Underwater archaeologists study the remains of a boat from the late 19th century | The transport was used for the salt trade in Patagonia

2023-07-18 04:30:13

With archival work and testimonies from residents of Puerto Madryn, Conicet specialists reconstruct the history and technical characteristics of the Colomba, a boat that suffered a fire in 1935 and was stranded on the local beaches. Currently, the ship is part of the cultural and tourist heritage of the city; Therefore, researchers monitor their conservation conditions. Although it is no longer possible to establish a maintenance proposal due to how it is, the information they collect allows them to predict what can happen in similar cases.

“Very little remains of what it was, much material was lost. It has been exposed to waves and weather for several decades. We have been monitoring it periodically through a drone that takes photos of it and we are observing the progressive disintegration of the ship,” says Guillermo Gutiérrez, maritime archaeologist at the Institute of Diversity and Austral Evolution.

However, the boat is part of the shipwrecks in the city, which make up a tourist circuit for both local inhabitants and visitors from other regions of the country and the world.

shipwreck tourism

Puerto Madryn was declared the National Capital of Diving in 2017 by the Chamber of Deputies of the Nation. In this sense, and added to the tourist boom that the visit of the Southern Right whales causes each year, touring the coasts, appreciating the landscape, the shipwrecks and its history, constitute another of the attractions that the city holds.

The volume of maritime traffic and the commercial activity of the Port of Madryn during the late 19th and early 20th centuries were not exempt from incidents that can be observed and visited today. “On the city’s coast we have seven shipwrecks that are already part of the terrestrial and underwater coastal landscape: the Río de Oro Shipwreck, the Emma Schooner, the Madryn Tugboat, the Bahía Galenses Shipwreck, the Vapor Kaiser, the Folías Shipwreck and the Colomba,” Gutiérrez highlights.

Together with the municipality of Puerto Madryn, within the framework of the “Tourism very close” program, the specialists developed a tour of the city’s shipwrecks to share the history of the vessels that are part of the local and regional cultural heritage.

a ship of transition

In 1919 the ship Colomba was sailing towards Comodoro Rivadavia, and in the interior of the Golfo Nuevo it ran aground near Punta Piaggio, a cape near Puerto Pirámides. She was later recovered and used to transport salt from Pirámides to Puerto Madryn. She was later sold and her new owners used her for port tasks.

On September 16, 1935, the boat caught fire and since then it has been abandoned on the beach in the northern area of ​​Puerto Madryn. The study of its remains allowed the researchers to infer that the ship was built between the last quarter of the 19th century and the first years of the 20th century.

The Colomba, according to research, was manufactured in a transitional stage of shipbuilding when the ships stopped being made of wood and began to be made of iron and then steel. “Although she was a sail-driven ship like the old wooden boats, she is made of steel and is riveted with iron,” describes the researcher.

rebuild your identity

The ship was popularly referred to in the city as a sloop. This term refers to a single-masted vessel that was used for river or port navigation. Usually, the sloops reached about 20 meters in length. However, when the specialists were relieving the pieces of the shipwreck on the beach, they estimated that the dimensions of the ship were approximately 33 meters.

The distribution and quantity of the shroud ties –the turnbuckles that secure the masts to the hull– allowed us to conclude that the ship had two masts. Due to all these characteristics, the researchers assure that the Colomba was a schooner and not a sloop as was assumed for many years.

“In addition, schooners were commonly used for commercial coastal traffic during the 19th century and early 20th century. The remains of the boat are representative of the last sail-propelled ships with metal hulls built for trade”, says the anthropologist.

In a 1918 newspaper article from a regional newspaper, a maritime accident is described in which the Colomba was the protagonist, when it was hit by the steamer Presidente Miter in Puerto San Julián, province of Santa Cruz. In the news, they also mention the boat as a schooner.