In June 2022 Ben Dunstan and I discovered this heavy copper-alloy tap on the wreck of the Royal Anne (1721), in a gully not previously recorded on the site that also contained cannonballs and musket shot. Because of the exposed position of the artefact and the risk of damage by the sea or of illicit recovery a decision was made to remove it for preservation and study. It weighs 15.8 kg and measures 39 by 20 cm, including the thick lead sheath that sealed it to a pipe leading from one of the ship's cooking kettles. Taps such as this - used to drain off water from the kettles - can be seen in several of Thomas Phillips' cross-sections of warships of the 1680s and early 1690s, and similar taps have been recovered from the Coronation, a second-rate warship launched in 1685 and wrecked off Plymouth in 1691, and the Northumberland, a third-rate warship wrecked off the Goodwin Sands in 1703. With the Royal Anne having been launched in 1709, this may provide a good timeframe for this type of kettle fixture on Royal Navy ships – mid-way between the simple cooking cauldron seen on the Mary Rose and the complex ‘Brodie’ stove installed on HMS Victory in 1765. As well as being a rare discovery for this period the Royal Anne tap is the largest artefact to have been recorded from the wreck other than the two surviving guns.
The Royal Anne is designated under the Protection of Wrecks Act 1973, and we are Licensees under the aegis of Historic England along with Mark Milburn. The tap has been declared to the Receiver of Wreck and is destined for museum display. For a detailed account of the Royal Anne, click here.
I am grateful to Kevin Camidge of the Cornwall and Isles of Scilly Maritime Archaeology Society for helping with the initial identification, and to Ginge Crook and Peter McBride for allowing me to see a photo of the Coronation tap.
Ben Dunstan after recovery of the tap, with the site in the background (click on images to enlarge).
The gully from which the tap was recovered, showing concreted cannonballs and lead shot.
Copper-alloy tap from the wreck of the Royal Anne (1721). Scale 25 cm.
Detail of a ship cross-section of a first-rate ship by the gunner and engineer Thomas Phillips (d. 1693) showing a galley kettle with a tap similar to the Royal Anne example. In 1683 Phillips accompanied Lord Dartmouth to Tangier, at the time when the Schiedam was employed there to remove guns and other material from the harbour during the abandonment of the colony. Samuel Pepys, also there on government business, recorded that Phillips 'views on many topics, including the improvement of navigation skills, the need to study the world's currents, the importance of mathematics in the educational curriculum of children intended for careers at sea, the simplification of the rigging of ships, and the needlessness of discovering the means of calculating longitude, which he believed would only bring about miscarriages at sea.'