Iron and Steamship Archaeology

Iron and Steamship Archaeology Success and Failure on the SS Xantho This page intentionally left blank. Iron and Steamship Archaeology Success and Failure on the SS Xantho Michael McCarthy Western Australian Maritime Museum Fremantle, Australia KluwerAcademic Publishers New York, Boston, Dordrecht, London, Moscow eBook ISBN: 0-306-47190-6 Print ISBN: 0-306-46365-2 ©2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers New York, Boston, Dordrecht, London, Moscow All rights reserved No part of this eBook may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording, or otherwise, without written consent from the Publisher Created in the United States of America Visit Kluwer Online at: http://www.kluweronline.com and Kluwer's eBookstore at: http://www.ebooks.kluweronline.com Preface In the early 1980s looting was occurring at the wreck of the iron screw steamship Xantho (1 848-1 872) and a request was made of the author to inspect the newly-found site and develop a strategy designed to put a stop to it. A test excavation was to be conducted and all loose attractive materials were to be removed and returned to the Western Australian Maritime Museum for conservation and safekeeping. It appeared to be a straightforward task—similar in ethos to many preemptive excavations conducted by the museum’s Department of Maritime Archaeology in previous years. In 1980, barely a year after the wreck had been found, the well-known British maritime archaeologist and theoretician Keith Muckelroy had stated that studies based on early steamships and the like, while interesting and sometimes providing useful display materials for museums, were not archaeology. He argued that “as an academic discipline” archaeology becomes redundant at the point where archives, representations, and oral histories provide more cultural information than can be obtained from the materials themselves. Further, he argued that the onset of “industrialisation and modern-style bureaucracies in the early 1800s marked the cut-off point’’ for underwater archaeological studies (1980:10). The influential maritime historian, David Lyon, then of the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich, was of a similar opinion. He believed that where detailed historical records of a particular ship were known to exist, there was little point in spending large amounts of time v vi PREFACE and money recording it’s features on the seabed (cf. Henderson, 1988; Lyon, 1974). Certainly there was a great deal of literature on Xantho in the archives. It had been built as a paddle steamer in Scotland in 1848 for use in sheltered waters, its original builders’ contract and specifications were extant, and it appeared in a number of underwriters’ registers. Over the course of its long career it received three registration certificates, including one of 1871 that recorded its conversion from paddle to screw propulsion. To add to this wealth of information, when it was lost on the Western Australian coast in November 1872, the incident was recorded at a court of inquiry in very great detail. As a result, it appeared at first glance that an examination of the wreck might not yield much new information about the vessel and the people involved. On the other hand, another of the acknowledged leaders in the field, George Bass, had advised of “the value of archaeological research on ships recent enough for photographic records to be available” (1 972: 10). This divergence of opinion from two very well-known and highly respected maritime archaeologists was pertinent, for at the time the Xantho program commenced, the study of iron and steamship wrecks was * arguably in its infancy. The Xantho presented an opportunity to examine these divergent opinions when a brief scrutiny of the available historical records posed a number of interesting and unexpected questions. The most pressing was, what strange man would buy an ageing recycled paddle steamer in Scotland (especially one originally designed for use in sheltered waters) and then transport it halfway across the world to the sparsely populated and poorly serviced northwest coast of Australia? It was a remote place that was almost as close to Singapore as it was to any port of significance on the Australian coast. The owner/operator’s decision-making powers were rendered the more questionable after the author’s first inspection of the site in 1983. There it became evident that Xantho had been converted to screw propulsion utilizing an outmoded and inefficient, secondhand ex-Royal Navy horizontal trunk engine. Such coal-hungry machinery would not normally be expected on a vessel destined for the pearling grounds in the north of Western Australia—a remote place where fresh water for the ship’s boiler was difficult to procure and where there were no coal supplies. PREFACE vii The first Europeans had settled in the region less than a decade before Xantho arrived and, as a result, there were no port facilities and the nearest marine workshops were in Surabaya and Batavia (now Jakarta). Figure 1. A contemporary chart showing the proximity of the northwest Australian coast to Singapore and the major ports of Surabaya, Batavia, Makassar, and Kupang (derived from the Camden Harbour Pastoral Association Prospectus. 