A History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks (25 page)

The metal ingots that formed the largest weight in the cargo included massive lead ‘pigs' of over 100 kilograms each that have been shown by isotope analysis to come originally from England, the source of most of the lead used in Europe at the time – for roofing, pipes, window cames – the strips used to hold pieces of glass together – and small-arms ammunition, with much of it being mined in the Peak District of Derbyshire. My research in the ‘Prize Papers' in the UK National Archives, detailed below, suggests that these ingots were from an English merchantman that had been captured by a Dutch warship and had its contents auctioned off in Amsterdam, at a time when England and Holland were at war and such activity was legitimate. By contrast, trace element analysis of two types of copper ingot from the wreck shows that these were most probably from Scandinavia and eastern Europe, sources of much of the copper shipped out of Amsterdam in the seventeenth century. Another ingot may have come from as far away as Japan, where the Dutch East India Company was acquiring copper at this period – adding to the goods on board the
Santo Cristo di Castello
that had been acquired from the East India Company in Amsterdam, which as we shall see included high-value spices and textiles.

Almost every dive produced a fascinating array of new artefacts, including brass spigots from barrels, miniature ornamental cannon and hundreds of brass pins. The pins were all hand-made in several different sizes and reflect the importance of pins in seventeenth-century society as clothes fastenings, in clothes-making and for fixing hair and wigs. By the 1660s, much pin manufacture was taking place in northern France, using brass wire manufactured in Holland and supplied by Dutch merchants who would then purchase and export them. Pin manufacture was famously evoked by the eighteenth-century economist Adam Smith in
The Wealth of Nations
to illustrate the division of labour:

One man draws out the wire, another straightens it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head; to make the head requires two or three distinct operations … and the important business of making a pin is, in this manner, divided into about eighteen distinct operations, which, in some manufactories, are all performed by distinct hands.

In fact, recent research suggests that Smith's knowledge of the industry was limited and fewer than half of those operations were performed in a typical workshop by separate individuals – and not just by men but by women, who made up perhaps half of the workforce and were paid considerably less. Nevertheless, Smith's example means that pin manufacture has had a central place in economic theory and in understanding the basis for the Industrial Revolution that was beginning to take place in his lifetime, linking the artefacts from the wreck with one of the key foundations of the modern world.

As well as the extraordinary revelation about works of art in the cargo – discussed below – the paintings of Renaissance and ‘Golden Age' Holland have played a central role in identifying and dating artefacts from the wreck. Many of the brass items were clearly being carried as scrap, some of them worn out or broken in use and others deliberately cut down to make them easier to recycle. What makes this so fascinating is that many of these were high-quality items originally from churches – candlesticks and candelabras, elaborate chandeliers and liturgical equipment. The best way of dating these items is by their appearance in paintings by Flemish and Dutch masters showing house and church interiors – the chandelier parts for example are closely paralleled in paintings by Emanuel de Witte (1617–92), notably his
Interior of Oude Kerk, Delft
of about 1650. Though that painting is close in date to the wreck, the chandeliers are likely to date considerably earlier, to the late sixteenth century, when churches that had been desecrated during the Reformation were being rehung with lighting and other essential equipment.

Several of the items dated even earlier than that, to the fifteenth century – making them among the oldest artefacts ever to have been found in a shipwreck off Cornwall. These include beautiful medieval candlesticks with a simple ‘baluster' stem, and spouts from lavabos, holy-water vessels that would have been hung at the entrance to churches. The spouts are closely paralleled in a triptych in the Metropolitan Museum of Art from the workshop of Robert Campin of Tournai, dated to 1427–32 and showing the Annunciation, with the lavabo depicted behind the head of the Angel Gabriel. Because the Calvinists disapproved of the idea of holy water, lavabos from Holland all date from before the mid-sixteenth century when they would have been pulled out of churches during the ‘Beeldenstorm' – the iconoclastic fury
when many Catholic church fittings and works of art were destroyed – making the wreck artefacts a rare survival from the greatest religious upheaval of early modern times. These events, and the artefacts in the wreck that represent them, have a direct bearing on Rembrandt and his art: the disappearance of religious art in Protestant Holland led to the secular art of the Golden Age, to the genre paintings, portraits and still-lifes through which Rembrandt and his contemporaries honed their skills, while a strong market continued for religious themes in the Catholic world to the south.

