Iron and Steamship Archaeology: Success and Failure on the S S Xantho' (The Springer Series in Underwater Archaeology)

249 Pages·2001·9.2 MB·English

by  Michael McCarthy

Iron and Steamship
Archaeology
Success and Failure on the SS Xantho
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Iron and Steamship
Archaeology
Success and Failure on the SS Xantho
Michael McCarthy
Western Australian Maritime Museum
Fremantle, Australia
Kluwer Academic Publishers
New York, Boston, Dordrecht, London, Moscow
eBookISBN: 0-306-47190-6
Print ISBN: 0-306-46365-2
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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 hadjustifiably 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.
TheXantho 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