On Wednesday, October 7, David Robinson used a hammer and roofing nails to drive a numbered tag into the timbers of a Nantucket shipwreck that a late-September nor’easter had pulled out of the sand, and by the end of that visit he had decided the wreck was a different ship from the one everyone had been talking about.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“This appears to be a very different type of ship,” Robinson, director and chief archaeologist of the Massachusetts Board of Underwater Archaeological Resources (BUAR), told The Inquirer and Mirror<\/a> after examining the segment that had been widely reported as part of the Warren Sawyer, a cargo schooner that wrecked on the island in 1884.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The wreck surfaced on Saturday, September 26, when island resident David DeHart found what he believed was part of a shipwreck on the south shore and sent a tip to Jason Graziadei, editor in chief of the Nantucket Current<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Graziadei drove out in heavy wind with his 8-year-old son, Owen, and the two had to leave the car and walk down because the storm had carved a steep drop-off at the drive-on beach islanders call the “Sewer Beds,” next to the town’s wastewater plant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “It was completely exposed and uncovered by the erosion that happened during this storm,” Graziadei told The Boston Globe, and he told WBUR that his son began asking what had happened to the people on board and why the ship had run aground.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Given where it was and where it emerged, it means that everyone who was driving onto the beach this summer was just directly over this,” Graziadei told WBUR, and later in that interview he added, “It’s amazing to think from, you know, over 100 years old that it’s still there.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n The guess had a solid history behind it, since a 40-foot (12-meter) bow section turned up in the same area on December 2, 2022, a 15-foot (4.6-meter) stern section was found nearby in February 2023, and Robinson’s own 2023 report concluded that the bow section was “most likely” part of the Warren Sawyer’s hull.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When Robinson first saw Graziadei’s photos and video, the setting looked familiar. “See how the wreckage extends from the base of the eroded bluff? That’s exactly the same situation that the wreckage we saw in 2022 was in,” he told the Current in late September.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He was just as direct with ABC News, saying that “from the photographs and video that I’ve seen, it looks like it’s the exact same wreckage, just based on its relationship to the dune bluff and the appearance of the timbers,” although after a preliminary visit he allowed that the GPS location left room for a different ship.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Jascin N. Leonardo Finger, deputy director and curator at the Maria Mitchell Association, a nonprofit research center on the island, was more cautious from the start. “While it’s in the same area where pieces were discovered back in 2022, we cannot ascertain it is the same wreck just by looking at it like this,” Leonardo Finger said in a statement reported by the Globe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On the beach, Robinson’s team and staff from the Egan Maritime Institute took measurements and noted the materials and the likely construction methods, and the Egan release that followed on October 8 said the sizes and wood species of the timbers, along with their location, did not match the wreckage documented in 2022 and 2023.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Based on the quality of the construction, it was not a schooner like the Warren Sawyer,” Robinson said, and the institute now describes the find as what appears to be a 50-foot (15-meter) section from the side of a large merchant vessel dating from the late 19th to early 20th century, 10 feet longer than the bow piece found in 2022.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Robinson’s hypothesis is that the wreck may be a schooner barge, since it has “some characteristics that we see in what are known as schooner barges.” “Schooner barges were the last of the American merchant sailing fleet, that were auxiliary sailors that were typically towed in strings behind a steam tug or a diesel tug, kind of like box cars on a train,” Robinson said. “They carry bulk cargos, and the majority of shipwrecks that we have off our coast are of schooner barges, because they were lost fairly frequently.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n “What I’m seeing here is kind of the equivalent of seeing a piece of an 18-wheeler’s container on the back of the rig on the side of the road,” he said, before adding, “It’s a part of our history, and an important part of our history.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n The tag Robinson nailed in made the wreck the first site in Massachusetts to join the Shipwreck Tagging Archaeological Management Program, or STAMP, which the Florida Public Archaeology Network at the University of West Florida created in 2019 and which the National Park Service and several states now use.