Shipwrecks resurface on land

by Steve Cunningham

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FARMERS regularly uncover buried treasure on their land. Sometimes they plough up an Anglo-Saxon silver hoard, or a Norman necklace. Often they unearth trove more valuable to archaeologists and historians, such as a hidden town.

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In northern France, farmers find unexploded shells from the First World War.

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In Holland, they've started digging up ships.

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Roelof Wester was ploughing his onion fields north-east of Amsterdam last year when his tractor struck something hard.

'I thought it was the deep roots of a tree,' he said. 'But when I started digging, I began to see planks. To my surprise, I realised I had found a complete ship.'

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The 16th-century, 65ft vessel is one of 435 shipwrecks to be discovered on land in recent years. Most have been found on farms. Some have emerged on building sites. Last month one turned up during work on a new cycle path in a nature reserve.

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Since the 1930s the Dutch have reclaimed large tracts of sea to provide land for their population. Whole new provinces have been created by building dykes. Recent heavy rainfall has helped bring more wrecks to the surface.

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'This is a uniquely Dutch phenomenon,' said Aryan Klein, project director of the Batavia Yard in Lelystad, where a museum has been created ago to deal with the maritime discoveries.

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'But if you think about it, it is not so strange, because where we are standing was the seabed until the 1960s. Maritime history is underneath our feet.'

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Flevoland, where more than 400 of the wrecks have been found, was part of the Zuider Zee, a large inland sea. The capital, Lelystad, lies above what was known as the Eastern Passage, once the main channel for ships from Amsterdam.

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This busy passage, prone to devastating gales, has left the area a nautical graveyard.

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Some wrecks were found during the reclamation in the 1960s. Many more were buried deep and uncovered only by ploughing.

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Wrecks - ranging from a 7,000-year-old canoe to large merchant vessels used in the Netherlands' golden seafaring age - have proved an amazing source for studying the development of shipbuilding.

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Even more remarkable, some cargoes have been preserved by the silt in which they were buried. Cutlery, goblets and olive oil bottles have been found and, on one ferry that sank in the 1440s, archaeologists found hundreds of eggs, their shells still intact.

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Only 110 of the 435 wrecks found have been excavated by archaeologists. The rest have been covered up, but holes made in the plastic sheet to allow in rainwater, otherwise a boat preserved for centuries in the silt would be soon be lost when exposed to the air.

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Many more wrecks will certainly turn up, but there could have been more.

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The Dutch government has decided not to reclaim the fifth and final part of the Zuider Zee, as had been planned. Instead it will be left as a lake and reservoir to provide recreation and water for a population of 16 million.

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