Ballast: Laden with History

By Mats Burström

In Ballast: Laden with History, the archaeologist Mats Burström charts how ship ballast helped to shape the world we live in. Until only very recently, ships were ballasted with sand, gravel, stone, or rubble to give them stability, and when they no longer needed the extra weight, it was dumped. The result was that huge quantities of ballast were shipped to new places and new continents. Ballast was often reused, sometimes in surprising ways. This is the first comprehensive account of ship ballast, so long overlooked, and now finally recognized for its diverse and exciting history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nordic Academic Press
• Release date: Jun 15, 2018
• ISBN: 9789188661234

Mats Burström

Mats Burström is professor of Archaeology at Stockholm University, Sweden. He has been instrumental in establishing the archaeological study of the twentieth century as a field of research. His studies within this field include a Nazi propaganda site in Germany, Soviet nuclear missile sites in Cuba, and personal belongings hidden in the ground in Estonia during the Second World War. His academic work is characterized by general references to art and literature.

Book preview

Ballast

Laden with history

Mats Burström

Translated by

Charlotte Merton

NORDIC ACADEMIC PRESS

Copying or other kinds of reproduction of this work

requires specific permission from the publisher.

Nordic Academic Press

P.O. Box 148

SE-221 00 Lund

Sweden

www.nordicacademicpress.com

© Nordic Academic Press and Mats Burström 2017

Translation: Charlotte Merton

Cover design: Fugazi form

Cover photo: Cobbled street made of ballast

in Savannah, Georgia, USA. Photo: Mats Burström

Tryckt utgåva ISBN: 978-91-88168-39-9

E-bok ISBN: 978-91-88661-23-4

Contents

A dawning interest

The weight that keeps the ship afloat

Previous research

Ancient artefacts in the ballast

Perplexing flint

Bright sparks and precious metals

Streets paved with ballast

Rubble crossing the Atlantic

Marked stones

What’s in a name?

Stones and beetles in Newfoundland

Ballast that took root

A wider view

* * *

Acknowledgements

Notes

References

A dawning interest

In the autumn of 2012, I spent a couple of months as a visiting researcher at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. During a coffee break, I got chatting with a colleague about a Palaeolithic hand-axe that had been found at an archaeological dig in the city. This Old Stone Age tool had been found in a flint filling layer, and the archaeologists had immediately realized that it was not native to Australia, but must have been shipped in from Europe with the rest of the flint as ballast.

The find piqued my interest. I thought it fascinating that an object so many thousands of years old could move from one continent to another in this way. Disappointingly, it proved impossible to find out more about the find. Nothing about it made it into print, and the excavation’s directors did not answer the questions passed on for me by my colleague. Yet nevertheless it raised questions. Were there other examples of ancient objects that had criss-crossed the oceans as ballast and turned up in unexpected places? And what other physical traces were there of ship ballast? Until that point I had had no real interest in ballast in archaeological terms, but now I found I wanted to know more. This book is the result.

It began to dawn on me that ballast had been far more common than I had ever imagined. It had been shipped in vast quantities. While it is not possible to come up with a precise figure for the total amount of ballast, it would seem that in the Age of Sail from the sixteenth to the early twentieth centuries there were several million tonnes of it. That being the case, it is surprising that ballast has not received greater attention from archaeologists.¹

The fact that ballast has not been the focus of a sustained archaeological inquiry begs the question of what else might be staring us in the face that we have failed to notice. What sprang to mind was a painting by the Flemish artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder from the mid-sixteenth century.² In the middle of the painting is a man in a scarlet shirt, ploughing, and beyond him an expanse of sea where the wind fills the sails of a ship. Close to the water’s edge is a shepherd, gazing up at the sky lost in thought, while his flock grazes and a sheepdog sits at his feet. In the distance, a port gleams in the light of the setting sun. As the title—Landscape with the Fall of Icarus—indicates, there is more to the painting than first meets the eye. Look closely and you will spot something unexpected: in the lower right-hand corner there is a pair of legs flailing in the water. Icarus! Not even the angler down on the shoreline seems to have noticed what is happening; he is busy sorting out his line. By the time he hears the splashing and looks out over the water, Icarus may already be gone.

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, c. 1555–1560. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Detail from Landscape with the Fall of Icarus with Icarus’ legs thrashing and a few feathers floating down. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

It is thought that Bruegel’s painting was a comment on the Flemish proverb ‘And the farmer continued to plough’.³ The saying referred to humankind’s ability to close their eyes to the suffering of others, carrying on with their own lives regardless. Or the painting may be an illustration of how easy it is to miss things that fall outside our area of experience. There are differences between the tale of Icarus and the subject of this book, though, for while the fable is a one-off, fast-moving, and, of course, mythical event, ballast is a solid archaeological reality that has endured for centuries. Which makes it all the more strange that ballast has not attracted greater attention.

The weight that keeps the ship afloat

Navigare necesse est, to sail is necessary, as the old saying goes.⁴ And all boats need ballast. It is what gives a vessel stability, preventing it from capsizing when it is not sufficiently laden with cargo. Nowadays water is used, pumped into large ballast tanks in the hold of the ship, but for most of the Age of Sail, ballast was solid—sand, gravel, or stone, sometimes iron or brick, or anything else that could be sold on, but traditionally whatever material was readily available where the ship had put in. Often the ballast was collected from a nearby beach. When loading cargo at the destination, any ballast that was no longer needed was simply discarded. Sometimes it was dumped into the sea, sometimes it was offloaded on land. If a boat deballasted onto land, it could be reused, either as ballast or for something completely different.

Ballast dumping soon became a problem because it silted up harbours and channels, with the result that in many places it was regulated from an early date. Thus, the Norwegian king Haakon Magnusson in 1313 banned the dumping of ballast in the port of Nidaros (present-day Trondheim).⁵ Ports often had special inspectors or ballast masters to ensure boats took on and discharged ballast according to the regulations, and strict fines were imposed on skippers who broke the rules. A panorama of Stockholm from the mid-seventeenth century shows boats moored along the city’s quays: the sheer number of vessels would have meant that uncontrolled deballasting would have rendered the harbour unusable. A city regulation of 1685 ordered all skippers to obey the local regulations for handling ballast, spelling out that anyone who disposed of ballast