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Each tag has its own non-repeating number and an individual QR code on it, so that anybody walking along the beach that encounters this can scan the QR code,” Robinson explained. “It will take them to the STAMP national database, and they’ll be prompted to input information that will allow us to track this thing.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n In Maryland, he said in the Egan release, one tagged timber traveled as much as 100 miles (161 kilometers) along the beach, which gives a sense of how far loose wreckage can wander.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “It’s extremely exciting because it’s something that I’ve wanted to do for the seven years that I’ve been in this position,” Robinson said, and a little later he summed it up with “I’m psyched.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Carlisle Jensen, executive director of the Egan Maritime Institute, remembered standing at the 2022 site “on a really chilly day in December,” talking about “how cool it would be to have a mechanism that could do this. So the fact that we’re here now is really wonderful.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Warren Sawyer itself was a 131-foot (40-meter), 380-ton schooner carrying 1,115 bales of cotton and 28 tons of scrap iron from New Orleans to Boston when gale-force winds put it ashore near Miacomet Beach at about 11 p.m. on December 22, 1884.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A 1945 account in The Inquirer and Mirror, reprinted by the Current, describes surf so heavy that only “the swaying masts” were “visible in the blackness of the night,” and sailors “too numbed with the cold” to reach the first line the lifesavers shot aboard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n According to the Nantucket Historical Association, “Captain Edwin L. Saunders and his seven men were rescued within an hour by the crew of the Surfside Lifesaving Station, despite the schooner rolling violently in the surf,” and islanders spent the next two weeks salvaging cargo before the hull broke up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Charles Allard, director of Egan Maritime’s Shipwreck and Lifesaving Museum, said in information the institute shared with LiveNOW from FOX that “her unfortunate end on the island’s south shore in 1884 is one of Nantucket’s most complete and remarkable stories of shoals, storms and rescue.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Wrecks keep coming and going on this coast because, as the U.S. Geological Survey<\/a> explains, storm waves carry beach sand offshore into large sandbars and calm-weather waves bring it back in the weeks and months after a storm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That same back-and-forth is behind efforts elsewhere to rebuild beaches that are disappearing<\/a>, and on Nantucket, whose beaches drew national attention in 2024 when a wind turbine blade broke off and scattered fiberglass on the shore<\/a>, it means old timbers can appear in one storm and vanish in the next.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “This happens so frequently, that pieces of shipwreck do show up on shorelines, that I felt compelled we needed to really get a handle on managing these resources,” Robinson said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Nobody knows the ship’s name, its cargo or when it was lost, and the schooner barge idea is a hypothesis based on one day of observations, with BUAR still due to issue its own official statement on the findings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Robinson plans to cross-reference the measurements against historical records to “see if any dots connect,” in the same way that a handwritten note once led divers to a 1680 shipwreck<\/a>, but he was candid about the odds. “If not, they don’t, and this will forever remain a mystery,” he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A sign now asks visitors to leave the wreck alone after apparent tampering, and under Massachusetts law it is illegal to remove, displace, damage or destroy underwater archaeological resources. “They’re puzzle pieces to our past that’s no longer available except in the archeological record,” Robinson said. “So when these things get picked apart, you’re losing that piece of the story, literally.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n The findings were announced in an October 8, 2026, release from the Egan Maritime Institute<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “It’s incredible, it truly is,” Jensen said on the beach, adding, “There’s so many shipwrecks that happen around us. So to be able to be part of a more modern day maritime history is incredible, and we’re so lucky to be here.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Photo: Egan Maritime Institute<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On Wednesday, October 7, David Robinson used a hammer and roofing nails to drive a numbered tag into the timbers … <\/p>\nA tip in the middle of the storm<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Why everyone thought of the Warren Sawyer<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
What the timbers showed up close<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
A first tag for Massachusetts<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The schooner that wrecked in 1884<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
How storms bury and uncover wrecks<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
What is still unknown<\/h2>\n\n\n\n