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Schooner in the Sand Home Page
A Shape in
the Sand
An Earlier
Discovery
Excavation:
Digging into the Wreck
What Did the
Ship Look Like?
The
Artifacts
Ports of
Call
World Market
Unanswered
Questions
Time
Line
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Learning
from Artifacts and Documents
After
each excavation of the wrecked schooner, archaeologists returned to the
laboratory where they cleaned and conserved the objects
they had uncovered. They also researched artifact styles, dates and makers.
Very few
of the artifacts from the Millecoquins schooner were mass
produced, and many were unmarked. Still, there were enough clues to narrow
down the date of the wreck. The label on an
unopened box of tea from China gave the archaeologists one clue. The name
of a salt inspector stenciled on the lid of a barrel used for salt
provided another.
 A Penny for Good Luck
An old
maritime tradition is to place a coin beneath the mast, in what is
called the mast step. Archaeologists found a United States large cent dated
1833 in the mast step of the Millecoquins schooner. Whether or not it
represents the actual year of the ship's construction, the penny confirmed
that the schooner was built—or a new mast installed—no earlier than 1833.
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