In Patagonia, archaeologists have discovered a shipwreck that turns out to be a long-sought 19th-century whaler. Tree rings from the wreck’s beams and planks indicate that the ship dates to the 1850s and was built in New England. According to the researchers, these are most likely the remains of the whaling ship Dolphin that sank in 1859 and whose demise is reported in historical records.
The first half of the 19th century was the heyday of whaling. At that time, many robust ships were built, especially in New England, which searched for the coveted marine mammals on all oceans of the world. The oil obtained from the whale fat was used, among other things, for oil lamps and as a lubricant, while the bones served as a general-purpose material for many everyday objects. It wasn’t until the 1860s that the early whaling industry collapsed because whales became scarce and oil replaced whale fat as a raw material.
Whaling on all seas
One of the ships built in the late whaling era was the “Dolphin”, a square-rigger built on Rhode Island in the summer of 1850, around 33 meters long and with a displacement of around 300 tons. After being launched, this whaler cruised the Atlantic and Indian Oceans for two and a half years before returning to its home port in 1853 loaded with plenty of whale oil. In the years that followed, forest hunting trips took the “Dolphin” to the Horn of Africa, the Seychelles and Australia. But on her last voyage, which began in 1858, luck ran out on the ship and her crew: she struck rocks at the southern tip of South America and sank.
The fate of the whaling ship has long been known, because its captain reported the loss of his ship in a letter to the owners. He wrote, “It lies on the rocks in the southwestern part of the New Bay.” The “New Bay” most likely meant the Golfo Nuevo, a type of natural harbor in Patagonia where many whalers used to take refuge. Today, the small Argentine town of Puerto Madryn lies on this bay. According to local tradition, the inhabitants of this settlement have always found remains of ships in the past, but it remains unclear which ships these wrecks were.
Shipwreck of unknown origin
Such was the case with a shipwreck released in 2004 by the shifting sands of the bay. Only a few beams and planks of the ship’s hull and deck could be seen in the flat tidal zone, which dried up at low tide. Archaeologists around Cristian Murray from the Argentine National Institute for Anthropology determined in 2009 based on initial analyzes that it had to be a wreck from the 19th century. But where the ship originally came from could not be determined in view of only a few other finds. The researchers suspected even then that it could be a whaling ship from Europe or North America – two iron boilers found in the sea sediment, like those used by whalers in the past, also suggested this.
Now a team led by Ignacio Mundo from the Argentine laboratory for dendrochronology has taken on the wreck again. For their study, they compared the annual rings of samples of the wood planks and beams with those in large annual ring catalogues, including the North American Drought Atlas, a database at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York. In it, researchers have collected annual ring data from more than 30,000 American trees over the past 2000 years.
Tree ring data helps with identification
Analysis of the wood from the shipwreck revealed that the beams were made of American white oak and likely originated in the Northeastern United States. The planks, on the other hand, were made of swamp pine, which is common in the southeastern United States. As the archaeologists report, the annual ring data show that the oak trees for the ship’s beams were felled in Massachusetts in 1849 – about a year before the “Dolphin” was completed in Rhode Island. The pine for the planks, on the other hand, came from trees in Alabama and Georgia—regions that at the time exported large quantities of swamp pine to shipyards in the Northeastern United States.
Taken together, this suggests that the wreck in Patagonia is a circa 1850 New England-built whaler – likely the long-lost Dolphin. “I can’t say with 100 percent certainty that it is exactly this ship,” says Mundo. “But the analysis of the tree rings makes it very likely.” After more than 150 years, the whaling ship has been found again – around 16,000 kilometers from its home port. “It’s fascinating that people once built this ship in New England, and now its wreckage is reappearing on the other side of the world,” says co-author Mukund Rao of Columbia University.
Source: Columbia Climate School; Specialist article: Dendrochronologia, doi: 10.1016/j.dendro.2022.125980