Workers at the World Trade Center were stunned this week when they discovered the fully-intact bottom of a wooden ship, more than twenty feet below ground.  Archeologists raced to the site of the find, roughly fifty yards from the spot where the South Tower of the World Trade Center once stood in Lower Manhattan.

Now, archeologists are trying to beat the clock and preserve as much of the boat’s 32-ft hull as they can before it is too late.  As soon as it’s wooden planks were exposed to the air and sunlight, they began to warp and pale.  The rotting is evident to everyone on sight, as it eminates a powerful and foul odor, similar to sulfur.  As a result of this exposure and the fact that the subway and car traffic of New York City is intensely felt underground, very little of the boat will likely be preserved.  They plan on saving some samples and using a process known as dendrochronology to determine the true age of this ship.  This involves comparing the wooden planks from the boat to the rings in old trees.

Archeologists believe this boat was used for sailing the high-seas, based on the heavy-duty design of the portion recovered.  They are also confident it ended up twenty feet under some of the world’s most expensive real estate because it was used as land-fill for a bulkhead in the 18th century.  The bulkheads were used to literally expand the size of lower Manhattan westward, when space for development became scarce.  The landfill material used were typically boulders, trash and lumber, and it is believed the ship was used because it was no longer seaworthy.  This means that a boat that was useless to settlers in colonial times is today the focus of the largest archeological discovery on Manhattan in nearly three decades.