Lost 1650 - Unidentified 17th-century merchant ship
Nobody knows this ship's name. Divers call her the Stonewall because her ballast lay in a long, narrow, high heap on the sand, like a field wall. She was found in the 1950s - most accounts credit Harry Cox, though Teddy Tucker is also said to have found and partly salvaged her about 1950. Tucker, searching the Bermuda archives, suggested she might be the Ragusan, a Spanish ship lost in 1648, but nothing has confirmed it. Bermuda's council records do show a Spanish captain and his men in the islands in the spring of 1648, waiting for passage home, and Bermudians jailed for hiding 'Spanish goods' recovered from their ship - but they give no ship's name and no position.
In the early summer of 1975 Edwin Dethlefsen of Franklin Pierce College, New Hampshire, spent three weeks on the site with a party of students, guided by the local diver Dave McLeod, surveying and making trial excavations at a total cost of about $5,500. They recorded a section of the starboard stern about 13 m long and dated the wreck to about 1650. In Dethlefsen's view she was no treasure ship but a cargo ship homeward bound from the New World to Spain, possibly sailing in convoy, and may even have been built or rebuilt in the Americas. The hull was covered in ash and charred wood, a sign that salvors had burned the upper works to get at her iron fittings. The project later became a cautionary tale: Dethlefsen reported that samples sent away for analysis were repeatedly lost, and the finds taken to the United States have never been traced. Bermuda now prefers to bring experts to its finds rather than send finds abroad.
East Carolina University returned in 1994-96 and excavated and recorded most of the lower hull. Mexican pottery, European ceramics, lead shot, shoe leather, a comb, a wooden rattle, a bone die and brass lace tips (aglets) suggested a Spanish ship, or at least Spanish people aboard, while the framing looked English. On the ceramics and other material ECU placed the loss nearer 1685.
The Stonewall is one of the Government's open wrecks, so recreational divers and snorkellers may visit it. It lies in shallow water - about 20 ft (6 m) - in a sand hole inside the reef platform, which makes it suitable for beginners and snorkellers in calm weather. What remains is the long ballast mound that gave the site its name, with some of the lower hull timbers showing beside it; there is no structure to penetrate. As with all historic wrecks, nothing may be removed.
Archaeologists have dated this wreck to about 1650 and, from later study of its pottery, to about 1685. Do you know of other finds or work on the site that could narrow the date?
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Approximate position, for interest only - never use for navigation.