Lost 1609 - English merchant ship (galleon), flagship of the Virginia Company's Third Supply fleet
Sea Venture was the flagship of the relief fleet that the Virginia Company sent from Plymouth in 1609 to rescue its struggling Jamestown settlement. Aboard were the fleet's admiral Sir George Somers, the new governor Sir Thomas Gates, Captain Christopher Newport, the minister Richard Buck, John Rolfe (later husband of Pocahontas) and William Strachey, who would write the most vivid account of the voyage. In late July a hurricane scattered the fleet. Sea Venture, her seams opened by the strain, took on water faster than her people could pump it out, and after days of bailing Somers sighted Bermuda and drove her onto the reef rather than let her founder.
She wedged between two coral heads about half a mile off St Catherine's Point, and everyone aboard reached shore with much of the stores. The castaways spent ten months on the islands and used timber from the wreck and Bermuda cedar to build two pinnaces, Deliverance and Patience, which sailed for Virginia on 10 May 1610 and reached Jamestown on 24 May to find about sixty survivors close to starvation. Accounts of the wreck reached London and are traditionally linked to Shakespeare's The Tempest.
The wreck was not forgotten: in the summer of 1622 Governor Nathaniel Butler's divers found her hull still sound in two or three fathoms and raised a gun, her sheet anchor, iron bars and pigs of lead, and the diver William Coxson slung another gun and an anchor from her. Edmund Downing, an American diver living at Cavello Bay and descended from one of the passengers, had been searching for her since June 1958 inside the channel; on 18 October, trying outside it for the first time, he found the remains of an old ship lying in a crevice of the reef about 20 ft down, some three-quarters of a mile off Gates Fort. He gave it only a 50-50 chance at first, but an English cannon dated 1601 was raised, and after Teddy Tucker and the Canton brothers had dived the site for the Government, the Smithsonian's Mendel Peterson put the odds at nine to one in March 1959; by 1960 he called it 'definitely the Sea Venture'. The Government dropped its own investigation when another gun seemed to be of later date, but the find helped bring about Bermuda's Wreck and Salvage Act of 1959. Allan 'Smokey' Wingood reopened the site for the Bermuda Maritime Museum from 1978, and the Sea Venture Trust, under archaeologist Jon Adams, completed the excavation and recording in the early 1980s. Little more than part of the lower hull survives; the finds - pewter, stoneware, early West of England storage jars, and even a scrap of Roman pottery in the ballast - are held by the National Museum of Bermuda.
The Sea Venture cannot be dived recreationally: the Custodian of Historic Wrecks has classified it as a restricted wreck, closed to recreational divers, and the site is not normally buoyed. In any case there is little to see: a short stretch of blackened hull timbers in about 20-30 ft of water, which were covered with jute sandbags in 2015 to protect them from shipworm. The finds are displayed at the National Museum of Bermuda at Dockyard, and a replica of Deliverance stood on Ordnance Island in St George's for many years.