A ship’s ‘manna from heaven’

Buried in the briny mud at the Charlestown Navy Yard was a cache of pristine antique oak, hand-hewn specifically for use in ships of the great tall-ship era.

“Manna from heaven,’’ Quentin Snediker, who directs Mystic’s preservation shipyard, said last month while inside the Morgan’s hold, where the Charlestown oak has been laid alongside fallen brothers from the Gulf Coast and the 1841 ship’s original beams. “It was chosen and cut by masters of the trade, ideal for its application.’’

Found in what had once been a timber basin for the Navy Yard, the underground supply had been preserved by the mud for nearly a century and has supplied some 140 pieces to the $10 million Morgan project, which hopes to relaunch the ship in the summer of 2013.

Crews working on a new Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital facility discovered the supply of live oak and white oak, and quickly recognized its value. David Burson, senior project manager at Partners HealthCare who is overseeing the Spaulding project, said crews had no knowledge of the timber until they saw pieces sticking up through the mud.

The wood bore numbers, he said, suggesting it was part of an inventory.

“We think they were stockpiling it’’ to use to repair damaged ships, he said. “It was in incredible condition.’’

An excavating engineer on the project who was familiar with ship restoration called Snediker, who could scarcely believe a trove of the finest ship timber had emerged from the distant past, seemingly waiting for the moment it was needed most.

“The chances of this were almost too much to accept,’’ Snediker said. “It’s staggering. Each piece by itself is a historical artifact.’’

The area where the wood was discovered was built over around 1913.

The hospital was happy to donate the wood for such a worthy cause, and kept a bit for itself to commemorate the site’s history, perhaps with a bench or boardroom table.