[Winnipesaukee Divers]

As an avid treasure hunters on the lake there certain items that are coveted; such as, clay tavern pipes, the best finds are ones fully intact, but even better are ones with fancy art work molded into the bowl (more on them later). The Round Bottom bottles with a blob top, the more imperfections the better (earlier date) are the second most coveted. However, the top of the list is are "Clay Rum" bottles from the ill-fated horse barge disaster back in 1796, where the King's shipment of rum to Montreal went down in a squall off the entrance to Alton Bay. Normally, clay bottles aren't worth much because there is no way to date them since the same manufacturing techniques are used today. Except these bottles have the King's tax tamp embossed onto them with the date.

The significance of the Round Bottom bottles is that they were used for a very specific purpose at narrow date in history. In the glass making process from the late 1700s to the mid 1800s a key ingredient was needed, a type of sodium. At that time the only place to get sodium was in a mine in Glasgow Scotland, but to get it here required special handling. Exposed sodium to water and it becomes very unstable (it explodes), so they build very heavy bottles, corked and bailed them. They also used a round bottom so can't stand up and let the cork dry out. In order to keep the bottles safe they would store them in the lowest part of the ship and pack them in as tight as they could, hence the term "Ballast Bottle". Ever wonder why so many ships sank making the voyage to the new world? They blew up during bad storm at sea if just one bottle broke.

There was a glass shop in Wolfeboro, located on the water front near WCYC back in this time period. Of course you heard me say this before: "I love diving the lake because; there has been 300 years of civilization on the lake. The first 250 years it was the dump; take your trash out on the ice, come spring and it's gone. Fast forward to today and all that's left ate the artifacts". These bottles had very little use once the contents were used so they were discarded into the lake, the dump. I guess they never thought about recycling them, like throwing them back into the forge and melt them down into new bottles. These bottles could get air trap in them and float all around the lake or used for other purposes and discarded elsewhere.

Before you scientific types go off the deep end... These bottles were named "sodi" bottles , I took that to mean sodium, but perhaps it's another similar sounding element. Maybe you can clarify it for me, after all, I'm just a bottom dweller.