow.  I and my colleagues have been spending the weekend reading through the different elements trying to iron out any minor issues, all the while thinking about how it will be received.  At points while we were putting this together it felt like we’d taken on an impossible challenge.  Not because it was hard work, but, because of the problem of how you condense a very broad subject into 4 different blocks, each supposed to take around four hours to complete.  Added to this we had the challenge of translating a subject which is rooted in material culture into a virtual form.  Archaeology is at its most vibrant in the field, museum and laboratory – when the material can be encountered and provoke a response.  Similarly, the different environments we work in as maritime archaeologists help create different forms of understanding; from plodding through sucking inter-tidal muds, happy days on boats, or diving down to visit a new site.  Viewed from this angle, translating all of that experience into an online course is a near impossible challenge – instead we’ve taken the only logical way forward, looking to introduce people to the subject, hopefully to enthuse them about it, and to position ourselves to respond to their thoughts and questions.

If you’re reading this post and are going to take part in the course, we really do want to know what you think, and to answer any questions you may have.  It will be interesting to see what people enjoy, what people hoped would have been there (but isn’t) and what people think should be changed.  Similarly, it’ll be interesting to hear about Maritime Archaeology and maritime heritage in different parts of the world and perspectives.

So, at the end of all this I, and i think all the team, have come to thinking that we may have finished posting material up onto the MOOC site, but, the course certainly isn’t complete.  Elsewhere i’ve written in an academic article about teaching maritime archaeology at university level, that the most important factor is the nature of the learning community you create.  You can’t simply plan your lectures and repeat them each year, as every cohort is different  and brings with it new challenges and opportunities.  This is what makes being a lecturer such a good job; we don’t just teach in the traditional sense of the word but look to engage, learn with (and from) our students.   As such, the prospect of engaging with a learning community at the scale of thousands is both daunting and exciting.   I am looking forward to being challenged in new ways and encountering new ideas and opinions.  Its still frustrating to think of new things we could add in and bits that could be refined, but, it would probably be more worrying if we didn’t …

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