Page 60 - TVH 2000 Anniversary Shipwreck Project

Vliegent Hart – Today and a Vision of the Future Rex Cowan The proper survey and excavation of a buried wreck with areas of hull intact requires substantial time and money. Many wreck sites, even those in the charge of an institution, get a sufficiency of neither one nor the other. For it takes extensive resources, tenacity and will to continue for many years the difficult, thankless and sometime dangerous task of carrying out controlled excavation and examination of an historic wooden wreck situated in an inhospitable sea. The work on the site of the Vliegent Hart has been underway continuously, though with patches of inactivity, since exploration for the site started in 1979 - a period of 22 years. Each year new blood has been added, and for one reason or another, old hands have dropped out or self-ejected. But all of them with almost no exception have added to the increasing resource of material, information and unique discoveries enriching the depositories of the VOC and Dutch Maritime history. Without listing the many people concerned, it should include at its head John Rose, the original Joint Director, whose energy, skill and enterprise initiated and supported the work for many years. The Vliegent Hart enterprise now has what is hoped will be its more permanent base - both physical and cultural - in the new Zeeland Maritime Museum. A long process of what might fairly be termed ‘informal bonding’ with the Stedelijk Museum and its staff, now looks as if a more formal structure could be designed. A structure where the work of post excavation research could be coordinated and relationships with other specific museums and institutes progressed so that specialist studies into particular artefacts or groups of recoveries can be instituted. One large study, that of the coinage and treasure and associated packaging material, has been in progress for many years in collaboration with the Rijksmuseum Penningkabinet at Leiden, and an interim report by Dr Hans Jacobi will be included in next year’s report. This year research work started on methods of acoustic site survey appropriate for an underwater site such as this, with often extremely poor or low visibility. More attention will be paid to this as well as developing and upgrading the computerised database, which are linked to the land base in the Stedelijk Museum. With the generosity of the Oxford Maritime Trust, work on the wreck site has been guaranteed for 2001. As with so many extensive and complex sites as this, only a small percentage of the work has been undertaken. Too often, wreck sites are left, often by teams with the best of original intentions, disturbed, partially surveyed and excavated, sometimes stripped of the more accessible areas of the wreck site, and abandoned with partial or inadequate publication. It is hoped that the Vliegent Hart will avoid this fate. - 54 -