As a nor’easter pounded the shores of Nantucket, in Massachusetts, on Saturday, it also uncovered a piece of history.
The Warren Sawyer, a three-masted ship that was headed for Boston from New Orleans with cotton and scrap iron, wrecked on Nantucket the night of Dec. 22, 1884. Waves invigorated by a nor’easter on Saturday washed a likely remnant of the ship ashore, according to Jascin N. Leonardo Finger, the deputy director of the Maria Mitchell Association, an organization that runs a natural-history museum on the island.
The remains were a chunk of wooden beams still attached to iron fastenings.
Shipwrecks near the island were not uncommon during the Warren Sawyer’s time, Ms. Leonardo Finger said in a statement. She added that Nantucket residents were known to scavenge items as wreckage from ill-fated vessels washed ashore.
Now, “people sometimes forget that we live 28 miles at sea and also what life was like out here,” Ms. Leonardo Finger said. “I think this is an unfortunate but good reminder.”
Other pieces of the ship were discovered in 2023 near the site of the wreck on Nantucket’s south shore, according to The Nantucket Current, which was first to report the latest finding on Saturday.
Everyone aboard the Warren Sawyer survived the wreck, Ms. Leonardo Finger said. The ship had taken “merciless billows” from the ocean, snapping the mast into two pieces in front of a crowd of people who had been “excitedly watching it fall into the sea,” according to an article published in The Inquirer and Mirror, a Nantucket newspaper, on Jan. 10, 1885.
A rescuer rushed to the edge of the water and tossed a line that landed on the boat, saving the crew, according to the newspaper.
There were more than 700 shipwrecks in the waters surrounding Nantucket in the 19th century, according to the Nantucket Shipwreck & Lifesaving Museum.
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