From Montezuma to Modeste to Modestie and back to Modeste

Mike Salter continues his guest blog for us as he drills down what happened to the Modeste, prize to HMS Hussar, wrecked on 11 November 1810. The details of her background, capture, and wreck are unusually interesting and detailed and break new ground for us.

He continues:

During research to establish a likely scenario, Serena Cant pointed out a National Archives catalogue item within the High Court of Admiralty; Prize Court, Prize Papers series with the heading “Contested Cause. Captured ship ; Modeste  (Master Uswald) 1810.” Initially, this seemed too early as the wreck was in November 1810, and prize cases could be months or years before finalisation. [1] There was also a very brief newspaper note of a case in the Admiralty Court on 21^st May 1811, involving a Modeste which claimed to be sailing under “Bremen colours and therefore claimed as such property”. The Court ordered “further proof” [2]

I asked TNA to do an initial search to confirm whether or not this was the right Modeste and it turned out it is. A day at TNA has cleared up many of the mysteries, although the result of the Court case may be hidden in another catalogue item. All references are to the HCA item as in [1] unless otherwise stated.

1. Construction and Name

Despite the auction advertisement in December 1810 stating that Modeste was a few months old, a check on Lloyd’s Register for 1809-10 reveals the presence of a vessel named Montezuma, built in America and owned by Charles Grandison from 6^th June 1809. She was three-masted, 314 tons, and had a ‘Man Figurehead’. As we saw in March 1854 in the Lincolnshire Chronicle reference to the figurehead on display at the Athenæum in Boston (Lincolnshire), quoted in Part I, “Our old friend Montezuma is most brilliantly got up for the occasion.” As we shall see, the trail for her capture and subsequent wreck reveals that Montezuma was the first name of the Modeste.

However, the Lloyd’s Register entries for 1809-1810 show the vessel was actually built in Massachusetts in 1800 and was repaired and copper-sheathed in 1809. Oddly the entries continue in the List until 1814, still with Grandison and Ship’s Co. shown as owner, despite the following details of sale and the wreck in November 1810. [Serena notes: this is not at all uncommon for Lloyd’s Register – sale, disposal and wreck are not always uniformly accounted for until the last quarter of the 19th century, and vessels may remain on the Register for a number of years before they finally drop out.]

A common thread is that Mr C. Cave, who owned the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens in Skirbeck, Boston, where the Montezuma figurehead was displayed for years before going to the Athenæum, was an auctioneer who sold the Sea Adventure, wrecked in the same storm, and would have known Messrs. Barnard and Chapman who bought the wreck of Modeste.

2. Early History and Sale to Bremen

The first report of Montezuma in Britain was her arrival in Liverpool in April 1800. [3] Several advertisements were placed in this and subsequent years for passengers and freight.

On 21 July 1809 she arrived in Liverpool and on 10 February 1810 the Montezuma (Grandison) arrived in New York with “lots of fore and mizzen mast damage, having been ashore.“

On 28 August 1810 the Montezuma was sold to the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen in Germany for $28,000 (c.£6,000 at the time).

A Certificate of Change of Ownership and Renaming to Modestie was issued by the Burgomasters of Bremen in September 1810, declaring that she had no contraband or prohibited goods, weapons etc.. The Master was Johann George Uswald , a citizen and inhabitant of Bremen, and the crew was 18 men .

On 20 September the Kiel Customs Controller issued a confirmation of the sale to Bremen and renaming Modestie. They mentioned the figure of 127 inscribed on the Main Mast as required by their laws (Doctors Commons translation from German).

3. Capture by HMS Hussar and the wreck of 10/11 November

This is a summary of the Public Instrument of Protest sworn by Lieutenant William McDougall in Boston, Lincolnshire, two days after the wreck (13 November).

Alexander Skene, Commander of HMS Hussar, frigate, sent McDougall on board the Modestie on 1 October with one Midshipman and 12 crew from the frigate, thinking it was Danish and enemy property. (Captain Skene later deposed that the Modestie had been lying in Kiel (which was Danish at the time) being fitted out as a ship of war.)