1864). The available research also indicated that economists and historians alike had justifiably dismissed both Xantho (1848–1872) and its owner, the Englishman Charles Edward Broadhurst (1826–1905). Xantho sank beneath him only a year after he had purchased it for use in the Australian viii PREFACE pearling industry, for example, and it soon became lost to living memory. Broadhurst himself was very controversial and was widely considered to be a persistent and somewhat unsavory failure. The author’s subsequent research (McCarthy, 1990) indicated that, though widely shunned by his peers, Broadhurst was in the mold of the widespread and very active nineteenth-century “British entrepreneur” as characterized by Payne (1 974). He was also widely acknowledged for his propensity to go out of the “ordinary grooves” in search of wealth and was later described as a visionary possessed of all the decisiveness believed to be characteristic of the “typical American” (Kimberly, 1897). Because they also failed to understand its central role in Broadhurst’s schemes, Xantho also appears to have been too readily dismissed by the historians. These considerations together with the anomalies apparent in the material record ensured that much of the next decade was spent attempting to address them. This was achieved through a combination of archival research and the “excavation” of both the stern of Xantho and its odd engine. The Xantho program also represented an opportunity to address other issues then becoming apparent with iron, steel (as a derivative of iron) and steamship wrecks, for in 1983 they appeared to represent a new class of underwater archaeological site. Thus the program was also partly driven by questions specifically aimed at investigating an iron-hulled steamship as distinct from the wooden-hulled vessels generally the object of research in maritime archaeology at the time. The questions included whether iron hulls generally behaved in the underwater environment like their wooden counterparts. Would they last as long? Were they as strong as they seemed? Did iron hulls pose any new problems to maritime archaeologists? Were traditional recording methods suitable for high- profile sites like iron and steel steamers, where hulls, boilers, and engines often dominate? In combining all of these elements in a program now well over a decade old, the Xantho project evolved from its original site management and artefact-oriented brief into a much broader research program, with three recognizable phases: description, analysis, and explanation. Acknowledgements Key personnel on the Xantho project have been diver/rigger Geoff Kimpton, corrosion specialists Dr Neil North, Dr Ian MacLeod, conservator/restorer Dick Garcia, engineer/adviser Noel Miller, model- maker Bob Burgess, project artist Ian Warne, iron and steam shipwreck specialist John Riley, photographer/divers Pat Baker, Jon Carpenter, underwater video operator Lyall Mills, and film maker Ray Sutcliffe. Dr Malcolm Tull of Murdoch University, launched me into the post- graduate study of Charles Broadhurst in 1985. The Masters thesis that he so thoroughly supervised was a corner stone to the historical and academic elements of the program to 1990. Associate Professor, Dr Peter Veth of James Cook University, supervised the Doctoral thesis on which this work is based and in doing so he also provided the academic and philosophical framework needed to help the Xantho project evolve from its intuitive base. Professor Richard Gould of Brown University, Dr Paul Johnston of the Smithsonian Institution and Professor John Campbell of James Cook University assessed the thesis, suggested it could be published, and provided many useful comments towards that end. Further editorial assistance was provided by Nick Burningham, Dena Garratt, Peter Harvey, Bill Jeffery, Vivienne Moran, Larry Murphy, Mike Nash, David Nutley, Dr Ian Oxley, Mark Staniforth, Shirley Strachan, Corioli Souter and Tom Vosmer. Sarah Stephenson and Bob Sheppard scrutinised the final draft from a ‘public’ context and made many important suggestions in preparation for its submitting to J. Barto Arnold, ix X ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Eliot Werner and support staff, notably Sandra Beris and Rosemary Sheridan at Kluwer/Plenum Publications. Many more people have been involved in this project and many of their names appear in text, or alongside illustrations and diagrams. Those not mentioned there are field archaeologists, conservators and technical specialists Brad Duncan, Nic Clarke, Steve Cushnahan, Dena Garratt, Peter Harvey, Mike Lorimer, Brian Marfleet, Sally May, Colin Powell, Brunhilde Prince, Bob Richards, Fairlie Sawday, Mark Staniforth, Shirley Strachan, Jill Worsley, and Peter Worsley. Those members of the deconcretion team not appearing in text or in photographs are Carmela Corvaia, Jan Davies, Louella Doran, Brad Duncan, David Gilroy, Ian Godfrey, David Kelly, Alan Kendrick, Bob Richards, Vicki Richards, Fairlie Sawday, Rhonda Wozniak and Kent Jarman.

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