More stuff I pulled out of the water #6

Actually, these were found on a beach. They are very old clothing buttons, and they are made out of lead.

As the man says, they don't make 'em like that anymore.

These were found on the surface of the sand not too far from each other, but about a year apart, near Lewes, Delaware. I found a few other things at this spot, too, which I will blog about one of these days. I'm uncertain of the age of these, but given the construction and the location in which they were found, there's every possibility that these once adorned a sailor's coat. The fascinating and exceedingly rare 1965 book entitled Pilots of the Bay and River Delaware, and Lewes Lore by James Marvil sheds some remarkable insight into the number of historic shipwrecks in the area, and how the bodies of deceased sailors were treated. This reference is one of the reasons why I suspect that these buttons belonged to a sailor (hint - many of the bodies recovered by Lewes "wreckers" were unceremoniously buried in the dunes). Only 1000 copies of the book were ever printed (I have two copies of this work myself).