Picking up the pieces of the past

by Kathy Canavan

When tens of thousands of pottery shards and tiny pewter soldiers began washing up on Delaware’s Lewes Beach in 2004, no one immediately fingered them as telltale signs of a shipwreck that occurred before the American Revolution.

Or, could that be two shipwrecks?

Just a half-mile from the beach and a scant 12 feet below the water’s surface, could two British merchant ships—each with a wooden hull stretching the length of two modern-day school buses—have been lying silently wedged into the coarse sand and gravel seabed for 235 years?

Were they already doomed and forgotten when Caesar Rodney made his storied ride from Dover to Independence Hall in 1776?
Two years after the artifacts first littered 1,000 linear feet of Lewes Beach, archaeologists are quietly deciphering more than 40,000 clues to the earliest known shipwreck in Delaware waters.

The artifacts, which once covered the sand so completely that it was difficult to walk without stepping on something two centuries old, are mostly gone from the beach now.
Gone are the metal-detector-toting tourists who were alerted to the find by a treasure hunt web site. Gone, too, are the duo dressed entirely in black who prowled the beach nocturnally and the scavengers who boldly dug within the scientists’ excavation lines on a Sunday morning when they thought no one would check.

They were thwarted when Daniel R. Griffith, AS ’70, the former Delaware state archaeologist who is director of the shipwreck project, pressed Lewes’ beach-sweeping machine into service. Pipe pieces, bottles, brass pins—all were scooped to safety. The machine dumped its precious cargo unceremoniously in a sandy heap behind the first archaeology lab in Cape Henlopen State Park. Since January of this year, the primary archaeology lab has been located at UD’s Pollution Ecology Lab on Pilottown Road in Lewes.

Griffith says he was ready to call out the National Guard if treasure hunters kept cropping up on Lewes Beach. When no gold coins turned up, they left on their own. (Of the 42,000 recovered artifacts, Griffith says, there was not a single coin.)

Last year, an 11-day, $100,000 archaeological dive confirmed one wooden-hulled merchant ship was located in the water off Lewes Beach. Researchers think it probably sank in the years leading up to the American Revolution.

Divers, fighting a dynamic current roiling out of the Broadkill River, sighted a large section of the ship’s keel still intact. They managed to salvage ceramics, polished-stone pestles and, using inflatable balloons to help lift, two heavy millstones and several heavy chunks of iron oxide dotted with artifacts. Side-scan sonar revealed that there was a second anomaly under the waves, but not necessarily a ship.

Now archaeologists, led by Griffith, are probing whether Delaware Bay is the final resting place of the Severn, lost in 1774, or the Commerce, capsized in 1771, or perhaps both ships.

“I tell people it’s like having a 500-piece puzzle. After you gather all of the pieces together, then you take a third of them out because they’re still on the beach or because somebody else has them,’’ Griffith says. “Then, you try to put the puzzle together, and it’s impossible.”

The mystery began in the fall of 2004 when a news reporter brought state archaeologists a shoebox full of ceramic shards she found on the beach near her Lewes house. They immediately recognized that the artifacts were centuries old.

When Delaware state archaeologist Chuck Fithian arrived at the beach, he found it covered with 200-year-old artifacts—Chinese pottery, Dutch shoe buckles, intricately detailed pewter pieces from a German strategy game similar to Risk—all utilitarian items in use when the steam engine and the flush toilet were new inventions.

Fithian and Griffith knew they had an intriguing find. What they didn’t know was that a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers beach replenishment project had just dumped thousands of cubic yards of sand on Lewes Beach, sand pumped from two spots within the bay.

In a few days, Fithian says, it was almost impossible to walk on the beach without stepping on an artifact. They set up a tiny excavation site and found 50 pounds of artifacts produced in England, South Africa, China, Germany and The Netherlands.

That find drew help from Delaware’s Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control, Lewes officials and Secretary of State Harriet Smith Windsor, CHEP ’79M, ’88PhD, who lives in Lewes.

Windsor championed the project. She secured $200,000 in state money and convinced Griffith to segue into a new role as director of the Lewes Maritime Archaeology Project.

He asked the community to help search the beach, and he worked with underwater archaeologists hired by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to comb the bay.

Researchers are mum about the exact location of the wreck because gold diggers raised the HMS De Braak from Delaware Bay on live television and, in the process, accidentally dumped thousands of fragile artifacts wholesale into the sea. Federal and state laws enacted since put all shipwrecks within U.S. waters off-limits to commercial salvagers.

Knowing protections were in place, Griffith took the bold step of erecting signs on the beach explaining the search and inviting beach-goers to share their finds, at least temporarily, for the archaeological record. Each artifact can more precisely date the cargo, he says.

So far, 150 people have turned in their finds. In June, one man donated 3,100 pieces. More than 40 volunteers are cataloging artifacts, and translating Dutch inscriptions.

Of the 42,000 artifacts numbered so far, Griffith calls them “priceless and worthless.” They won’t sell on e-Bay, he says, but they are valuable clues to our colonial past. Francis Lukezic, a UD senior studying archaeology and art conservation, spent last summer piecing together ceramics, made when the word “Wedgewood” was usually preceded by “Josiah.”

Susan Ritter, AS ’93, who has extensive experience in archaeological fieldwork and lab analysis, is analyzing hundreds of shards of mineral-water bottles, mostly from an 18th Century German company known as Selters.

By dating the artifacts, the archaeologists have calculated the ship was likely a British commercial carrier traveling in the years just before the American Revolution. British law prohibited any country from trading with its colonies directly, so these ships were packed with cargo from around the world. It was common for British ships to dock in Lewes because the town was home to the river pilots who escorted the ships up to Philadelphia.

Looking for answers to what’s under the sea, archaeologists in Lewes use their noggins, the Internet, shipping logs, insurance records, even Ben Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette. They’ve toted artifacts to Bay Health Medical Center in Dover for CAT scans.

Last June, Griffith realized something jarring. “It was the first time it dawned on us that we might have two ships,” he says.

Speculation was spawned when a donor came in with a piece of pottery found on the beach in 2005. The piece was produced between 1762 and 1775 as were the other recovered artifacts, Griffith says, but it was not exactly the same as any of the others.

“It was like, ‘Uh oh. This may be a different shipment,’” he says.

Griffith muses that a common thread—the University of Delaware—unites five of the researchers in the project. Secretary of State Windsor earned two degrees at the University. Griffith and Ritter earned one. Lukezic is currently enrolled at the University. Sharyn Murray, AS ’74, volunteers two days a week, producing intricate drawings of small finds whose detail would be missed by cameras.

“Five of us, on different life paths, at different stages of our careers, have all come together in the same place to work on this project,” Griffith says.