Lost 1661 - English wooden sailing ship (passengers and cargo)
The Virginia Merchant was an English ship carrying passengers and goods from Plymouth to Jamestown, calling at Bermuda on the way. Under Captain Robert Burke she had just left Castle Harbour when, on 26 March 1661, she ran onto a submerged reef about 250 metres off the South Shore, near what later became the Sonesta Beach Hotel.
The loss of life was terrible. Of 179 people aboard, only about ten reached shore - thought to be the heaviest toll of any Bermuda shipwreck, made worse because few people of the time could swim.
After three and a half centuries in the surf very little survives of the wooden hull. What remains - a pile of ballast stones, some timber and a large iron hook that was probably her anchor - lies in a sand hole next to the buoyed Sandy Hole dive site. A cannon thought to be from the ship was raised and mounted at the Sonesta Beach Hotel.
The wreck itself is scant - ballast, timber fragments and an anchor-like hook - and the real attraction is the reef around it: archways, tunnels and overhangs both inside and outside the breakers, with schools of horse-eye jacks on the outer reef, groupers, and good shell-hunting in the sand. Depths 12-45 ft; usually dived together with Sandy Hole, a popular training and night-dive site.