Mardi Gras Shipwreck

Daily Log

May 29, 2007, Tuesday

Update by Della Scott-Ireton, FPAN, and Sam “Sparky” Koepnick, Texas A&M

The telescope came up early this morning in perfect condition. The outer casing is wood, with brass edges on the collapsing sections. The glass is in place and, though clouded, doesn’t appear to be cracked. We’re hoping we may find inscriptions on the brass edges once the scope is cleaned and conserved in the lab. We haven’t brought up the compasses yet, although the fryer basket scoop worked well to lift them from the sediment. The boat crew helped make special padded crates to hold the compasses, but the seas have picked up again so we’ll wait for a window of calm weather to bring them up.

As we began to recover a broken ceramic tureen from near the weapons chest, we discovered several more intact pieces adjacent to it, including a plate, stacked saucers, a cup, and a bowl (guarded by a huge red crab in the photo). We are now in the process of using the ROV’s sticky foot to pick up these pieces and stow them in crates. As each artifact from the shipwreck is recovered, its location, or provenience, is entered into a program called Site Recorder 4, created by 3H Consulting of Plymouth, UK, especially for shipwreck excavations. Site Recorder is a program designed for keeping track of a site’s geography and artifacts and contains all information pertaining to each artifact, such as position, type, material, description, and excavator. We also keep track of the artifacts with a relational database designed in Microsoft Access® to be able to query our data set, print out reports, and keep our conservation forms in order. As the artifacts are removed from their context, the change is noted on the site photomosaic, so project staff always know how the site is changing and what artifacts remain.