The Transatlantic Steamship Liverpool. Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division 2003679830
“…If this life is a shipwreck, we must rescue as many as we can, and not forget to sing in the lifeboats.” Peter Gay: his viewpoint about the message of Voltaire’s story “Candide”
“Down to the Sea in Ships”
Did you know that an unglazed china marble was recovered from the wreck of the RMS Titantic?[1] This seems impossible to us! The ship was 882’ in length, the largest ship in the world at the time, and it sank in 2.5 mile-deep water. It seems phenomenal that one marble could be found on the wreck. And, if it is unglazed china, as The Marble Collectors Society of America’s newsletter reports, then the marble is much older than the 1912 sinking of the luxury liner.
We are fascinated by the Titantic marble, but it is only one of millions of marbles which were shipped across the oceans by sail and steam. Marbles made of stone, ceramic, and glass were made in Germany from about the 1850s until the 1930s. See our post The Lauschaer Glashütte and the Origins of Modern Glass Marbles. Both Holland and England also shipped marbles by sea. Tons of these marbles crisscrossed the seas by sail and steam in the 19th century.
We find it hard to imagine such a sea voyage. Look at the print at the top of this post. The ship in the print is the Paddle Steamer Liverpool. In this print she was ferrying passengers. She was outbound from England to the United States. As you can see, she had a side paddle and two funnels and she was the first steamship built and fitted for transatlantic service. She first sailed in October 1838.
Look Out!
Look at those seas! While the sea was running high, the Liverpool was not in a gale. Unlike schooners under sail, she was steam powered and could plow head-on into the seas and wind. The water was often like this most of the sixteen or seventeen days between Liverpool and New York.. Incidentally, the Liverpool, steaming under a different name, sank with the loss of two lives in 1846 off Cape Finistere, Spain.
Sail and steam ships were the very lifeblood of nations in the 19th century. Tons of goods and passengers crossed the oceans and seas day and night in all seasons and under all imaginable weather conditions.
Henry’s Mill
It took seventeen or eighteen days to steam across the Atlantic from England to the United States. Generally, the trip home was one or two days shorter, but ships sailed all seven seas. We recently read a study about Henry’s Mill No. 1, for example, which was a relatively isolated sawmill town in south-west Victoria, Australia. It was established in 1904.[2]
There was no road to the town. A timber tramline connected the community to Forrest which was about seven miles to the north. While there was one store in town, people generally bought staples from nearby towns. These were delivered by the tramline about twice a week.
And guess what? An archaeology study uncovered 21 marbles in Henry’s Mill! These included clay, limestone, one clearie, German Swirl (3), Banded Opaque (2), and even one German Lutz!
This just goes to prove that ships delivered marbles all over the world! It took some sixty days to sail from Bremerhaven, Germany, to Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. The trip was over 13,000 nautical miles or over 15,000 land miles. And in Melbourne the marbles had to be off-loaded and then hauled to towns near Henry’s Mill. Finally they were delivered by tramway!
Celestial Navigation
It is estimated that there are some 900 shipwrecks off the Great Barrier Reef alone! Remember, there were no GPS, radar, or NOAA electronic weather forecasts and navigation updates to rely on when sailing and steam ships like the Liverpool crossed the oceans and seas. But just like today, the world’s coastlines are dynamic: they change constantly, and navigational charts in the 19th century were static and two dimensional. It has been said that it was not the deep sea that sailors most feared but the beach.
Today ship crews use digitized navigational systems and dynamic electronic navigational chart displays. Charts can now be updated electronically and automatically. And yet shipwrecks still occur. In the 19th century ships sank in cyclones, they burned at sea, there were boiler explosions on steamships, and they broke up on rocks and reefs and uncharted sand spits. And far too many were simply lost at sea with all hands. Needless to say, tons of marbles dot the sea floor all over the world.
Marbles recovered from Shipwrecks
We saw our first shipwreck marbles online in late 2012. We read the November 2012 MarbleCollecting.com Newsletter which we cite in the first paragraph above regarding the Titantic . The Newsletter reports that there are hundreds of charted shipwrecks, with many more uncharted and unrecorded off Long Island, New York, alone.
The paper also notes that shipwrecks “dot the shores” along the east coast of the United States and in the Gulf of Mexico. Their small inset map showing the locations of wrecks in the Southeastern United States is astonishing!
The Newsletter noted that while marble cargos were lost over the years “very few have been discovered.” In fact, we doubt that when cargos are discovered treasure hunters have any interest in picking marbles off the sea floor!
The Long Island Wreck
A few days after reading the MarbleCollecting newsletter, which discusses the 2000 shipwreck off Long Island where marbles were recovered, we were browsing the Internet. We saw an ad placed by Peter R. Caparelli, Bayside, NY, owner of the business website Land of Marbles. We bought from Peter for years and we really appreciated his hard work trying to sort out, name, and identify Vacor marbles.
When the marbles were discovered off Long Island the diver saw no ship’s structure nor any part of a ship. The diver believes that the ship may have burned. All he found on the seafloor were beer steins, porcelain doll heads, and lots of marbles.
Here is Peter’s ad for his shipwreck marbles:
“These marbles were recovered from a shipwreck off the coast of NY over a 10 year period (1999 to 2009). The ship’s cargo included beer steins, porcelain doll heads and German hand-made marbles. The marbles were badly eroded and their cores could not be seen, so I had these examples professionally polished so that their beauty could be enjoyed. Varieties include white and yellow latticinio cores, three and four division divided cores, coreless swirls, one, two and three color solid cores, (including lobed cores and tri-level cores) – even onionskins, and some have mica!
