The World Trade Center Shipwrecks

In 1916, construction workers digging

the 7th Avenue subway line in lower

Manhattan uncovered a series of wooden

beams in the wall of their tunnel. They

had stumbled upon a shipwreck nearly 20

ft under Greenwich Street near what is

now the World Trade Cent's Courtland

Station.

The foreman realized this could be

something important. So he asked local

historians and archaeologists to come

down to the site and check it out. But

none of them were interested in it, or

at least not enough to go and excavate

it. So he took it upon himself to

recover whatever he could. He and his

crew took 8 1/2 ft of the ship's keel

and three exposed frames out of the

ground.

They said it was so difficult to pull

out of the wall that they suspected the

rest of the ship was still there buried

just beyond their reach. In the 1960s

and 70s when the port authority started

building the first World Trade Center,

they expected to find the rest of the

vessel because they were digging right

next to the subway tunnel. But they

never did. Instead, they found other

things like a ship's anchor, a swivel

gun bearing the insignia of the Dutch

East India Company, and another smaller

vessel that once again people didn't

seem to want to keep or document.

Nearly 40 years later, construction

crews were building the new World Trade

Center. This time, archaeologists from

the consulting firm AKRF were present

monitoring the site.

they could excavate and recover whatever

it is they might find. And in 2010, they

came across yet another ship. This one

was more than 20 ft under Washington

Street. It was much more intact than the

previous wrecks, although only the lower

portion remained, including the ship's

keel frames and the inner and outer

planking. There was also a small section

missing at the bow where the

construction crews built a slurry wall

that cut through the ship. Now, when you

think of the World Trade Center,

shipwrecks probably aren't the first

thing that come to mind. So, let's talk

a little bit about what they're doing

here. Manhattan is an island, and it

used to be a bit smaller than it is

today. Here's a map of New Amsterdam

from 1660. And here is a modern Google

Earth view. The basic street layout is

still there around the old or natural

island. And all of this extra stuff is

landfill.

For hundreds of years, there was an

intentional effort to expand the

shoreline for a couple of reasons. For

starters, it meant that there was more

room to build things, but also the water

around the tip of Manhattan used to be

very shallow and had a very shallow

slope. That meant merchants couldn't

bring their seaf fairing ships right up

to the island shore, so they had to

ferry their cargo over on smaller boats.

The colonists would fill in these mud

flats, the inner tidal zone, and shallow

areas, then build warves and peers out

to the deeper parts of the harbor so

that the merchants could directly unload

their cargo. That kept happening over

and over and over again, pushing the

shoreline farther out into the harbor.

The two ships at the World Trade Center

almost certainly served as a way to

expand the shoreline. So, what are they?

The identity of the 1916 ship is still

up for debate. For a very long time,

historians believed it to be the remains

of the Dutch ship Tiger.

In early 1614, Tiger was commanded by

the Dutch explorer and merchant Adrien

Block. Block was preparing to sail back

to the Netherlands after trading with

the native tribes in the area when a

fire broke out and burned Tiger down to

the waterline.

The crew abandoned ship and built a new

one to make the journey back across the

Atlantic.

Today, nobody knows where Tiger sank,

only that it was somewhere on the North

River near lower Manhattan.

It is completely understandable why

historians thought this was Tiger.

This 1916 ship absolutely burned at some

point because the tops of the frames

were charred. The subway construction

crew also found a Dutch ax head among

the timbers. In 1955,

radiocarbon dating gave it a date range

of somewhere between 1590 and 1640.

Plus, the cannon with the VOCC insignia

on it was found nearby.

However, there are also reasons to

believe that this is not the tiger. In

the late 1990s, a Dutch underwater

archaeologist studied the remains and

found that it didn't quite match what

you would expect to see in a 17th

century Dutch ship.

The stem post doesn't attach to the keel

in the way you would see on a Dutch

ship, and the frames are smaller and

farther apart than you'd usually see on

an oceangoing vessel. Plus, it's in a

landfill. Without a detailed excavation,

it's hard to tell if anything recovered

alongside the ship is related to the

ship.

As it turns out, that cannon they found

is probably from 100 years after Tiger

sank. So, if this is the Tiger, the

cannon is completely unrelated.

On top of that, there were also some

questions about the radiocarbon date. It

was still a new technology in the 1950s.

Scientists were still trying to work out

some of the early problems with

radiocarbon dating and one of the ways

they corrected it was through

dendrochronology.

Today, the Museum of the City of New

York has the ship's remains in its

collection. And as of this video, it

looks like they're going to use

Dendrochronology to re-examine the

timbers to figure out once and for all

if it is the Tiger.

The other ship, the one discovered in

2010, did have a more detailed

excavation and has had more research

since then. At first, the archaeologists

thought it could have been a small cargo

or ferry ship because it had a flat

bottom and shallow draft. Those were

very common features for 18th century

river boats and harbor craft. So, early

reports and studies called it a Hudson

River sloop, which were very common in

New York.

It also could have been used as a

coastal trader because it had evidence

of shipworms from the Caribbean.

However, as they excavated more, it

became clear that it was some kind of

small warship. It was just too short to

be a cargo ship. It didn't have the

space to be a practical cargo carrying

vessel. The ship's lines didn't match

any known riverboat, but they found that

it was almost identical to a late 18th

to early 19th century gunboat.

It was also built in the same way as

other known gunboats like the

Philadelphia on display at the

Smithsonian and the Spitfire, which is

still at the bottom of Lake Champlain.

Then the archaeologists found military

related artifacts. They found a

4-pounder cannonball, grapeshot,

buckshot, birdshot, and musk balls.

Aside from maybe the birdshot, this was

all common ordinance for a late 18th

century military site. They also found a

pewer button for the British 52nd

regiment who had been stationed in New

York City in 1778.

Now, remember, this is still in a

landfill. So, why do these artifacts

matter more than the ones found with the

1916 ship?

The oversimplified answer is that these

artifacts were found within the ship.

And I don't mean within the area that

was the ship's hold because that was

filled in by the landfill.

The military artifacts were found

between the ship's frames and planking.

They were inside the ship's structure,

which isolated the objects from the rest

of the site. In other words, these

things were already within the ship when

it entered the landfill.

In addition to the artifact analysis,

the researchers did a

dendrochronological study on the beams.

It revealed that a lot of the wood came

from the Philadelphia area no later than

1773.

That's a very important detail because

the 52nd Regiment was also a part of the

occupation of Philadelphia during the

American Revolution.

It seems like this ship was an American

gunboat built to protect Philadelphia or

the Delaware River. Then the British got

a hold of it, sailed it around the East

Coast in the Caribbean before finally

bringing it to New York, where it

eventually made its way into this

landfill.

There is a lot more to this story than I

could ever tell you in the length of

this video, but luckily some of the

archaeologists who either excavated the

ship or conserved it have given some

talks that you can listen to here on

YouTube. So, I'll leave a link to those

in the description if you'd like to hear

more about it and directly from them.

But if you enjoyed this video and you'd

like to see more like it in the future,

let me know in the comments. Remember to

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time.