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This thread has been prompted by the discussion going on over in the Lambsfoot thread at the moment. In the course of that enjoyable discussion about the evolution and possible genesis of the Lambsfoot pattern and its name, those wonderful pictures of the hoard from the sunken Steamship Arabia came up.
http://1856.com
Now if you're like me, you need to wipe drool off your screen as you pore over those tantalising photos. What an incredible snapshot of cutlery history, frozen in time they are.
The west coast of Victoria, the state in the south east of Australia that I live in, is also known as The Shipwreck Coast.
Matthew Flinders, the English navigator and cartographer, said of it: 'Seldom have I seen a more fearful stretch of coastline.'
Looking at those Arabia pictures got me thinking how over the last year or two I have taken a few road trips out to that part of the world to, among other things, see if I could turn up any 'sharp and pointy treasure'.
Although scouring maritime museums and small coastal town historical societies' exhibits often prompts the desire to share my discoveries with like minded friends here, in this case I wasn't happy with the quality of the photographs, and frankly, I wondered if there was enough 'meat' in my travels to entertain and interest you discerning Porch folk.
Taking photos with a phone camera in museums can be a real exercise in frustration, what with the glass reflections and wonky fields of focus.
So I'd decided to simply keep my finds in my personal reference material...
But reading and thoroughly enjoying Donn's recent Salisbury cutlery jaunt, who evidently had to contend with the same issues, I've resolved to just present the material anyway in the hope that you can look past any amateurishness, and just savour this sampling of colonial knives from long ago and far away.
This part of Victoria is comprised of volcanic plains - some of these volcanoes were still active 7,000 years ago, when the area had already been populated by its original inhabitants for millennia. The ancestors of the Gunditjmara and other indigenous tribes of the area, called the volcanic eruptions and lava flows 'The Dancing Earth.'
If you look at the strata of the precipitous cliffs all along this coastline, you can see the bands of volcanic ash and fused chunks of iron projectiles and scoria that are evidence of particularly violent geologic periods of activity, layered with creamy white limestone chalk: the countless bodies of crustaceans from the ancient sea floor, ossified into chalky sediment, which were then lifted out of the sea by continental plate tectonics to form the forbidding cliffs and reefs that English, French, Dutch, American and Scandinavian mariners have feared, and come to grief on for the last four hundred years.
The indigenous tribes like the Gunditjmara had already developed complex hydrological systems of eel farm aquaculture dating back at least 7,000 years before the first English navigators charted this coastline in the late 1700s.
Of course the most traditional of all traditional knives were used by those first inhabitants of this area: the plenitude of flint 'cores' that were washed up on these beaches, encased in marine concretion ensured a steady supply of high grade cutting tool material for thousands of years. Indeed, one of the seven major trunk trading routes that crisscrossed Australia long before European settlement, started here and in the nearby diorite 'greenstone' axe quarries of Mt William.
I don't have any samples of these cutting tools - the very earliest 'traditional knives' to show you unfortunately. However, I can show you some 'flint cores' which I have foraged for future flint-knapping projects.
Exposed flint/chert outcropping in the foreground on the beach at Childers Cove.
The white chunks of marine concretion washed up here, contain flint cores.
And here is one of the 'cores' with the outer concretion chipped away (with a Peanut for scale).
Make no mistake, these tools could have been far sharper than any steel, when ground and flaked by a skilled hand. I was fascinated to learn that flint can also be toughened by heat treating.
Obsidian scalpels - a more refined version of chert and flint - are cutting edge experimental opthalmic technology even now.
http://edition.cnn.com/2015/04/02/health/surgery-scalpels-obsidian/
And an 'anvil stone' I found on my travels, surrounded by a strew of flint and stone flakes, evidence of thousands of years of edged toolmaking operations. This particular stone was also used to crack shellfish gathered from the cove below with hammerstones.
This is the view looking out to sea from the 'anvil'. Not a bad 'day at the office' working here!
Those chunks of rocky promontory are actually the remnants of tongues of lava, which extend far out undersea, onto the continental shelf.
The first European maritime explorers of this coast were Matthew Flinders and Nicolas Baudin, around the turn of the 18th century - English and French naval officers respectively.
Not long after the British and French naval expeditions came the secretive whaling and sealing vessels of Scandinavia, Nantucket and Britain, manned with canny, commercially motivated voyagers, who braved the longest and most epic journeys in human history up until those times.
