YORKTOWN, Va. — I recently visited the Watermen's Museum to check out a piece of a 1700s ship pulled from the bottom of the York River.
"It looks kind of decaying and falling apart, which it is, because the problem with rope and other textiles and leather and things is that they don't survive well over time," says Michael Steen, the Director of Education at the Watermen’s Museum. "This piece of hawser rope comes from a shipwreck from 1781."
The HMS Charon was a warship in the British Royal Navy supporting General Cornwallis at the Battle of Yorktown. Steen tells me, "Cornwallis is here with his troops and he knows the French are coming. So he starts sinking ships to form a barricade. The remaining ships are put on patrol. [In] this case, the Charon and the Guadalupe are in charge of watching the upper river to keep the militia from coming downstream."
He continued, "The Charon was here on the York River side. It got hit by hotshot from the French batteries, caught fire, and drifted all the way across to the Gloucester side [where it] ran into several boats over there."
The wreckage from the HMS Charon and many other ships are still at the bottom of the York River. Steen says, "When John Broadwater was doing his underwater archaeology back in the 1970s and the 1980s, this piece of rope was found down below in the wreckage."
The Watermen's Museum is located on Water St. in Yorktown. For more information on hours and admission visit watermens.org.
