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Resurrected Ship: The Sparrowhawk
Nearly four hundred years ago a shipload of would-be colonists set out from Liverpool, England, on the ship Sparrowhawk. These people were not bound for the Cape. They intended to go to the colony at Virginia, but, thanks to wind and wave (and perhaps bad navigation), although they had come safely across three thousand miles of the vast Atlantic, they got far off their course.
Whether the ship was unmanageable in stiff southerly gales, or whether the captain was wholly in the dark as to his true position, the Sparrowhawk a 36-ton ship carrying 25 passengers came into Nauset Harbor and drove herself hard onto a sandbar in December of 1626. Perhaps, they tried to pull her off by kedging, that is, sending out small boats from the ship, with lines by which, having dropped anchor, the small boats would try to pull the grounded ship toward them and thus free her little by little.
All we know of what did happen after she grounded is that all hands managed to get ashore without mishap. There they fell in with Indians who had seen them from the shore. The Indians were friendly to them and conducted them in safety to Plymouth.
The Sparrowhawk, of course, was abandoned to her fate. Time passed. Summer gales and winter storms assailed her, and the shifting sands piled around her, and at last the Sparrowhawk disappeared. She was entirely buried in the sand, except for her masts. It is said that the Indians destroyed them and her deck houses.
Not only was the Sparrowhawk buried—she stayed buried for two hundred and thirty-seven long, forgotten years. Nature is never quiet around Cape Cod, and Cape Cod sands are one of her playthings. The winds and waves of tumultuous tempests and tides, having buried the Sparrowhawk in the sand, now undid their work. New storms washed away from her sides, and from beneath her bows and counter, the heavy sand which so relentlessly had gripped and held her there so long.
And one day, when the tide had gone well out, people on the shore saw her hull showing somewhat on the mud. Curious Cape Codders dug her free and hauled the old ship up on the beach. There they found her hull nearly as sound as ever, her staunch timbers of English oak well preserved.
Unearthed by that storm in 1862, the remains of the ship have been on display at the Pilgrim Hall Museum since 1889. The Sparrowhawk incident of 1626 is known as the first recorded European shipwreck on the East Coast of the United States.
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Posted by capelinks - (website) on 04/28/06
Categories: History
Keywords: history, maritime, shipwrecks
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