The Modeste was taken off the island of ‘Femeren’ (Fehmarn), south of the Belt, sailed for Dars Head [Darß], west of Rügen, Germany, then on the 5^th to Gothenburg, Sweden, under convoy of HMS Stately, Captain Campbell. On 24^th they reached Rob’s Snout (west Jutland). The winds were unfavourable, so they put back to Gothenburg, leaving again on the 3^rd November for Yarmouth. The wind was from the N and E and the top-sail split.

The vessel had insufficient ballast, too light and sailed fast, losing convoy. On 8 November they reached Dugeons Light [Dudgeon Light] off the Lincolnshire coast (placed there in 1736). They stood off ‘til 2am; wind in NE; stood up for Winterton Lighthouse seen at 2pm. Wind fell calm, strong ebb tide; 8-9pm anchored off Winterton lighthouse in hope of pilot coming out. Wind increased – no pilot came, signal was flying. Wind increased from the SW. About 9 or 10am on the 10^th the cable parted from the anchor – wore and made sail to clear Haisboro’ Sands, blowing a horrendous gale from the ENE. In the night split the stay sails, no other sails could be set (lead going all night).

Set close-reefed sails and not being able to lay higher than N and NW the ship struck a sandbank in Boston Deeps – didn’t know exact position; into deep water again, gale increasing. About 5am on the 11th ship struck again, then back into deep water several times. At daybreak ship struck again but still kept going ahead for a 1/4 hour when she struck aground there being [line illegible but may have said “every chance the hull would fall over”.) With great difficulty got the boat out and part of the crew went in her – lowered a small boat down with remainder of the crew and left the ship, which was lost, except part of the rigging, sails and part of the wreck of the hull.

Weather clearing up and could see the land distant 5 or 6 miles, made for it, desiring the crew in the other boat to keep close to him. McDougall saith the above is a true and correct record, the ship Modeste having been lost. He declares to protest that the Damage and Loss of the said ship was not through any neglect or default of his or the mariners belonging to the ship, but due to the causes aforesaid.

Attestation and Seal

4. Master Uswald’s and Shipowners’ Position

The translation of a letter of 12th November from Uswald to the ship’s agents Albers & Droop said: “On night of 9^th Nov. at Winterton Flats. blew fresh. In am, 10^th, gale from the E and ENE, parted anchor and with storm sails set, drove. During night it was a little more moderate, set more sails, grounded at 3am on Banks. Yesterday, 11^th, am, had the misfortune to strand at Gibraltar Point. Ship total loss so began to save whatever possible. He bemoans his predicament and lack of help. The ship is bilged: he is detained on the Guardship at Yarmouth.

An affidavit on 30^th November from the shipowners said that the Modestie was not owned by any Enemy and had a Licence from the United Kingdom.

An affidavit from J G Uswald said “Modestie cleared Kiel in September, Uswald, master, on behalf of Bremen merchants. In ballast to Riga, then cargo to London (with licence from United Kingdom on board.) Licence was produced from a hiding place between decks. McDougall left the Modestie saying she was free to proceed but returned. On 2^nd October he was informed Modestie was being sent to Yarmouth. Put back due to unfavourable winds and sailed again on 3^rd Nov. No pilot when near the English coast – believes McDougall at fault.

An affidavit from two crew members of the Modestie stated that there was a licence to their knowledge and the ship was lost due to the lack of skill and ignorance of McDougall.

5. Affidavit in support of McDougall

This was sworn by Francis Napier, Edward Duffy and Thomas Allen on the 3^rd December 1810, and exhibited McDougall’s statement. It discussed the ship’s papers and the licence issue, then “arrived at Winterton Light, anchored on 9^th Nov. waiting for a pilot. Morning 10^th Nov. blowing hard, colliers failed to stop and help find pilot. Fired rockets and raised (pilot) signal flag. 10am, parted cable and was driven out. About 5am on 11^th Nov. driven onshore at Gibraltar Flats near Boston. Had kept Master Uswald informed at all times. Uswald was not prevented from making a protest. McDougall had 20 years’ experience as a mariner, 14 of which in the Royal Navy.“

6. Court proceedings and auction details

On 28^th November 1810, a Commission to make Judgement was issued in the case of the Prize capture by the Hussar and it was executed on the 1st December 1810, by fixing to the pillars of the Royal Exchange.

