Lost 1783 - Royal Navy fifth-rate frigate, 32 guns
HMS Cerberus was a 32-gun fifth-rate frigate launched on the Thames at Rotherhithe in 1779, one of a group of frigates built for the Royal Navy during the American Revolutionary War. She was about 126 ft long with a beam of some 35 ft.
Early in 1783, with the war winding down, she put in to Castle Harbour for water. She was Captain Sir Jacob Wheate's ship. On 21 February a pilot came aboard and had her unmoored to take her out to sea. Minutes after she passed the Castle she touched a hidden reef in the middle of the channel and was carried onto the rocks at its southern edge. The crew cut away the masts and threw guns and shot overboard to lighten her, but the water rose to her gun ports and she was abandoned, the men being taken off to the Castle without loss of life. Her decks stayed above water for some days and several guns and carriages were salvaged. The officers and crew were later moved into the captured French ship La Sybil.
Who was in command that day is not settled. The usual account, given by Berg, has Wheate aboard when she was lost and dying of a fever soon afterwards. But in 1967 the Colonial Archivist, Commander Guy Middleton, wrote in the Bermuda Historical Quarterly that Wheate had already caught the fever and died, and that his second-in-command, Lieutenant Parkinson, was anxious to get to sea. As the Royal Gazette reported his article, most of her officers were later lost when the sloop Mentor, carrying them to New York, disappeared, so the main surviving account is the evidence of the gunner, Hewman Shrewsbury, at the court martial held at the Nore on 18 October 1783, which found that the officers and crew were not to blame.
The wreck had a lasting effect on Bermuda's naval history: the Admiralty stopped Royal Navy ships using Castle Harbour as an anchorage. A small silver crown engraved to mark the loss, showing the ship whole on one side and dismasted on the other with the words "Cerberus cast away", is in the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich.
Locally the site became known as the Musket Ball (or Musket-shot) Wreck, after the quantity of lead shot once found there. The Bermuda Maritime Museum surveyed it in 1993.
Very little is left. According to the Government's wreck page, Hurricane Fabian (2003) swept away most of the debris and musket balls; no timber survives and the main things to see are about half a dozen iron ballast weights. The site is not regularly visited by Bermuda's dive operators and is not part of the Bermuda dive-site programme. The Castle Harbour entrance can have strong tidal currents and boat traffic. It is listed as an open wreck, but any artefacts remain protected - look, photograph and leave them in place.
Accounts differ over who was in command when HMS Cerberus was lost in 1783 - Captain Sir Jacob Wheate, or Lieutenant Parkinson after Wheate's death. Do you know of a record that settles it?
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Approximate position, for interest only - never use for navigation.