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Excavated
between 1996 and 2000, this small portion of the ship's bottom was recorded as best as possible. A few timbers
were raised and are deposited in tanks in the former Centro Nacional de Arqueologia Náutica e Subaquática,
in Lisbon. The remaining timbers were wrapped in textile and buried under several layers of sand bags.
The analysis
of the Pepper Wreck artifacts was the subject of a MA thesis at Texas A&M University, by Sara Brigadier, and
the hull remains were reconstructed as part of my PhD dissertation.
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The three astrolabes found
at the SJB2 site: São Julião da Barra I, São Julião da Barra II, and São Julião
da Barra III (details).
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These
ships are so interesting and so badly known to us that the research on the Pepper Wreck has continued uninterrupted
since 1996 and has originated a number of other projects, designed to address the questions that stemmed from my
2001 reconstruction of the hull.
Several
virtual models have been constructed to test many different sorts of questions, related to the plausibility of
my reconstruction: Did it float? Did it stay upright? Did it sail? What speeds could it reach under different weather
conditions? What angles could it withstand sailing upwind? How was the sail plan? How was the standing and running
rigging of such a vessel? How strong were these hulls, considering the scarcity of timber and the small size of
the components of the Pepper Wreck hull? How were these ships conceived? How were they built? What sort of control
was possible over the final product in relation with the original idea? Did they carry 450 people? How? Where and
how did they live? Where, when and how did they cook? Did they bring back from India 250 tons of peppercorns on
average? Where and how? How were the cargo and victuals stored?
The list
of questions is long. Moreover, many answers raise new questions, making this research a lot of fun in a kind of
a fractal way.
This webpage
is intended as an introduction to this topic. I believe that without a wide public interest we will never learn
anything about the Portuguese Indiamen of the 16th and early 17th centuries.
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