In the meantime, an appraisal had been carried out by Thomas Alldridge, who was appointed as auctioneer by the Hussar’s Agents, on the 13^th Nov. and he recommended that the ship be sold by auction at the earliest possible date as the wreck was four miles offshore and in danger of sinking into the sands.

There is an account for labourers’ wages and expenses for the period 11-22^nd Nov. which includes a team of Mr Carrott, the farmer on whose premises the Auction was held on 11^th Dec. (not 7^th as advertised). Receipts from the Auction included £800 for the hull and bowsprit, but after all expenses the nett proceeds were only £659 18s, of which £518 11s was paid to the Customs House in Boston as a deposit for duties.

For a ship which had been sold for $28,000/£6,000 a few months before this was a tremendous loss, although there was an insurance of £6000, dated 8^th Oct., presumably taken out by the Hussar’s Agents after the capture. This would have covered most of the loss, if paid.

The previous owner, Grandison, swore an oath, dated 29^th Jan 1811, that he had handed over the British licence to Uswald on sale of the vessel, then named Montezuma.

7. Affidavit of Captain Alexander Skene of 22 February 1811

He detained the Modestie on 1^st Oct. 1810 and put McDougall on board. He returned with the ship’s papers and Master Uswald who said he was bound from Kiel to Riga (the previous owner had said Dantzig) to pick up a cargo for England.

There was no licence and Skene asked Uswald if he had one – he said ”No”. Skene believed the ship had been in Kiel to be fitted out as a ship of war. William Turner, the Hussar’s carpenter was sent on board to survey the Modestie and he concluded that “Modeste was calculated as a Ship of War”.

Skene said he found fresh produce for Hussar (she had been at sea for 4 months) and he offered to pay Uswald for it, but he refused, saying it was a trifle.

Skene said McDougall was of impeccable character and that Modestie had Danish markings on her main beam (including the figure of 127 inscribed on her main mast) but the owners maintained she was sailing under Bremen colours, i.e. as a neutral, as mentioned in newspaper reports.

8. Conclusion

• The life of the ship, Montezuma, launched in 1800, wrecked in November 1810 was as short as that of the Sea Adventure (the subject of my previous Blog in March 2024) was long.
• She was clearly a well-built and capable ship of 320 tons, having sailed the New York to Liverpool route and to Africa, Jamaica and South America.
• However, her luck ran out when sold by the owner to the City State of Bremen in late August 1810 for the substantial sum of $28,000 (c. £6000)
• Almost immediately after her name change to Modestie (not La Modeste; nor Modeste) she was captured by HMS Hussar off the Island of Fehmarn (Danish)
• My understanding is that the United Kingdom was not (yet) war with America, nor with the City State of Bremen, but was at war with Denmark, pressured by Napoleon to exclude British ships from the Baltic. Demark had declared war on Britain after the English had bombarded Copenhagen in 1807.
• British Orders in Council of 1807 imposed strict blockade on all ports from which British ships were excluded. Kiel (Danish) therefore had a choice whether to trade solely with Britain or not at all.
• Further, British control of Baltic trade owed its survival to widespread fraud and deception. The ships had to be foreign and were furnished with false papers and certificates showing them to be trading with ports friendly to France. They were given a British licence conferring immunity from detention by British cruisers but they had to join a Convoy and stay with it until it reached England. [5]
• The Saumarez Papers also say there was “Official information on the deteriorated state of the entrance to Yarmouth Roads”. This was in late 1810, making a pilot essential.
• It does seem unlikely that a British licence given to the American ship Montezuma (licences name the vessel and Owner’s country) could be valid if transferred on sale. There was a scheme in place for temporary licences to be issued by British ships which had to be surrendered for a formal one, once in England.
• The Court’s decision has not been discovered, but McDougall had navigated the Modestie to within 5 miles of her destination of Yarmouth and the actual cause of the loss was the parting of the anchor cable, allowing the ship to be driven by the storm some 80 miles to be wrecked off the coast of Lincolnshire. Sixty ships came to grief in similar fashion in that storm from Whitby to the Thames during that storm.
• There was little or nothing left from the proceeds of the auction after costs, duty and expenses.
• Captain Skene certainly went on to command large naval vessels, so it seems likely the case did not result in him being punished for the loss of Modestie , which it seems was an Act of God.
• The actual result of the High Court of Admiralty case is most likely to be found in The National Archives but may take quite some unearthing.

