Lost 1659 - Merchant ship carrying passengers and cargo
The Eagle of London, commanded by Captain John Whitty (Berg calls him George Withy), was an English merchant ship carrying passengers and goods to Virginia. Between nine and ten o'clock on the night of Wednesday 12 January 1659 - 1658 by the old reckoning, in which the year began in March - she was cast away on the North East Breakers. Her crew was saved, and her passengers went on to Virginia the following month in the Virginia Merchant, the ship that would herself be lost on the South Shore two years later.
Bermudian boats were soon at the wreck. Two days later the governor, Captain William Sayle, ordered every boat master who had been aboard to bring what he had taken to St George's, warning that the island had still not recovered its credit after the 'horrid and vnparalelled abuses' committed at the wreck of the Hopeful Luck a few years before. Berg describes the Eagle as a Virginia Company ship, though that company had been dissolved in 1624, so she was more likely a private merchantman in the Virginia trade.
Her remains lay unnoticed for nearly three centuries. According to Berg, the site came to light after June 1956, when the American ocean-racing yacht Elda, competing in the Newport to Bermuda Race, was wrecked on the same reef and a diver working on the yacht spotted old cannon on the bottom; the Royal Gazette's reports of the Elda's loss do not mention the older wreck. The site was worked by Teddy Tucker, who recovered clay tobacco pipes, pewter spoons, candlesticks, flint ballast and other 17th-century material. In July 1962 a Smithsonian Institution team under Mendel Peterson, diving with Tucker, spent a day on the wreck; bad weather cut the work short, but the Royal Gazette reported that they raised a soapstone bullet mould, a copper sand can, a pewter spoon, lead from window panes and shot from the ship's magazine. Local diver Bill Gillies later found shaft-and-globe wine bottles near the site, though the glass was so poor that many crumbled when lifted.
The Eagle lies one group of breakers west of the Manilla Wreck, and the area is part of the North East Breaker dive.
Berg reported the site in a large sand hole in about 35 ft of water by the North East Breakers, with little left apart from two cannon; the keel and engine of the yacht Elda lie close by. It is an exposed outer-reef site a long boat ride from shore, diveable only in calm weather. Any artefacts are protected and must be left in place.