Dutchman Out of His Depth

Archaeologists excavating a seventeenth-century Dutch merchant ship off southern England have recovered a 30-foot-long oak rudder decorated with a Baroque carving of a mustachioed man. Bournemouth University’s David Parham first saw the carving while surveying the wreck. “It was a shock,” he says. “Usually in archaeology you only encounter skeletal remains of people. But this carving had to have been modeled on a real person. Here I was looking at him face to face. He struck me as looking mournful.”