The nor’easter that battered the East Coast over the weekend unearthed a fragment of maritime history on the small Massachusetts island of Nantucket.
It washed ashore a new piece of a shipwreck, which historians say is probably the wooden, three-masted schooner Warren Sawyer that was built in 1869 and wrecked on the island on Dec. 22, 1884.
The ship was built “to serve as the 19th-century version of an 18-wheeler” and was on its way to Boston from New Orleans carrying over 1,115 bales of cotton and 28 tons of scrap iron, said David Robinson, director and chief archaeologist of the Massachusetts Board of Underwater Archaeological Resources.
Footage from the local outlet Nantucket Current shows an array of decaying wooden planks and frames covered in nails being battered by the waves.
Other fragments of the boat were found in the same area in 2022 and 2023.
“With a sharp crash a large portion of the weather quarter gives way before the blow of huge seas, exposing the interior of the craft to the merciless billows,” a January 1885 issue of the local newspaper the Inquirer and Mirror reported.
Nantucket has been dubbed a historical “graveyard of the Atlantic.” Hundreds of ships passed by the small island daily in the 19th century, and storms and shoals caused 700 shipwrecks in the waters surrounding the island, according to the Nantucket Shipwreck & Lifesaving Museum.
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