Lost 1750 - French merchant ship, about 110 ft, armed with twelve 6-pounder guns
The 'Frenchman', or French Wreck, is the working name for a French merchant ship whose own name has never been found. Bermudian divers William McCallum and Ernest Decouto came upon her in 1982 far out on the western reef: Decouto spotted a cannon, then a long gash cut through the coral by her keel, leading to two sand holes in 50-60 ft of water. McCallum and Teddy Tucker, with weekend volunteers, then spent some eight years excavating the site with an airlift.
The finds tell her story. Most of the pottery, glass and pewter is French - Normandy stoneware, pewter with French makers' marks and a painted faience bottle dated 1749, so she sank after that year - and matching wares from the French fortress of Louisbourg point to the 1750s. Galley firewood came from trees of Hispaniola, suggesting a call in what is now Haiti. Her hold held mahogany boards cut to eight-foot lengths for French furniture makers, lignum vitae logs, boxes and barrels of indigo, broken casks, crates of muskets and cutlasses, and small trade goods such as brass crosses for missionaries, shoe buckles and buttons - perhaps meant for French Canada during the Seven Years' War. Tucker's reading is a voyage from France to the West Indies, on to Canada, and home with timber.
She was about 110 ft long and carried twelve 6-pounders, all found on the site, so none had been thrown over to lighten her. Tucker thought she struck the outer breakers in fair weather and settled with her masts above water, letting her people escape in the boats. Storms later broke her apart and buried the wreckage so quickly that shipworm never got in. Archaeologist Ivor Noel Hume ranked the finds among the best-dated groups of French everyday objects found anywhere in the Americas.
The name should not be confused with L'Herminie, the French frigate lost on the western reefs in 1838, which is sometimes also called 'the Frenchman on our rocks'.
Not a public dive site: the position has not been published and there is no Government mooring. The wreck lies in about 50-60 ft far out on the western reef and was excavated as an archaeological site through the 1980s; as a historic wreck it is protected, and nothing may be disturbed or removed.