Lost 1752 - Bermuda sloop (single-masted merchant sailing vessel)
The Hunter Galley was a Bermuda sloop, the fast single-masted cedar trader for which the island was famous in the 18th century. A shipping register of 1749 describes her as a 40-ton vessel carrying five guns, built in Bermuda and launched in 1747. Sloops like her carried goods between the American colonies, the Bahamas and the West Indies.
In late December 1751, under Captain Clement Conyers, she sailed from the Dutch island of St. Eustatius for South Carolina. A violent storm damaged her rigging and sails and swept a man overboard, so Conyers turned for Bermuda to make repairs. A second gale on 9 January split her remaining canvas. The island was sighted next day, but the battered sloop could not be brought into harbour and was anchored in Hogfish Cut, the channel through the western reefs. On 11 January a third gale tore her loose; the mast was cut away, and she was driven onto the rocks and sank.
Teddy Tucker located the wreck and identified it as the Hunter Galley in the 1950s. The first archaeologists to work on her came from Franklin Pierce College in New Hampshire, whose field school under Dr Edwin Dethlefsen, with Dave McLeod as dive master, surveyed the site off the Pompano Beach Club in 1974 and returned in 1975 to finish the work. Their ceramics confirmed the date of the wreck, and they also found bones of horses, pigs and cows - and human bones - while archive research traced the later careers of her officers. East Carolina University's maritime studies programme looked at the site in 1997 and returned with the Bermuda Maritime Museum (now the National Museum of Bermuda) for mapping and partial excavation in 1998-99. James Southerly's 2003 thesis, Cedar on the Reef, found loose timbers and planking with one small section of framing still attached, together with ceramics, glass, metal and organic finds. The construction and artefacts pointed to an early-to-mid 18th-century Bermuda-built vessel, supporting Tucker's identification and making her possibly the only Bermuda sloop yet identified by archaeologists.
Little survives above the sand: Berg (1991) describes ballast stones and scattered timbers in about 12 ft (4 m) of water a short way off Pompano Beach, while the ECU study places the site on the reefs about 600 yards (550 m) off the south-west shore near Hogfish Cut. It is a shallow site, but the reef channel can carry strong water movement. Under the Historic Wrecks Act 2001 nothing may be disturbed or removed from any wreck without a licence.