FEATURES
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DIVERS TRY TO SOLVE THE MYSTERY OF THE VESSEL
By Frank Adams, FSU Communications Group
Underwater archaeologist Chuck Meide
watched thick chunks of colorful coral being chipped off a cannon that hadn't
been exposed to air in two centuries.
He hoped marks on it would tell him if the sunken ship he and others were diving on had been manned by slave traders, English sailors or Caribbean pirates.
The vessel had sunk to the bottom of Kingstown Harbour in the capital of the island nation of St. Vincent and the Grenadines 200 years ago.
Now a crew of 16 archaeologists and divers from Florida State University and the Institute of Maritime History (IMH) is trying to shed new light on this watery mystery.
Meide, a recent graduate of Florida State, was co-director of the expedition that started excavating the pristine 18th century shipwreck.
If the 3,500-pound iron gun had a broad-arrow design stamped on it, the cannon had belonged to the English Navy. If the gun was blank, then it might have belonged to an armed slave trader or perhaps a privateer. Those were the guesses members of the expedition hazard-ed before they left, based on some pottery they had recovered, and the fact that the ship's hull had been sheathed in copper.
In the late 1700s, copper sheathing was a radical new way of protecting wooden ships' hulls from the marine worms that loved to chow down on wood, and the English Navy and slave traders were among the few who could afford it.
Meide eagerly waited for answers while the team chiseled coral from the gun.
When the coral around the base of the 9-foot-long cannon was chipped off, it turned the archaeologists' expectations upside down. Instead of a broad arrow, or no mark, the chiselers found three fleurs-de-lis, meaning the gun was made in France, not England.
"When I saw the French fleur-de-lis on the cannon I was excited," Meide said. "Then I said, 'What?'"
A researcher in France matched marks on the gun to records in French archives to reveal that the gun was cast in a French royal foundry in 1776 - which meant the ship could have been French.
Or it could have been an American privateer equipped with French cannons to attack British ships.
The first season of work on this shipwreck is over, and members of the team are still pondering pieces of the puzzle.
They will pore over archives to identify artifacts, and chemically analyze a copper sample to determine where it was mined.
Meide and the other expedition director, David Johnson, director of Caribbean research for the IMH, look forward to going back.
"But we need to raise a lot more money to continue," Johnson said.