1650 Trade Pipe from the PIPE WRECK Shipwreck AACA

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Fantastic artifact! This is a clay trade pipe produced in the 1640's- early 1650's that was recovered from the famous shipwreck called The Pipe Wreck which was a ship sailing to the Hudson Bay with trade goods. This is a very rare FUNNEL type clay pipe and only 7% of the pipes recovered from this shipwreck wer of this shape, and this is the only shipwreck to have this style! The pipe measures 3 1/4" long the inside of the bowl measures 9/16" in diameter, the bore hole in the stem measures a hair over 1/16" inch. The pipe is covered in sealife encrustations. I have one other pipe of this shape from The Pipe Wreck (in my personal collection) it has a Tudor Rose deign on the bottom, this one looks like it has the same design but very hard to see. Guaranteed 100% authentic and from The Pipe Wreck. I will be listing one more lot with pipes from this wreck, after that they are GONE so please check back on my auctions. I am a member of the AACA. T is some information about this shipwreck at the bottom of this page under the pictures so please take the time to read it. Discovered in 1966 off the north coast of the Dominican Republic, the Monte Cristi shipwreck represents the remains of an English-built ship carrying a Dutch cargo that sank in Spanish waters during the mid-17th century. Despite heavy salvage of the site by sport divers and treasure hunters, significant features of the ship's construction and a substantial sample of the ship's cargo have survived. This cargo was predominantly composed of several types of clay tobacco smoking pipes, although other diagnostic artifacts such as ceramics, trade goods, and luxury imports have also been preserved. One artifact which has appeared consistenüy throughout the excavation of the wreck is a ceramic known as Rhenish stoneware, especially a type called Barlmannkrilge which was produced and exported from the town of Frechen, near Cologne, during the 16th and 17th centuries. No complete stoneware vessels have yet been found at Monte Cristi, but the mottled-brown salt-glazed fragments are characterized by applied Bartmann faces and body medallions typical of Rhenish stoneware from other 17th-century sites. Analyses of other artifacts from the Monte Cristi shipwreck have placed the date of the wreck between 1652 and 1656 and the likely destination of the ship to have been the northeastern seaboard of North America. In testing these theories through a study of the Monte Cristi Rhenish stoneware, it has become apparent that the assemblage probably date to the 1650s or earlier and has parallels at several sites in North America and on shipwreck sites around the world. More valuable from an interpretive point of view is the actual size of the stoneware assemblage, which suggests that the Rhenish stoneware was a major element of the ship's cargo. Since the Dutch were the primary transporters of Bartmatmkrüge in the 17th century, the stoneware's presence is a strong indication that the ship was under Dutch ownership at the time it sank. The ceramic pipes, which form by far the largest portion of the cargo, provided the initial temporal framework for the wreck. Over 25,000 clay pipe fragments have been excavated at this site to date, making Monte Cristi the source of the largest collection of ceramic tobacco smoking pipe fragments yet recovered from a shipwreck site . Approximately 2000 of these pipe fragments are stamped with one of seven distinguishable maker's marks, namely EB, WH, D*C, P*C, a Tudor rose, a fleur-de-lis in a diamond outline, and a decorative star or flower designated as Fort Orange Type (FOT) 49 (Hall, 1996:126-152; Huey, 1988: 740). The most predominant maker's mark, the initials "EB," almost certainly represent the work of Edward Bird, an Englishman who manufactured and exported pipes from Amsterdam from 1630 until his death in 1665. Since fragile 17th-century ceramic pipes generally had a life span from manufacture to disposal of less than two years (Noël Hume, 1985: 296), then it is apparent that the Monte Cristi pipes were produced and exported sometime... read more

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