Archaeologists say wooden wreckage exposed on Nantucket in late September is not the Warren Sawyer but instead appears to be a roughly 50‑foot section of a large merchant vessel dating to the late 19th or early 20th century, the Egan Maritime Institute said in an Oct. 8 news release reporting on an Oct. 7 assessment by state archaeologists.
The Massachusetts Board of Underwater Archaeological Resources (BUAR) has said the Warren Sawyer was a three‑masted schooner that ran aground on Dec. 22, 1884, while carrying 1,115 bales of cotton and 28 tons of scrap iron from New Orleans to Boston; the captain and seven crew members were rescued and local residents recovered hundreds of bales of cotton after the grounding, BUAR records show.
The Warren Sawyer’s remains had been documented in the same area in 2022 and 2023, but the recent assessment concluded the newly exposed timbers do not match those earlier remains, the Egan Maritime Institute said.
David Robinson, director and chief archaeologist of the BUAR, told Fox News Digital that several physical clues prompted the re‑evaluation: the newly exposed ribs were larger than those in the previously documented Warren Sawyer remains, the types of wood differed, and some iron fastenings appeared to date to after 1884.
“So those clues led us to believe that this probably was not from the same vessel and not Warren Sawyer,” Robinson said to Fox News Digital. He added the remains may be from a schooner barge, a type of merchant vessel used along the East Coast in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but he cautioned the identification is uncertain.
Robinson said researchers are turning to historical records and a weight‑of‑evidence approach to try to narrow candidate ships. The Egan Maritime Institute release also noted the fragment is unusually large for wreckage exposed along the Massachusetts coast and that the site was the first in the state to receive a tag under a shipwreck monitoring program to help track remains as they move along the shoreline.
Jon Ross Myers is the executive editor and publisher of the Mississippi News Network, Mississippi's largest digital only media company. He can be reached at editor@tippahnews.com
