The Red River Wreck project team continued mapping on Wednesday, trying to record as much of the exposed wreck as possible before closing the site on Friday. With the departure Wednesday morning of the team from Long Beach City College (http://www.lbcc.cc.ca.us/), the crew is now down to about half its normal strength. The highlight of the day, though, was the recovery of a complete barrel of salt pork, probably intended as rations for the garrison at Fort Towson.

First indications of the cask appeared earlier in the week, when LBCC student Cynthia Schantz discovered a loose barrel stave in the bottom of the ship. On Tuesday, Scott Whitesides of East Carolina University (http://www.ecu.edu) and Daniel Seib of Indiana University Bloomington (http://www.iub.edu) recorded the barrel in place and developed a plan for its recovery. They also took samples of the contents in the event that the 160-year-old cask broke apart during recovery.

On Wednesday Whitesides and Seib worked to clear away the remaining sand around the base of the barrel. The natural-fibre barrel hoops had disintegrated, and Whitesides and Seib were forced to remove several of the remaining barrel staves individually. The next planned phase was to move the barrel into the submerged lift basket that had been prepared for it, but as the barrel broke free from the hull it began to float. Whitesides grabbed the barrel with both arms to pull it back, but instead it took the six-foot-six Whitesides directly to the surface.

The cask was quickly moved to the work barge, where both heads and the single remaining stave were photographed. No markings were seen, but stenciling may fade almost immediately when exposed to sunlight, and careful study of the photographs may allow researchers to detect markings that were not seen upon initial examination. The cask was then quickly covered again and transported to the project base camp at Fort Towson, which is believed to have been its original, intended destination.

This single barrel is believed to have been overlooked by the teams that salvaged the cargo when the boat sank. It contains pork and lard. Much of the pork is in cuts that would not be considered very desireable today; a quick examination of the solidified contents of the barrel revealed leg bones, two jawbones and a complete skull. Dr. Sheli O. Smith, who oversaw the recovery of the barrel, observed that her earlier research on the American Revolution revealed that the most common single complaint of naval and maritime crews in that day was over the quality of the rations provided by civilian contractors. If the pork cask recovered Wednesday is any guide, it would appear that nothing changed much in the sixty years following. The congealed lard has about the appearance and consistency of wet styrofoam, but smells much, much worse.

The barrel and its contents will be taken to the Conservation Research Laboratory (http://nautarch.tamu.edu/napcrl.htm) at Texas A&M University, where they will be preserved and analyzed before any decisions are made about their eventual exhibition.

Dinner Wednesday evening was enchiladas suizas.