BOSTON — Last weekend’s powerful storm on the East Coast exposed the splintered timbers of a possible19th century shipwreck that had been buried beneath the beach on Nantucket Island, Mass.
Maritime experts from the Egan Maritime Institute on the island are examining whether the weathered wooden beams fastened together by rusted iron revealed on the southern shore could be remains of the Warren Sawyer, a wooden schooner lost in 1884.
The institute’s exhibits and collections manager and the state’s underwater archaeologists will work to determine which vessel the wreckage came from.
The slow-moving nor’easter battered the Northeast coastline with heavy rain, strong winds and dangerous surf, flooding low-lying communities from New Jersey to New England. The storm also raised concerns about coastal erosion similar to concerns up and down California as waves crashed into beaches and seawalls in recent storms.
The Warren Sawyer ran aground Dec. 22, 1884, while carrying 1,115 bales of cotton and 28 tons of scrap iron from New Orleans to Boston, according to the Massachusetts Board of Underwater Archaeological Resources. Its captain and seven-member crew were ultimately rescued.
The schooner remained intact on the island’s Miacomet Beach for two weeks, allowing islanders to save 700 bales of cotton using skids and teams of oxen, records show. Then on Jan. 6, 1885, another storm tore the ship apart, scattering pieces of its hull, remaining cargo and cordage across more than half a mile of beach.
More than a century later, remains believed to be from the ship have continued to emerge from the sand.
Jason Graziadei, who has lived on the island for two decades and is editor of the online news site the Nantucket Current, said he went out to the beach amid heavy winds with his 8-year-old son after he got a tip about possible wreckage on the island’s south shore.
They found the wooden beams on a drive-on beach by the town’s wastewater facility that everyone calls the “Sewer Beds.” Erosion from the storm had formed a steep drop-off and they had to park their car in order to get down to the beach.
It was directly beneath a route beachgoers had been driving all summer.
“Given where it was and where it emerged, it means that everyone who was driving onto the beach this summer was just directly over this,” Graziadei said. “I just think it is so funny and so cool.”
Graziadei said his son was excited by the discovery and began asking what had happened to the people aboard the ship and why it had run aground. The two could walk right up to the exposed wreckage.
“It’s amazing to think from, you know, over 100 years old that it’s still there,” Graziadei said.
State archaeologists inspected a roughly 42-foot section of hull exposed on Miacomet Beach in late 2022 and concluded it was probably part of the Warren Sawyer. A roughly 15-foot-square section of the lower stern appeared nearby in February 2023, but shifting sands buried it again before state archaeologists could return to document it.
Nantucket is one of the areas known as the “graveyards of the Atlantic,” with more than 750 wrecks estimated in the surrounding waters.
The institute urged visitors to not disturb the newly exposed wreckage. Massachusetts law prohibits removing, damaging or displacing underwater archaeological resources.
Willingham writes for the Associated Press.
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