As a whole, the group exhibits greater-than-average eye appeal and exceptional balance of design – these were not your common handmades! Each includes a signed and dated Certificate of Authenticity printed on 100% cotton paper with watermark and a raised gold seal bearing the LandOfMarbles logo attesting to the marbles provenance. A landofmarbles.com exclusive! Marbles are sold grab bag style (randomly), we cannot honor specific requests.”
Devitrification: the transformation of a glass into a crystal
In fact, the glass marbles were never “badly eroded”: they were devitrified. We have probably all seen marbles like this: we found a glass marble on Merritt Island, Florida, which was devitrified by the salty air and the sun.
“Glass is amorphous in nature—its atomic structure does not involve the repetitive arrangement seen in crystalline materials. But occasionally, it undergoes a process called devitrification, which is the transformation of a glass into a crystal—often an unwanted process in industries. The dynamics of devitrification remain poorly understood because the process can be extremely slow, spanning decades or more.”[3]
The result of devitrification over time is that the marbles in question become “cloudy”. However, this film, which we have even seen called “scum” in the literature can be easily buffed or polished. The whole glass marble hasn’t crystallized but a thin layer of glass on its surface has. This photograph shows devitrified compared to polished marbles.
Grab Bag
So, when Joanne’s mother, Betty R. Hayes, asked us what we wanted for Christmas in 2012 we mentioned the shipwreck Land of Marbles. She was happy with that so we ordered one marble immediately.
We were both amazed and pleased that our “grab bag” marble is an 11/16” marine or blue-green color clear marble with mica. Marble on left side of photograph. Baumann, Collecting Antique marbles Identification and Price Guide, 4th Ed. has an essay on “Mica” on pages 72 – 73. On page 173 he notes that ours is a rare color type which is found about 5% of the time when reviewing colored micas. There is a photograph of Baumann’s color in plate #133b.[4]
Let’s Do It Again
We were so pleased with our Mica shipwreck marble that on Christmas Day we ordered two more! They arrived in early January 2013. This time the grab bag gave us a 21/32” Joseph Coat or Joseph Swirl! We did not have one in our collection. Ours is transparent with predominantly blue ribbons and a wide variety of other colors. This marble is to the right in the photograph above.
At first we thought that the marble it is a 360o Indian, but quickly realized that it is Opaque. We also looked at Maglite Indians. We spent hours online and with all of our references. Finally, in Baumann’s Collecting Antique Marbles Identification and Price Guide, 4th Ed., pages #86 – 87 (Essay “Joseph Swirls”) we found what we were looking for. Baumann shows five of these German Swirls from ca. 1870.
Joseph Coats “…can be identified by their continuous and evenly spaced lines. The majority of Joseph swirls are made using glass chips, which gives an uneven appearance to the striped colors.” Of course our marble has been polished, but what convinced us is this: “A continuous series of colored rods or a mixture of brightly colored glass chips was added around the outside of the marble, which was then covered with another thin layer of clear.” This describes our marble perfectly and we are 100% certain that it is a Joseph’s Coat.
The second marble is a 9/16″ 4-lobe divided core swirl with external yellow ribbons. The divided cores are (a) yellow and green and (b) red and white. This little marble is to the left in this photograph.
It took us weeks and multiple emails before we received all three marbles. During this time, we thought it would be nice to have an unpolished shipwreck marble as well. However, Pete had none for sale. We were able to purchase cullet from one of the glass houses in Lausha, Germany where the mica Joseph’s coat, and 4-lobe were handmade. See our post The Lauschaer Glashütte and the Origins of Modern Glass Marbles.
Pete sold out his shipwreck marbles at Land of Marbles and around 2019 he closed the website down and sold off any remaining inventory.
We have visited several glass house sites in the States and we have always wondered about what is left at the old glassworks sites in Lausha where this cullet came from. Well, we asked our friend in Lausha, Dr. Gerhard Greiner-Bär, about this. He told us that “there is relatively little left of the old glassworks locations in and around Lauscha.”
He lists a dozen sites and glass and shards of the glass melting pots can be found in ditches at only a very few. As for the more famous Schneiderhütte and Seppenhütte, where they “were rebuilt and the old land was completely removed.”
Flea Market Find
In December 2013 we visited the Webster Westside Flea Market, Webster, Florida. This is a remarkable market but, for some reason we do not understand, it is only open on Mondays.
We bought a shipwreck marble from a dealer[5]. He had certificates of authenticity on other shipwreck artifacts but not on the few marbles which he had on offer. He said that the marbles, and others he had like them, came from a European shipwreck. Certainly not much provenance, but that is all he had.
We knew by now, after hours of research and study, that shipwreck marbles are not so unusual. But what is odd about this little 17/32” clay marble is that it is lead covered with clay! It weighs 10g and one can easily see the mold line where it was made in a two-piece mold press of some sort. The dealer had several marbles like this and on some the mold line was not visible We are amazed and cannot imagine a clay/lead marble! The story continues. Read about other shipwreck marbles and what we learned about them in the next post: Shipwreck Marbles: The Rest of the story. Reference notes for this part will appear in part two.
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Comment:
“Hi very interesting story on ship wreck marbles….” EMagazine Comment John Wojtczak, Merredin, Western Australia
