A ghostly shipwreck has emerged in Newfoundland, and residents want to know its story
Wreck could have been dislodged during post-tropical storm Fiona
The massive, overturned hull of a seeminglyancient ship has appeared without warning along the southwestern tipof Newfoundland, dazzling nearby residents eager to know who mayhave been aboard and how it met its fate.
Wanda Blackmore says her 21-year-old son, Gordon, came roaringinto her house on the morning of Jan. 20 after spotting the longshadow beneath the water just off the beach near Cape Ray, N.L. Assoon as the tide went out, she put on her jacket and set out to seeit herself.
Since then, the wreck has attracted a steady stream of localadmirers heading out to examine its long, curved planks and thewooden dowels holding them together.
"It's amazing, there is no other word for it," Blackmore saidin an interview. "I'm just curious if they can name the ship, andhow old it is and if there were any souls lost on her."
Gordon Blackmore was out hunting seabirds early in the morningwhen he first saw the wreck, his mother said. He'd been at the samespot just a few days before and there was no sign of it.
But the beaches along that corner of Newfoundland have erodedsubstantially in the past few years. As post-tropical storm Fionatore through the area on Sept. 24, 2022, destroying about 100 homesand pounding away shorelines, it churned up the sand along Cape RayBeach, said Neil Burgess, president of the Shipwreck PreservationSociety of Newfoundland and Labrador.
If the ship was buried, Fiona may have dislodged it from itssandy grave, and each subsequent storm would have loosened itfurther, Burgess said. There were large swells there last week, andthey may have finally unearthed the wreck enough to be discovered bysomeone out hunting birds.
Burgess said he figures the ship was built in the 1800s, noting a few different factors led him to that conclusion. The wooden dowels noted by Wanda Blackwood are called trunnels and they were used as nails in wooden ships from that era. There are also copper pegs in the wreck, each more than two centimetres wide, which were used tofasten the hull's planks together, which Burgess said are quite large.
The emerged hull is about 24 metres long, and it's not complete,which means the ship itself was even longer than that, he added.
"It was a fairly substantial sailing ship, bigger than aschooner, I think," Burgess said, adding that if its hull is madeof oak, it wasn't built in North America.
He hasn't yet been out to see the wreck he lives in St. John's,about 900 kilometres east by highway but he's looking for anopportunity to get there.
The seabed around Newfoundland is littered with "thousands" ofshipwrecks and they surface from time to time, he said. But thatdoesn't make the Cape Ray wreck any less exciting.
"This is perfect," Burgess said. "This is a great, great event."
Wanda Blackmore is also excited, and she spent much of the pastweek emailing anyone she could think of the Maritime HistoryArchive at Memorial University, even the premier who might be ableto dispatch experts to Cape Ray and make sure the wreck isprotected.
She hopes they'll be able to determine the ship's story andperhaps even get part of it displayed at the museum at the Cape Raylighthouse, which is a federally recognized heritage structure. Thefirst lighthouse at the site was built in 1871 to guide ships fromall over the world through the Cabot Strait, at the meeting of theGulf of St. Lawrence and the open Atlantic Ocean.
Cape Ray was part of a high-traffic route centuries ago, and thewreck could be from anywhere, she said. "We don't know!"
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