A Boy Found a Shipwreck on a Scottish Beach. It Turned Out to Be a 250-Year-Old Warship From the American Revolution

The HMS “Hind,” later renamed the “Earl of Chatham,” was a frigate in the British Royal Navy before it was repurposed as a whaling vessel

Christian Thorsberg | Daily Correspondent

July 29, 2025

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After a windy winter storm whipped against the Scottish island of Sanday in February 2024, a schoolboy stumbled upon several peculiar wooden beams emerging from the dunes of a local beach.

The beams were the ribs of an old wooden ship, though nobody knew the vessel’s identity. The wreckage quickly became a subject of fascination among the 500-person community on the island, which has a long history of commercial fishing and seafaring.

Sanday, the third-largest of Scotland’s Orkney Islands, was once known as Scotland’s “cradle of shipwrecks.” Roughly 270 have been discovered on its 20-square-mile coastline since the 1400s. Locals quickly jumped into action following the boy’s discovery, using tractors to excavate 12 tons of oak timbers buried under the sand.

Dig It!, an organization that supports Scottish archaeology, named the wreck as one of Scotland’s five biggest archaeological discoveries of 2024.

“I would regard it as a lucky ship, which is a strange thing to say about a ship that’s wrecked,” Ben Saunders, the senior marine archaeologist at Wessex Archaeology, a research firm commissioned to help identify the shipwreck, tells the Associated Press’ Jill Lawless. “I think if it had been found in many other places, it wouldn’t necessarily have had that community drive, that desire to recover and study that material, and also the community spirit to do it.”

Now, more than a year after the discovery, the island finally has its long sought-for answers. Archaeologists used dendrochronology, the study of tree rings, to determine the ship was built in the mid-1700s with wood sourced from the south of England. Using a list of historical wrecks near the island, researchers identified the ship as a 500-ton vessel called the Earl of Chatham.

“You remove ones that are Northern European as opposed to British, you remove wrecks that are too small or operating out of the north of England and you really are down to two or three … and Earl of Chatham is the last one left,” Saunders tells the AP.

Built in 1749 in Chichester, England, the ship was originally known as the HMS Hind, a 24-gun frigate that served in the British Royal Navy. In its early years, the Hind was stationed in Jamaica, which was a British colony at the time, according to the Washington Post’s Leo Sands. It was later used in the sieges of Louisbourg and Quebec during the French and Indian War.

During the American Revolutionary War, the Hind protected British cargo and helped escort convoys to and from the colonies. Between 1780 and 1781, the vessel’s crew “proved relatively adept at its task, intercepting at least four American privateers,” writes the Washington Post.

The ship was decommissioned in 1784 and sold to a London-based merchant, who changed its name to the Earl of Chatham. For four years, the frigate was one of roughly 120 London-based ships that undertook annual whaling expeditions in the Arctic waters around Greenland. In 1788, on its way to the Arctic, the vessel capsized not far off Sanday’s coast. All 56 members of its crew are thought to have survived.

250 year old shipwreck discovered in Orkney gives up its secrets

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Today, the ship’s timbers are preserved in a freshwater tank at the Sanday Heritage Center, where they’re on display for visitors.

“The discovery of the Sanday wreck is a rare and fascinating story,” says Alison Turnbull, director of external relations and partnerships at Historic Environment Scotland, in a statement from the organization.

“Wessex Archaeology worked closely with the community of Sanday to discover the ship’s identity, which shows that communities hold the keys to their own heritage,” she adds. “It is our job to empower communities to make these discoveries and be able to tell the story of their historic environment.”

Christian Thorsberg | Read More

Christian Thorsberg is an environmental writer and photographer from Chicago. His work, which often centers on freshwater issues, climate change and subsistence, has appeared in Circle of Blue, Sierra magazine, Discover magazine and Alaska Sporting Journal.