6 days ago
Solved: riddle of the shipwreck that emerged from island sands
On a cold bright February morning last year, in the still that follows a winter storm, the people of Sanday discovered the timbers of a boat on one of their sweeping beaches.
There is nothing unusual about wrecks in this northern outpost of the Orkney Islands, on the edge of the treacherous gap between the Atlantic Ocean and the North Sea.
But this ship was clearly very old, its hull held together with wooden pegs rather than nails. It was so old that even specialist archaeologists were not confident they would ever find out what it was.
Until the timbers told their own story. A detailed dendrochronological study has revealed the vessel was made with oaks grown in the south of England and felled in the middle of the 18th century.
Now, after more than a year of painstaking research, archaeologists and historians have solved the mystery of the Sanday wreck and revealed it is a Royal Navy frigate called HMS Hind, which sank in 1788.
'There was always a hope,' Ben Saunders of Wessex Archaeology said, when asked if he thought he would ever find out what exactly had emerged from the sands of Sanday. 'But we've been very, very lucky with this. We started out with the list of wrecks, which had been collated through various researches over the years. On Sanday alone that is 270, a colossal number.'
The wood, Saunders explained, was key. Many ships in the early modern period were built with timber harvested from the great forests of Poland and the Baltic. That kind of vessel would have been almost impossible to trace. Rarer English oak was another story. Historians scouring records eventually realised the Sanday wreck must be the Hind. And this was a ship with an incredible history of her own.
The 24-gunner fought at Louisbourg and Quebec in the Seven Years War with France before helping the British Empire try, unsuccessfully, to quell rebellion in its American colonies.
Old and obsolete, the Hind was eventually sold and converted to a 500-ton Arctic whaler, feeding fast-industrialising Britain's almost insatiable demand for oil. Renamed the Earl of Chatham, it was on an Arctic journey, under a new skipper, a Captain Paterson, when it wrecked off Sanday in March 1788. Its entire 56-man crew was saved.
The accident even made the pages of The Aberdeen Journal, a predecessor of today's Press and Journal, the following month. The paper called Sanday 'the cradle of shipwrecks in Scotland'.
Saunders and his team, supported by Historic Environment Scotland and Sanday and wider Orkney volunteers, also dug into the written history of the Northern Isles and their astonishing kindness to mariners thrown on to their shores.
He said: 'Throughout this project, we have learnt so much about the wreck, but also about the community in Sanday in the 1780s. Sanday was infamous for shipwrecks at the time, 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 seas.'
Sanday over the years has snared Danish and Swedish East Indiamen, Dutch warships, emigrant ships headed from Germany for a new life in America and dozens of smaller trading vessels.
Islanders had speculated that last year's wreck might have been a vessel from the Spanish Armada as it scattered north after skirmishing with the English in 1588. Local lore has long claimed any islanders with dark hair or olive skin must be descended from one of Philip II's would-be invaders of England.
Deep in the files of the Statistical Accounts of Scotland, which began in the late 18th century, a Northern Isles minister called William Clouston boasted of the way his parishioners handled wrecks. In impeccable English, he said one captain from Danzig (modern-day Gdansk) who had lost his ship in Orkney in 1774 had declared that 'if he was to be wrecked he would wish it to be on Sanday'.
Saunders believed the Orcadian cleric was contrasting the hospitality of his community with a myth of Cornish 'wreckers', but the archaeologist added: 'I spent a lot of time in Sanday over the last year. It's a very hospitable place, it's very kind. They've been very, very welcoming to me. And I massively appreciate all the work they've done on the project as well.'
The archaeologist may have to return. Climate change is hitting hard in Sanday and some of the other low-lying north isles of Orkney. Experts expect more wrecks to be exposed as storms move the islands' sands.
The Hind, meanwhile, has been preserved. Its timbers are in a freshwater tank at Sanday Heritage Centre.
