The find was “a huge curiosity,” Curtin said. The hull was removed from the sand and widely displayed. A local landowner gave it the name Sparrow-Hawk, according to the Journal of Archaeological Science. The story achieved wide currency after a storm churned up a saltmarsh in 1863, revealing the site of a former harbor in Orleans and Chatham and exposing the timbers of a shipwreck. The following year, the servants were sent by ship to Virginia, because their indentures bound them to service there. One of the ship’s male passengers impregnated one of the maids, and the two fled to Boston apparently “to escape punishment,” Bradford wrote. They were housed with various families, and remained in the colony long enough for ties to develop. The arrival of a significant number of newcomers not intending to become part of a religiously founded colony - and not all of them English - may have had a significant impact on the colony’s daily life. The ship’s passengers included two English merchants along with farmers and the indentured servants. “There was a ship, with many passengers in her and sundrie goods, bound for Virginia,” Bradford wrote at the beginning of a detailed account of the incident in his journal of the colony’s history, “Of Plymouth Plantation: 1620-1647,” published in 1981. The shipwreck and the removal of its passengers to Plymouth is one of the most dramatic stories of early 17th-century New England. But scientists, using newly developed techniques, were able to “lower the window of improbability” of that identification, Curtin said. “We hope to move beyond assumptions to the realm of the probability,” she said.īuried by the tides until a 19th-century storm exposed them, the timbers have long been believed to belong to the ship bound for Virginia in 1626. The new effort to confirm an old find will help the museum to flesh out an intriguing episode in the Pilgrim story.Ĭurtain said the study gives Pilgrim Hall Museum a scientific basis to display the timbers in future exhibitions and pursue its effort to develop a nuanced portrait of the ship’s passengers and what effect their stay in Plymouth might have had on both the colony and on their own futures. The results of the study published in a March 11 article in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, titled “Dating the timbers from the Sparrow Hawk, a shipwreck from Cape Cod, USA,” confirm the remains are the oldest known shipwreck in Colonial English America. “Are they, in fact, from the same vessel described by William Bradford that brought the first documented Irish colonists to New England?” “One great question has haunted this assemblage of salt-worn timbers,” Curtin said. The ship’s 109 timbers have been assembled into a skeletal hull, “disassembled, measured, drawn, and exhibited many times,” said Pilgrim Hall’s executive director, Donna Curtin, “but they have never been fully examined archeologically or forensically until now.
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