The Curious Gems of the River Thames

So, what is a nautical disaster? For most of London’s history, the Thames was used for business. The Romans settled Londinium because of its natural harbor, and for centuries, London’s docks served as a harbor for ships from around the world. Did one of those ships, carrying a haul of garnets, capsize, leaving its cargo rolling down the river?

Academics are tracking the garnet trade in Britain, which is thousands of years old, and there we may find clues. Archaeologist and Professor Helena Hamerow of Oxford University found through a national survey that garnets, a stone prized by the Anglo-Saxons, were discovered in a “large concentration” encrusted with metal objects in a grave dating back to the sixth century across the Thames Valley. With rocks not native to the valley, and before mass transit, garnets destined for London would have traveled by sea, Hamerow said, and then, by river. This means that garnets have been making their way to the River Thames for thousands of years. During that time, many may have been lost at sea.

Only a few people are legally allowed to hunt garnets in the Thames—or even remove them if they are found by chance. Mudlarks are one of the few legally allowed to remove things from river banks. To be a mudlark, you need a license, and in recent years, the British government has suspended issuing new licenses for several years after a surge in application during the pandemic lockdown, leaving the strict community to mudlark in a pattern of prevention.

Even for experienced mudlarks, Thames garnets are a valuable find. Lara Meiklema mudlark and author, says that one of the things we know for sure about garnets is that they are “not native to the Thames,” but that theories about how they got there are far-fetched. .

Heather Stevens, known online as the Thames Wandererwas one of the last to get a mudlarking license before the pandemic freeze, and he’s been combing the riverbank ever since. “I went to the beach one day with a friend just looking around and I brought rocks home. I posted pictures of them on my artistry page, another mudlark contacted me via private message who explained that I need a permit to go mudlarking because the land belongs to the crown. Twenty minutes later I brought a permit.”

Stevens found her first garnets two years ago while searching the beach for Tudor dress pins. At first he dismissed them, thinking he saw shards of dark red glass. However, just thirty minutes later, a fellow mudlark told him that he had found a treasure. “I was very surprised that semiprecious stones could be found on the beach so I have been collecting them in various forms ever since.”

Stevens’ favorite theory of the origin of the gems is that the garnets were the spoils of smuggling. From the 17th to the mid-19th century, smuggling was “rampant in Britain,” according to the late historian Trevor May in his comprehensive Smugglers and Smuggling. In 1798, the Thames Police built specifically because smugglers cost London merchants hundreds of thousands of pounds a year. Heavy import duties made smuggling an attractive way to obtain inexpensive imported goods, such as fine wines, luxurious fabrics, and jewels.

The garnets are supposed to be imported, and face nearly a 70 percent import duty. Stevens speculates that when the stones were shipped to London, “crews aboard docked ships intended to push sacks of garnet … over the side of the ship to later return and retrieve them at low tide. “

Mudlarks are legally prohibited from exploiting their finds—Steven and others who found garnets kept them, made them into jewelry, or gave them as gifts to friends. About solving the mystery of where they came from? Garnets are “notoriously hard to date” according to Stevens. In his archaeological work, Hamerow could only date his stones by the surrounding metalwork, and the age of the graves in which they were placed—meaning that even the Thames garnets were exposed, undecorated, their kept their secrets.