For a ship that’s been sunk 150 years, the Modern Greece has impeccable timing.
On the morning of June 27, 1862, the 210-foot blockade runner slipped through a ring of Federal warships to enter the Cape Fear River.
Its hold was filled with goods from England for the industry-void Confederacy.
Before the Modern Greece could pass under the protection of Fort Fisher, which guarded the route to Wilmington, the USS Cambridge caught a glimpse of it and opened fire. Soon, the USS Stars And Stripes joined in.
The Modern Greece’s captain made a difficult decision. To prevent the goods from falling in to the hands of the North, he drove the ship aground. And the guns of Fort Fisher were able to finish it off, making sure nothing was left behind for the enemies.
Or so everyone thought for almost exactly 100 years.
Right around the 100th anniversary of the ship’s sinking, and while the nation was in the midst of commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Civil War, divers discovered that the Modern Greece had not, in fact, been completely destroyed.
It was still filled with its original cargo.
Thousands of artifacts were recovered by Navy divers and the N.C. Department of Archives and History. Much of their preservation techniques were the first of their kind and amounted to the beginning of underwater archaeology, not just in North Carolina, but in the United States, said deputy state archaeologist Mark Wilde-Ramsing.
Over the next four years, Civil War sites and museums across the nation will honor the 150th anniversary of the Civil War with elaborate commemorations. And here, the state will also honor the 150th anniversary of the sinking of the Modern Greece and the 50th anniversary of the beginning of underwater archaeology.
They’ll do this, in part, by conserving more of the artifacts plucked from the river 50 years ago.
Last week, 11 East Carolina University graduate students and two University of North Carolina Wilmington interns took their spring break to help the state archaeologists. They used techniques built on those early underwater archaeology foundations to essentially re-excavate the artifacts.
“The leaves have fallen in over the years and made this sort of faux soil, as one student put it, and it protected the artifacts,” said Susanne Grieve, director of conservation for East Carolina University’s Maritime History Program.
She stood in front of a rectangular in-ground troughs that still contained tea-brown water, oak leaves and some artifacts.
The early conservators had put the Civil War-era rifles, hoes, pocket knives and other items in the tanks and filled them with water to prevent oxygen from deteriorating them further. When leaves dropped into the open tanks, they also smothered the items and left behind artifact-preserving acidic tannins.
The students used buckets, wheel barrows and shovels to dig out the “faux soil.” And on the last day of the process, they finished up cataloguing about 2,945 items in a computer and reflecting on what they had learned.
“You think of Civil War sites and you think of weapons,” said ECU graduate student Emily Powell. “But we were finding things that people would use in their regular lives.”
As she spoke, she walked over to a Tupperware container filled with water and long, brown gnarled objects that only looked remotely like knives after she said they were.
If she had to pick her favorite artifacts on this project, this would be it. The pocket knives were made with ornate raw rubber handles. Powell pointed to a shiny spot, the brass pin that, at one time 150 years ago, the blade pivoted on. She also picked up the remnants of a long fixed-blade knife with an antler handle and silver tack heads.
“Pretty ornate,” she said. “Not what I was expecting.”
Nathan Henry, assistant state archaeologist, explained that the Modern Greece’s manifest listed its cargo as war materiel.
But the officers aboard were allowed to carry a certain percentage of “speculation items” – that is, goods they could personally sell on the black market.
The hoe blades and eating utensils that Henry carefully handled were mostly made in Sheffield, England. Some lead ingots were marked Liverpool. And there were cases of Enfield rifles, still neatly stacked.
“It’s a cross-section of the industrial age of England,” Henry said.
The artifacts have been put into new storage contains inside the Underwater Archaeology Branch’s conservation facility and decisions will be made on how to best conserve them. Wilde-Ramsing said he hopes they can serve as more training for students and education for the public.
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