Excavation in 2020 focused on a new area of the wreck that had been buried in shingle but was exposed by the winter storms. Among the first artefacts that I discovered were a lead seal with the crossed-keys symbol of the city of Lieden – source of the finest cloth in the cargo, and birthplace of Rembrandt – and a fragment of a bronze mortarium embossed with the letters IHS, an abbreviation of the name Jesus in Greek. Just beneath those was a brass chisel used to knock wax seals off letters – an essential piece of desktop equipment, though rarely found. The most likely person to have such an item would have been the captain, and I wondered whether Viviano had used this very chisel to open the letters that he had received from his patrons in Genoa while the ship was under construction and at the wharfside. Next to it was a fine pair of navigational dividers with traces of gilding still remaining on the brass, and perhaps used by Viviano to measure distances on nautical charts supplied by the booksellers and cartographers of Amsterdam.

The most remarkable discovery was a brass figure of the crucified Christ, a ‘Corpus Christi'. Despite nearly 350 years in the sea, the quality of the chiselling in the hair and the drapery was still evident, as well as the excellence of the anatomical study in the musculature and emaciation of the torso, the facial features – executed according to the precepts of the Catholic Counter-Reformation, showing Christ without pain or suffering – and the wound on the right side of the chest where the spear was thrust in after death, following the account in the Gospels. The figure was based on a larger original of circa 1569–77 by the Italian artist Guglielmo della Porta, who was inspired by Michelangelo's statue of Christ the Redeemer (1519–20), as well as by the sculptures of classical antiquity still visible in Rome. The religious iconography dictated by the Council of Trent (1545–63), which set out the terms of the Counter-Reformation, shows a new
emphasis on private devotion and personal communion, meaning that these figures of Christ of the later sixteenth century reflect an attempt by the Catholic Church to strengthen itself and make its practices more attractive to those who might have considered conversion to Protestantism.

At a period when much focus historically is on England – these were the years of the Great Plague and the Great Fire of London, so vividly brought to life in the diary of Samuel Pepys – it was elsewhere in Europe that the greatest prosperity and achievements in the arts were to be found. Amsterdam was home to the Dutch East India Company, the largest trading organisation the world had ever seen, with more power and wealth than many states. Trade in the east led to great strides in navigation, cartography and shipbuilding, opening up opportunities for personal riches and bringing in a flow of spices and other exotica to Amsterdam, which acted as an entrepôt for the rest of Europe. Among other nationalities, the Genoese in particular reaped the benefits of this trade, with the old merchant families of Genoa having their ships built in Amsterdam – including the
Santo Cristo di Castello
, which was probably modelled on the ships of the East India Company – and laden with goods from the east, destined not only for Genoa but also for the other ports of Italy and Spain, as well as the Ottoman court of Constantinople. Genoa, too, had her own rich maritime history, as the home of Christopher Columbus and John Cabot, and with Genoese bankers playing a major role in Spanish trade in the New World. Amsterdam and Genoa were both republics, and thus represented styles of government that paved the way for the American and French revolutions of the following century.

Seemingly endless wars, religious conflict and misery are one measure of Europe in the seventeenth century, but another was a world in which the power of trade was ascendant and the patronage of those who grew wealthy as a result was an important factor in the creative flowering seen in Amsterdam in this period – all of which is exemplified in the
Santo Cristo di Castello
, built in Amsterdam for Genoese traders and with a cargo ranging from exotic eastern goods to the most expensive books ever printed and among the greatest works of painting of the period.

