"Look, look under that rock, in the water is something blue, do you see it?" My daughter was pointing into the wave. I reach and here it is, a chip of porcelain with a beautiful cobalt blue glaze. Now this is interesting, and I smirked because I knew that this was special.
"What do you think it is mom?" My daughter asks me.
"Well," flipping the piece in my hands and turning it towards the sun to have a better look at it, "why don't you try to feel it first? This is not a piece of bone china, but it is light as a feather, chalky white on the back, and to me this looks like a fine quality piece of porcelain. It looks very old. Let's see. Who used cobalt blue glaze in the old days? This chip is not made recently obviously. It could be a piece of Dutch china, after all they did colonize this part of the world and brought here plenty of Delft pottery. It also could be English too. They began to use blue cobalt glaze in the 1800s, or it could be Chinese. However, I tend to believe that it was manufactured in Delft. This cobalt blue color is very special. As you can see the chip is flat, and it could be from some sort of a plate, not a vase, or a cup. Anyway, think of it as a tiny token of history. What you have now in your hand, is a true conversation piece, and you and your girlfriends could play Nancy Drew to figure out it's history and origins. Isn't it mindblowing to figure out who were the people that manufactured it, who were the people who used it in their daily lives, and of how it came to end up here in the Atlantic waters, on the New York Gold Coast."
Some time ago, I listened to the New York City leading hurricane historian Nicholas Coch, a professor of coastal geology at Queens College, discussing about the beach findings at Rockaway beach with a team of students. With that occasion, he realized that the artifacts washed ashore were coming from the only island that had been swallowed by the ocean on the night of August 23, 1893. That night a devastating category 2 hurricane made landfall close to the NYC. The following morning, August 24, Hog Island had dissapeared. Now you have to know that a large sand barrier island began to raise during the Civil War times, and that barrier island was named Hog Island. It seems that the Native Americans used the island to raise pigs, and later people had built inns, hotels, and used the island for sunbathing like a resort area. Now what if that little chip was part of a plate somewhere on Hog Island. Its not impossible, no?
"As a matter of fact, you and the girls can research further on the history of Hog Island as well as the surrounding area. You can learn from this little blue porcelain chip; more about the history of these shores than I can tell you now. Think about it, very few New Yorkers know about the existance of Hog Island, and many more when asked about it will just shrug their shoulders and say, 'Why should I know? I wasn't born then', and sadly enough not many are interested in learning the history..a chip of what?"
To make it even more interesting I mounted this little blue chip on a piece of mother of pearl, and secured it with a crocheted silver wire. That's how the little blue porcelain chip became a beautiful piece of jewelry, a true conversation piece that will spark many interesting discussions. It is a piece that long after I will move to the Rainbow, it will help my daughter to teach her children how to keep an open eye and mind for precious treasures like this and spark the imagination.
