Saturday Data: Wasted Effort

  

      The folks who used Federal Money to bring up debris from the CSS Georgia, a Civil War ship, decided a lot of what they brought to the surface was junk...that it "did not shed any new light on the lives of sailors serving aboard the vessel." So they sent it back down.

"Remains from the Confederate ironclad were salvaged during the summer and fall as part of a $703 million deepening of the Savannah harbor for cargo ships."

"Altogether, 16,697 artifacts weighing a total of 135 tons were returned to a watery grave at the bottom of the Savannah River, said Jim Jobling, project manager for the Conservation Research Laboratory at Texas A&M University, which is tasked with cataloging, cleaning and preserving artifacts from the Civil War shipwreck."

     The Georgia was scuttled by the confederate crew to prevent it from being seized by U.S Government forces.

  

What the CSS Georgia looked like

   Seems to me they passed up a great opportunity to pay for the operation that recovered objects that WERE valuable...by selling the "junk" to collectors. 
     If they charged just $25 each for the pieces, they would have collected half a million dollars. And the market for those pieces might have brought in more than that. Now they sit in containers buried in the mud in case they later decide to take a second look.

If this topic is of interest, you might want to go to the other blog I help maintain, about the CSS Alabama, another Confederate ship. It sank after a battle off the coast of France and many artifacts were recovered.