Early inventors of diving equipment in England soon became involved in nautical archaeology. In 1836, John Deane and William Edwards found the remains of Henry VIII’s warship Mary Rose, which sunk in 1545 off Portsmouth, England. During the next four years, they salvaged numerous artifacts, including a variety of armaments and some wooden hull remnants, many of which they recorded in exquisite watercolors.

Not all early nautical archaeology required diving. Remains of an earlier battleship, Henry V’s Grace Dieu, which had been launched in 1419, were reported in the mud of the Hamble River in Harold J. Osborne White’s 1859 Hampshire and Isle of Wight Directory but were not properly identified before the twentieth century. After an amateur’s crude excavation of the site in the 1870s, perhaps with explosives, the Hampshire Field Club in the last year of the nineteenth century removed some of the ship’s timbers to a museum in Winchester, England, where they were displayed as being from a “Danish galley.”

Other European discoveries followed that of the Grace Dieu. In 1864, part of a Roman hull of the second or third century a.d. was salvaged from the harbor in Marseille and fancifully named “Caesar’s galley.” Other parts of the hull, raised in the 1950s, showed its planks to be fastened edge-to-edge by mortise-and-tenon joints in the shell-first kind of construction now known to have been in fashion in the Mediterranean from at least the fourteenth century b.c. until around the eleventh century a.d. Most modern wooden hulls are built in the frame-first manner, in which planks are simply nailed to a pre-erected framework of keel, stem, sternpost, and frames (ribs).

A different tradition of shell-first hull construction existed in Northern Europe, and a great deal of research was conducted there in the nineteenth century. Instead of being joined edge to edge, the planks of these hulls overlapped one another like shingles, and in this case were fastened together by long metal nails driven through them from the outside and clenched over inside, coining the term clinker built.

The clinker-built hull of a great open war vessel from the second half of the fourth century a.d., deposited as an offering to the gods in a bog at Nydam in Schleswig, germany, was, in 1864, the first ancient ship excavated by an archaeologist. Less than two decades later, in 1880, a clinker-built, ninth-century ship found at Gokstad became the first of a number of Viking ships recovered from royal burials in Norway, where the clay soil remarkably preserves wood and iron. A replica of this ship crossed the Atlantic in 1893, an early example of experimental archaeology.

Far away in Africa, hot desert sands preserved hull timbers equally well. Five funerary boats from about 1,850 b.c., intentionally buried near the pyramid of Sesostris III at Dashur, were discovered in 1894 by the French archaeologist Jacques De Morgan. The planks of the ten-meter hulls were held together by mortise-and-tenon joints. Two of the hulls are now in the Cairo Museum, one is in the Field Museum in Chicago, and one is in the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh; one is missing, perhaps reburied at Dashur.

1900–1960

The first half of the twentieth century saw a dramatic increase in salvage by helmet divers. Although a Roman wreck found in 1900 by Greek sponge divers off the Aegean island of Antikythera gained notoriety mainly because of spectacular discoveries of bronze and marble Greek statues, and a unique astronomical instrument, a few planks were raised that showed mortise-and-tenon joinery. Concentration on statuary and pottery rather than hulls continued in the salvage of artifacts by Greek and Turkish sponge divers from another Roman wreck, at Mahdia off the coast of Tunisia, in the six years following its discovery in 1907. Although fragments of wood were raised in 1928 by the Greek sponge divers who salvaged famed bronze statues of Zeus or Poseidon and a jockey and horse off Cape Artemision, they were never properly studied. Nor were the fragments of wood netted by a fisherman three years earlier along with the bronze statue of a nude youth in the Bay of Marathon in the Aegean.

Detailed records of a hull of the Roman period had already been made at this early date,