Lost 1753 - Unidentified armed merchant ship, probably Dutch-built
The Manilla Wreck is an unidentified mid-18th-century ship lying upside down on the North East Breakers, discovered and named by the Bermudian diver Harry Cox. He called it after the manillas found on the site: horseshoe-shaped brass or bronze bracelets made in Europe and used as currency on the West African coast, where they were traded for goods and, notoriously, for enslaved people. Tiny glass trade beads from the site were published by Karl Karklins in 1991, and some are displayed at the National Museum of Bermuda.
The wreck reached a world audience in December 1977, when Mendel Peterson of the Smithsonian featured Cox's and Teddy Tucker's finds in National Geographic. As the Royal Gazette reported, the magazine described a ship lost off Bermuda in the mid-1700s that "was probably Dutch", and called her finds "the largest known collection of slave-trade currency".
The ship's identity is still debated. Records mention a Dutch or Danish vessel lost in this area in 1753, the most common candidate; another suggestion is the English merchantman Lord Frederick, bound from the Clyde to Charleston. The stacks of large iron guns on the reef have led some to argue that she was an armed escort or trader rather than a slave ship herself. What the finds do show is that the vessel was tied into the Atlantic trade in which manillas bought human lives.
The wreck lies one group of breakers east of the remains of the Eagle, an English emigrant ship bound for Virginia, lost in 1659.
Little of the hull survives. Divers see piles of iron cannon cemented together and overgrown with coral in shallow water on the breakers. It is an exposed outer-reef site that can only be dived in calm conditions, and it is usually visited as part of a North East Breaker dive.
All artefacts are protected; report finds to the Custodian of Historic Wrecks rather than lifting them.
Approximate position, for interest only - never use for navigation.