Texas State researcher helps find pirate cannons Recent find in Panama thought to be from Capt. Morgan's ship.

Frederick Hanselmann and Joe Lepore raise a cannon to the surface using a lift-bag. Frederick Hanselmann and Joe Lepore raise a cannon to the surface using a lift-bag. Photo: Donnie Reid Photo: Donnie Reid Image 1 of / 8 Caption Close Texas State researcher helps find pirate cannons 1 / 8 Back to Gallery

SAN MARCOS — Six deteriorating pirate cannons, discovered by a team that included a Texas State University researcher, will help Panamanian antiquities experts tell the history of that nation.

The cannons, found in September in the muck at the mouth of the Chagres River, are thought to be from the deck of ships led by legendary pirate-for-hire Capt. Henry Morgan, who was en route to raid Panama Viejo — now called Panama City — in 1671.

Instead, says Frederick Hanselmann, Morgan's flagship ran into a reef. Then, like a nautical rumba line gone bad, three of his other ships either ran into the same reef or into each other trying to avoid it. All of them sank, depositing the cannons and everything else on the ocean floor.

Undaunted, Morgan took his remaining ships to the city and sacked it.

The discovery of the 340-year-old weapons, which are now in Panama's possession and being preserved, is an important find, says Hanselmann, the school's chief underwater archaeologist.

“It was an important event in the development of the country,” he said. “It's a major find for the country. It's a major find for the people.”

William B. Lees, president of the Society for Historical Archaeology, agreed: “It's part of a bigger story,” he said. “It's part of a nation's view of itself.”

The ultimate goal of archaeology, Lees said, isn't to find interesting stuff, but rather to find tangible proof of historical events.

The past is complicated, with multiple narratives that sometimes present a murky or unclear version of history. Archaeologists find tangible proof of those stories.

“With archaeology,” he said, “you have a more objective set of information. It's stuff that was left behind. It doesn't tell the story. It is the story.”

Hanselmann was part of a team, including researchers from the Office of National Marine Sanctuaries, an agency under the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Waitt Institute for Discovery, a San Diego, Calif.-based nonprofit, that began studying Morgan's raid two years ago.

Researchers pored over archives and memoirs in European libraries and studied the history of the geopolitical world at that time.

The Spanish ran the New World. England, their major rival/nemesis, wanted a piece of the action. Rather than wage conventional war, England hired pirates, who were essentially mercenaries with their own ships, to gum up Spain's efforts.

Morgan — yes, the same guy from the rum commercials — was one of those pirates for hire. He was helping disrupt Spain's control of the New World and, in this instance, was concerned with the strategic importance of the Isthmus of Panama.

After gathering the anecdotal information, Hanselmann said, researchers conducted a visual survey of the site. They found the reef and undertook a snorkeling tour of the area.

The site showed evidence of looting and tampering, such as holes in the reef where treasure hunters had used explosives to help them find lost pirate booty.

Treasure hunters want shiny stuff that will sell well on eBay, Hanselmann said, and don't care about more historically significant finds. But they can cause damage to those items in the process.

Hanselmann's crew originally found eight cannons in the sand and under rocks. They came back last year to grab them and preserve them, but found only six. He doesn't know where the other two went, but he theorizes that active currents in the waters may have moved them.

The iron cannons are consistent with weapons that would've been found on a pirate ship of that time: small and mobile.

Military cannons, Hanselmann said, were huge and mounted to the deck, meant to sink an enemy's ship. The pirate cannons, however, were engineered to damage a ship and cause the crew to surrender.

Experts are now using a painstaking process of removing corrosive chemicals from the molecular structure of the cannons' iron barrels. When that's finished, the items will go on display in a Panamanian museum.

Hanselmman and his co-researchers, meanwhile, will return to the water later this year to do a more exhaustive survey of the wreckage. He's not sure what the team will find, or even if they'll ever be able to prove conclusively that they've got Morgan's wreckage.

“You're never 100 percent certain,” he said, “unless you find a bell with the ship's name engraved on it.”