Our homeschooling group had a field trip to the Steamboat Arabia museum last Friday: fascinating stuff.
The paddlewheel in the background was part of the original
Arabia, reconstructed. They also have part of the stern housed in the museum. When it was first excavated (from the farm field), they didn't have anywhere to put it, but rather than let it dry out (and shrink), one of the excavators dug a big hole in his backyard, buried it there, and left his garden hose on it for two years to keep the wood moist. (Other smaller findings they froze in blocks of ice and kept in large refrigerators.) Later, they discovered they could use a preservative called polyethylene glycol (see the second to last paragraph of this
article page), which they sprayed on the stern every night for 12 hours for several years.
The bottom parts of the boat, where the cargo was stowed, were made of oak and such sturdy woods, while the upper decks were made of a lighter wood like pine so the boat wouldn't be top heavy. The upper decks would have been the first to be washed away by the river after the boat sank. The cargo, one of the last supply shipments to the region before winter set in, however, was all intact: barrels of Wedgewood china; bottles of perfume, used by both men and women, since it was likely people bathed only once or twice a year; bolts of fabric; pickled vegetables, which were still edible; woodworking tools and all the various woodworking accoutrements; ink wells; all manner of glass bottles and pitchers; beautiful calico buttons (below); thousands of pairs of shoes – all on display at the museum as they preserve and restore it. One of the excavators came out and spoke to us after a short film saying how it's taken them 20 years to preserve two-thirds of their findings, and it'll take another 10 years to finish the remaining third.
Similar to the wood of the boat's stern, the shoes and boots found have to go through a slow process of dehydrating the water molecules from the leather and replacing the water with polyethylene glycol (PEG) molecules. Then the fabric insoles have to recreated and hand sewn. Another example of this dehydrating/preservative process was a rolling pin, which took 9 months to complete. There were also barrels of nails, which were mud-rusted together into one mass. The mud-rust would first have to be chipped away and then each nail scraped with dental tools, and finally dipped in some PEG.
The older students in our group got to take another tour in which they got to help preserve some of the artifacts from the boat. How awesome would that be? I wish I could have gone on that tour.
