Discussing my suggestion that the sextant box marked with the numbers 1542 and 3500 was from the USS Bushnell, Ric asks:
The box was found in the context of a castaway campsite and was assumed at the time to be associated with the castaway. What other items found by Gallagher and TIGHAR do you see as being reasonably attributable to the Bushnell party?
At this point I don’t know enough about the identification and dating of the artifacts found by Tighar to say whether the Bushnell is a more likely source than the Coast Guard guys, colonists, or the castaway. The possibility that some items found at the Seven Site once belonged to Paul Laxton’s wife is something that has been mentioned but which does not seem to have been discussed much, and I'm not sure why.
Certain glass artifacts, e.g., the Campana/Skat bottle and the Ointment Pot, have received a lot discussion on the forum and in Tighar reports and there has been quite a debate about who left them and when they were manufactured. The origins of other glass artifacts (e.g. the partially melted beer bottle, the partially melted green bottle, the deco-style Mennen bottle) have yet to be discussed in as much depth on the forum or in Tighar reports. For now I’ll leave it in the capable hands of Burrell, Carter, Cerniglia, Gillespie, Harris, et. al., to consider whether any of the glass items found at the Seven Site might be attributed to the Bushnell. Joe Cerniglia is working on a report about the glass artifacts I will certainly read that with great interest; I’m sure it will spur a lot more discussion on the forum.
Setting aside the glass artifacts, there is one type of artifact found at the Seven Site that I DEFINITELY think could be Bushnalia and that’s the, er, um…coprolites. I think we can be certain the Bushnell guys left scat, if not Skat, behind during their time on Gardner (I hope no one is going to post a reply stating that I need to
prove this to be the case before it can be accepted as a possibility). At the moment I can’t find what Tighar has said about those coprolites so I’ll have to leave it at that. Perhaps there will now ensue five or ten forum pages of heated back-and-forth argument about things coprolitic; if so, please accept in advance my apologies for ever bringing the subject up.
Or did a Bushnell sailor happen to drop only his sextant box on the way through while not noticing the skeleton?
You’re doubtful that a Bushnell sailor could have left a sextant box near the castaway’s bones without noticing them. I don’t see why this is hard to believe. After all, the Gardner colonists found the castaway’s skull and the Benedictine bottle without (as far as we know) seeing the rest of the castaway’s remains.
May I now turn your question around? How do you explain that when Gallagher & Co. searched the castaway’s campsite they failed to find any of the glass artifacts that Tighar has found at the Seven Site? In his message to Vaskess (October 17, 1940) Gallagher says “We have searched carefully for rings, money and keys with no result”. Yet Gallagher and his searchers failed to find the partially melted beer bottle and the partially melted green bottle, and they also missed the Campana/Skat bottle, ointment pot, and the deco-style Mennen bottle. The Seven Site covers about 1000 square meters and in this area Tighar has found a number of features that it thinks match Gallagher’s description of the castaway’s camp, e.g., the skull hole, bird and turtle bones, fire remains, possibly even the Ren tree that the castaway died under, or that tree’s successor. In Gallagher’s time the Seven Site was open Buka forest, not the dense scaveola thicket that Tighar had to cut through so Gallagher would have had any easier time than you guys did seeing an artifact like the beer bottle. How is it that Gallagher & Co failed to find any of the glass objects found by Tighar at the Seven Site?