Everything in it Delta I It is a great mystery, even his real name. What happened so that a ship loaded with Swedish cannons and American silver ended up sunk near the port of Cádiz almost 400 years ago? Where was she going and where was she coming from? What was her flag? These are all unanswered questions since that lost wreck appeared in 2012 under meters of mud, during the construction of the new container terminal. With the stimulating challenge of so many enigmas to solve, the ship from the mid-17th century is going to emerge from the depths of the Cadiz bay in the coming days, in a pioneering and unprecedented operation in Spain. The hoisting will allow us to study and scan its naval architecture in detail and then return to the depths of the Atlantic.
The recent history of Delta I —so named when it was found by chance 12 years ago along with two other ships—is full of firsts. So, it was the first time in Spain that a plan was designed to move a sunken historical wreck from its original location. Now, “it will be the first time that it is taken from the sea” for study, as explained by Milagros Alzaga, head of the Center for Underwater Archeology (CAS), of the Andalusian Institute of Historical Heritage (IAPH) and main architect of the project. If at that time it was because the location of the deposit clashed with the work of the new terminal, these days the extraction – financed and promoted by the Port of Cádiz – will be a reality through expansion work on that same space reclaimed from the sea.
The work, which has already begun underwater, is not expected to be easy. It will be necessary to secure and hoist a structure 20 meters long by seven meters wide. That span corresponds to the preserved lower part of the wreck, known as the plan of the ship. The Diversship company divers are struggling to locate the straps that were placed more than a decade ago to move the remains, which went from the 19 meters deep in which it appeared buried in the mud to between six and eight meters – in depending on the tides—to those found now. They will then resort to a specific structure that Navantia built for this movement, but with the task now of raising the ship to the surface, powered by several hydraulic jacks.
When the ship emerges – something that is expected to happen in a few weeks – it will be moved to a tent more than 25 meters long, located in the Navantia Cádiz shipyards and with controlled humidity conditions. There, specialists from CAS and IAPH will have three months for their project of documentation and disassembly of the wreck to find out what the architecture of the ship was like. “We know she’s broken, but we don’t know why. We also know that it dates from the mid-17th century, but at that time there were no guidelines that governed how a ship was built, only parameters such as tonnage or draft were set. For us she is an archaeological jewel,” says Alzaga.
To open that valuable chest, CAS technicians will study the remains by layers of construction. First they will dismantle the inner lining, then the frames and then the outer one. From each area they will take a sample of wood with which they will carry out dendrochronology studies that allow determining the age or origin. They will document each phase and piece with photographs and photogrammetry (a procedure to obtain plans of large areas through aerial photographs), and they will place each piece in containers of salt water that, finally, will end up again at the bottom of the sea, protected with geotextile (a permeable and flexible fabric) and mud.
Little is known about a ship whose name is unknown. In the archaeological campaign carried out a year later after its discovery in 2012, specialists recovered 27 iron cannons from Sweden, 22 silver ingots, originating from the mines of upper Peru (today Bolivia) with marks that date them to 1651; ceramics and a bell with the legend ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph’, a “usual” message of the time that does not indicate the name of the wreck, as Alzaga clarifies. All of these vestiges—among which there were also glass or shoe soles—required months to years in controlled salinity tanks at the CAS headquarters in Cádiz, until the stabilization of the materials was achieved, which made their deposit in the Museum of Cádiz viable. .
It is precisely this technical complexity that also explains why the wreck itself, once studied and documented, ends up dismantled again under the sea. “They are large remains and difficult to preserve. We have no technical means, nor assurance that the wood will be preserved for a long period of time. We do not want it to be visible today, but rather to be preserved in the future,” says the head of the CAS. In fact, throughout the world, there are few examples of historic ships rescued from the sea that have been able to be stabilized out of the water and turned into museums. One of the best known, the Mary Rosewas recovered in 1982, in Portsmouth (England), “it took up to 34 years to stabilize, it cost 6.4 million euros and a museum worth more than 47 million had to be built,” exemplifies Alzaga.
Only the extraction operation and study of the Delta I It will involve an investment of 2.6 million euros that will be borne by the Port Authority of the Bay of Cádiz. For the return of the wreck to the sea, the IAPH specialists will have a precise 3D modeling of the preserved remains of the ship, each of its parts and its assembly process. This material will be used to prepare informative materials and to illuminate new research on underwater archaeology. The question will be whether it will also serve to clear up some of the great unknowns surrounding the Delta Ithe ship that will emerge from the depths of Cádiz.
And the ‘Delta II’ turned out to be the ‘Saint George and Saint Elmo’
JA Cañas
One of the big doubts to clear up about the Delta I is knowing the name of the wreck. “We would have very valuable data: what life it had, what it was used for and what happened to it,” explains Milagros Alzaga, head of the Center for Underwater Archeology of Cádiz. That is why it is planned that, in parallel with the extraction, a documentary and archival investigation will be carried out to find out, which is not expected to be simple. Alzaga knows this well because in 2018 she was able to find out the name of another of the three wrecks found in the Port of Cádiz in 2011. The one then named Delta II turned out to be the Saint George and Saint Elmo, a Genoese commercial ship from the 16th century that had the sad honor of being the first ship sunk by the pirate Drake in his attack on Cádiz in 1587.
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