Artifact in Focus: the ankle shackle
Out of all the fascinating artifacts that tell interesting stories about shipwrecks and the maritime past, some stand out. In this post, we will be looking at one of the most interesting objects we have found so far: part of an ankle shackle from a shipwreck on St. Eustatius.
In January 2018, during our first field season at the SE-504 shipwreck site on St. Eustatius, we found an unusual object that we had never seen before. We decided to recover, conserve, and study it in detail. This process revealed that it was one half of an ankle shackle, the first of its kind ever found around the island. It was located among numerous other finds on the site, making it very likely that it belonged to the shipwreck’s artifact assemblage.
The shackle, made of a copper alloy, contains a hinge on one end which originally connected the other half, while the other end features an extension for a pinhole to lock the two halves. Attached to the artifact halfway is a metal ring which was used to attach this shackle to another one.
The most likely interpretation is that the shackle was used to restrict the movement of misbehaving sailors. Aboard ships, confinement was a common punishment for minor offenses. Being shackled by the ankles was called ‘being held in bilboes.’ This immobilized sailors who were punished for causing minor disruptions on deck or other nonviolent offenses. Sailors were confined to the bilboes and then chained to uncomfortable locations on deck. When seas were rough, they were sometimes chained to the head of the ship, where they would be drenched for hours by waves splashing across the bow. It was also common for offenders to be left in the hot sun followed by the chill of night for days at a time, which must have been an extremely unpleasant experience.
The shackle could also have been used to restrict the movement of enslaved people. While a single shackle half is not an indicator that this vessel was carrying human cargo, it opens up the possibility that it may have. Additional similar finds at the site are necessary to make more definitive conclusions about this.
For this artifact, we again enlisted the help of talented archaeological illustrator Eric Stegmaier, who made the reconstruction drawing below showing the shackle and how it could have been used.
