Scientists Gather to Study 17th-Century Ship Timbers Found in Lower Manhattan in 1913
A little known fact about early New York history: Very little is known about early New York history. For the time between Giovanni da Verrazzano’s arrival in 1524 and the early years of the 17th century after Henry Hudson’s landing in 1609, almost no records or artifacts remain to shed light on the growing community of settlers and traders who inhabited La Nouvelle-Angoulême (the name Verrazzano gave to the harbor he found, to flatter his royal benefactor in Paris, Francis I, who had been Count of Angoulême until ascending the French throne).
That might be about to change. The Museum of the City of New York (MCNY) has embarked on a joint project with the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands to analyze ship timbers found buried in Lower Manhattan more than a century ago, when the tunnels for what is now the 1 train were being excavated. In 1916, workmen laboring 18 feet below the now-vanished intersection of Greenwich and Dey Streets (roughly the block south of the Oculus, on the World Trade Center campus) stumbled across the bow, the keel, and several ribs of an 80-foot-long, oceangoing vessel.
Under pressure to stay on schedule, the construction crew cut away the section of the ship that was protruding into their tunnel and took it to the New York Aquarium, then located at Castle Clinton in the Battery. (The rest was left in place and likely destroyed by the construction of the original World Trade Center in the 1960s, and its successor in the early 2000s.) The section brought to the Aquarium was submerged in a seal tank, which probably saved it – exposure to air likely would have reduced the delicate timbers to powder in short order.
Further inquiry showed that upper edges of the vessel were burned, with the hull above that point missing. This clue yielded a tentative identification: these remains were likely part of the Tyger, a Dutch trading vessel that was one of the first to anchor in the harbor on a commercial voyage, rather than a mission of exploration. Captained by Dutch trader Adriaen Block, the Tyger had come to La Nouvelle-Angoulême in the summer of 1613 to load up on beaver pelts, which were much prized in Europe. But in November of that year, just as Block was preparing to sail east across the Atlantic, a fire broke out aboard the Tyger and the ship burned to the waterline. The location at which the vessel was anchored was adjacent to a stream and small inlet along what was then the riverfront, at Greenwich and Dey Streets.
Rather than undertaking the trouble and expense of lifting the remains of the ship out of the water, Block and local officials appear to have submerged what remained of the Tyger in silt and abandoned it. The vessel was forgotten. A century later, it was further entombed as landfill pushed the shoreline several hundred yards westward.
In the 1940s, as the Aquarium was being moved out of Castle Clinton, the remnants of the Tyger that had been discovered decades earlier were donated to the Museum of the City of New York, where, ever since, they have been preserved but never extensively studied.
Until now. The Museum’s new research project – which begins this month, when a team of Dutch scientists – will focus on identifying the wood species used in the timbers and determining through dendrochronological analysis when and where those trees were cut. “Tree rings in the shipwreck timbers can reveal the date and provenance of the wood,” explains one of the scientists, Dr. Marta Domínguez Delmás.
All of this data will point to the vessel’s origin and construction date. The project will analyze the design of the timbers as shipbuilding elements, with a focus on how they were made, their function within the vessel, and what they reveal about construction techniques.
Another member of the team from the Netherlands, Dr. Martijn Manders, notes, “the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands is responsible for the research and management of Dutch shipwrecks abroad. These wrecks from different time periods not only can tell us an awful lot about the history of our country, but also the positive and negative connections we have had with different peoples in the world. The arrival of the Tyger in 1613 marks one of the earliest attempts to connect with the ‘new’ world and to map the area that would later become New York.”
MCNY president Stephanie Hill Wilchfort says, “these ship timbers connect us directly to New York’s earliest years as a crossroads of cultures, commerce, and exploration.”