(water splashing) - It was pretty overwhelming.

I didn't know it was a shipwreck at first.

I just was like, this could be part of the wharf.

I have no idea.

- Our story starts on the lower Cape Fear River, south of Wilmington.

Archeology students measuring the remains of an abandoned colonial wharf literally hit the historic jackpot.

- And then I stumbled upon just pieces of wood sticking out of the sediment and there was planking.

So the surface and I told someone that, hey, there's some weird wood kind of stuff down here.

- Sometimes big discoveries just happen by luck.

The skill lies in recognizing not only what happened, but what it means.

- It's kind of emotional.

I'm not gonna lie, I don't think I've told anyone else, but I did cry in the woods a little bit when I was walking back by myself.

Just realizing that if I didn't stumble upon that last year, it would have been gone and we would have never came back and then we would have never found all these other wrecks eroding.

- Tests of the wood show the timbers were made of Mexican cypress.

That's significant and an important clue to solving a mystery of history.

This stretch of the lower Cape Fear was the location of Brunswick Town, a British port in colonial America.

♪ History shows in September, 1748, toward the end of King George's War, a Spanish privateer ship called the La Fortuna attacked the port.

Privateers were individuals hired by governments to attack an enemy.

The privateer could keep part of whatever loot or bounty was captured.

The La Fortuna was sunk during the week-long Spanish occupation.

- This incident was a major development in early colonial North Carolina.

A Spanish ship to come up and attack Brunswick Town and then to eventually be sunk and sort of lost to time.

You know, it's been looked for since the 1960s.

People have been interested in trying to find the site.

So I would say that Fortuna, La Fortuna was probably one of the sort of holy grail sites of, like, what happened to it?

The idea that what we are looking at could represent the remains of La Fortuna are really exciting.

- I think something on board her blew up, a barrel of powder that was on the deck and it caused a catastrophic fire in the rigging.

And that's what does in Fortuna.

- And in a way it's also tragic because the only reason we think that no one was ever able to find it before is because it's been buried under a marsh that is now rapidly eroding.

- The water is a double-edged sword.

Over time it created the marsh that preserved the remnants of Brunswick Town, but now erosion caused by climate change-fueled sea level rise and stronger storms is exposing what remains of the colonial period.

Waves created by boat traffic are also washing away the riverbank.

- We are using this as an opportunity to study what is eroding out of the bank.

So scattered along our feet here, you have all of the debris coming out of the wharf structure itself, but also things that people dropped and broke, like glass bottles or ceramic sherds.

I mean, just right here, you can see a beautiful redware ceramic sherd.

- That's a piece of pottery?

- Yeah, this would have been, it's not big enough to really show, but it would probably would have been a mug of some sort.

I'm probably the first person to touch it since the last person that dropped it and then threw all their broken pieces into the river.

And that's a pretty cool thing to really feel that connection to a site like this.

- Researchers combing the beach never know what they will literally stumble upon.

While pottery shards are common, pieces of shipwreck are not.

- One of the things that we tend to look at is, what are the fastener patterns?

What are the overall dimensions?

What are some of the characteristics of how the shipwright shaped the timber?

We have a large assemblage of frames that sort of match with this.

You have wooden trunnels, which are basically wooden fastenings.

There is some, but not a lot of iron fasteners on these.

And each one of these frames, you can see sort of here how the shipwright used an adze or to basically chop the tree branch to form the shape of the frame.

- Researchers recovered 63 pieces of timber from the waterfront.

So this would have been under the ship and the planking would have gone over this.

- Yeah, so you would have had outside planking basically running perpendicular to this.

And then these tunnels would be fastened to that.

And that would be the outer hull planking or the outer skin of the ship.

And then on the inside, this would have been also planked.

And we call that the ceiling planking, even though it's basically the bottom inside of the ship's hold.

- And I mean, this is just my imagination, but I'm just picturing this and somebody, some shipwright, correct?

Just pounding away to drive that in.

- Yep, so you would use basically a hand auger to sort of bore out a hole and then you use a mallet and shape the wooden dowel.

- Early analysis shows the artifacts are from four different shipwrecks, but the majority of the pieces appear to be from the La Fortuna.

And each piece has its own unique story to tell.

- And you can see here that you have the carved Roman numerals nine, essentially.

That is indicative of maybe the ninth frame of whatever component this came from, whether that's part of the actual ribs of the ship or part of like a stern structure, like the transom.

- I'm just looking at this.

Is this a tongue and groove?

I mean, somebody got another piece of wood went right in here.

- Yep, so-- - Wow.

- And so another plank would have slotted in there and then this probably went into another wall of some sort.

- I'm holding something that someone worked on a couple hundred years ago.

That is so cool.

- Yep.

- I mean, look at the craftsmanship.

I mean, that, you know, it's a ship, but still look at-- - Yeah, yeah, I mean-- - They worked hard on that.

- They would take a lot of time and care into making these vessels, you know, to the best of their ability.

♪ - The shipwreck artifacts are being analyzed at the conservation lab for the North Carolina Office of State Archeology at East Carolina University.

The segments are also beginning the slow, several stage process of desalinization and preservation.

- We want to do everything that we can to prevent decay, collapse, any detrimental effects as we're working on these things.

And we don't wanna do anything that will suddenly shock an object and it react adversely.

- The timbers are laser scanned, creating virtual copies that show exact shapes, colors, textures, and it's all done to scale.

- We can have a full 3D digital reproduction of this original timber, that then we can minimize our impact in just handling this and manipulate the pieces of the shipwreck virtually to try to reassemble the site as it would have been.

- Think giant historical puzzle.

- When you have a virtual copy of it, you can spin it in full three dimensions and manipulate it which way or another.

And that's how really we're gonna match these fastener patterns to the planking that we see on the hull and piece the puzzle back together.

- Smaller artifacts like this broken punch bowl provide context and add to the tapestry of the 18th century waterfront that archeologists are creating.

- And then when it came back to the lab and was conserved, it ends up saying the other bowl and then, and that's a traditional 18th century English custom of drinking rum punch out of a bowl.

So it was like passing the rum punch bottle or bowl around, having another sip.

And it's sort of that one more before we hit the road kind of custom or activity.

- When we're talking about seeing different, you know, cultural origins of these types of artifacts on shipwreck sites, that can certainly be an indication of the origin of the ship.

But also, you know, something to think about is that during colonial times, there are all different kinds of trade networks and all different kinds of people sort of living together at different spaces.

So things could have been imported from anywhere.

- The history of Brunswick Town is a jigsaw puzzle with three quarters of the pieces missing.

And every day, that's the beauty of this place.

Every day, we find a little bit.

Yeah, we might find a quarter of a piece fits right here.

- On the one hand, we are excited because with the erosion of the marsh, this whole 18th century landscape is just coming to life for us.

But it's also destroying a natural barrier to the shore.

It's destroying cultural heritage because as we're seeing it, we're excited, we're recording it, and then it's being lost because we can't keep all of it.

We can't stop the erosion.

(water splashing)