Mushrooms and pneumatic hammering

Yesterday we returned to work at our beloved shipwreck, the medieval Lootsi Cog, our dear for the next two years. She's residing now outside the Estonian Maritime Museum in Lennusadam, Tallinn.

So, we donned our vintage jumpsuit-kind of denim workpants and new safety shoes, helmets also, and climbed on board the amazing 14th century structure.

What a sight it was, once again. What a thing we have on our hands, what a LIVING thing. Yep, it's alive, very much. That's for sure, when we looked at the mushrooms and tiny seedlings of trees growing on the bottom of the wreck. Not on the wood itself, but on the sand and all kinds of organic debris covering the planks, in this pre-cleaning phase of the latter life of the ship.

What a life she has had, this ship. An unknown ship that wasn't supposed to be here. Not now, in 2023. Nobody thought it would be around, not the carpenters and shipbuilders who put it together some 700 years ago, nor the sailors who then sailed on it, carrying goods for the Hanseatic League.

No, such things are not built to last forever. It's an anomality that this one is still here, together with the other Cog we've been lucky enough to work on, the Kadriorg Cog, which is now on display at the Fat Margaret.

But here she is, the Lootsi ship, cut in four pieces so that it could be transported. And here we are now, doing our best to preserve her. We want to keep her like she is now. Do what's necessary to keep her intact. We don't want her to crack in pressure of too fast drying or insufficient support. We don't want to see any pieces falling off. We don't want the mushrooms to be there! Although we kind of love the idea of the ship still being a living entity and a base for new growth, it is actually another kind of living we have in mind. The story of this ship continues, she lives on, after the centuries' oblivion underwater and underground, and useful life as a ship before that.

She’s had quite a life. Who knows for how long she sailed, as a new one, and after evident reparations and fixes? Rudder fittings, huge iron parts, for instance seem to vary a bit, judging from how they look now, heavily encrusted. They seem to have been altered and replaced. Let’s see what kind of forms are revealed from under the corrosion layers.

Surely it will be some examples of age-old wisdom of shipbuilding. That's another phase of the ship's life, the making of -phase, manufacturing it. The work of those shipbuilders. Evidence of their work is right there, in the forms and details. Toolmarks of carpenters and blacksmiths.

But there's an even earlier phase. The life of the ship’s materials. The trees she was made of, the huge oak trees, from whose enormous trunks those wide planks were sawn. The trees must have been amazingly big. Oak-planks like these don't exist anymore. They don't. Or they do, I'm sure, but they're not common. Why? For one thing, all such big oaks in Europe were cut down, most of them, because they were so brilliant for shipbuilding purposes.

Ships were made of big oak trees, the likes of what we have here, and almost all of them were lost in times. The cycle of life caught in them. Organisms took over, the wood decomposed, as always happens, naturally. Likewise, metals corrode, they want to go back to the comfortably stable ore-form.

Unless they happen to be in such conditions that they actually preserve, in the form their makers made them. Such is the case with the Lootsi ship. She was very lucky to be buried just here, in Tallinn's harbor, under all that fine sand, which has kept her materials in good condition and surprisingly fresh for centuries.

But now mother nature is trying to take over, reaching out to this ship that came from her, and invites her to continue the cycle of life. Mushrooms! Trees sprouting!

But no! We're here to stop it, or not stop but halt. We take the unfair and impossible challenge of fighting the natural cycle of life. We will clean everything so that the mushrooms don't grow. We will reveal the shapes so that air can flow all around and let her dry evenly and gently, without any stress to the wood. We will do what's needed to stabilize this all.

That damp debris must go! That's one point we start. But before going on with our brushes, spatulas, sticks, vacuum cleaners and what not, we must make sure to document everything.

And this is where it all starts to feel very familiar. For what we did next was exactly the same thing we did last time with the Kadriorg Cog. We took thread and pins and spanned a grid or about 1x1m squares on the ship's inner surfaces. This is the grid that enables us to locate any possible (and very likely) finds we'll come up when cleaning. There must be bits & pieces & artifacts buried in all that sand and debris.

So now the ship has turned to a challenging field of criss-crossing red threads. It looks good, and familiar. I feel at home now, standing there on the ship.

Although it's not that homey. Not just yet. No, this is a wholly different ship and another project. I already love this ship but it's a weirdly different feeling than what I had with the previous one. Something's eerily different here. Still, I love it.

The iron parts! Apart from cleaning and finishing with the beeswaxing of the planks' endings (see previous blog post), we need to concentrate right away to the iron bits. They are plentiful and they're amazing, especially the huge rudder fittings. Those we want to see, exposed from corrosion crusts, stabilized and protected so that they don't corrode away, these unique pieces of evidence from age-old shipbuilding wisdom.

For that, Heikki spent the whole day with a pneumatic hammer, working through the crusts, to reveal the original surface of those iron bits. As he went on, hammering away with this fancy gentle tool, a beautiful end of a nail was revealed. How can it be so sharp-shaped? The original surface is right there.

As Heikki was cleaning and I was occupied with documentation grids, our Maritime Museum colleagues Priit and Lisette continued with other things. Lisette going through the bags of small loose pieces collected from the excavation site - they're many! - and Priit running errands and making sure that the site is safe to work at, for us and for the visitors to come.

This story is just starting. For us. It'll be a ride, working on this ship, with our dear colleagues at the Estonian Maritime Museum. Can't wait for the story to continue.

But for the ship, it's just a continuum of her long story, a story that started some 700 years ago, and actually many many centuries before, when the trees she's made of started growing. Glad to be part of this part of her story, as one of her loving caretakers.