2009 Season

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excerpt from "The Frigate Ertuğrul: 2009 Highlights—A Campaign Full of Surprises

by Berta Lledó
Read the complete article first published in The INA Annual, 2009

2009 Field Campaign

Field work on Ertuğrul shipwreck resumed in January and February of 2009 at Oshima Island, Japan, as the second season of archaeological excavation following the 2007 survey  and the first excavation campaign in 2008 (Figure 3).

During the three field campaigns on this rich archaeological site more than 4,000 artifacts have been raised. The first year, consisting of only a survey, yielded 11 diagnostic artifacts. In 2008, the first excavation campaign, the number of artifacts recovered rose to 1,164, while in 2009 the artifact count was 3,534.

The difference between the two campaigns is not only due to more dives and total bottom time (155 dives or 164 h bottom time in 2008 versus 183 dives or 188 h bottom time in 2009) but also to a concentration on richer archaeological levels. In 2008 the team removed a layer of at least 50 cm of loose shells and gravel whereas in 2009 they could start directly in compacted levels.

For the 2009 field work, the Kushimoto municipality provided Ertuğrul Project with a research center in town, an old depot building previously used sporadically by the community for meetings and eventually as a youth club. The project rented a traditional Japanese house across the street to be used as living space for the team.

During the first week of the project we habilitated the depot into a fully working archaeological laboratory for the processing and conservation of artifacts, with space for a computer center (Figure 4).

In the center of the lab we had a low set of tables that accommodated up to 16 people. These were used mostly in the afternoons when we welcomed high school students and their teachers for practical sessions on nautical archaeology, and volunteers who came to help with the conservation process. The center was also used extensively for press conferences that the Kushimoto municipality arranged regularly, as well as for our team’s evening meals (Figure 5).

During afternoons the influx of volunteers to the lab was extremely helpful. We had a regular group, who varied in age from 7 to 90 years old, who participated in all stages of the process, from receiving the artifacts, to photography, registry, and especially mechanical cleaning. With their help we finished the initial cleaning of many of the thin copper plates covered by concretion, all of the nails, and all of the copper pieces recovered in 2008 and 2009. Some large concretions were also worked with chisels and hammers, which resulted in the recovery of a large number of nails, lead fragments, and other small artifacts that they contained (Figure 6).

During our two-month stay in Kushimoto the desalination process of artifacts in wet storage from 2008 continued. By the end of February, most of the artifacts from 2008 were almost desalinated. Those fully desalinated were slow dried. Among the objects were some concretions and a few copper-alloy objects that were immersed in benzotriazole (more commonly referred to as BTA) for 24 hours for stabilization before slow drying.

Although progress in the initial conservation of the artifacts went well, at the end of the 2009 campaign we faced the same problem as in the previous year: how to arrange the desalination and treatment of artifacts after our departure. To solve this issue we agreed on a collaboration plan with the Kushimoto Marine Park (Figure 7).

We were allowed to use several concrete tanks in the storage area of the park, similar to those in the INA Nixon Griffis Conservation Laboratory in Bodrum, Turkey. In them we stored large artifacts (i.e. three copper pipes measuring two meters in length, several large concretions, and the cooking pot which measured 75 cm in diameter and 45 cm high). An adjacent area was designated to hold all the plastic boxes that contained the rest of the artifacts remaining in Kushimoto, with the promise that water will be changed in all the boxes on a monthly basis, thereby improving our storage situation and allowing slow desalination.

The Kushimoto Marine Park, in collaboration with the Kushimoto Municipality, also held a wet exhibit of some of the artifacts in one of their show rooms starting in April 2009. The main theme was the excavation and raising of Ertuğrul’s cooking pot. The exhibit consisted of three sections: a picture show of the project, with pictures taken by professional underwater photographer and project member Mazakazu Akagi; a video presentation showing the excavation and raising of the cooking pot; and a display of actual artifacts in two areas: a low tank with open top in which concretions, bullets, and a cannon ball are can be seen and a cylindrical glass tank specially built to contain the cooking pot (Figure 8).

The exhibit raised great public interest which drew a large number of visitors.

Increasing Collection

Since the start of the project all artifacts have been registered in an Ertuğrul Project database, and copies left with the Kushimoto municipality in Japan.

During our 2009 campaign the most representative object of the shipwreck was raised: a 75-cm (29-inch) diameter copper-alloy cooking pot. Its recovery was an event that every newspaper in Japan wanted to feature. The raising of the object was done during a press conference at the wreck site, both on the dive boat and under water, organized by the municipality. The cooking pot was then brought to the Ertuğrul Center and its lid, still inside the pot, was removed in an official ceremony; the sediment within the pot was sifted in search of any significant remains, a labor which proved unfruitful (Figures 9, 10 and 11).

The cooking pot was the center of attraction in the Kushimoto Marine
Park from April 2009 to January 2010 as the central piece of the Ertuğrul Project exhibit.

