‘Fragile’ ship that sank in storm 2,500 years ago needs to be rescued — piece by piece

Brendan Rascius
Fri, June 30, 2023 

Photo from UV Nautical Archaeology

Around 2,500 years ago, a small Phoenician ship sailing in the Mediterranean Sea got caught in a tempest.

The storm sent the wooden vessel to the seabed below, where the current buried it beneath the sand.

There — off the coast of modern-day Spain — the ship lay undetected until its discovery in 1995. It has enthralled archaeologists ever since.

The wreck is “nothing short of exquisite,” Deborah Carlson, a professor of nautical archaeology at Texas A&M University, told McClatchy News.

“On the one hand, it occupies a very important place in history — both chronologically and geographically, because it exhibits construction techniques that are associated with the Levant, where the Phoenicians originated.”

The Phoenicians were a seafaring civilization that ruled the Mediterranean before the Greeks and the Romans, according to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. While based around modern-day Lebanon and Syria, they also inhabited cities in north Africa and southern Europe.

In addition to its historical significance, the wreck, named Mazarron II, is also “in superb condition,” Carlson said.

However, the remarkably preserved ship may soon face destruction if left exposed to powerful underwater currents, Carlos De Juan, an archaeologist at the University of Valencia, told McClatchy News.

“It’s in a complicated area where the currents are affecting the seabed, taking away the sand, so we had to make a decision,” he said.

The decision: haul the entire 25-foot-long ship to the surface.

The ambitious project will likely take over a year and require significant preparation, De Juan said.

The vessel, while well preserved, is not intact. The “fragile” hull, located under about six feet of water, is full of small cracks commonly seen in old wooden wrecks, De Juan said. So, it will have to be recovered piece by piece.

In preparation for its retrieval, De Juan and other archaeologists have spent hours underwater creating a detailed map of the ship’s remains. Their plan is to take advantage of the existing cracks, so that further dissection will not be required.

De Juan said the vessel is scheduled to be brought ashore in the summer of 2024. It will then be displayed in a museum.

But, even once the vessel is on dry land, maintaining its state of preservation will not be easy, Brendan Foley, a maritime archaeologist at Lund University in Sweden, told McClatchy News.

“The economic costs of long-term preservation after conservation are simply enormous, even for a comparatively small vessel like Mazarron II,” Foley said.

Preservationists will have to constantly fend off fungi, bacterial growth, and loss of structural integrity, Foley said. Additionally, a specific temperature and humidity will need to be maintained wherever the vessel is displayed.

“It’s one thing to bring up these hull remains, and quite another to care for them forever after,” Foley said