Finding the Wreck
August 9th, 2010 | No Comments
OBX Shipwreck July 2010
Written by Robert Hill, owner of round house, next door to “Sea Notes”, Duck NC.
Last April, I read a newspaper article about an old shipwreck that was found about 15 miles north of our rental house in North Carolina. They talked about it how it had wooden dowels and holes instead of metal parts and they were dating it about 1650.
In May, while visiting our rental house, I had walked down to the beach and saw a piece of wood long barely sticking out of the sand. After digging around for a few minutes I noticed it too had wooden dowels and some unusual carvings. I was sure it was also part of a very old shipwreck. I called around to several groups and no one seemed to be interested. I finally talked to the director of the “Graveyard in the Atlantic Museum” who asked me to send pictures. Two days after sending the photos, the director flew down from Boston to get a first hand look.
The director, another archaeologist and myself started to dig it out. The more we exposed, the more excited they got. All in all it ended up being 15 feet long. They pointed out a seam in the wood where you could see that it had been glued together with tar and horse hair. Wow! – horse hair from 1650. They took out various pictures and reports they had from another shipwreck. They were convinced this is part of the beam of the same shipwreck that was found 15 miles north. In fact, those unusual notches and holes are the way the piece is attached to another piece of the beam. That piece of the beam is still missing and could be either offshore just a few feet or anywhere along the coast. They decided they should take it down to the museum.
The next day, the archaeologist showed up with another individual from the Federal Park Service and a flatbed trailer. I went up and down the beach to gather all the strong young men I could find to help lift it on to the flatded. After a lot of false starts, we were finally able to get it onto the truck and off it went to the museum.
Since then, they have moved the shipwreck date even further back to 1609. That is only two years after the founding of Jamestown, and OVER 150 YEARS BEFORE THE SIGNING OF THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE. They are now saying, this definitely is the oldest shipwreck ever found in the Outer Banks. For those of you from the East Coast, you know that the Outer Banks are called, “The Graveyard of the Atlantic” because there are literally thousands of wrecks along the it’s coast. Since getting home from our trip, I’ve done lots of research on this wreck and have found multiple articles, videos, and photos on the Internet. I tried to summarize some of those sites below. I have also attached just a couple of the photos we have of the piece we found in front of our house.
This was a once-in-a-lifetime experience I will never forget. I’m even supposed to get a certificate certifying that I was the one that found it with GPS coordinates and dates.
Bob