Footnotes

[1] HCA 32/1589/4248, The National Archives (TNA), Kew https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C14202011

[2] Public Ledger and Daily Advertiser 22 May 1811

[3] Staffordshire Advertiser 12 April 1800

[4] See note [2]

[5] Saumarez Papers, Navy Records Society, pp.xx, 151, 88-92.

U-247 lost off Wolf Rock, Land’s End

For this month’s entry we turn to my colleague and fellow Maritime Research Specialist Tanja Watson. Thank you, Tanja, for putting this together! Tanja writes:

Over 1,500 British and foreign vessels are known to have been lost along the English coast during the Second World War. Some forty-five of these losses were German U-boats – not all located, or identities confirmed, but nearly all of them went down on the Bristol Channel and English Channel coasts. [1]

One of the identified wrecks is the U-247, a German Type VIIC patrol submarine.[2] Over 600 Type VIIs were built and represented the workhorses of the Kriegsmarines submarine fleet during World War II.

The U-247 was built in 1943 at the Friedrich Krupp Germaniawerft yard at Kiel. She was fitted with a Schnorchel underwater-breathing apparatus in April 1944, which allowed U-boats to stay under water for longer to avoid enemy detection. [3]  

The U-247 was part of the 1st U-boat flotilla, also known as the Weddigen flotilla – the first operational U-boat unit in Nazi Germany’s Kriegsmarine. This combat flotilla was stationed first in Kiel (1935-41) and then Brest from June 1941 until it was disbanded in September 1944, and its remaining boats were distributed to other flotillas. [4]    

The U-boat was sunk by two Canadian war frigates, the HMCS Swansea and Saint John, on 1 September 1944, while out on her second and final patrol. She had left Brest a few days earlier, on 26 August, with 52 crew on board under the command of 24-year-old Oberleutnant zur See Gerhard Matschulat who had been in post for one year. [5]

She was just entering the English Channel, near Wolf Rock – a rock located 9 miles (15 km) southwest of Land’s End, Cornwall, when six Canadian frigates from the 9th Escort Group, sweeping the convoy route between Land’s End and Hartland Point, picked up a strong signal at 6:45pm, 15 miles east of the Wolf Rock Light on Thursday 31 August 1944.

Monnow, Stormont, and Meon of Escort Group 9 (EG9) were ordered north to pursue the search, while Saint John, Swansea and Port Colborne were ordered to remain to pursue the contact. However, ‘tide conditions made the contact difficult to hold, and after a number of depth-charge and Hedgehog attacks contact was lost’ just after 11pm.

Contact was re-established at 1.55am by Saint John three miles from Wolf Rock, on the bottom at 77 metres. Two depth charge attacks from the frigate brought up oil and explosions from the target. A search was conducted of the area, but nothing was found other than the oil slick. Saint John’s echo sounder trace indicated the U-boat was heavily damaged, and directed by this, Saint John dropped five more depth charges on the target at 2pm, which completely destroyed U-247. [6]  

Eventually rising debris, including a scrap of paper from the engine log (a certificate for the 10 millionth revolution of U-247‘s diesel engines); a door panel; clothing and other paperwork, confirmed the identity and the sinking. There were no survivors. [7]

Both depth-charges and Hedgehog had been used. A naval intelligence record (AUD Assessment) of the attack shows U-247 was detected by Asdic (sonar) but due to a lack of records, it was not possible to determine when or exactly how the U-boat was destroyed. [8]

Originally developed during World War I, at a time when the technology to locate submarines was very primitive, depth charges did not have to be direct hits. Once detonated the explosion created a fast-expanding gas bubble, generating a high-pressure shock wave that multiplied through the water, and could cause fatal damage to a submarine’s hull, even if the depth charge exploded some distance away. [9]

Developed in the years just before 1944, the Hedgehog antisubmarine mortar fired a spread of smaller explosive charges (eventually as many as 24 projectiles) ahead of the firing vessel. [10] The device proved to have a much higher kill to use ratio than depth charges, which a U-boat could survive hundreds of over a period of several hours, [11] but the Hedgehog relied on a direct hit. On average, one in every five attacks made by a Hedgehog resulted in a kill – compared with fewer than one in 80 with depth charges. [12]

The general wreck position was recorded as 49.54N, 05.49W, [13] where it lies at a general depth of circa 68-73 metres (sources vary). When located in the 1960s, it was still giving off oil. [14]

The UK Hydrographic Office (UKHO) recorded a more precise position in 2002 (49°53,933’N, 05°49,916’W); and observed that the hull had blown open in front of the conning tower and was lying on its starboard side with bows facing south-east. [15]

The U-247 was of the same U boat type featured in the West German film Das Boot (1981). [16] This film gives a good impression of the experience working on a U-boat and of being under attack from depth charges.

