America’s oldest warship, sunk in 1776, is getting a 250th-birthday makeover

Conservator Angela Paola is lying on her back under the 16-ton gunboat, picking debris from between its nearly 250-year-old planks. She is wearing blue surgical gloves, grimy white coveralls, and a half-face respirator.

Dust floats in the beam of her headlamp, and the light reveals bits of the original oakum and pitch used to seal the bottom of the Philadelphia before it was sunk in battle by the British in 1776.

As she pokes a tool between the planks, clumps of hardened sediment fall on her. “It’s dirty,” she says. “But it is really satisfying work. And it’s really exciting to see it slowly start to show itself through all the mud and the years.”

The Philadelphia is the country’s oldest surviving intact warship, according to the Smithsonian Institution. It was launched on July 30, 1776, a few weeks after the Declaration of Independence was adopted. And as the nation prepares for its 250th birthday this summer, experts are grooming the old vessel for its place in the celebration.

“It’s one of the most important objects — movable objects — of the Revolution, flat out,” Anthea M. Hartig, director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, said in an interview at the museum this month.

The gnarled boat has survived battle, sinking, the elements, wood-eating bacteria, rodents, misguided attempts at preservation, tourists, and almost 250 years in the country it helped found.

It’s “one in a million,” Paola, the conservator from Texas A&M University, said through her respirator last week.

The 53-foot-long boat, hastily built of green oak, was sunk by British cannon on Oct. 11, 1776 at the Battle of Valcour Island, on Lake Champlain. But historians say the small fleet it was part of helped thwart British plans to invade the colonies from the north, and furthered the cause of independence.

The boat, powered by oars and sails, spent 159 years sitting upright in 60 feet of water at the bottom of the lake until it was raised in 1935. It then became a tourist attraction: admission 50 cents, according to an old advertising poster, and was carried from place to place on a barge.

After almost 30 years, it came to Washington in 1961 as one of the early arrivals at what was then the National Museum of History and Technology. It was hoisted inside while the building was still under construction and has been there ever since.

Since July, the museum has had the Philadelphia partially cordoned off in a special conservation lab on the third floor of the East Wing.

There, experts from the Smithsonian and Texas A&M are working with vacuums, brushes and dental tools to give it a state-of-the art cleaning and look for lost artifacts in areas they said have never been probed before. Visitors can watch the work through a large viewing window.

The vessel rests in a huge cradle. Arrayed around it are its lower mast, rudder, two anchors, three big cast-iron guns, gun carriages, swivel guns, and the 24-pound British cannon ball that helped sink it.

The Philadelphia’s biggest weapon was an 8-foot-long, 3,800-pound cannon made in Sweden. It sat on a wooden rail at the front of the boat and fired a 12-pound iron ball. The gun still had a projectile in its mouth when it was discovered.

The boat was raised on Aug. 9, 1935 by history enthusiast and salvage engineer Lorenzo F. Hagglund and yachtsman J. Ruppert Schalk. When it came up, it contained a trove of more than 700 artifacts, according to John R. Bratten’s 2002 book, The Gondola Philadelphia & the Battle of Lake Champlain.

It also had a handful of human bones.

According to salvage reports, “there were a couple of arm bones … some teeth and a partial skull that were found on board the boat itself,” said Jennifer L. Jones, director of the museum’s Philadelphia gunboat preservation project.

“We know there were a lot of injuries,” she said in an interview at the museum this month.

The Oct. 11 battle was a daylong shootout with both sides firing iron cannon balls that could sink a ship or tear off a limb.

Less than two years after the start of the Revolutionary War, the British had been planning an attack from Canada south along the lake between New York and Vermont to try to split the colonies.

They quickly assembled a fleet of about two dozen vessels near the lake in Canada for the task.

The Americans countered, building and gathering a fleet of 16 vessels, including the flat-bottom Philadelphia and seven others like it, said Peter D. Fix, of Texas A&M, the lead conservator on the gunboat preservation project.

The two sides met in a narrow channel of the lake between the New York shore and Valcour Island, about five miles south of Plattsburgh, N.Y.

“It was a very bloody battle,” Jones said.

From the American hospital ship, “Enterprise,” crewman Jahiel Stewart wrote in his journal: “The battel was verryey hot [and] the Cannon balls & grape Shot flew verrey thick.”

“I believe we had a great many [killed] … Doctors Cut off great many legs and arm and … Seven men [were thrown] overbord that died with their wounds while I was abord,” he wrote.

Each side suffered about 60 men killed and wounded, Bratten wrote.

Jones said it is possible the limbs found on the ship had been amputated. Their whereabouts are unknown, she said.

The Philadelphia was commanded by a young Pennsylvania army officer, Benjamin Rue. He had 43 men from many walks of life under him.

“We have a wretched, motley crew in the fleet,” American Gen. Benedict Arnold wrote before the battle. “The refuse of every regiment, and the seamen, few of them, ever wet with salt water.”

Arnold, who commanded the patriot fleet, later deserted the American cause and went to fight for the British in 1780. He died in England in 1801. One of the crewmen on the Philadelphia, Joseph Bettys, also switched sides. He was later captured and hanged.

The Oct. 11 battle was a stalemate. The British withdrew; the Americans, bottled up in the channel, escaped that night. But two days later, the British force tracked down the Americans and destroyed most of their fleet.

Only a handful of American ships survived the fight. The Philadelphia was not one of them.

The ship is now “heavily degraded,” said Fix, the lead conservator,

The hull still bears three holes made by British cannon balls. A wooden cross piece near where the mast stood is charred, probably from the ship’s brick fireplace. The hull planks have lost about three-quarters of an inch in thickness to bacteria, Fix said.

Care of the boat “is a huge undertaking, of which the conservation is one part,” he said. “The conservation, the preservation, is kind of the avenue to learn all this other extra stuff, which has been great.”

“Our main task, as we were assigned, was ‘let’s make sure we make it last for another 250 years,’ ” he said.

Back under the vessel recently, conservator Paola put chunks of fallen debris in an orange bucket, to be sifted for artifacts later. She said it was amazing that the Philadelphia had survived.

“She lasted,” she said. “We’re really lucky.”