What shipwrecked insects reveal about life at sea in the 17th century

Agreat deal of romance attaches these days to the “Age of Sail”, the period between the 15th and 19th centuries when wooden sailing ships reached their technological apogee. Historians, however, have a less rosy view. The journals and logs that have survived from the era do not paint an especially pretty picture of conditions aboard.A new paper offers insight from an unexpected source. Written by Eva Panagiotakopulu, an entomologist at the University of Edinburgh, and Ana Catarina Garcia, an archaeologist at Nova University in Lisbon, and published in , the paper examines two shipwrecks off the Azores, both of which date to about 1650. The first, known as Angra C, is thought to be a Dutch ship; the second, Angra D, was Spanish.