On May 6, 1863, Solomon Linnell II and Alfred Rogers spotted the ribs of a ship’s hull poking through tidal flats at Nauset Beach on Cape Cod.
A recent storm had caused the sands to shift, revealing the shipwreck with its timbers jutting skyward like skeletal fingers reaching out from a long-forgotten grave. Linnell and Rogers were excited by their find. On the same day that Union forces were limping away from a bloody beating by Gen. Robert E. Lee’s troops 600 miles away at the Battle of Chancellorsville in Virginia, they believed they had located the “Holy Grail” of Pilgrim-era artifacts: the Sparrow-Hawk, an English ship that had run aground in 1626.
A century and a half later, we still don’t know for certain whether they were right. Nothing was ever found identifying the shipwreck’s provenance. Not even the boat’s real name is known; Sparrow-Hawk is what the discoverers dubbed the 1626 ship they thought they’d found.
