During the Battle of Valcour Bay on Oct. 11, 1776, a cannon on the gunboat New York exploded. All but one of its pieces had been recovered and are displayed at the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum. On Monday, researchers brought the final piece of the cannon to the surface. North Country Bureau Chief Pat Bradley was there as the artifact was brought to shore.
Divers brought the missing piece from the depths Monday morning. Documentary filmmaker Paul Frederick was onboard as the piece was hefted onto the boat. The researchers from the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum and Texas A&M University placed the artifact into a trunk and brought it to shore.
Institute of Nautical Archaeology affiliated scholar Art Cohn is co-founder of the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum. He says the piece is significant because it is from the first ever American naval fleet to engage the British during the American Revolution.
“It’s a remarkable piece of history, our history, national history, international history. And for the last 25 years formally we’ve been examining this underwater site for clues and evidence and a better understanding of what took place here and why it was so important to the outcome of the war," Cohn said. "And the most important piece is a big portion of a gun that exploded during the battle. Today we’ve uncovered what we think is the last piece of several pieces of this exploded cannon.”
The cannon piece is so heavy it took four men to carry it to a memorial at the Peru Boat Dock for a short ceremony.
Researchers made a 3D print of the gap in the original cannon. Valcour Bay Research Project co-founder Ed Scollon held it against the newly recovered piece.
“This is the 3D imaging that’s been done. If this lines up to this, we’ve got 100%. If we can just tilt it up so I can just put this on the end for a second," Scollon said. "See this edge right here. We’ve got one right here. We’re just going to place this here. What do you think?”
The crowd responds with applause and “Yeah, well done.”
Texas A&M has been involved in artifact search and recovery efforts for decades with the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum.
Center for Maritime Archaeology and Conservation Director Christopher Dostal says technology was crucial to finding this piece.
“Without the magnetometer I don’t think we would have found this," Dostal said. "It was just so far underneath the clay. Once we had the target, we were able to zone in on it. But it’s so much further than you would expect it to be. Like, if I dug my arm all the way into the ground, you wouldn’t even see it. You kind of like have to burrow. But the flip side of that preservation is unbelievable up here. You’ve got cold, dark, anoxic clay. Things like this just don’t happen. That’s really exceptional.”
Once the divers were able to put their hands on the cannon piece, they used a PVC post to mark its location. Then, East Carolina University third-year graduate student Ethan Whiten and Texas A&M second year Ph.D. student Sean Crowley dove into the lake to clear out enough clay to make it possible to recover it from the lake waters. Crowley became involved during the second or third dive.
“You could like feel it down there and then it’s very clay-ee. So it’s very, very hard," Crowley said. "So I just had some work gloves on. And you couldn’t see anything so it was like archaeology by feel or by braille. So, you’re completely blind but you can feel where the cannon is and so you’re clearing out just the mud and just going and going until it’s a little bit looser so we could deploy the lift bag.”
Whiten says they had to be careful how they approached the underwater digging.
“The cannon was sitting at an angle. So in order to make sure that it didn’t continue sinking further to the point where we couldn’t raise it we were instructed not to dig underneath it out of fear that it would keep sinking," Whiten said. "So, we dug enough of it off so we could get a strap around it and then pull it up with a lift bag.”
Scollon says the piece tells a tragic story from the country’s early history.
“Every time this thing fires it pushes down on the carriage and the carriage pushes back. And over the course of how many times they ever fired this gun, it started to fracture," he said. "And finally it just lets go and it was just catastrophic. And it was a situation where these men were fighting with whatever they had and in this case it wasn’t enough.”
The cannon is on display at the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum. This shard will be conserved before being put on display.
