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Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:
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A shipwreck located by a young boy in February of 2024 has finally been identified.
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Researchers had 12 tons of oak timbers to work with when investigating the history of the ship.
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Experts and community volunteers combined to discover the ship was once the British Royal Navy’s HMS Hind, later turned whaler.
When a young boy discovered the 12-ton oak hull of what had once been a ship washed up on a Scottish beach, the find energized an entire community. It also kickstarted a research project in which experts and volunteers searched side by side for insight to the ship’s history.
The effort was plenty successful, and folks were able to identify the timber as the remains of the HMS Hind, a British Royal Navy vessel that was wrecked in 1778 while serving as the whaler Earl of Chatham.
“Sanday [the Scottish island on which the wreck was discovered] was infamous for shipwrecks at the time,” Ben Saunders, senior marine archaeologist at Wessex Archaeology, said in a statement. He added that the island was once “called the ‘cradle of shipwrecks in Scotland,’ but the community was equally well-known for its hospitality as it looked after sailors who fell afoul of the area’s stormy seasons.”
Unearthed from the sand in 2024 and pushed ashore in the very same type of storm that likely caused the ship’s demise, locals knew only they had a 33-foot-by-16-foot oak hull knitted together by wooden pegs on their hands. Through a dendrochronological assessment of the timber, investigators found that one section was likely made by timber felled between 1748 and 1762, and another portion was constructed from timber felled between 1750 and 1780. Of equal importance was confirming the timber came from the south and southwest of England.
With the provenance of the timber set, the community partnered with Wessex Archaeology, the Sanday Heritage Centre, and Historic Environment Scotland to wade through archives (both local and national) and community records to find candidates for the ship. It took more than 20 volunteers to parse the data.
The team filtered out impossible and unlikely ships and then focused their search on potential candidates, looking at construction methods, materials used, and the sizes of the ships. There was a clear winner: the whaler Earl of Chatham.
“It is thanks to our dedicated team of community researchers and the evidence they have gathered that means we have been able to identify the Sanday Wreck with a reasonable degree of confidence,” Saunders said.
“You remove ones that are Northern European as opposed to British, you remove wrecks that are too small or operating out of the north of England and you really are down to two or three,” Saunders told the Associated Press, “and Earl of Chatham is the last one left.”
The people on the island were crucial in the process. “You’ve got a lot of people in Orkney who are connected to the sea anyway,” Saunders told The Guardian. “That meant we could collage this massive amount of data and start saying: ‘Right, that ship is too small, that ship was built in the Netherlands, no, not that ship.’”
Research into naval records at The National Archives and National Maritime Museum in London further unraveled the ship’s past. The 24-gun, sixth-rate frigate was built in Chichester in 1749 and saw active service on multiple occasions—including during the sieges of Louisbourg and Quebec in 1758 and 1759 and during the American Revolutionary War in the late 1770s and early 1780s. The HMS Hind wasn’t a massive battleship, but a fast and relatively agile large sailing ship that operated as a convoy escort and counter-privateer cruiser. It was later turned into a training ship for the navy in the Irish Sea.
After its long naval career, HMS Hind was declared surplus, and was sold in January of 1784 to London shipowner and merchant Theophilus Pritzler, who refashioned it into the Earl of Chatham, a 500-ton whaling ship. First captained by William Brown, the ship hunted Greenland right whales—also known as bowhead whales—for four seasons and brought back 19 whales, equating to 385 tons of blubber that could be turned to oil. But when the ship’s next captain took over the helm in 1788, he wrecked the ship on the northeast end of the island of Sanday that spring.
An Aberdeen Journal article from April of 1788 noted the incident, writing that the ship was “totally wrecked with 56 hands on board.” All on board were saved.
The island of 500 residents has long been known as a shipwreck danger, with 270 shipwrecks recorded off the 20-square-mile island since the 15th century, according to the AP.
“The discovery of the Sanday Wreck is a rare and fascinating story,” Alison Turnbull, director of external relationships and partnerships at HES, said in a statement.
The timber hull, which was well preserved under the sand for over 235 years, is now housed in a custom-built freshwater tank at the Sanday Heritage Center, funded in part by the National Heritage Memorial Fund. Without the water, the timber would dry out and crumble.
“Throughout this project, we have learned so much about the wreck,” Saunders said, “but also about the community in Sanday in the 1780s.”
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