The Metta Catharina: the wreck that kept its leather
The Metta Catharina von Flensburg was not a famous ship. A two-masted brigantine out of Flensburg, she carried freight between the Baltic and the Mediterranean — hemp, tallow, and on her last run, Russia leather from Saint Petersburg bound for Genoa's bookbinders and shoemakers.
In December 1786 she anchored in Plymouth Sound to wait out weather. The weather won. A gale drove her onto the rocks off Drake's Island, and she went down with her cargo. The crew survived. The leather did not — or so everyone assumed for the next hundred and eighty-seven years.
1973: the divers
In 1973, divers from the Plymouth Sound branch of the British Sub-Aqua Club found the wreck. Among the timbers were bundles of hides, still rolled and tied the way the Saint Petersburg tannery had packed them. They were reindeer skins, and they had been underwater since the year before the French Revolution.
They should have been jelly. Instead, they were leather.
The hides at the heart of the bundles came up supple, their grain intact, still scented with the birch tar they'd been curried with two centuries earlier. Some were sound enough to be cut and worked. Shoemakers and bookbinders bought pieces of the salvage; objects made from Metta Catharina leather still turn up, quietly outliving their makers.
Two hundred years in seawater is not a marketing claim. It is the most extreme durability test any leather has ever passed by accident.
What the sea preserved
Why did it survive? The method. Russia leather was slow-tanned in bark liquors — willow, birch, and other boreal barks — which saturate the collagen with tannins that bacteria cannot digest. Then it was curried with birch tar oil, which repels water and carries phenols that resist rot. The cold, low-oxygen mud of the Sound did the rest, but the mud only preserved what the tannage had already made nearly incorruptible.
The bitter footnote: by 1973, nobody could make Russia leather anymore. The tanneries that held the method did not survive the Russian Revolution, and the full recipe was never written down. What we know today comes from trade records — and from the recovered hides themselves, which have been analysed down to their tannin chemistry.
Why this story hangs in our workshop
Smolten exists because of this wreck, in a roundabout way. The recovered hides proved that the old method wasn't folklore — that bark and birch tar and patience genuinely make a leather that laughs at time. We apply that method to wild Atlantic salmon skins from the Côte-Nord: a different animal, a different century, the same chemistry.
Every skin we tan is, in a small way, an argument that the Metta Catharina's cargo deserves descendants.