Onion Bottles?

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Harry Pristis

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Anyone got an onion bottle to show us?

onion_Dutch_half.jpg
 

Bass Assassin

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I wish I did Harry. I don't think there a very many of those within a couple hundred miles of me!
 

capefeardiver

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I've got a nice Dutch onion I found diving off the coast of NC. I'll post a pic this evening when I get home. They are great bottles, def in my top 5 favorite bottles I have found.
 

scubapro67

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Here's another seawater find. A little rough around the string rim. Debating whether to clean off the barnacles............thoughts?

Barnacle Onion - side 1.jpgOnion Base - Barnacles.jpg
 

nhpharm

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I'd definitely leave the barnacles on it! Those are both beauties for sure!
 

Harry Pristis

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Here's another seawater find. A little rough around the string rim. Debating whether to clean off the barnacles............thoughts?

Outstanding finds, scubapro67! Can you ascribe any particular history to them?
I would leave just that small patch of intact barnacles that is high on the shoulder in your image. That would show the marine origin of the find. The other marine adhesions are superfluous.

suwanneeonion.jpg

Here's a pic of a bottle I found years ago on the bank (private property) of the Suwannee River on the Gulf Coast of Florida. The bottle is an English onion from about 1700 (+/- 10 years).
At that time, the only European settlement in peninsular Florida was Spanish St. Augustine on the Atlantic Coast. At the same time, English soldiers and slavers from the Carolina colonies were wiping out the Spanish missions to the Indians in the interior of the state. By 1710, the aboriginal Indians in North Florida had either moved westward out of Florida or were living in the immediate area of St. Augustine.
So, was my onion bottle brought to this remote area on the Gulf Coast of Florida by English soldiers and slavers? Maybe. This river does reach the area of the Spanish missions, and rivers were the routes of access to the interior.
But wait. At this same time, William Teach, the famous English pirate known as "Blackbeard" is reputed to have sheltered in the river. My onion bottle was found not far from the place where local lore holds that Blackbeard buried some treasure!
Wooden vessels were sailed up freshwater rivers in order to careen them. The sailors would tie ropes to trees on the bank and use winches to tip the ship. Once the hull was exposed, the sailors would scrape away the marine growth. Then they reversed the ship to clean the other side of the hull.
A clean hull meant less drag in the water. Less drag meant greater speed. Speed could be crucial if you were a pirate. Blackbeard was slain in 1718 in a fight with a British force off Ocracoke Island, North Carolina.
So, was Blackbeard the last person to drink from this onion bottle? Maybe. It's fun to think about it.
---------------Harry Pristis

 
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scubapro67

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Harry - Nice bottle! I especially love English onions - even better if they are the pancake variety. I have a couple more, and one that came out of the James River here in Virginia.
Both of my bottles above came from the British coastline. The barnacled one I bought at auction so don't have any additional background. The first is believed to come from the Goodwin Sands area off the Kent coast. There is no direct attribution to a wreck, but the most famous in that area was HMS Stirling Castle that went down in the great storm of 1703. The bottle style works for this time period. There were however 13 men-of-war and 40 merchant vessels lost in this same storm, so no way to tell which ship this came from.

Duncan
 
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Harry Pristis

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Thanks, Duncan!

Here's another I brought back from Guyana. Guyana (Dutch Guinea) was a Dutch colony, so "Dutch" onions are what is found there. These onions were blown in a number of countries in Western Europe for the Dutch overseas trade.

onionhorseshoof_B.jpg

 

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