British warship sunk in 1703 storm gives up its secrets three centuries on | Archaeology

The British warship HMS Northumberland was built in 1679 as part of a wave of naval modernization supervised by Samuel Pepys, a decade after having stopped writing his famous newspaper and became the most senior administrator of the Royal Navy.

Twenty-four years later, after the ship participated in many main naval battles of its time, it was at the bottom of the North Sea, victim of the great storm of 1703, one of the deadliest weather disasters in British history.

Now, more than three centuries later, Northumberland abandoned its secrets thanks to the gap of sands off the Kent coast, which has exposed a large part of its hull.

An investigation revealed that the ship is in a remarkable state of preservation, not only its woods, but its strings and even unprecedented barrels having been protected against erosion and disintegration in the sand.

The survey, funded by the History England, which oversees protected wreckage sites across the country, revealed that much more from the ship’s hull did not think it previously, potentially making Northumberland wreck one of the best preserved wooden warships in the United Kingdom. The other artefacts detected on the foundations include copper boards, seven iron cannons and part of a wooden cart.

However, as more of Northumberland is revealed, archaeologists say they are in a race against time to learn everything they can from what has been called a “Stuart temporal capsule” before its woods were claimed by the sea.

The northumberland wreck, one of the more than a dozen ships of the navy lost during the large storm, was located for the first time in 1980 in Goodwin Sands, a shallow water area off the agreement, in eastern Kent. Hefin Meara, marine archaeologist at Historic England, said that the region, although difficult to access and dive, “is brilliant for the preservation of equipment like this”.

He said: “We are incredibly lucky that this site has been covered for so long, the sand has really kept it, very good condition. This rope, for example, is as fresh as that of the day the ship sailed, and we have very many barrels and similar – at this stage, we simply do not know what is.”

While the investigation revealed that certain parts of the wreckage were proud of the seabed, Meara said that there were “still many ships surviving even more deeply in the sand”. “There is a lot of archeology on this site, and there is a large quantity that we can draw from it,” he added.

This includes the answer to questions such as the way the ships were made and equipped at a key moment in the history of the British navy, when Pepys, as the secretary of the Admiralty, tried to professionalize him in a modern combat force.

Meara said that the richness of the survival of organic matter was unusual. “Canon iron can well survive on wreck sites, but it is quite rare to meet the wooden cars on which they were seated. There are a lot, a lot like that that gives us the opportunity to unravel and know more. ”

Among the naval wrecks very well preserved, marine archaeologists and historians can turn to the Mary Rose, from the beginning of the 16th century, and other ships of the 17th and 18th centuries, he said. “This one fills the gap.”

Unlike the Mary Rose, however, costs and practices mean that it is not planned to recover the Northumberland. “We have these incredibly dynamic seabed environments where the wrecks can be buried for hundreds of years – then this sand cover is moving away,” said Meara.

“Suddenly, the wreckage is exposed to marine biological organisms and the chemical processes operating on things like iron. A wreck that can survive in good condition for centuries degrading very, very quickly [once exposed]. So we have a small window of opportunity to go and discover what is there and answer these questions. We are now at the mercy of the elements, and it’s a race to see what we can save. »»