Unidentified large merchant ship, probably northern European-built
Nobody knows this ship's name or exactly when she was lost, so she is known by two finds from the site: a pewter mug and a green-glazed earthenware one. She was a big merchantman, estimated at 130-140 feet and around 600 tons, and she was wrecked on the north-west reefs of Bermuda some time in the mid-1600s. Found in 1965, she was excavated over three seasons from 1972 by Teddy Tucker with a Smithsonian Institution team.
Much of her lower hull survived, giving a rare chance to study how a 17th-century merchant ship was put together. Her bottom was oak, but everything above the keelson was pine or spruce, pointing to a northern European builder; a board carved with letters that Noel Hume reads as Swedish supports that. Below the waterline her builders had added a second layer of softwood planking, laid over a bedding of animal hair and tar - protection, Tucker believed, against ice. Her pottery, however, suggests she was sailing under Spanish colours.
Her last voyage had taken her far from the ice. Her hold held cattle hides (Cuba is the likely source), mahogany from Central America, and the souvenirs of a curious traveller: Pacific abalone shells, a small stone axe head and an Indian stone pipe. Her ballast was a jumble of stone, brick and English flint, probably shovelled from a careening ground. Salvors had chopped out the knee timbers along her port side to get at the iron fastenings, suggesting she was stripped in winter, when burning the hull and free-diving for the fittings was not practical.
After three seasons of excavation in the 1970s, what remains lies in about 25-30 feet of water on the north-west reefs.