The Case for the Privateer Rapid by Jack B. Irion, PhD
A
small wooden ship, roughly 65 feet long and armed with a single six-pounder cannon and a crate of mismatched flintlock muskets, pistols, and swords disappeared beneath the waves of the G ulf of Mexico some 35 miles off the Mississippi River delta and settled to the bottom in 4,000 feet of water. It remained forgotten and undisturbed for nearly 200 years until, in 2005, its now disintegrated and buried remai ns were detected by the sonar of an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV), a 14foot- long unmanned submarine packed with survey instruments, collecting data about seafloor conditions along the proposed route of a natural gas pipeline.
Operated Vehicle (ROV) when it was discovered that Target D-11 was, in fact, the remains of a shipwreck. What fo llowed was a series of negotiations between the MMS and the gas pipeline company that eventually led to the funding of an operation to recover more than a thousand artifacts from the seafloor. Texas A&M University was comracted by the pipeline's owner to oversee the archaeological recovery of artifacts from what was code-named the Mardi Gras shipwreck after the name of the pipeline next to which it was found. Field work began on 21 May 2007. From the time that the Mardi Gras shipwreck site was first discovered, one of the most pressing questions, naturally, has
After archaeologists at Texas A&M completed their analysis of artifacts recovered from the site in 2007, ten possible ships were identified as reasonable candidates in their report of the investigation. While each of the ten candidate vessels was close in approximate size to the remains of the Mardi Gras shipwreck, significant differences existed between the historical record of each of the vessels and the remains on the bottom of the G ulf of Mexico. It was at this stage that journalist Pamela Keyes entered the picture some seven years after the wreck was first glimpsed on the seafloor. Ms. Keyes is researching the War of 1812 British blockade of coastal Louisiana and had been an avid follower of the Mardi Gras Shipwreck Project's website when the team was in the field in 2007 (http: //www. flpublicarchaeology.org/ mardigras/). She was copied on an e-mail inquiry by the MMS in 2009 to Dr. William C. Davis, author of the book The Pirates Lafitte. This correspondence served to jog Ms. Keyes's memory of an account relating to the loss of the American privateer schooner Rapid in 1813 that she had found in the course of h er own exhaustive research in contemporary newspapers. The 6 Jan uary 1814 issue of the New York Evening Post carried the following story: NEW ORLEANS, DEC. 4 Lossofthesch r.Rapid-OnS unday, the 28'h ult. the private armed schooner Rapid, capt James Sandford, owned by Mr. H. Elkins, who was on board at the time of her misfortune, left the Balize 1 with strong wind from the Northward, and a heavy sea. At 11 o'clock AM . descried the British sloop-of-war Herald to leeward in chase; set all sail to escape the enemy; at 3 P.M. being struck by a heavy sea the schr. upset, the Herald at this
View of the Mardi Gras shipwreck as first seen on the seafloor from underwater video.
The sonar image showed a small, indistinct pile of debris on an otherwise featureless seafloor, but nothing that was readily identifiable as a shipwreck or gave any cause for special consideration. Nonetheless, the aco ustic anomaly was reported as Target D-11 to the Minerals Management Service (the predecessor agency of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, or BOEM), an agency within the US Department of the Interior that has jurisdiction over oil and gas exploration and development. The pipeline's intended route was being inspected the fo llowing year with cameras mounted on a submarine Remotely 24
been: "What ship is it?" While a great deal can be inferred from the archaeological recovery abo ut the ship's size, type, nationality, temporal affiliation, and function, we still depend upon the historical record to put flesh on the bones. A rough estimation of a date for the ship was formulated by MMS archaeologists as between 1780 and 1820, based upon an analysis of the visible artifacts on the seafloor and, specifically, two recovered creamware ceramics. Nothing, however, in the secondary literature or even in the MMS sh ipwreck database suggested a plausible identification.
1
The Balize, or "La Balise" was a settlement and fort built near the mouth of the Mississippi River in what is today Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, at the intersection of Northeas t Pass and Pass a l'Outre. After sufferin g through several major storms, it was eventually destroyed and relocated in 1853. Northeast Pass had served as the primary entrance ro the river for more than a century before 1829. (Cipra 1997:137).
SEA HISTORY 142, SPRING 2013