During the 2009 field work, some of the most interesting discoveries were made in the laboratory. For example, one late afternoon we identified a circular shape of an unknown material in one of the large concretions brought that day from the site to be cleaned. When carefully cleaned and opened the concretion revealed a perfectly preserved cast-iron cannon ball with its wooden sabot. (Figures 12 and 13). This was one of the four cannon balls recovered in 2009. Each weighed 12.5 kg, with an approximate diameter of 16 cm. Although two of them had preserved wooden sabots, the straps that should have been holding the iron ball to the sabot were not preserved. The wooden sabots are still being treated in Bodrum; final cleaning of their thin layer of concretion might reveal more details about these interesting artifacts.

Other artifacts in the same excavation area included a Palliser shell of 7-inch caliber. After it was carefully released from the concreted seafloor and brought to the surface it was transported and handled by the Japanese Army Special Forces since wet gun powder, even after 120 years in the sea, can still be dangerous if handled improperly (Figures 14 and 15).

Palliser shells were a type of cast-iron ammunition used in 19th-century naval battles to penetrate enemy ships’ hulls. They had a powder-filled cavity, but no fuse, being expected to explode with the shock of impact. According to the literature they were supplied for guns of 7-inch caliber and over. The Palliser shells found in Ertuğrul were most likely intended to be used with one of the five 150-lb Armstrong guns carried on board.

Use of gunpowder-filled shells was discontinued by the British in the 1880s when their artillery studies showed them ineffective against the new hardened armor developed for naval ships. If the Ottoman navy followed British guidance in these matters, the Palliser shells found in Ertuğrul presumably were already old when on board.

Besides the apparent obsolete armament that equipped the frigate in 1890, Ertuğrul itself was one of the last ships of her generation to be lost. Already from the mid-1840s frigates were built with steam engines and screw propellers, but they were still fully rigged following the traditional design, which also conserved coal.

Ertuğrul was a wooden frigate of 79-m (260-ft) length, 15.5-m (51 ft) beam and 2,344 tons burthen, launched in Istanbul in 1864 as a sailing ship, and equipped with a screw propeller and two horizontal steam engines of 600 hp in 1865 in Portsmouth, England, to keep up with new international navy trends. Already in the 1870s battleships were taking a whole new design approach; from the early 1880s the American, German, Russian and Japanese naval forces were steel plated, their armaments newly designed for them.

“Screw frigates,” built first of wood and later of iron, continued to perform the traditional role of the frigate until late in the 19th century. Toward the end of that century, the term “frigate” fell out of use. Armored vessels were designated as either “battleships” or “armored cruisers,” while unarmored vessels including frigates and sloops, were classified as “unprotected cruisers.”

A living example of the era of Ertuğrul is the frigate Jylland, a Danish steam frigate that sailed between 1860 and 1892. It was then used as stationary barracks until World War II. A major restoration program of Jylland began in 1960 in Ebeltoft, Denmark, and since then the vessel has been converted into a museum. “The last survivor from the era of wooden-hulled, screw driven warships,” Jylland could make a good comparative study with Ertuğrul due to their similarities in date, size, displacement, and power.

Yokohma Porcelain from Ertuğrul, the First Found in Japan

Japanese porcelain production started in the mid-17th century with the discovery of local sources of porcelain clay in the Hirado area. In 1662, a new source of a white-bodied clay was found on Amakusa Island. This discovery led to the creation of Hirado ware. Hirado-ware kilns belonged to just one family, Matsuural, which collected Chinese porcelains and used them as models for their products. The pieces produced in their kilns were only for their private use, to use as presents to foreign dignitaries, or for the emperor’s use at court. “Its unavailability added to its mystique.” Japanese earthenware products, however, were always second to the Chinese, which were of better quality and refinement. Between 1659 and 1682, for example, the Dutch East India Company carried 190,000 Japanese pieces to Holland, whereas 3,000,000 were imported from China.

In the 1830s some Hirado ware was made available for trade, especially with the Dutch East India Company, although its price could not compete with those of Chinese porcelain of similar quality.

With the opening of Yokohama harbor for international trade in 1859, a whole new line of export products had to be created. Many of them lacked quality and followed European fashion to gain clientele, but this was not the case with some of the very fine porcelains produced in Yokohama, where some of the workshops gained fame for their delicate shapes and decorations. Their fine ware found favor in the imperial palace, and they were the most expensive souvenirs to be bought in the harbor. The decorative style that resulted from combining traditional Japanese porcelain techniques with European and American fashion styles added to their uniqueness.

Following the Meiji-restoration (1868), the Japanese government placed special importance on pottery manufacture, not only as part of a policy to encourage new industry, but also as a way to improve Japan’s image in Europe and the United States through the introduction of its high-level art products to the international market.

Although Yokohama was where the workshops were situated and where more than 400 pottery artists were based, the region was not rich in porcelain clay, which had to be imported from other regions of Japan. On many occasions the Yokohama workshops applied only the final decoration on plain white pieces already produced in other areas of Japan.

