New analysis provides more clues about Pilgrim-era shipwreck

In 1626, a ship foundered in stormy seas and wrecked on Cape Cod, where the passengers were aided by the local Indigenous population and the Pilgrims in nearby Plymouth.

Now the most in-depth scientific analysis of timbers found more than 150 years ago has provided the best evidence yet that they belonged to the ill-fated vessel known as the Sparrow-Hawk.

The results of an international, multiyear study on the remains of the ship were published Friday in the “Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.”

“I am just over the top about this news,” said Donna Curtin, executive director of the Pilgrim Hall Museum in Plymouth, which has been in possession of 109 timbers from the Sparrow-Hawk since 1889.

The timbers have long been assumed to be from the roughly 40-foot (12-meter) Sparrow-Hawk — the oldest known shipwreck of English Colonial America — based largely on where they were found, but there always remained some uncertainty.

“Historical narratives get distorted over time,” Curtin said.

Historians do know that a small ship bound for Jamestown, Virginia, with a pair of English merchants and several Irish servants on board was driven ashore by a storm in 1626 in what today is the town of Orleans, based on the written accounts of Plymouth Colony Gov. William Bradford.

“Ther was a ship, with many passengers in her and sundrie goods, bound for Virginia,” Bradford wrote, going on to describe how the vessel had been at sea for six weeks, how the captain had become sick with scurvy, and they had run out of water and beer.

As for the passengers, “The cheefe amongst these people was one Mr. Fells and Mr. Sibsie, which had many servants belonging unto them, many of them being Irish,” he wrote.

They are the first documented Irish colonists in New England, although as indentured...