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Like on many nude beaches, odd things can be found on Marshall’s Beach at low tide. For instance this portion of a brick wall:
However, one time at low tide I came across this brass or copper collection. What I’m wondering is what it is this stuff and how did it get there? If you know the answer, or have a guess, please enter a comment below.
Someone on Quora came up with what seems a very astute answer. Here is his comment:
The first photo appears to be bricks that look like a section of wall but if you know that they often put a floor of bricks underneath the ship’s stove to protect the wooden deck from burning. Some ships had brick overs but since there’s no burn marks I’d guess this was the base underneath a stove.
The round plate looks like a bronze through-hull fitting, or perhaps a part of a bilge pump. Bronze was used because it didn’t corrode like iron.
Threaded pipe fittings mean that it was probably late 18th or more likely 19th century. Possibly early 20th but they’d stopped using bricks for stove insulation before then.
The parts with the copper rings might have been used to connect fore-and-aft sails to wire rigging. That would make it late 19th century. Copper nails were used to prevent corrosion that would happen with iron nails.
So, I think it looks like the wreckage from a ship from the late 19th century. Probably wooden and with wire rigging. They used a lot of ships like that for the salmon packing industry around San Francisco in the last half of the 19th century.
One remaining ship in San Francisco from this time is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balclutha_(1886)
Although steel-hulled, it’s similar to the sort of ship that your wreckage might be.
