Several blogs back I reported on my discovery of a 2 pound Amsterdam blokgewicht (block weight) from the Mullion Pin Wreck, an important find in its own right and also because the date of 1665 stamped on the weight provides additional evidence that the ship was indeed the Santo Christo de Castello from Amsterdam (Gibbins 2019a). In this blog I’m reporting on three more weights with markings, one of them – a large cup weighing over 3 pounds - found only last week …
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A copper-alloy crucified Christ (Corpus Christi) from the Mullion Pin Wreck (1667), off Cornwall, England
I discovered this figure in 2019 while diving on the Mullion ‘Pin Wreck’, a mid-17th century merchantman off Cornwall so-named for the abundance of brass clothing pins found at the site. The wreck is almost certainly the Santo Christo de Castello, a Genoese-owned ship built in Amsterdam in 1666 and wrecked on her maiden voyage the following year from Holland via London towards Iberia …
Read MoreA dated two-pound Amsterdam blokgewicht (block weight) from the Mullion Pin Wreck (1667), off Cornwall, England
I discovered the artefact in these photos in 2018 while diving on the Mullion ‘Pin Wreck’, a mid-17th century merchantman wrecked off the west coast of the Lizard peninsula in Cornwall, England. It is a two-pound Amsterdam blokgewicht (block weight), a type of copper-alloy weight shaped like a truncated cone that was used by Dutch merchants from the 17th to the 19th century (Nagel 2013, 2019; van Diest 2016, 2019). 17th century examples are rarely found, and this is one of the oldest known …
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