In addition to the merchandise listed in William Paynter's deposition quoted earlier in this chapter – cinnamon, cloves, coral, iron, lead and Russian hides – a document in the Amsterdam Notarial Archive contains a fascinating insight into the cargo of the
Santo Cristo di Castello
, listing the goods of one of many merchants with consignments on the ship, Paulus Cloots, in a claim that he made after the loss: 1,658 bars of iron weighing over 90,000 pounds; four vats containing 5,200 pounds of copper; ten bales of 4,305 pounds of ginger; four packs of 3,598 pounds of Russian hides; and packs of flax linen, cloth from Leiden and ‘apparrell', including worsted stockings. Because of the metal, the goods of this single merchant might have constituted a fifth or more of the total cargo weight in the vessel, but a greater proportion of the volume in the hold would have been taken up with bales of cinnamon, cloves and other spices, the highest value merchandise in the cargo and also the goods brought the greatest distance – with cloves coming from the Moluccas Islands in Indonesia, a distance of over 22,000 kilometres to Amsterdam and a voyage time of up to a year for the East Indiamen sailing the route.

On 4 December 1667 – two months after the
Santo Cristo di Castello
was wrecked – the captain of another Genoese ship that had been lost that year in English waters, the
Sacrificio d'Abramo
, petitioned King Charles II of England for the recovery of his cargo. Despite sailing with the Duke of York's passport, ‘his lading belonging only to Italians and Spaniards', on 15 June ‘his ship was yet seized by the King's ships, brought into Ireland, condemned as a prize, and the goods sold at a fifth of their value'. The king consented to the case being re-heard, but the damage was done and there was to be no recompense for her captain, Antonio Basso, or the numerous merchants who had cargo on board. From our viewpoint, though, her greatest treasure was saved – the papers that had been in the captain's cabin were sent to the High Court of Admiralty and survive today in The National Archives, constituting a uniquely detailed record of a ship's lading for a voyage from Amsterdam to Spain and Italy at this period. I was fortunate to be able to examine these papers, many of them never before studied, under the aegis of the Prize Papers Project, an initiative overseen by the Academy of Sciences and Humanities at Göttingen in Germany with the objective of digitising all of the papers in The National Archives from ships taken as prizes by the Royal Navy from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries.

I had gone to look at the papers because the ship was very similar in date and cargo to the
Santo Cristo di Castello
– the
Sacrificio d'Abramo
had set sail from Amsterdam only a few months earlier, risking passage while the war between Holland and England was still on – and I was excited to find not only bills of lading shared between the two ships, but also that the two captains had carried out negotiations together with the same agents and merchants in Amsterdam. Viviano and Basso were part of an extensive network of Genoese shippers and merchants based in Amsterdam and the ports of Spain who played a major role in maritime trade at this period. The papers contain much fascinating information on the crew, some of whom were English – former prisoners from captured ships brought to Amsterdam – and on the paperwork required at the time for international trade, including ‘plague passports' issued by the ports where the ship had put in. Of great interest were 118 bills of lading, listing goods procured in Holland and Germany as well as imports from the ‘Indies' and the Americas – pepper, cinnamon, cloves, indigo, sugar, logs of ebony, Indian textiles and silk, Russian cowhides, cloth and other textiles from the Low Countries, ingots of lead and copper, scrap metal, books and charts, paintings and much else. Because the cargo overlaps with that of the
Santo Cristo di Castello
, which contained a similar range of perishable goods, the evidence of the Prize Papers complements the artefacts from the wreck and allows an extraordinarily rich picture to be built up of a merchant ship and its cargo at this period.

Cargo listed in the bills of lading for the
Sacrificio d'Abramo
, 1667

Pepper

Cinnamon

Cloves

Camphor

Guinea grains

Swedish iron

English lead ingots

Copper ingots

Tin

Brass

Pewter plates

Russian hides