Glass
Two shards of thin glass were recovered from excavations amidships. One (08,776) is an amber or yelowish-brown color, comparable in shade to Munsell #10YR 5/8. It measures 9.2 mm by 11.2 mm and is 1.6 mm in thickness. A single similarly amber-colored glass shard (2.6 mm in thickness), slightly curved and badly abraded was found on the Molasses Reef Wreck (Smith 1986a:4).
Fig. 72. This small amber-colored glass shard was recovered from excavations amidships.
The second shard (08,796) is quite thin, and light greenish-gray in color, comparable to Munsell #5GY 7/1. It measures 15 mm by 25.5 mm, and is .5 mm in thickness. This shard corresponds to the pale green “lightbulb glass” found at Santa Elena, South Carolina. The Santa Elena glass ranged from .5 mm to 1.55 mm in thickness, averaging at .81mm (South et. al. 1988:25). The pieces probably were household items, from stemmed glass ware. Shipboard examples of this pale green glass have turned up at Molasses Reef with the recovery of the bottoms of two nearly identical pharmaceutical vials (Keith 1987:255). These were similar to others found at the sixteenth-century offshore colony of Nueva Cádiz, Venezuela, which are described containers for medicines from Southern Spain (Willis 1976:63-64,
appendix 2).
Download the entire report in