For one long day and night in late summer 1992, Hurricane Andrew ravaged southern Florida. The storm’s 150-plus mile-per-hour winds smashed homes and businesses and left hundreds of thousands of residents in shock. Later, however, when divers from Biscayne National Park went out to survey the storm’s impact on the area’s underwater resources (which include a significant collection of shipwrecks dotting the park’s 181,000-acre underwater landscape), they discovered that Hurricane Andrew had uncovered one of her own hidden treasures: the highly preserved remains of a two- deck, 44-gun British man-of-war.
Archaeologists believe the ship to be HMS Fowey, a fifth-rate warship that sank in 1748 and has been resting virtually undisturbed for almost 250 years on the ocean floor two miles east of Biscayne’s Elliott Key. This wreckage is giving archaeologists a valuable glimpse into the world’s maritime past and at the same time a better understanding of nature’s ability to preserve and protect historic artifacts.
“What we have here is a relatively intact and very well-preserved assemblage of a mid-18th-century English warship that has had very little human impact on it,” said project co-director Larry Murphy, an archaeologist with the Park Service’s submerged cultural resources unit (SCRU). Though it originally was discovered in 1978 by sport divers who thought it was a Spanish treasure ship, only a small part of the sunken vessel was then visible, mostly the ends of timber frames and some debris. When Hurricane Andrew’s winds stirred the 30-foot-deep water vigorously enough that much of the rest of the ship was quickly uncovered, investigators found that substantial length of the starboard side of the 126-foot vessel was visible. They discovered coral-covered pig-iron ballast (embossed with the British Broad Arrow) scattered amidst the wooden skeleton of the boat and shot, iron fastenings, pottery, deadeyes, chainplate, and a cannon truck. Three of the boat’s gun ports—one of which still retained its cover— and two 18-pounder cannon also emerged.
After its initial assessment, the Park Service assembled a team to investigate the wreckage the following summer. Divers from SCRU, Biscayne National Park, the University of Maryland, and the Maritime Archaeological and Historical Society mapped the entire site and have spent the last three years developing ways to preserve it permanently. They have been aware all along that as damaging as the storm could have been to the wreckage, it presented them with a rare opportunity for study, as it is unlikely that the Fowey ever would have been fully excavated otherwise. The Park Service’s policy for underwater wrecks is merely to document what is visible, preserve it as much as possible, and excavate only when the site is in danger.
Trying to imagine what sent the Fowey to the bottom in the first place conjures up images of a storm nearly as powerful as the one that uncovered it two-and-a-half centuries later. It is more likely, suggests the project’s other director, John Seidel, that the inaccuracies of contemporary charts led the Fowey and the ships with which she was sailing into shallow water, and two of them straight onto a reef. “The admiralty charts at the time showed the latitude precisely, but the longitude readings were inaccurate, so [ships] went farther west than they thought they were and ended up running into a reef,” Seidel said.
Much of what is known about the Fowey’s last days comes from records of the court-martial proceedings that followed the ship’s loss. On 26 June 1748, the Fowey was in convoy to her summer duty station in Virginia with two other English ships—a brig from Rhode Island and the Jane from New York—and a prize cargo ship, the Spanish St. Judea, which the Fowey had captured three weeks earlier in the Caribbean. At 0230 on 27 June, the brig ran aground. The Fowey’s Captain Francis Drake ordered the tow line cut to the prize so that an attempt could be made to assist the stranded ship, but the Fowey herself ran aground. The ship’s cutter, barge, and longboat attempted to pull the Fowey off the reef, and the captain tried to kedge off by using his own anchor and one borrowed from the prize. By 0600, the brig had freed herself, but the Fowey remained on the reef. Captain Drake threw the forecastle guns overboard to lighten the ship, and he moved the guns on the lower deck aft. At noon, they were still there and pumping out water. Finally, after throwing five more guns overboard, the ship broke free of the reef.
That was not the end of it, however. Water was coming in fast through a hole in the Fowey’s hull, and the entire crew and 80 Spanish prisoners were unable to bail fast enough to keep her afloat. At 0400 the following morning, Captain Drake assembled his officers for a conference, and all agreed that there was no hope of saving the ship. They decided they would rather run her up on the reef, where she could be repaired or salvaged, than allow her to sink in four fathoms.
It may have seemed like a good idea, but when they tried to run her aground again, the ship ran up and over the reef and back down the other side, tearing off her rudder and making a huge hole in the hull even larger. The men suddenly found themselves floating again in four fathoms of water, surely bewildered by their continued bad luck. The ship’s fate apparent, Captain Drake put out oars and small sails to steer her as best he could before she was scuttled. At 0430, he ordered the stern anchor dropped and had the gunner spike the guns to disable them and cut the gun breechings so that when the ship settled they would roll across the deck and punch holes in the opposite side of the boat. The crew threw all small arms except 33 muskets overboard. When the rest of the crew had transferred to the Jane, the carpenter’s mate opened the sea cock and scuttled the ship.
The crews continued on to Charleston without the Fowey, and eventually the captain and his officers were brought up at the court-martial hearing to account for the loss of the ship. On 5 December 1748, the court assembled on board HMS Anson in Portsmouth, England, and concluded that Captain Drake and his officers did everything in their power to preserve the ship; they were cleared of any wrongdoing.
The Fowey settled on the bottom and gradually was covered with sand and coral. Today, the new documentation of her remains is helping specialists better understand the nature of life on board ship and the evolution of shipbuilding in what Seidel thinks is a significant and largely unexplored era of maritime history. “Historical and popular interest in the so-called ‘age of the fighting sailors’ is focused around the Napoleonic wars, so there are studies galore about the early 19-century navy. But before that, during the Georgian period, there were significant changes in the British Navy that set the stage for a lot of what followed. This ship is just prior to those changes, and if you want to understand the transition and evolution of naval warfare, you have to be looking at that precursor period.”
