Wrecks of Bermuda

Discovery and the Spanish treasure route

The islands are named after the Spanish captain Juan de Bermúdez, who sighted them in the early 1500s (about 1503 by some reckonings, 1505 by others); "La Bermuda" appears on a printed map by 1511. Spain never settled here, but its fleets sailed past every year carrying silver and gold from the Americas, and some did not make it. The San Pedro, lost in 1595, gave up one of Bermuda's most famous finds in 1955: an emerald-set gold cross recovered by the Bermudian diver Teddy Tucker. Shipwrecked sailors of several nations were stranded on the islands during this century, and some left their mark: a rock on the south shore carries an inscription dated 1543.

For all its treasure-island reputation, Bermuda has produced only three significant finds of gold and jewels: Teddy Tucker's San Pedro treasure (lost 1595, found 1955), his San Antonio finds (lost 1621, found 1958), and a hoard of late-1500s gold found by recreational divers William Gillies and Harry Cox after Gillies spotted an ivory tusk on the bottom. That last find lay with ballast stones but no ship - perhaps the contents of a chest spilled from a Spanish vessel that broke up and drifted away. All three together would fit in a shoe box.

The Sea Venture and the birth of a colony

In July 1609 the Sea Venture, flagship of a fleet taking settlers and supplies to the young English colony at Jamestown, Virginia, was caught in a hurricane. Leaking badly, she was deliberately run onto the reefs off the east end of Bermuda by Admiral Sir George Somers. Everyone on board, around 150 people, got ashore safely. They lived on the island for ten months, built two new vessels, the Deliverance and the Patience, and sailed on to Jamestown in 1610.

The wreck gave England its claim to Bermuda, which was settled in 1612. Accounts of the shipwreck and the survivors' life on an "enchanted" island reached London and are widely thought to have helped inspire Shakespeare's The Tempest. The remains of the Sea Venture were found in 1958 and are a protected historic wreck. The story of the Sea Venture →

The colony and the wreckers

As English settlement grew, so did traffic and losses: the magazine ship Warwick sank in Castle Harbour in 1619 and the Virginia Merchant was lost on the south shore in 1661. Bermudians became expert pilots and salvors, and "wracking" was a recognised way of life: when a ship struck, local boats raced to rescue the crew and salvage the cargo. The Royal Navy frigate HMS Cerberus was lost off the east end in 1783.

Salvage began with the colony itself. When the Spanish ship San Antonio was wrecked in 1621, Governor Nathaniel Butler had her guns, silver and cordage taken for the colony and told the salvage gangs they could keep almost everything else; the Spanish ambassador in London protested that Bermudians had even stripped the survivors, and Butler left office in 1622 amid complaints that he had been too keen on Spain's treasure. The salvors' own records survive: one officer made 23 trips to the wreck in a single season, and the divers threw her tobacco cargo away as worthless.

Because so many Bermuda wrecks grounded in water shallow enough for their masts to stay above the surface, they were easy to strip, and it has been estimated that nine out of ten were at least partly salvaged soon after they were lost. Salvors sometimes burned a stranded hull in summer and free-dived for the iron fittings left in the ashes; in winter they hacked out the ironwork with axes instead. What modern divers find is usually what the salvors missed.

Salvage diving was dangerous from the start. In March 1623 the supply ship Seaflower, bound for Virginia with arms for the struggling colony, blew up in Castle Harbour (then called Southampton Harbour) when a drinking party aboard set fire to her powder, killing about fourteen people. The divers sent down afterwards reported that they worked in great danger for very little - some meal, vinegar and a chest of clothes - though letters recovered from the wreck were carefully dried and kept. The Seaflower's remains have never been found.

Warships, blockade-runners and steamers

The Royal Navy built its great dockyard at the west end of Bermuda, and the island's strategic value grew. The French frigate L'Herminie was wrecked off the west end in 1838, leaving cannon scattered across the reef. During the American Civil War (1861-65) St. George's became a busy base for fast Confederate blockade-runners carrying arms in and cotton out; the Mary Celestia and the Montana are their best-known remains. As steam replaced sail, iron-hulled steamers such as the Minnie Breslauer, Darlington and Lartington joined the list. In 1896 the Royal Navy deliberately scuttled HMS Vixen across the Daniel's Head channel to block it; her bow still breaks the surface.

Liners, freighters and The Deep

The twentieth century brought bigger ships and bigger wrecks: the Madiana, Caraquet, and in 1936 the Spanish liner Cristobal Colon, the largest wreck in Bermuda's waters, whose remains are spread across the northern reefs. During the Second World War the schooner Constellation sank on the north-west reefs; her story inspired Peter Benchley's novel The Deep, filmed in Bermuda in the 1970s.

Bermudian divers led the way in finding and studying these sites. Teddy Tucker (1925-2017) spent a lifetime on Bermuda's wrecks and found many of them; his discoveries, including the Tucker Cross, made Bermuda famous in the world of underwater exploration.

From the 1960s Tucker worked with Smithsonian Institution teams led by the underwater-archaeology pioneer Mendel Peterson: together they found the Warwick in Castle Harbour in the mid-1960s, and from 1972 they excavated the 17th- century 'Tankard Wreck'. Much of the island's wreck archaeology has been done by skilled Bermudians - among them Allan 'Smokey' Wingood, who directed the excavation of the Sea Venture, and William Gillies, a diver and conservator whose skill with waterlogged finds was such that he restored 17th-century glass bottles for Colonial Williamsburg.

Bermuda also has a place in the history of deep diving. Off the island in June 1930 the naturalist William Beebe and engineer Otis Barton were lowered in the bathysphere, a steel ball less than five feet across with small quartz windows, reaching 803 feet on 6 June and more than 1,400 feet a few days later; in August 1934 they went down 3,028 feet, more than half a mile. In 1991 the Russian research ship Akademik Mstislav Keldysh tested its submersibles in Bermuda waters before heading north to film the Titanic.

Artificial reefs and protection

Since the 1980s several ships have been sunk on purpose as dive sites and artificial reefs, among them the Hermes, the King and the Xing Da. The older wrecks are now protected as part of Bermuda's heritage under the Historic Wrecks Act 2001, and many popular dive sites are marked by buoys with no-fishing zones around them. Read how wrecks are protected →