Footnotes

[1] Statistics derived from Historic England’s National Marine Heritage Record (NMHR), currently accessed via the Heritage Gateway

[2] U247: Historic England, NMHR Ref No. 919799

[3] U-247, https://uboat.net/boats/u247.htm

[4] 1st U-boat flotilla, https://www.uboat.net/flotillas/1flo.htm

[5] Gerhard Matschulat (1920-1944), career record: http://www.ubootarchiv.de/ubootwiki/index.php/Gerhard_Matschulat

[6] Kemp, Paul (1997), U-Boats Destroyed: German Submarine Losses in the World Wars, p. 216

[7] See note [6]

[8] National Archives ADM 199/1786, AUD1561/44

[9] https://navalhistoria.com/depth-charges-the-underwater-weapons-of-war/

[10] https://naval-museum.mb.ca/people/sir-charles-goodeve/

[11] “The Hedgehog — Meet the Allies’ Devastatingly Effective U-Boat Killer”, www.militaryhistorynow.com

[12] “Britain ASW Weapons”, http://www.navweaps.com

[13] https://uboat.net/boats/u247.htm,

[14] McCartney, Innes (2002), Lost Patrols: Submarine wrecks of the English Channel, p. 22

[15] UKHO Wreck Report 22440, https://www.wrecksite.eu/ukhoDetails.aspx?22440

[16] Das Boot, directed by Wolfgang Petersen, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_VII_submarine

What can scientific investigation of glass from wrecks tell us?

For British Science Week (6-15 March 2020) I am delighted to welcome my colleague Dr Sarah Paynter, Materials Scientist at Historic England, as our guest blogger. She describes some of her recent work involving analysis of glass from wreck sites and what these finds can tell us about wrecks. Some of the key finds recently analysed include those from designated wreck sites, such as the wreck of the London, lost off Southend-on-Sea 355 years ago this week on 7 March 1665, or the ‘Wheel Wreck’ off the Isles of Scilly.

Over to Sarah: 

The Historic England laboratories at Fort Cumberland specialise in the conservation and analysis of all kinds of ancient and historical materials. We have worked on archaeological glass for many years but when our remit expanded to include wreck sites, we had the opportunity to work on glass artefacts recovered from the sea. It has been an eye-opening experience . . .

Cargo vessels and warships alike contain a surprising amount of glass, some as part of the vessel structure, such as windows at the stern, but there are also glass components in the instruments (sand glasses and sundial/compasses) and personal belongings (spectacles and mirrors), as well as fine goblets for officers’ use, and often a great many glass bottles and beads amongst the cargo.

Glass bottles:

On a wreck site this glass can be found scattered in a debris field and the preservation can often be remarkable – despite terrible explosions, navigational errors, violent storms and loss of life, glass bottles can still occasionally be found intact and unopened with the stopper in place.

Ironically, a damaged object generally holds more promise for us than an intact one, because we can usually take a small, fairly unobtrusive sample from a previous break. We use pincers or glass cutters to clip the broken edge, giving us a sample a few millimetres across, which exposes fresh glass. We need this fresh surface to obtain a good chemical analysis because even seemingly well-preserved objects are altered by their time in the depths.

The surface is usually covered in a fragile skin of iridescent, flaky, weathered glass, as well as concretions, marine organisms and sandy mud, all of which limit the usefulness of surface analyses. We can identify old breaks because these also have a matt, altered surface, whereas any breaks that have occurred during recovery and post-excavation handling are shiny and smooth.

The chemical make-up of the glass, and the environment that it has lain in, both have a huge impact on its condition when it is recovered centuries later. English medieval glass made before the mid-16^th century tends to degrade very quickly, whereas later glass can be miraculously preserved because it is chemically more resistant to weathering (Historic England 2018).

