Ships story revealed in 435-year-old wreckage - San Felipe

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mad4wrecks

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Re: Ship's story revealed in 435-year-old wreckage - San Felipe

Great story Tony. Thanks for the link. :icon_thumright:

Tom
 

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cuzcosquirrel

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Aug 20, 2008
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Re: Ship's story revealed in 435-year-old wreckage - San Felipe

Nice stuff. I like how he is building a model of the San Felipe's internal structure. Good plates, good work, good stuff, good times. I had a suspiscion on the hull ribs like he has modeled out a year or two ago about the San Agustin. I might talk to him about it.

Quote from article:

With hundreds of thousands of years of predictable winds, waves and depositions of sand as reference points, the line of debris is readable. The team has worked backward from the locations of these artifacts to place the likely remains of the sunken hull. After scanning the area with an ultra sensitive magnetometer, the team now has tracking data showing magnetic anomalies consistent with a buried hull. In short, they have a strong suspicion as to where it is.

If this anomaly is a sunken galleon, it may never be known for certain whether it is the San Felipe. Ship owners back then did not paint names on hulls, Mr. Breiner says. The porcelain can be dated by experts skilled at matching a design with the year in which that design was current.

Mr. Breiner says he plans to return to the site in February to survey the wreckage in detail and create a grid-based map of the debris field. The magnetometer can detect ballast stones, cannon barrels, and iron spikes used to hold the ship's ribs to its keel. Other items with a smaller footprint but still detectable include weapons, tools, boxes, furniture parts and personal effects of the crew. The lack of oxygen under the sediment inhibits corrosion.

Team members, when they do speak about this project, hold back its exact location. Search and recovery work is undertaken only with the explicit permission of the Mexican government and in the presence of archaeologists from the INAH, the National Institute of Anthropology and History, Mr. Breiner says.

Once Mexican specialists isolate and recover the hull and debris, the pieces will be restored to the extent possible -- perhaps a five-year enterprise -- and displayed in a museum in Ensenada, the capital of Baja California, Mr. Breiner says.

The joy of a journey like this one, Mr. Breiner says, is that it takes on a breadth of field of its own. Geology, oceanography and map-making are as critical as magnetism in solving this puzzle.

The questions Mr. Breiner poses in a paper on the subject are many. Why is the line of debris so straight? Why are there more objects at the southern end? How do the answers to these questions help reconstruct the events of the shipwreck? Where are the ship's anchors and why are they where they are? What has happened to the hull over four centuries? How did the porcelain stay in relatively good condition for hundreds of years in such a sandy and abrasive environment?

End of article quote.

Looking for cannon balls might make sense. I recently ran into a letter where a Spanish Philllipines govenor talked about having three special bronze demi-sakers cast for the Santa Ana, the ship Cavendish captured in 1587 off Baja California.
 

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