Karl (ship)
The river ship "Karl" comes from the reign of Charlemagne and is the oldest evidence of cargo shipping to and from Bremen. It is one of the three plank-built ships from the Carolingian era that have been preserved in Germany - alongside the ship from Krefeld-Linn and the river barge from Niedermörmter on the Rhine. It was found in Bremen in 1989 , mostly recovered, preserved for years and is now in the German Maritime Museum in Bremerhaven .
Find and rescue
On March 29, 1989, excavation work for a hotel building on Wachtstrasse in Bremen exposed a long, narrow, wooden ship ten meters below street level. It was in the groundwater. 12 m protruded into the construction pit, an estimated 5–7 m stuck in and behind the concrete retaining wall of the construction pit.
In five days of an emergency rescue - 50 trucks with concrete would pour the excavation pit on the sixth day and the city's archaeologists were sick or away - the state archaeologist's conservator identified the ship as a medieval cargo ship, had it drawn and a geologist to record the find situation. The conservator of the German Maritime Museum gave the construction company's carpenters instructions on how to surround the ship with a custom-made support structure. They sawed it off the concrete wall and a crane lifted the parcel onto a padded low-loader that drove it to Bremerhaven for conservation and detailed scientific research.
Ship type
The floor of the almost 20 m long ship consists of three broad and thick planks. The two outer, the chin-up planks , have an L-shaped cross-section and thus form the transition from the floor to the side walls. These are Kimmplanken with ax and Dechsel hewn and both vertically and horizontally bent slightly. They determine the shape of the trunk and give it great rigidity. The ends of the ship rise about 40 cm above the middle and are also narrower than the middle part of the ship.
The side walls are made up of three planks. The planks are 30 cm wide and 5 cm thick in the middle, made of clinker brick (i.e. overlapping one another) and connected with wooden dowels. The port side is completely preserved, most of the starboard side is missing. The overlaps are caulked with moss . A heavy, upturned bow plate closes off the floor at the front. Half- ribs arranged in pairs and individual floor walls connect the floor planks with one another and hold the slightly outward sloping sides of the ship. The shipbuilders only used wooden dowels to fasten the frames.
The largest width of the ship can be reconstructed to about 230 cm with a side height of about 75 cm. There are no traces of a mast or oarlocks. The ship was probably pounded , which must have been an efficient technique in the shallow bank water of the slowly flowing Weser, which was not regulated in the Middle Ages.
The ship is made of oak and the craftsmanship is very demanding. Judging by its size, gradually by the thickness of its planks, it was built to transport heavy loads on rivers: A flourishing city like the bishopric of Bremen needed lumber, bricks and foundation stones, lime and roof shingles, wrought iron and weapons, grain and slaves.
Two C-14 dates as well as broken fragments found in the ship suggest that the ship sailed around 800 AD, an exact tree -ring dating showed that the year of fell of the tree for a side plank was 808 AD Conservator's ship "Karl".
Preservation and presentation
Archaeological finds made from wood saturated with water shrink very much when they dry. Such woods can be soaked and filled with a stabilizing agent while they are still wet, so that they retain their shape and size while drying. There are various means and methods of stabilizing wood saturated with water.
The "Karl" was soaked for six years in heated baths with synthetic waxes from the group of polyethylene glycols (PEG): four years with low molecular weight PEG 200, then two years with high molecular weight PEG 3000. The second bath could not be carried out optimally for technical reasons. therefore the stabilization of the timbers did not succeed as well as it could have been.
During the long watering phase, the wood of the ship detached itself from its association. The ship had to be rebuilt for the presentation of the "Karl" in the German Maritime Museum. With new dowels in the old dowel holes in the overlaps of the side planks and in the flanks of the chin planks, the original shape of the hull was created almost automatically. A steel skeleton inconspicuously fitted into the ship supports and holds the Carolingian river ship "Karl".
literature
- Thomas Moritz: The excavation in Bremen's old town 1989, in Bremisches Jahrbuch, Volume 70, Bremen 1991, pp. 191-206
- Per Hoffmann: Conservation and presentation of the river ship "Karl" in the German Maritime Museum . In: Konrad Elmshäuser (Hrsg.): Ports, Ships, Waterways. To shipping in the Middle Ages . (Writings of the German Maritime Museum Volume 58), Bremerhaven 2002, pp. 86–69.
- Per Hoffmann: The search for the right form - reconstruction of the Carolingian river ship "Karl" . In: Restauro (2006), Issue 8, pp. 508-513.
- Dieter Hägermann, and Konrad Elmshäuser: Bremische Kirchengeschichte im Mittelalter , Bremen 2012, pp. 30–32 (on the location, with illus.).
- Ulrich Weidinger: With cogs to the market square. Bremen's port structures from the early Middle Ages to industrialization. Bremen 1997, p. 61.
Web links
Coordinates: 53 ° 4 ′ 26.3 " N , 8 ° 48 ′ 24.2" E