Lost 1889 - Wooden sailing ship ('ship' rig)
The Richard P. Buck was an American square-rigged sailing ship of 1,490 tons register, built at Bath, Maine, in 1882 in the last great era of Maine-built wooden ships that carried bulk cargoes round Cape Horn between the US East and West coasts. In 1889 she belonged to New York and was commanded by Captain Jesse L. Carver.
That spring she was bound from Philadelphia to San Francisco with 2,149 tons of general cargo, including refined petroleum. Damaged by heavy weather, she put into Bermuda in distress on 15 April 1889 and anchored in Murray's Anchorage off St. George's, where about 2,000 cases of petroleum were landed. Then, in the early hours of Good Friday, 19 April, fire broke out between decks. The ship burned out and was beached near the old naval tanks at St. George's, and the fire- and water-damaged cargo was auctioned over the following months. The coroner's jury, having heard the captain, his officers, carpenter, cook, steward, stewardess and sixteen seamen, decided that nothing could have caught fire by accident: the ship had been 'wilfully set on fire' down the fore hatch between 2 and 3 a.m. by someone from her own crew.
That was not the end of her. On 18 May 1889 salvors built a cofferdam round the burnt hull, and the steam tug Gladisfen pumped her out and towed her back to Murray's Anchorage. On 7 June the hull was auctioned on Market Square, St. George's, for GBP 850, and at the end of July the Gladisfen took her in tow for Philadelphia, arriving on 2 August 1889. So the Richard P. Buck did not remain at Bermuda. A London report that she was scuttled, and later accounts of a wreck that burned out off St. George's, are not borne out by the contemporary reports.
In 1991 the Bergs' dive guide, on the word of local diver Mike Davis, described charred remains off St. George's as the Richard P. Buck. Since her hull was raised and taken away, those remains must belong to some other vessel, so far unidentified.
There is no Richard P. Buck wreck at Bermuda: her burnt hull was raised and towed to Philadelphia in 1889. The burnt-out remains off St. George's that the Bergs' 1991 guide describes under her name - scattered wooden beams and brass spikes - are another, unidentified vessel.