Museum team finds historic shipwreck off North Queensland coast

by Australian National Maritime Museum on 6 Jan 2009
Australian National Maritime Museum archaeologists have almost certainly found the site of an intriguing 1829 shipwreck on the Great Barrier Reef some 20 km off the coast of North Queensland.

Scanning Flora Reef, 13 km east of the Frankland Islands off Cairns, they have found an anchor and other metal fittings which they consider probably mark the final resting place of HM Schooner Mermaid, a government vessel that ran aground and broke up on a voyage from Sydney to Port Raffles (in what is now the Northern Territory).

They hope to find further evidence in the next few days to confirm the vessel’s identity. 'This is an historically significant shipwreck, and there have been several attempts to locate where it happened – all of them unsuccessful so far,' the leader of the museum team, maritime archaeologist and curator Kieran Hosty, said today. 'There’s great excitement among the team at the strong prospect we’ve found it.'

The search team, which includes National Maritime Museum archaeologists and divers as well as scientists from James Cook University and the Museum of Tropical Queensland, set out from Cairns on New Year’s Day specifically to search for the Mermaid wreck site.

They targeted Flora Reef as earlier searches had discounted several other possible sites.

Scanning the seabed with magnetometers on Sunday afternoon (4 Jan) they located a site 'of interest' in 2.0 metres of water. Archaeologists dived and identified a length of anchor chain, rigging components, part of a magnetic compass and some copper-alloy hull fastenings, all apparently from a vessel of the early 19th century.

The team yesterday (Mon) made a further discovery – an iron anchor, also clearly from an early 19th century vessel.

'This is fairly strong evidence,' Kieran Hosty said today. 'In the official inquiry that followed the shipwreck, it was recorded that the crew threw an anchor overboard when the vessel was in trouble and tried to pull Mermaid off the reef… and they did this just a half a cable (150 metres) from the site where the ship finally ran aground and broke up.

'The anchor we’ve found is the right age, the right size, the right distance from the identified wreck site and in the right alignment.'

Mr Hosty said the museum team is now pegging out the area in order to carry out a thorough archaeological search for further corroborating evidence and for clues as to what happened on board the vessel on that fateful day.

Because of the age anchor and the other objects, the Flora Reef shipwreck site will now be protected under the Commonwealth Historic Shiprecks Act (1976).

Mermaid , a 21-metre wooden vessel built in India, was well known in Australian waters in the late 1820s, having circumnavigated the continent on a voyage of exploration under the command of Lieutenant Philip Parker King RN.

Parker King mapped vast lengths of coastline from Arnhem Land to Cape Leeuwin and King George Sound to the Great Barrier Reef.

Mermaid left Sydney for Port Raffles (Cobourg Peninsula) on 10 May, 1829. When it reached North Queensland its Captain, Samuel Nolbrow, had strict instructions to follow the safer inshore passage, inside the Barrier Reef.

For some unknown reason Nolbrow elected to take a shorter, more dangerous route through the reef which was (and still is) incompletely surveyed. In this he acted against the active advice of other officers on bvoard.
Mermaid ran aground and was wrecked on an unidentified reef on 13 June 1829. The captain and crew took to the ship’s boats and were rescued 11 days later by a passing merchant ship, the Admiral Gifford.

The present expedition, with 25 personnel in two Cairns-based research vessels Nimrod Explorer and Spoilsport, is being sponsored by the Silentworld Foundation, part of Silentworld Ltd, an Australian shipping company.

The research party includes two students and a teacher from Bega High School, the winners of a national essay and multimedia competition on maritime history and archaeology.

The students are producing an illustrated blog which they are posting daily on the National Maritime Museum’s website at http://anmm.wordpress.com/category/maritime-archaeology/

www.anmm.gov.au