Page 79 - Kennemerland VOC ship, 1664 - Published Reports

K. MUCKELROY: HISTORICWRECK SITES
relationship between these factors and the
surviving remains is that on the Low Lee Ledges
in Cornwall, which has a much more favourable
environment than its remains would suggest.
This is a site which has yet to be systematically
excavated, so its archaeological assessment may
be in error; at the same time, there may have
been particularly thorough salvage immediately
after the wrecking, or, since it is on an offshore
reef, the vessel may have drifted off and sunk
elsewhere. Attribute 8, the measure of slope,
also registered a fairly strong correlation, but
since this is essentially another measure of
bottom topography, this result simply serves to
reinforce the conclusions drawn from attributes
9 to 11. The other attribute to achieve a fairly
high value for tau, number 2 representing sea
horizon, reflects the exposure of a site to vary-
ing physical forces, and seems to suggest that it
is the variety of disturbing forces which is more
significant than their force. This idea makes
sense if one thinks of a deposit in a gully,
which may be concentrated into one sheltered
area, and which can only be disturbed by applicable when dealing with post-Medieval forces acting in a totally different direction; the
fewer the number of directions from which disturbing movements can come, the more likely is that deposit to remain undisturbed. Similarly, with a sea-bed covered with sedimen- tary deposits, the substrate is more likely to remain relatively stable if it is not being assaulted by forces acting in many different directions. In terms of the wreck formation system mentioned above (Muckelroy, 1976: fig. 6), a restricted sea horizon effectively reduces the significance of the recycling chan- nel whereby artefacts, once buried, are reexposed to the hazards of salvage or disinte- gration, and so increases the level of survival.
In Fig. 2, the ranking of the sites’ archaeolo- gical characteristics is purely on the basis of the quality of the survival of the remains. In some cases the ordering of the sites in terms of the
wrecks in British waters. Dumas has written:-
‘When a boat runs aground on a rock and is holed, it sinks without other damage to the foot of the seacliff, where it lies sheltered from the sea’s violent motions’ (Dumas, 1972: 32). While this may be so with Classical amphora carriers, it does not seem to be so with vessels such as those listed above. The Santa Maria, for example, having holed itself on a reef, seems t o have broken up on the surface, depositing the ship’s bottom and its ballast on the sea-bed almost immediately, while the upper parts of the vessel drifted down current in an increas-
ingly waterlogged state (Martin, 1975: 96-7). The sea-bed distributions on the sites of the Kennemerland and Hollandia, seem to indi- cate that similar processes operated in these cases. The explanation for the different beha- viour of these post-Medieval vessels must lie in their size, and in particular in the fact that their ballast was concentrated in one part of the vessel (i.e the lower hold), and in a situation where it was liable to be lost immediately after
relative significance of their distributions
varies somewhat from this initial ranking, and
so a second set of correlations have been per-
formed, relating distribution rankings to the 11
environmental attributes. The value of tau initial impact. The scatter of ballast bricks correlating this new ranking with the original around the foot of Stoura Stack, the place of
ranking (A) was naturally very high at 0-728, initial impact of the Kennemerland (Price & although this was in fact lower than that Muckelroy, 1974: fig. 3), clearly illustrates between the latter and attribute 9 (see Fig. 3). this process in operation. Having lost at least a
The results display no appreciable distinction between these correlations and the first set; it seems that none of these environmental factors can explain the divergence in the two archaeo- logical rankings. However, further consideration of those sites achieving unexpectedly high rank- ings, namely the Kennemerland, the Santa Maria, and the Hollandia, shows up one sig- nificant common denominator. They alI lie in open water, away from any coasts, and the high level of significance in their distribu- tions relative t o their survival characteristics stems from the fact that they reflect the spillage of the ship and its contents as it drove onwards following the initial impact, breaking up as it went. This common circumstance was not, of course, directly reflected in any of the chosen site attributes. This observation also prompts a few important thoughts on the ways in which these large wooden ships actually break up, and the indications are that, as in so many related topics, the conclusions which have been drawn from Mediterranean experience are not directly
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