Lost 1661 - English wooden sailing ship (passengers and cargo)
The Virginia Merchant was an English ship in the Virginia trade, carrying passengers and goods from England to Virginia by way of Bermuda. She was no stranger to the island: in January 1659 she called there and carried on to Virginia the passengers of the wrecked Eagle. Her master, on both voyages it seems, was Robert Burley (the records spell him Burlie and Bierley; Berg has Robert Burke). On 26 March 1661 she was cast away on the South Shore - according to Berg just after leaving Castle Harbour, on a submerged reef about 250 yards off what later became the Sonesta Beach Hotel.
The loss of life was terrible. The Bermuda shipping register notes '170 lives lost', and the Somers Islands Company, answering a widow's petition that August, wrote of her husband, the master's mate, 'drowned with 168 more' and eleven saved. It is thought to be the heaviest toll of any Bermuda shipwreck, made worse because few people of the time could swim. The sheriff, Captain Tucker, seized the goods that came ashore as wreck, half for the Company and half for the salvors, and the governor had her guns raised - though the Company complained that his account of the proceeds was 'inconsiderable', having heard that 'the one wrecke was very great'.
The wreck was found by Teddy Tucker, who held the licence to work it. In July 1961 he dived it with Mendel Peterson of the Smithsonian Institution, the photographer Peter Stackpole and Don Schanche of the Saturday Evening Post, who used a balloon for aerial photographs; the Royal Gazette placed the site in 15-30 ft about half a mile off the Carlton Beach Hotel (later the Sonesta), rather than the 250 yards Berg gives. Finds included silverware and a carpenter's level, and the wreck proved of real archaeological interest: Peterson found that the outside of the hull had been sheathed with animal hair, an old defence against wood-boring shipworm. Only one or two other wrecks, among them Florida's 'Wedge Wreck', are known to show this.
After three and a half centuries in the surf very little survives of the wooden hull. What remains - a pile of ballast stones, some timber and a large iron hook that was probably her anchor - lies in a sand hole next to the buoyed Sandy Hole dive site. A cannon thought to be from the ship was raised and mounted at the Sonesta Beach Hotel. In 1967 a 3,000-lb gun from the wreck was raised without a licence and found in Boat Bay, and the operator of a skin-diving school was prosecuted; it may be the same gun.
The wreck itself is scant - ballast, timber fragments and an anchor-like hook - and the real attraction is the reef around it: archways, tunnels and overhangs both inside and outside the breakers, with schools of horse-eye jacks on the outer reef, groupers, and good shell-hunting in the sand. Depths 12-45 ft; usually dived together with Sandy Hole, a popular training and night-dive site.
Approximate position, for interest only - never use for navigation.