When a group researching the final resting place of the Defence got their hands on one of the ship’s cannons, buried in the mud of a Maine harbor for 200 years, their archaeologist partners at Texas A&M asked an important question: Is it loaded?
It was, as it turns out, explain David Wyman and Donald Small, two retirees who, over the past two winters, built a 1/16 replica of the 85-foot Defence. Both men taught at Maine Maritime Academy. Wyman and others took dives on the wreck in the 1970s.
The ship was part of the colonial effort to dislodge the British from Castine during the war for American independence.
Building the replica took a couple of winters, the men say. Raising key parts of the Defence back in the 1970s took several summers.
And the work was potentially dangerous, as they learned.
“You need to show that the cannon is unloaded,” Small remembers the Texas A&M researchers advising when it was raised.
“The ball, wadding, and powder were all there,” Wyman adds.
That long-loaded, now disarmed cannon today resides in the Naval History Museum in Washington D.C., while most of the Defence still lies on the bottom of Stockton Harbor, a good-sized cove between Cape Jellison to the east and Sears Island to the west.
Researchers have been guarded about the wreck’s exact location, and with good reason—at low tide, she’s in only about 11 feet of water. Souvenir seekers might be tempted to retrieve some part of the ship.
The Defence replica was an appropriate project for Wyman, Small, and the others to tackle. The ship played a role in an important part of the town’s history.
The Penobscot Expedition in 1779 was the American attempt to drive the British from Castine, a headland strategically situated at the top of Penobscot Bay near the mouth of the river. But the colonial forces were routed, due to “poor coordination, bickering commanders, inadequate training, and inexplicable delay,” according to the Castine Historical Society’s website.
Paul Revere, one of the leaders of the Penobscot Expedition, was court-martialed for his part, but later exonerated.
The Americans fled in their ships, and the Defence—a two-masted brigantine, or brig, which Small says probably was square rigged—ducked into Stockton Harbor as the British vessels pursued.
“The crew took her into Stockton Harbor thinking the British wouldn’t see her,” Small explains, perhaps hoping she would be hidden behind Sears Island. But when the British forces closed in on her, the captain and crew jumped overboard and swam to shore, setting the vessel on fire as they left.
The fire was probably set near stern where the magazine was stored, which Small believes contained a sizable amount of gunpowder.
The ship landed on her side as she sank and over the years, settled into the bottom, “with about the deck line” above the mud, Small says.
Other American vessels, including the Samuel, Warren, Vengeance, General Putnam, Charming Sally, Hector, Black Prince, Monmouth, Hazzard and Tyrannicide were scuttled as they fled up the Penobscot River. Those wrecks lie north of Sandy Point through to Bangor.
It’s believed the Defence was built somewhere north of Boston, probably in Beverly.
“American ships at that time were not constructed from any plans,” Small explained, but rather relied on a shipwright’s personal approach. The names of the owners are known, he added, and one was of the prominent Cabot family of Boston.
The Defence served as a privateer, a vessel sanctioned by the fledgling U.S. government to attack British shipping.
“They were sailing, hoping to make money on what they could capture,” Small said.
It was Dean Mayhew, who joined the Maine Maritime Academy faculty in 1963, who came to believe the sunken ship was in Stockton Harbor. According to Underwater Dig: The Excavation of a Revolutionary War Privateer, by Barbara Ford and David C. Switzer (William Morrow and Company, 1982), Mayhew had become interested in the Penobscot Expedition while he was a student, and when he arrived in Castine, he began investigating.
A letter from the period by a British admiral noted an enemy vessel had been caught in Stockton Harbor. Almost 200 years later, Mayhew learned that a local fisherman, Cappy Hall, reported snagging his nets on something unusual in the area, according to Underwater Dig.
In 1972, the Academy organized a summer ocean engineering project for the school’s students, as well as for some attending the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. One of the tasks for students was building and operating a sonar device. Needing a target to test their work, someone remembered Mayhew’s theory that a shipwreck lay at the bottom of Stockton Harbor.
Wyman remembers the students working at making the sonar able to identify objects to the side rather than just downward. Passing over the location where the fisherman snagged his net, an unusual shape was identified. Students with scuba gear dove and immediately found items that appeared to be cannons. Soon after, a “shot rack,” a carved wooden shelf holding cannon balls, was found and raised.
In all, 16 cannons that would have fired six-pound balls were found. The divers also found a brick cook stove, dishes, spoons, belt buckles, and leather shoes. The vessel’s “breast hook,” a timber near the bow to which framing members were attached, was found, still with bark on it.
The Maine State Museum in Augusta has in its collection a tin with blueberries, a ration for one of the 100 who served on the Defence. The crew was probably small, the men say, with the others aboard serving with the Massachusetts militia.
The excavation work continued each summer, Wyman remembers, from 1972 through 1980, by carefully working in 5-foot by 5-foot grids. “We dove every day for six weeks,” he said. “There was some discussion about raising it,” he said of the ship, but it seemed too difficult.
“I took a lot of the measurements,” Wyman remembers, carrying a tape measure down to the bottom with him into the Stockton Harbor mud. “Getting the measurements took multiple years.”
In recent years, when Small and Wyman would walk around town together, they began discussing the idea of building a scale model of the Defence. Others agreed to help, including Dick Anderson, Steve Brookman, and Walt Murphy.
“We worked one morning a week once the snow fell,” Small said. “There was probably as much conversation as work,” he joked.
Unlike most ship models, the viewer is about to see into the structure, so replicas of the breast hook, the stove, and the cannons are visible.
The model is on display at the Wilson Museum on Perkins Street in Castine.