Due to their desire to keep hidden their productive hunting and fishing grounds, not a great deal of information remains, either of their sea routes, or the exact patterns of their edged tools. I have searched for representations of the edgeware that may have been used by those early British navigators, and whalers and sealers of the 1800s but haven't found a great deal of definitive information.
The carbon steel blades they used have largely been lost to the tyranny of saltwater corrosion and time. I have uncovered material documenting their flensing, mincing and boarding knives; and other whaling tools like blubber, bone and boat spades but I think the boat knives and jackknives they carried were so common as to escape detailed description in narratives of the day.
If I could conjecture what they used, at least in terms of sheath knives or 'fixed blades', I would imagine something like a Green River skinner type pattern, along with a boat knife, possibly, of the shape an Englishman or Australian would have called a Dadley knife, or an American of later times may have identified as a Kephart style blade.
This is a knife and sheath which belonged to one of the surviving sailors of the Fiji, wrecked on this coastline in 1891.
It may be fairly representative of a sailors or boat knife of the day.
http://www.flagstaffhill.com/history-queries/flagstaff-hill-buildings/wrecks-information-sheets/
http://www.flagstaffhill.com/media/uploads/ShipwreckTrail.pdf
And now we come to two notable shipwrecks out of more than 600 which now rest on the sea floor off the West coast of Victoria, mainly from the days of sail -
The wrecks of the Loch Ard (lost in 1878)
(http://vhd.heritagecouncil.vic.gov.au/shipwrecks/417/download-report )
and the SS Schomberg (sunk in 1855).
(http://www.aberdeenships.com/single.asp?index=100116)
I'll just give a brief sketch outline of the circumstances and background of each wreck, and for those who are interested in more information, I'll post links.
These two ships are interesting to knife enthusiasts, as the wrecks of both of them were later found - The Loch Ard, 89 years after her sinking, and SS Schomberg, exactly 117 years to the day after she sunk. Among the goods salvaged, were pocketknives destined for Melbourne.
Melbourne at the time of the sinking of the Schomberg was in the midst of a major series of gold rushes. The year after the Schomberg, under the command of Captain 'Bully' Forbes was wrecked, 95 tonnes of gold was extracted from Victoria's goldfields. At the peak of the gold rush, 2 tonnes a week was flooding into the Treasury Building in Melbourne. Much of this astonishing bonanza was shipped back to 'The Mother Country' and paid off the entirety of Englands national debt. Melbournes population had exploded from zero non-indigenous inhabitants in 1835, to 10,000 in 1840, to 29,000 in 1851 at the time gold was discovered, to 123,000 three years later. In 1861 the population had topped half a million.
The SS Schomberg was the largest ship ever built in Britain, at that time, a full rigged Clipper of the Black Ball Line, intended for the upper end of the emigrant passenger trade, able to carry over 1000 people in luxury.
Captain Forbes, known as 'Bully Forbes' by his men, had drunkenly boasted of making Melbourne in 60 days 'with or without the help of God'. Forbes, a hard taskmaster, obsessed with maintaining his reputation of making record transits for the Black Ball Line, had once issued orders to his crew brandishing a pistol in each hand. It was recorded that, during a brief stop at South Uist in the Outer Hebrides, he had run down and tackled a sheep, whilst showing off to a party of ladies.
On the 78th day out of Liverpool, Forbes was below deck, playing cards with two young ladies, when the Schomberg ran aground on a sandbank west of Cape Otway. A nearby ship was able to assist in taking off passengers and crew, without loss of life, and over the next weeks some of the passengers' luggage and the most valuable cargo was removed, before the ship broke up. The forepart of the vessel eventually washed up in Tauperikaka Creek in New Zealand.
http://vhd.heritagecouncil.vic.gov.au/shipwrecks/612/download-report
In 1972, a local fisherman investigating a snagged anchor rediscovered the remains of the wreck.
The blades of most of these salvaged pocket knives have long since rusted away, but it is fascinating to view the handle shapes of these patterns as a frozen moment in cutlery history. One thing to note is the beautiful detail work on the threaded, pinched and rat-tail filed bolsters.
Quite a few fruit knives like these were recovered.
A long, barehead jack - possibly originally a single blade pattern.
Congress pattern.
Swell centre penknives.
Jack with curved stag handle. It's possible that this could have been a pruner.
Part of a Congress knife, included here for the lovely bolster work.
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