STREET. JOHN’S, NL –
The massive overturned hull of a seemingly ancient ship has appeared without warning along the southwestern tip of Newfoundland, dazzling nearby residents eager to learn who may have been aboard and how it met its fate.
Wanda Blackmore says her son Gordon, 21, came roaring into her house the morning of January 20 after seeing the long shadow underwater near the beach near Cape Ray, NL. As soon as he went out the tide. She put on her jacket and went out to see it herself.
Since then, the wreck has attracted a steady stream of local admirers who come to examine its long, curved planks and the wooden dowels that hold them together.
“It’s amazing, there’s no other word to describe it,” Blackmore said in an interview. “I’m just curious if you can name the ship, how old it is, and if any souls were lost on it.”
Gordon Blackmore was hunting seabirds early in the morning when he first saw the wreck, his mother said. He had been in the same place a few days before and there was no sign of it.
But the beaches along that corner of Newfoundland have eroded substantially in recent years. When Post-Tropical Storm Fiona swept through the area on Sept. 24, 2022, destroying about 100 homes and washing away shorelines, it churned up sand along Cape Ray Beach, said Neil Burgess, president of the Shipwreck Preservation Society. of Newfoundland and Labrador. .
If the ship was buried, Fiona could have dislodged it from its sandy grave, and each subsequent storm would have loosened it further, Burgess said. There were big waves there last week, and they may have finally unearthed the wreck enough to be discovered by someone hunting birds.
Burgess said he estimates the ship was built in the 19th century, and noted that a few different factors led him to that conclusion. The wooden dowels observed by Wanda Blackwood are called logs and were used as nails on wooden ships of that era. There are also copper pegs in the wreck, each more than two centimeters wide, which were used to fasten the hull planks, which Burgess says are quite large.
The emerged hull is about 24 meters long and is not complete, meaning the ship itself was even longer, he added.
“It was a pretty substantial sailing ship, larger than a schooner I think,” Burgess said, adding that if its hull is made of oak, it was not built in North America.
He hasn’t gone out to see the wreck yet (he lives in St. John’s, about 900 miles east by road), but he’s looking for an opportunity to get there.
The seafloor around Newfoundland is littered with “thousands” of shipwrecks and they surface from time to time, he said. But that doesn’t make the Cape Ray shipwreck any less exciting.
“This is perfect,” Burgess said. “This is a great, great event.”
Wanda Blackmore is excited, too, and spent much of last week emailing anyone she could think of (the Maritime History Archive at Memorial University, even the prime minister) who could send experts to Cape Ray and make sure the wreckage will be recovered. She is protected.
She hopes they can determine the ship’s history and perhaps even display some of it at the Cape Ray Lighthouse Museum, which is a federally recognized heritage structure. The site’s first lighthouse was built in 1871 to guide ships from around the world through the Cabot Strait, at the confluence of the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the open Atlantic Ocean.
Cape Ray was part of a busy route centuries ago and the wreck could come from anywhere, he said. “We do not know!”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Jan. 27, 2024.