Chemical analysis of the porcelains found in the wreck of Ertuğrul show that their chemical composition is very similar to that of Amakusa’s porcelain clay, which is rich in the clay mineral kaolinite. Amakusa, considered to have one of the best quality porcelain clays in Japanese territory, was one of the providers to Yokohama workshops, providing either the raw material or already-produced white earthenware (Figure 16).

Unfortunately there is little information for the study of the Yokohama productions. Because of both natural and human-created disasters in Yokohama after 1890, these businesses did not continue after their successful period of trade. The Great Kanto earthquake of 1 September 1923 killed at least 30,000 people in Yokohama and destroyed 60,000 buildings. It took more than six years for the city to recover, but only 16 years later, in 1945, during World War II, repeated bombings destroyed almost half of the city, the remaining facilities being confiscated until 1952.

Only recently has this type of porcelain gained interest, thanks to public awareness created by the exhibits of private collectors who have been gathering examples from different parts of the world.

A Piece of Cable

One surprising lab discovery in 2009 was a piece of electrical cable. According to the records, Ertuğrul was equipped with electric lighting in 1865 in Portsmouth, an early example of electric applications in ships. The preserved cable recovered from the Ertuğrul site is only 13 cm long, 6.7 mm diameter, but that is enough to prove this early application of shipwiring (Figure 17).

According to Robert Monro Black, shipwiring became common in the United States only after Americans contacted the Anglo-Brush Electric Light Corporation in the 1880s, but he refers mainly to commercial liners. Surely the application to military ships was earlier. “The earliest types of cables employed for shipwiring were for the electric lighting and ball wiring. The insulated wires used for the lighting circuits consisted of a single strand of copper wire insulated with a layer of pure rubber tape which was then double cotton covered and waxed. Vulcanized rubber insulation was also used over a tinned copper conductor or over a plain copper conductor with an intermediary layer of pure rubber... Nevertheless oil lamps were carried in position and ready for use should the power fail as it sometimes did... The power was supplied from batteries of Leclanche cells. The wiring was generally carried in a wood casing or some sort or moulded conduit. For a two-wired system, a double groove was used and a single groove for an earth return... In these early days, standards of illumination aboard were poor. Ocean liners in the first stages of conversion from oil lighting to electric lighting had one 8- or 16-candle power lamp to serve two cabins and an alleyway. No attempt was made in individual switches since it was general practice to switch the circuits on and off in their entirety.”

Whistle

Another interesting artifact found during the 2009 excavation was a carved bone whistle (11.9 cm long by 1 to 2.3 cm wide). It was decorated with geometrical motives of rough incisions on its exterior surface that divided the decorated area into four sections separated by double lines. These sections were decorated by oblique lines that alternate directions, creating a general zig-zag effect. The wider area of the bone, including the sound hole, was left undecorated (Figure 18). The main features of this whistle are similar to those of more sophisticated bosun’s whistles, naval signaling instruments usually made of brass or copper, sometimes even of gold or silver. This piece could be a personal possession of one of Ertuğrul’s crew, possibly purchased on one of their numerous stops in the Indian and Pacific oceans or even carved and made on board during the frigate’s long voyage.

Thanks to a personal communication with paleo-osteologist Juan Antonio Lopez Padilla, of the Archaeological Museum of Alicante, Spain, we know that the Ertuğrul whistle was carved out of a “right tibia of a small lamb or sheep. The sound hole is on the caudal aspect of the bone, and the widest part (corresponding to the proximal epiphysis of the tibia) shows that the bone has been sawed across. The tibial crest is scraped where there are remains of a small hole that was most likely to pass a string and wear the whistle suspended.”

According to Vincent Megaw, an expert on archaeological evidence for simple blown instruments, the piece from Ertuğrul “is a simple end-blown pipe or whistle; the—now missing—fipple or block being the wedge which constricts the passage of blown air which impinges on the voicing lip to set up the vibrations which produces the sound, (the piece from Ertuğrul) is obviously a simple signaling instrument.”

Mr. Corwen ap Broch, who makes and plays replicas of ancient instruments, also commented on our piece, noting that “it must also have had a block inside, more or less under the blunt end of the sound hole, which would have left a narrow opening inside to direct air over the sharp edge and generate the tone.” The difficulties of making a well fitted block in a hard material for such an irregular interior surface led Corwen to suggest that wax could have been used. “The pitch could have been altered while playing by making the opening at the wide end bigger or smaller, by inserting a finger into it or by closing the hand around the end. It may have had a range of more than an octave. This would allow it to be played with one hand.”

A similar piece, but bearing the sound hole closer to the mouthpiece, is one carved out of whale bone, scrimshaw from 1750, handiwork created by whalers. On many occasions in scrimshaw the engravings were painted to enhance the design; typical pigments were candle black and tobacco, which could well have been used on our whistle since the incisions are of a darker brownish tone whose cause is still to be determined.