Description

The near-complete wooden shovel, carved from a single block of wood, which may have been used for a variety of purposes on board ship in the early modern period, such as stirring the cooking cauldrons, moving ballast in the hold, or for shifting ashes from the ovens in the galley. The blade retains both the horizontal shadow line for its shod-iron edge, now corroded; and is also heavily burnt along its length, which is symptomatic of its use to feed and rake out the galley fireboxes.