Page 96 - Kennemerland VOC ship, 1664 - Published Reports

R. PRICE AND K. MUCKELROY: THEKENNEMERLAND
I Lead ingot
0w5 10 Figure 10. Map of the wreck material off Stoura Stack.
sum, preserved a significantpatterning (Muckel- roy, 1975).
6Stoura Stack
The traditional rhyme about the Kennemerland tells us that ‘on Stoura Stack she broke her back‘ (Forster & Higgs, 1973,292), and the dis- covery of a gully filled with over 100 lead pigs from the ship’s ballast barely 10m from the corner of the stack vividly illustrates this dis- aster. A map of the sea-bed around the stack is given in Fig. 10. Detailed investigations of the ingots themselves is not yet completed, so that the present discussion will be limited to des- cribing and discussing their situation on the sea- bed. The full significance of this assemblage, representing, as it does, one of the largest collections of 17th century lead in existence will only emerge after this work is completed.
Lead ingots weighing around 150kg each will not have moved far on sinking, so that
their find situations must reflect pretty closely the exact places where the ship’s bottom was torn open. Nevertheless, the gully in which they lie, being from 12 to 17m deep, with steep sides 8 to 10m high, has funnelled them into its narrow bottom, and aligned them with the trend of the gully. In places the leads lay four deep in the gravel. The only other artefacts found in this gully to date are considerable numbers of yellow Dutch bricks (Overijsselsde Steen) and iron cannon balls of various sizes, both, surely also derived from the ship’s ballast. Although many areas around the stack have yet to be searched thoroughly, we are fairly confi- dent that there are no leads up against the cliff to the south of the gully, so it would appear that the stricken ship did not float that far south on the backwash from the cliffs. The fact that there are also no leads within the eastern half of the gully shows that, once it struck, the ship swung around to the west at once, and
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