Parts of a shipwreck discovered on a beach in Sanday in the Orkney Islands off mainland Scotland.Credit :
Wessex Archaeology
A schoolboy running along a beach in Scotland made an incredible discovery — a 275-year-old ship that once belonged to the British Royal Navy.
He discovered the ship’s hull in February 2024 after a storm in Sanday, one of the small Orkney Islands off the country’s northernmost tip. However, researchers were only recently able to solve the mystery of where it came from, according to the Associated Press.
After the boy’s initial discovery of a large section of the hull, residents of the 500-person island came together to help preserve what was left of the wreck. Local farmers used tractors and trailers to haul the 12 tons of oak timbers off the sand, and local historians then dived into an intense period of research to hopefully identify the ship and how it came to be on their local beach.
Section of the Earl of Chatham, formerly the HMS Hind.
Credit: Wessex Archaeology
“That was really good fun, and it was such a good feeling about the community — everybody pulling together to get it back,” one of the island’s community researchers, Sylvia Thorne, told AP. “Quite a few people are really getting interested in it and becoming experts.”
Researchers dated the wood on the ship to the mid-1700s — specifically from southern England — which allowed them to eliminate non-British ships from their search. They then eliminated shipwrecks that were too small or that would have originated from the wrong part of the country, and it led them to identify the vessel as the whaling ship the Earl of Chatham.
However, further research revealed that before the ship was the Earl of Chatham, it was the HMS Hind, a 24-gun Royal Navy ship built in 1749. The HMS Hind was active in the British sieges of Louisbourg and Quebec in the 1750s and was also deployed by the British during the American Revolution in the 1770s, per AP.
The vessel was ultimately sold and used as a whaling ship in the Arctic Circle until it eventually sank in a storm on the North Sea on April 29, 1788, according to .The Gurdian.
Experts consider the ship “lucky” — despite its demise. All 56 crew members survived the shipwreck, and its time at sea was “amazingly long-lived,” given the period and conditions in which it was active, according to Ben Saunders, senior marine archaeologist at Wessex Archaeology, per The Guardian.
Saunders also noted that researchers and local community members were additionally fortunate because there happened to be so much archival information that helped them positively identify the vessel.
“We’re lucky to have so much archive material, because of the period and because of where it wrecked in Orkney. It’s been very satisfying,” he added.