The Fowey is an opportunity to do just that. To make the study easier, the wreckage was thoroughly mapped and video-recorded by the archaeologists and divers who visited the site for two months in summer 1993. Divers tagged every inch at a one-inch-to-one-foot scale. As a backup, the divers used an experimental computer process called photogrammetry—in which several hundred 35-mm scaled prints are made of the wreckage from a variety of angles. The result of all this is a complete one-to-ten scale map of the wreckage with every fastener and joint recorded. In addition to being an archaeological record of the site, the maps eventually will be overlaid with others drawn of the wreckage during dives made in the early 1980s to show how the site has shifted as a result of time or the hurricane.
The archaeologists are looking at the ship’s framing and layout and have compared it to specifications from England to confirm its identity. There is a good deal of conformity in their comparisons, so they’re reasonably sure it is the Fowey, which was built in 1744 in Blades, Hull, England. The dimensions and physical characteristics of the ship found off Elliott Key, and the fact that the Fowey is known to have gone down in that area, leave little room for doubt. Two discoveries within the wreckage, however, have given researchers some cause for hesitation: Two pieces of pottery found in the boat could not have been made before the 1770s, 30 years after the ship went down, and some of the internal construction—the knees, which supported the gun deck—are a composite of wood and iron that was not thought to have been introduced in British vessels until some 50 years after it sank. “It’s possible that the Fowey may have been a little ahead of its time,” Seidel said.
If this is so, then this particular wreckage could say a lot about how closely private contractors followed military guidelines when building ships. “There were certain regulations, or ‘establishments,’ that contractors had to follow, but it is in the nature of military contracting that what people said they would do and were supposed to do and what they really did weren’t always the same thing,” Seidel said.
The wreckage of the Fowey also has provided a great deal of information about what happens to a ship once it becomes a wreck and is changing many commonly held beliefs. “The more we learn about shallow-water shipwrecks, the more we see the weaknesses in our ‘common sense’ notions,” Murphy declared, “such as that shallow-water wrecks are easily disturbed and that the wood structure is eaten away. In fact, none of that is true. Most of the ships survived the storm intact, and with the Fowey we have a shallow-water vessel that has a major piece of shell structure exposed, but has a high level of preservation.”
The issue of site preservation is significant right now, Seidel explained, because salvage operators are inflicting tremendous damage on wrecks by looting them. Many times, they get away with it legally, “saying that if they don’t get to it now it’s not going to be there in 10 or 20 years, and it’s better to get the information now than let it disappear. But that’s just not true. This thing has been there for more than 200 years, and the notion that it’s being destroyed is ludicrous.”
Fortunately, the Fowey is protected because it is in National Park territory. But that did not stop divers in the early 1980s from attempting to salvage what was then visible. When it was first discovered and one of the divers attempted to exert admiralty claim on it, some damaging excavations were undertaken. “They had exposed some of the structure, and I think they did some damage to the grass beds that held sediment intact over the wreck,” Seidel said. “That created an avenue for further erosion, which is one of the reasons the hurricane had such a dramatic impact.”
By the end of the 1993 investigation, team members realized that leaving the wreckage as it was would expose it to threat of theft or vandalism—and that recovering and preserving the ship’s remains was prohibitively expensive. Consequently, a dredge covered the Fowey with sand until permanent preservation plans were developed. Last spring, SCRU assembled a conference of 15 scholars to address the issue. The team included a coastal engineer, a marine ecologist, a marine biologist who specialized in sea grass, marine borers, a marine chemist, a geochemist, two sedimentologists, a specialist in wave mechanics, and resource managers from the park. They concluded that the ship had reached a stabilization after two centuries of burial that was disrupted by the 1980s looting and that the re-growth of sea grass is essential to the ship’s preservation, as it controls the movement of sediment.
Preservation efforts that rely on backfilling and sandbagging are unlikely to succeed. Cultural resources exist within a larger natural system, and human interference of any kind can have unforeseen consequences. With the Fowey, it appears, it makes a great deal of difference what kinds of materials are used to backfill excavations or disturbed areas. Sediments that are as close a match as possible to natural sediments in the area will be put on the site and monitored as an interim measure, and the scientists feel that the inclusion of muds and fine-grained sand may provide enough cohesion to resist erosion in the future.
In a broader sense, Seidel believes that these findings are critical because of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s current tendency to contract out to private parties to search for and excavate, even minimally, submerged archaeological sites, especially in the Florida Keys National Maritime Sanctuary. “This is done for a variety of reasons,” he said. “The notion that sites in the Keys are threatened by natural process has taken root, and this exploration policy is viewed as expanding our knowledge of a database that is shrinking. In addition, there may be a belief that limited excavations cannot be too damaging.”
Both of these assumptions are probably wrong: “The evidence suggests that these sites are actually quite stable until humans begin to fool with them,” Seidel said. “Once that happens—however limited initially—we are likely to see dramatic and negative impacts. These will not be seen right away, but over the long term they are almost inevitable.”
To protect the Fowey from this fate, the archaeologists’ strategy is to proceed with the matching-sediment placement, monitor the wood deterioration and metal corrosion, and if the preservation fails, to work on a more permanent solution. Seidel’s fear, however, is that nothing will work. “There may have been too much damage from the first excavation,” he reflected. “If that’s the case, then the Park Service will be faced with a tough decision: whether to excavate fully and document the wreck, to recover it, or to leave it alone and hope for the best.”