WaPo has a pretty interesting article on the efforts of the U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command as told through the horn of a Conn Trumpet.
MATT MCCLAIN / WASHINGTON POST Shanna Daniel is part of a conservation team at the Washington Navy Yard working on a trumpet found in the wreckage of the USS Houston in 2013.
The old, bent trumpet is dripping with water as Shanna Daniel lifts it from its basin in the conservation lab at the Washington Navy Yard.
It’s a B-flat horn, made around 1934, with a bell that was smashed in battle, a missing mouthpiece, and brass tubing that is split and pitted.
Daniel, in a white lab coat and lavender rubber gloves, rests it on a layer of hard foam and lowers a magnifying light over it. She picks up a surgical scalpel and begins to scrape deposits from the surface.
She is very careful. The object has traveled a great distance, and sealed inside may be the DNA of the sailor who played it.
The trumpet arrived at the lab 21/2 years ago, handed over by an Australian diver who found it in the wreck of the USS Houston, a World War II cruiser, off the coast of Java in Southeast Asia.
This trumpet was illegally salvaged recently from the wreck of the USS Houston, a heavy cruiser lost at the outset of World War II off the Indonesian coast. The trumpet is now under the care of the Naval History and Heritage Command’s underwater archeology branch that preserves, protects and fights to recover looted U.S. Naval history. Efforts are underway to preserve the trumpet while Navy divers prepare to survey the wreck of the Houston this month during annual Cooperation Afloat Readiness and Training exercises.