Scientific analysis of glass: 

We use several different analysis techniques in our work, depending on our research questions, the size and condition of the object, and whether we can take a sample. The scanning electron microscope (SEM) can show us the structure on a microscopic scale, as well as chemical composition, even if the sample is only a few millimetres wide.

The benchtop XRF (X-ray fluorescence) spectrometer provides similar chemical information and we can sometimes fit intact objects into the machine, which is ideal if we cannot take a sample from them. We also have a portable XRF machine, which gives less complete results, but which can be used on any object, even those that are still wet or very large. It can also be taken out on site as it is about the size of a hairdryer and not much heavier.

One of the main advantages of working on wreck material is that we often know to the day, when the ship was lost, and perhaps the ports of origin and destination. This means wreck sites can provide precisely dated material for the archaeologist. The objects might be found in a case packed for transport, in a chest of personal belongings or on the deck where they were being used. Accounts of the time may even provide us with details of ship architecture, provisions, armaments, cargo and crew, and the life of the vessel from the shipyard through to eyewitness accounts of its final journey. It is very rare in land-based archaeology to have so much information around the context of an object. Samuel Pepys, the famous diarist, gives a detailed account of the devastating loss of the London, in an entry on March the 8^th 1665:

“This morning is brought me to the office the sad newes of “The London,” in which Sir J[ohn] Lawson’s men were all bringing her from Chatham to the Hope, and thence he was to go to sea in her; but a little a’this side the buoy of the Nower, [the Nore] she suddenly blew up. About 24 [men] and a woman that were in the round-house and coach saved; the rest, being above 300, drowned: the ship breaking all in pieces, with 80 pieces of brass ordnance. She lies sunk, with her round- house above water. Sir J[ohn] Lawson hath a great loss in this of so many good chosen men, and many relations among them. I went to the ‘Change, where the news taken very much to heart.”

Bottles, instruments and windows: tracing technological changes: 

The reasons for analysing archaeological and historical glass are varied, but we are always aiming to answer a question, either to identify something, or to work out how old it is or where it is from. Wreck material also serves another purpose because we can often date it so precisely, so we are using our analyses of glass objects from precisely dated wrecks to add to a kind of ‘calibration curve’ for how the composition of windows, bottles, beads and vessels change over time in England. On the occasions when we are presented with glass from an unidentified wreck, we have used our ‘calibration curve’ to estimate the date of the wreck from the composition of glass bottles or trade beads. For example, bottles were recovered from the protected wreck site of an unidentified vessel with a cargo of probable mining machinery in the Isles of Scilly, known as the ‘Wheel Wreck’. Analysis of the bottles added to growing evidence that the vessel might be older than previously thought.

This ‘calibration curve’ works especially well for post-medieval glass because technological developments appeared thick and fast from the 16^th century onwards, and glass compositions changed quite rapidly (whereas in earlier periods, the technology used to make glass remained fairly constant for centuries at a time).

We can see how quickly glass technology changed in later periods by comparing the glass objects from two Navy warships: the London, which exploded off Southend on the 7^th of March 1665, and the Stirling Castle, which was wrecked alongside three other warships a few decades later in the Great Storm of the 26^th of November 1703. The shape and composition of green glass bottles has already changed subtly even in this brief period of less than 50 years, to the extent that they began during the 18th century to resemble modern bottles more closely. (Burton 2014)

We can see some differences in the images below:

At this time, bottles were made by gathering hot glass on the end of a blowing iron, inflating a bubble in the glass to form the body of the bottle, and lengthening the neck. The sides and base of the bottle body could be shaped using a mould or a flat surface, even the floor. The end of the bubble was pushed in to create a ‘push-up’ at the bottle base, so that it would stand on a flat surface.

To finish the bottle, the pontil iron was attached to the bottle base so that the neck of the bottle could be broken free of the blowing iron, and then the rim shaped by further working or by applying more glass. Finally the bottle was detached from the pontil, leaving a pontil scar.

Finds specialists can use the characteristics of bottle bases, including the type of pontil mark and the shape of the push-up, to work out the date of a bottle or where it was made. We can also look at the composition of the bottle glass to see if it matches our analyses of other English-made bottles. With cargo vessels, analysis is a useful tool to investigate the movement of goods around the world. We can use analysis to work out where goods were made and where they were going to.

