Perhaps most surprisingly, a huge variety of foodstuffs were found during the excavation of the Bertrand. Dried and salted beef, mutton and pork, oysters, strawberries and peaches, peanuts, pepper sauce, bottles of whiskey, and even butter were among the items discovered on board, many of them heavily aged but otherwise still intact.
"It really doesn't have much of a smell anymore," claims curator Bill Cantine about the block of butter recovered by archaeologists from the wreck of the steamboat Bertrand.