Warwick

History

The Warwick was the 'magazine ship' of Sir Robert Rich, one of the backers of the young Bermuda colony - a supply vessel named for the Earl of Warwick, patron of the colony's new governor, Nathaniel Butler, whom she carried out to the island. She reached Bermuda on 20 October 1619 and lay in Castle Harbour (then Southampton Harbour), intending to go on to Virginia.

Towards the end of November 1619 a hurricane struck. Most of her cargo had been landed, but the anchor dragged and she was driven broadside against the reefs and cliffs near the harbour mouth, below the King's Castle; the Garland, riding beside her, saved herself only by cutting down her masts. Holed, the Warwick sank and rolled onto her starboard side, where harbour silt buried and preserved much of that side of the hull. Saving her became Butler's first salvage job, and a frustrating one. Early in 1620 he got three guns out of her 'with infinite toile and labour', but the rest were lashed down so tightly that divers could not free them until the ropes and decks had rotted; a few butts of beer, raised after six months under water, were still good to drink, and five guns came up the following year. When Butler went back in the summer of 1622 with twenty men and two divers, they raised only one small gun.

Teddy Tucker and Mendel Peterson of the Smithsonian located the site in the mid-1960s - at the time the most complete English wooden merchant hull ever found. Small finds have proved as telling as the hull: fragments of Roman red-gloss tableware from the reign of the emperor Claudius lay among her ballast, probably dug with river gravel in London; there are clay pipes, a notched boxwood piece from a stringed instrument, perhaps a gittern, and an Iberian two-handled bottle that showed the type was older than thought. Between 2008 and 2012 the National Museum of Bermuda, the Institute of Nautical Archaeology and Texas A&M, with partners including the University of Southampton, excavated and recorded the hull in detail; finds include cannon, an iron grenade lodged in a plank and a merchant's lead weight.

Diving the wreck today

The Warwick is a restricted wreck under the Historic Wrecks Act 2001, so she is not open to recreational divers. Bermuda 100 says finds are shown in the shipwreck gallery at the Bermuda Underwater Exploration Institute (BUEI).