 

Glassworkers could also make different types of glass, depending on what the glass was going to be used for. For a lens in a pair of spectacles or an instrument, like the pocket sundial/compass from the London, they used special, purified, more expensive ingredients to obtain a colourless glass (instead of the common green). Colourless glass was also used to make mirrors and the best goblets. The closely guarded industrial secrets for making colourless glass were originally brought to England in the 16th century, along with other technology, by glassworkers from Continental Europe, and their expertise led ultimately to a revival of the English glass industry.

Glass windows on ships are a particularly striking feature and appear to develop in parallel with those on buildings. Glass had become more widespread in the windows of ordinary homes in Britain by the early 17^th century, and ships dating to the 17th century, like the London, also had windows incorporated into the elaborately decorated stern, where the captain’s cabin would be situated.

In the past, glassblowers had several techniques for making flat glass for windows.

One technique involved making rectangular sheets of glass (broad or cylinder glass) by elongating a blown bubble of glass into a more cylindrical shape using gravity, which involved swinging the blowing iron back and forth whilst standing on a platform, or over a pit. The cylinder was cut along its length, then unfolded and flattened.

Alternatively, a round sheet of glass, known as a crown, was made by blowing and shaping a bubble, which was then transferred to a pontil iron rod so that the other end of the bubble could be opened up. When the glass was spun, it opened into a disc shape, or ‘crown’. When the pontil was removed it left a ‘bull’s eye’ in the middle with a pontil mark. Diamond-shaped quarries of glass, for glazing windows, were cut from the thinner glass around the edges.

In earlier windows, the glass quarries were joined together using bendy lead strips known as cames, and the glass tends to have a greenish colour, similar to contemporary bottles, or the green glass component from the London sundial shown above.

Later in the 17^th century wooden glazing bars were adopted to hold the glass panes in place. As time went on, the technology for making large sheets of flat glass improved, so window panes could be made larger, and the ingredients used to make the glass were improved so that the glass became increasingly colourless (Dungworth 2012).

Glass beads: 

By contrast, the tiniest glass objects we have encountered so far on wreck sites are glass beads, which were made and traded on a vast scale in the past, either small and plain beads, or elaborately multicoloured examples. The better-known European manufacturers were based in Venice, Amsterdam and Bohemia, where huge numbers were made, and there were also established bead-makers in the Indo-Pacific region and Africa.

European beads were widely transported by sea, with a commensurately widespread distribution in archaeological contexts, reaching the American and African continents. Plain, monochrome beads can be superficially difficult to tell apart just by looking at them, but examining their composition will usually give us enough clues to work out when and where they were made. So glass beads from wrecks can also help to answer archaeologists’ questions at wreck sites around the world, as a means of dating contexts and investigating trade.

At Fort Cumberland, the work on all kinds of finds from wreck sites around the coast of England continues to aid in our understanding and management of wreck sites. There can be few more appropriate locations to investigate the remarkable finds from historic ships than in Portsmouth, a port city and also home to the Mary Rose Museum and the National Museum of the Royal Navy.

Discover our online dive trails: visit wreck sites without getting wet!

Visit Historic England’s virtual dive trails and explore the designated Wheel Wreck and London sites!

Acknowledgments:

With particular thanks to colleagues at Historic England (Angela Middleton, Serena Cant), the HMS London licensees, Cotswold Archaeology, Michael Walsh, Jörn Schuster, Kevin Camidge, David Dungworth, Florian Strӧbele, Fred Hocker, Niklas Eriksson, ‘The Glassmakers’ Mark Taylor and David Hill, Alastair Miles at the Mary Rose Trust, Diana Davis at the National Museum of the Royal Navy, the Nautical Archaeology Society, and all those collaborating on the wreck sites described here.

References:

Burton D, 2014 Antique Sealed bottles 1640-1900 and the families that owned them. Antique Collectors Club Ltd.

Dumbrell R 1992 Understanding antique wine bottles. Antique Collectors Club Ltd.

Dungworth D 2012 ‘Historic window glass. The use of chemical analysis to date manufacture’ Journal of Architectural Conservation 18, 7-25.

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