SAVANNAH, Ga. (AP) — A warehouse along the Savannah River is holding historical treasures that evidence suggests remained lost for more than 240 years — a cache of 19 cannons that researchers suspect came from British ships scuttled to the river bottom during the American Revolution.
The mud- and rust-encrusted guns were discovered by accident. A dredge scooping sediment from the riverbed last year as part of a $973 million deepening of Savannah’s busy shipping channel surfaced with one the cannons clasped in its metal jaws. The crew soon dug up two more.
Archaeologists guessed they were possibly leftover relics from a sunken Confederate gunship excavated a few years earlier in the same area, said Andrea Farmer, an archaeologist for the Army Corps of Engineers. But experts for the U.S. Navy found they didn’t match any known cannons used in the Civil War. Further research indicates they’re likely almost a century older and sank during the buildup to the Revolutionary War’s bloody siege of Savannah in 1779.
In a timeframe of just over a year, 19 cannons were hoisted from the same area of the river a few miles downstream from Savannah, where Georgia was founded as the last of Britain’s 13 American colonies in 1733.
“They’re in remarkably good shape,” Farmer said. “Many were buried in clay and covered by silt and debris that kind of protected them.”
Now officials with the U.S. and British governments, as well as the state of Georgia, are working together on an agreement to preserve the newly found guns before putting them on display. Commodore Philip Nash of the British Royal Navy, a military attache based in Washington, viewed the artifacts submerged in metal tubs of water during a visit Thursday.
“Some of these pieces are in amazing condition and I’m sure could tell some stories,” Nash said.
The cannons are being kept in water to prevent further deterioration until experts can carefully clean them. Meanwhile, researchers are looking for more definitive proof linking the cannons to British ships from the American Revolution.
