Lost 1623 - English merchant ship (Virginia Company supply ship)
Seaflower was a Virginia Company ship that knew both of the Company's colonies. In 1622 she had been at Jamestown, and letters carried home in her brought London its first news of the Powhatan uprising of March that year, which killed about a quarter of the Virginia settlers. After some debate the Company decided the colony was worth saving and loaded relief ships, Seaflower among them, with provisions, seed corn and obsolete weapons released by the Crown. One lot was a batch of out-of-date longbows which officials preferred to keep in Bermuda rather than risk them falling into Powhatan hands.
Early in 1623 she reached Bermuda and lay in Southampton Harbour, today's Castle Harbour. Some of her Virginia passengers came ashore meaning to stay, and on 17 March the governor ordered them to register at St George's. Within the next three days she was gone: her master entertained friends aboard, and while guests were drinking and smoking in the great cabin and the gunroom a careless fire reached the powder. Captain John Smith's history says some were blown out of the gunroom into the sea and pulled out alive but so burned that 'their lives were worse than so many deaths'; he counts eighteen lost (the figure the Royal Gazette repeated in 1967), another account about fourteen, including, Noel Hume says, the master's eldest son, who was her gunner. One passenger killed was a man named Trussell, whose wife and children were ashore. The ship sank at once with sixty barrels of meal meant for Virginia, where the settlers waited for her corn through April, unaware she was lost.
On 20 March the governor proclaimed that anyone hiding goods from the 'good shipp called the Seaflower' would be treated as a felon, and on 4 April he ordered boats to stop pillaging the casks and chests that had drifted ashore around St David's and Cooper's Island. Salvage was disappointing and dangerous. Hume counts one of the salvage divers, Morgan Gwynn, among the Seaflower's victims; the divers reported that they worked in great danger for very little reward. Two years later Bermudians said the divers had once brought up a great chest too heavy to lift into their boats - its lid broke and the pewter and iron tools inside spilled back into the sea. The authorities tried without success to blow up the hulk as a hazard, and the wreck has never been positively identified. In the summer of 1967 Mendel Peterson of the Smithsonian and Teddy Tucker searched Castle Harbour for her with magnetometers, but Peterson would not say whether they had found her, and no find has been confirmed since. Smith says she had already landed what she was leaving in Bermuda, which would put the longbows ashore; but Noel Hume pointed out that if the party in fact celebrated her arrival rather than her departure, her longbows may still lie in Castle Harbour - the oldest after those of the Mary Rose.
The site is unknown: the Seaflower has never been positively located and there is nothing to dive. Castle Harbour is shallow but usually murky, with strong tidal streams around Cooper's Island.