What will it take to preserve Cape Ray's shipwreck? Documentation, and non-stop salt water

The shipwreck that unex‐ pectedly appeared along Newfoundland's south‐ western tip in late January has captured the imagina‐ tion of people across the globe, especially residents who live near the site, who are now scrambling to pre‐ serve the remnants of the ancient vessel.

Preserving the overturned hull in a museum would be costly given how large it is perhaps hundreds of thou‐ sands, if not millions of dol‐ lars, says the Shipwreck Preservation Society of New‐ foundland and Labrador.

But there are ways to keep the historic ship in the community for a few more decades; it'll just require thorough documentation and a lot of salt water, said James Delgado, the former director of maritime heritage for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

"Document as best you can, save what you can," said Delgado. "And with that per‐ haps … give people a sense, walking on a beach outside of a surfline, that here is a ghost from the past un‐ earthed from its grave that perhaps has a story to tell."

Preserving a ghost from the sand

Delgado said there are a few approaches to preserving shipwrecks that aren't able to make it into a museum. One is to tag the ship, note where it is in the water, and let it drift naturally.

The other is to bring the structure high above the sur‐ fline so passersby can get a glimpse of the past, said Del‐ gado.

WATCH | What needs to be done to preserve the Cape Ray shipwreck:

It's a process local resi‐ dents and divers are working diligently to achieve, said Neil Burgess, the president of the Shipwreck Preservation Soci‐ ety. Community members have launched an online fundraiser to raise money that would allow them to re‐ cover, transport and pre‐ serve what they are calling a "unique piece of history."

Burgess said the ship has been pummeled in the surf, and as the waves continue to hit the wreck, pieces of the hull are becoming loose and could eventually tear parts of the structure apart. A bull‐ dozer or excavator would need to pull the hull out, he said, which has become heavy with water. The longer that takes, the less of the ship there will potentially be to pull out, he said.

"It's kind of a race against time at this point," he said.

If residents are able to bring the ship away from the surfline, the next step to pre‐ serving it is to keep it wet with salt water, a piece of the process Delgado says is "ab‐ solutely critical."

If the vessel has been buried for over a century and a half, which Delgado says is likely, it'll be saturated with water, and the wood's com‐ position will have changed from such a long soak. Once it dries, the wood will splin‐ ter, with the extent of the splintering dependent on the materials used in the ship.

Delgado said people should throw buckets of wa‐ ter on the ship every day to keep it from drying out. The ship also shouldn't be brought indoors if it's not going to be preserved at a museum standard, because once it's out of the humidity and the moisture of salt air, the ship will dry and break apart.

"We've often left these in place on beaches all over the world because this phe‐ nomena, particularly as cli‐ mate change is here and as beaches are now getting hit with heavy erosion, more and more of these ghosts from the past are emerging from the sand," he said.

Delgado says it's hard to tell how long the structure will last if it's kept wet on the shore, but it's entirely possi‐ ble that if it's out of the way of the surfline, it could last for a few decades, he said.

"Let's be clear: inevitably all things go and break apart," said Delgado. So the best thing people can do is keep the ship intact as best they can, touch it, take sam‐ ples and continue to try to learn more about its makeup and origins.

That's why, says Delgado, another crucial step is for residents to document the ship - take photographs, measure its parts, get a de‐ tailed drawing of the ship to scale, and mark the wooden trunnels, pins that fasten the wood together.

Delgado says people have also begun to virtually pre‐ serve ships using cameras or lidar, a way to measure ranges using lasers.

Provincial archaeologist Jamie Brake told CBC News

he and other experts have collected a number of sam‐ ples, including copper rods, wood and mortar to learn more about the ship, includ‐ ing its age and origin.

Myth of uniqueness

Brake told reporters that ex‐ perts don't have enough in‐ formation to indicate whether the ship is a unique specimen, and without an indepth analysis of the sam‐ ples from the vessel, Burgess says it's too early to sign off on its significance or a lack thereof.

Thousands of ships, likely similar to the one in Cape Ray, were built in the 19th century, said Delgado, as tradeways became global, connecting places such as Newfoundland and Labrador to the rest of the world. Ships were likely as common as freight trucks are today, he said.

But that doesn't take away from a shipwreck's nov‐ elty.

"I think too many times we get hung up on the con‐ cept of uniqueness or origi‐ nality," said Delgado.

What makes ships impor‐ tant is what they meant to families and communities, he said, and the way they shaped towns and environ‐ ments. More needs to be gleaned from the ship's sam‐ ples through archaeological study, and hopefully, the community of Cape Ray will be able keep the ship on the shore for people to look at and learn from for years to come.

"The importance would not be that it's unique, but that it speaks to something now gone that was once so common," he said.

"It's not the famous peo‐ ple, it's not the ones whose names show up in the history books. What makes history is the rest of us who get up and go to work every day and in a case of something like this, those who got up to go to work and had to go to sea, knowing that there was no guarantee, perhaps, that they'd be able to come back."

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