Grado Wreck
About
This Roman merchantman sank in the northern Adriatic about six miles off Grado during Trajan's reign, its hold packed with roughly 600 amphorae of processed fish sauce weighing some 24 tons. Divers recovered the wreck in 1999, exposing a 13-meter hull built shell-first with mortise-and-tenon joints. A lead pipe near the keel, once fitted to a suction pump, kept the bilge clear on runs down from Aquileia. A coin of Trajan found in the wreckage anchors the ship in the empire's high tide.
What happened here
A merchantman goes down with everything aboard and the sea keeps most of it. Cargo is usually amphorae — wine, oil, fish sauce — stacked in layers in sand, or roof tiles, or marble in the round, or ingots stamped with the smelter's name. Timbers survive where the mud or the cargo covers them, and the hull shows how it was built: planks edge-joined with mortise and tenon before the frames go in, a way of building that is slow, strong and about to be abandoned. Personal things come up too — a cooking pot, a lamp, coins that date the last voyage to within a few years. Most losses happen in autumn, close inshore, on a coast the crew knew.
Sources
Nearby
Roman Maps shows the empire frozen at 11 August 117 CE, the day Trajan died — its moment of greatest territorial extent. Explore the full map →