A nor'easter that lashed Nantucket over the weekend stripped away enough sand to reveal the wooden bones of a shipwreck long buried on the Massachusetts island's south shore, and a tip from a local resident helped news outlets find it.
The discovery came to light through the local newspaper. Jason Graziadei, editor-in-chief of the Nantucket Current, was covering the storm when he received a message from a reader. The tipster, David DeHart, reported finding what he believed to be a shipwreck uncovered by the storm.
"I drove out there with my son Owen and sure enough, it was right there where David said it was," Graziadei told NPR via email.
Photos taken at the site show newly visible wooden timbers jutting out of the sand in the rough shape of a hull, with waves breaking over the remnants. The remains sit on a south shore beach known as Point of Breakers, the same stretch of coastline where fragments of a vessel were identified in 2022.
That earlier find set in motion years of work by the state's leading underwater archaeology experts. David Robinson, director and chief archaeologist for the Massachusetts Board of Underwater Archeological Resources, inspected the 2022 discoveries and spent several months conducting research alongside the Egan Maritime Institute and the Nantucket Historical Association.
Robinson's conclusion was that the wreckage most likely came from the schooner Warren Sawyer. In a 2023 interview with the Nantucket Current, he described the process of historical archaeology, saying that as with most work of its kind, researchers explore the available literature and archival, photographic and archaeological evidence assembled for a site, working collectively toward a conclusive determination about whether the wreckage belongs to a tern — a type of sailing vessel — the Warren Sawyer.
Schooners were the workhorses of 19th-century coastal commerce, and the Warren Sawyer was no exception. The vessel was a cargo ship carrying bales of cotton and scrap metal from New Orleans to Boston when it went down in the night of Dec. 22, 1884, in a storm. Local historical accounts have long placed the grounding at this site on Nantucket's south shore.
For archaeologists, the exposure of the timbers is significant less for the drama of the moment than for what it reveals about how a site can be studied more than a century later. Coastal storms routinely unearth and rebury submerged or buried material, exposing features that had been hidden by sand for generations. Each new cycle of erosion can add detail to a record that is otherwise assembled from scattered fragments.
The timing was fortuitous for researchers who had already surveyed the area. Because the 2022 investigation drew the attention of the Board of Underwater Archeological Resources, the Nantucket Historical Association and the Egan Maritime Institute, the newly exposed structure falls within a documented site rather than an unknown one. That means researchers returning to Point of Breakers can compare what the storm revealed against the record assembled in prior seasons.
The identification also carries weight for the wider community. The Nantucket Historical Association and the Egan Maritime Institute have an interest in documenting wrecks tied to the island's maritime economy, and a confirmed site can inform everything from local histories of shipping losses to assessments of how storms and shifting sand reshape the coastline.
What remains uncertain is the degree of certainty about the vessel's identity. Robinson framed his determination as a conclusion drawn from the best available evidence rather than a final verdict, a caution typical of underwater archaeology, where wooden remains decay, scatter and are sometimes moved by currents. The phrase "likely belonged to" is doing significant work in the reporting, reflecting the difficulty of proving the link between a named schooner and an anonymous set of timbers more than 140 years after the fact.
The storm also serves as a reminder of the conditions under which Nantucket residents live and work. Heavy winds and seas battered the island, which sits at the edge of the Atlantic and is routinely exposed to nor'easters. For residents, the same weather that disrupts daily life can open windows onto the island's past.
For now, the remains lie in the open air and surf at Point of Breakers, visible to anyone who makes the trip down to the south shore beach. Whether additional investigation will formally confirm the Warren Sawyer identification remains an open question, but the discovery has given researchers a renewed reason to return to a stretch of shoreline that has already proven to hold more history than its sandy appearance suggests.
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