What could this be?

[stepfen]

Hello,
I recently dived the wreck of the Carnatic in Abu Nuhas in Egypt/Red Sea and I saw this structure near the engine room:

Our guides insisted that it was storage for wine bottles, but I can thing of several reasons this is highly unlikely.
For example this thing looked like one large piece (several meters long by few meters wide and maybe a meter or so deep) made of very strong material (it has survived almost intact all these years underwater) while the holes are very deep (how to get the bottles out of them?) and placed too far apart (a lot of wasted space/material/weight between holes). All this just to store bottles ??? Wooden crates, could do the same much easier/lighter/cheaper.

Does anybody else have a better idea what could this be??
Nothing really important. Just out of curiosity.

Thanks a lot

 

[Cthippo]

Looks like a boiler face to me, but hard to tell from the pics.

 

[CycleCat]

A hot, vibrating motor room hardly seems the place to store wine bottles.

 

[Nic2750]

It looks like a heat exchanger. It would be unusual nowadays to store one of those - even a spare - outside the engine room, but I wasn't around in 1860 so that might have been normal then.

The holes would be too large for a heat exchanger on a modern vessel, but it looks like the Carnatic was a steam ship, so having pipes wide enough for wine bottles wouldn't be totally unthinkable. I've crawled through heat exchanger pipes on working steam ships, and they're much bigger than on modern power-driven vessels.

 

[scubaozy]

Probably something like Scotch marine boiler - Wikipedia.

 

[stepfen]

Probably something like Scotch marine boiler - Wikipedia.

So, obviously it is part of the engine/boiler. Makes much more sense. Thanks guys...