Written by the TreasureGuide for the exclusive use of treasurebeachesreport.blogspot.con.
 |
| Pewter British 54th Regiment of Foot Button |
The above button years ago in the West Indies. It was found near a battle site where the French and British fought in December of 1788. I'll talk about that more below.
The 54th Regiment of Foot was an infantry regiment of the British Army. Originally formed in 1755 as the 56th Regiment of Foot, it was renumbered as the 54th when the 50th Regiment and 51st Regiment were disbanded. It was renamed as 54th (the West Norfolk) Regiment of Foot on 31 August 1782.
I've made a lot of mistakes and expect to keep making mistakes as long as I walk this earth. I expect to make mistakes but I try to avoid repeating the same mistakes.
There are two types of mistake that I want to talk about today. They are opposites. One is thinking a find is not a good when it actually is, and the other is thinking an item is good when it is actually not.
The first example of the first type of error that comes to my mind is a musket flint that I found. I detected a very twisted rusted piece of metal that I uncovered, but paid no attention to. I then saw the flint. This was my first time that I detected a site like that. I was accustomed to digging gold rings in those days and didn't know much about hunting artifacts. I can remember that experience precisely today: where I was, uncovering the rusty metal item, etc. And I regret to this day that I didn't recognize the twisted piece of rusty metal and flint. I'd appreciate them much more today than I did then.
Not only do I wish I had kept what I later realized was a musket hammer and the flint, but the failure to appreciate the find in the field resulted in not hunting the immediate area more effectively. Who knows what else might have been found where those items were. I did find several other nice finds during that hunt including grape shot, soldier art and military buttons ( including the one at the top of this post ) but I still wish I had picked up the flint and hammer.
That is an error caused by not recognizing the possible significance of a find when it was found. If I had taken the item home but still didn't realize its significance, I could have still lost it or damaged it through improper cleaning. If you do not treat an item as potentially significant until you prove otherwise, a good find can easily be lost again or damaged beyond repair.
The area had already been studied by archaeologists but the park ranger was interested to see what I could find near the ocean where the archaeologists couldn't excavate. They had a small museum there, and they kept a grapeshot that I found.
Another example would be a medallion from a 1715 Fleet beach that I did not recognize because when I dug it up it was encrusted and didn't look like anything other than a common coin. I kept it for quite a while without really studying it and eventually put it in a tumbler with a bunch of modern coins. When I took it out of the tumbler, it was clean enough that I could recognize it as a religious medallion and it still had some silver gilt on it. After that it was studied, but the damage was already done.
I could give you more examples of times when I made the same type of mistake, some of them involving even nicer items, but the point is that treating a find as being nothing significant before you know for sure can have disastrous results.
If, on the other hand, you make the other kind of mistake - that of treating an item as valuable or significant when it is nothing - the results aren't nearly as bad. The biggest thing with that type of error is that you end up getting disappointed when you learn that the item is not as good as you hoped it would be. That is why I recommend trying to avoid the first type of error even if it means making the second kind of error.
Here are two recommendations that I often repeat. First, never throw away an item until you KNOW that it is nothing good. Don't be hasty. And second, if an item has any chance of being good, treat it as if it is. As I've shown in the past, it can take a long time to be absolutely sure. You might never solve the puzzle. It is better to think a find might be good even if it is not, than to make the mistake of concluding that it is no good and then finding out too late that it is better than you thought. I learned the hard way. Some of my biggest regrets are the result of not appreciating an item enough to care for it properly. My advice is that when there is any doubt, keep it and study it until you are absolutely sure.
To give just one example of when I thought a find was good when it wasn't, I once found what appeared to be a gold escudo. That was back in my early days of detecting. It would have been my first gold escudo, and it came from a treasure wreck beach, so it seemed possible. It was encrusted and so I tried to clean it. I took great pains to carefully clean it. I got it fairly well cleaned and was confused by the fact that I couldn't identify it. This was before I was experienced with testing metals, and I didn't have the reference books that I have today. Eventually I figured out that it was a fake. Yes I was disappointed, and I wasted time in trying to carefully clean it, but I learned a lot.
---
There will be a free Robert Marx lecture at FIT on February 20.
Civilized people should be able to disagree without being disagreeable.
Happy hunting,
TreasureGuide@comcast.net
