Times of the Islands Fall 2016

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astrolabe newsletter of the Turks & Caicos National Museum This graffito is located on the side of the window opening of the Kitchen building at Wades Green. (You can see it in situ on page 57). DONALD H. KEITH A Phantasmal Project Saving the Ghost Fleet of the Caicos Islands. By Dr. Donald H. Keith, President, Turks & Caicos National Museum Foundation Unbeknownst to most residents of these islands, a fleet of ancient ships has sailed the Caicos for more than 200 years. A ghost fleet of sorts, almost invisible. Hundreds of people have looked right at them— and seen nothing! Don’t bother gazing out to sea because they aren’t there. No, they’re on dry land, hiding in plain sight in dozens of different places, dark corners where you would least expect to find them. 54 www.timespub.tc
astrolabe newsletter of the Turks & Caicos National Museum My first glimpse of a small part of this fleet came in 1987 when TCI Museum Founder Grethe Seim showed me images of the ships that she and Countess Helen Czernin encountered at St. James Plantation on North Caicos. They were full-size tracings made directly from fine lines someone etched or engraved into the plaster covering an interior wall. The old home, now in ruins, is thought to have been built by the first Loyalists to settle in the Caicos Islands following the American War of Independence. Helen, an artist, was curious about how the etchings were made. She concluded that they were done while the plaster was still soft, like doodles that people make today in wet sidewalk cement. If so, they were done at the same time the house was built in the 1790s! Grethe, an avocational archaeologist, loved a good mystery and was puzzled by the ships’ location on an interior wall near a window. Knowing that I was a maritime archaeologist, she showed them to me in the hope that I could shed some light on the lingering questions of who made the ships? When? And what did they mean? There were seven images, rendered in remarkable detail, of different types and sizes of vessels, all but one proudly flying Union Jacks at their mastheads. Some ships were so clear it was tempting to speculate their type and even nationality, but others were faint and eroding to invisibility. The longer I looked, the more detail I could see. It was obvious that whoever did this had more than a passing familiarity with sailing ships. Sail shapes and configurations were Grethe Seim and Helen Czernin traced the images of ships found on the walls of St. James Plantation in North Caicos. At top is a tracing of a two-masted schooner (or faithfully represented, along with the myriad of stays, shrouds, halyards, and other other. In real life, the largest would have been the topsail brigantine (lower left), fol- ketch). Below are tracings of four other ships. The ships are not to scale relative to each lowed by the double gaff ketch with the Bermuda rigged main and mizzen topsails ropes that controlled them. Parallel lines on (upper right), followed by the sloop (lower right) and sailing skiff (upper left). the sails show that they were made of long, relatively narrow canvas strips sewn together. Curiously, Ship graffiti in archaeology lines representing the masts were shown passing through As an archaeologist, I was aware that ship depictions, or the decks to terminate on the keel. The artists attached graffiti, on walls, structures, and geological features are particular significance to the flags flying at the mastheads—almost certainly Union Jacks. Some examples date back more than a thousand not uncommon at coastal locations all over the world. years. Times of the Islands Fall 2016 55
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