Tiny fragments of copper pulled from a French shipwreck are helping historians unlock secrets about how Napoleon’s warships were built and supplied during one of the empire’s most desperate wartime campaigns.
A new study examined metal sheathing and nails from two French warships that sank off the coast of France in 1809, offering rare physical evidence from a period when written records fell silent on such details.
The research, published in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, focused on the Lion and the Robuste, two warships lost during the Napoleonic Wars. Both vessels were part of a convoy sent in October 1809 to resupply French troops fighting in Spain.
British warships intercepted the convoy near Roses, on the Catalan coast, and chased the French ships north. Unable to escape, the Lion and the Robuste ran aground near Sète, in southern France.
French commanders ordered both ships burned rather than let them fall into British hands. The blasts on October 26, 1809, were so powerful that people more than 40 miles away, in Nîmes, mistook them for an earthquake.
How shipwreck clues are unlocking Napoleon’s warship secrets
Sébastien Berthaut-Clarac, the study’s lead author and a researcher at the University of Perpignan, led a team that recovered copper sheets and sheathing nails from the wreck sites.
Shipbuilders coated wooden hulls in copper to protect them from marine worms and to help ships sail faster. But French naval engineers rarely documented how that copper was made, treating it as a minor detail. That left a gap that only physical evidence could fill.
Using two lab techniques, electron microscopy and mass spectrometry, the team analyzed the chemical makeup of the metal. The copper sheets from both ships turned out to be pure copper, most likely shaped by rolling.
Metal evidence points to divided wartime supply chains
The nails told a more complicated story. They were made of bronze mixed with lead, but the exact formula varied from ship to ship and even within parts of the same ship.
The Robuste’s nails contained noticeably more lead than the Lion’s, and the two ships likely drew copper from different sources entirely.
Berthaut-Clarac said the findings suggest that French shipyards did not follow a single fixed recipe for sheathing materials.
Instead, supplies likely shifted based on what was available, given wartime shortages and the fact that France had to import most of its copper from abroad.
The Lion was built in Rochefort and the Robuste in Toulon, and the differences between them point to separate supply chains feeding the French fleet even in the final years of Napoleon’s naval ambitions.
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