On September 26, 2026, a nor'easter cut into the bluff near the drive-on beach access by the sewer beds and exposed a run of dark, weathered timbers at its base. Island resident David DeHart spotted them, and David Robinson, director and chief archaeologist of the Massachusetts Board of Underwater Archaeological Resources, told the Nantucket Current they were most likely the same wreckage uncovered in 2022 and later identified as the Warren Sawyer—a three-masted schooner lost on that stretch of beach on December 22, 1884.
THE STORY BEHIND THE SCHOONER
She was a working vessel, not a grand one: a 360-ton coastal schooner, the kind sailors called a tern for her three masts, bound from New Orleans to Boston that December with 1,115 bales of cotton and 28 tons of scrap iron below deck. A gale drove her off course, and around 11 p.m. she went ashore near Miacomet.
On the beach, Eugene Clisby, a patrolman from the Surfside Life-Saving Station, caught her lights off Miacomet Rip and ran back to call all hands. The surf was breaking clean over the hull; only the masts showed, swaying against the dark. Capt. Veeder fired a line over the jib-stay, aimed well forward so it wouldn't strike anyone aboard, but the sailors were too numb with cold to work their way forward and make it fast. It took a second patrolman, Williams, waiting for a lull and running down into the wash to sling a hand line over the bow himself. The crew secured it, the lifesavers rigged a breeches buoy—a life ring fitted with canvas breeches, hung from a pulley that runs along a hawser from ship to shore—and one by one, Capt. Edwin L. Saunders and his seven men came off the wreck. All eight survived.
For the next two weeks, before the sea finished breaking her apart, islanders worked the wreck—unloading cotton, stripping spars and gear—while a steady stream of onlookers came out to watch. Wendell Macy, the New Bedford-born painter who summered on Nantucket and had a sharp eye for what would sell to its visitors, painted the scene at least seven times and hung one version in Congdon's Pharmacy on Main Street before shipping it to New Bedford for exhibition.
"One of Nantucket's most complete and remarkable stories of shoals, storms, and rescue."
Charles Allard, Egan Maritime Institute, 2023
The schooner has been surfacing on her own schedule ever since. A cyclist found a section of what researchers believe is her lower bow in December 2022; two months later, a resident walking her dog came across a larger piece of the stern farther west, its heavy beams still studded with iron fastenings. Robinson, working with the Egan Maritime Institute and the Nantucket Historical Association, named the Warren Sawyer the likeliest match, though the team stopped short of complete certainty, citing a discrepancy in the fastening hardware on record and the number of other ships that broke up along the same shore. Egan Maritime has said the site tends to reveal itself about once every 20 years. This time, it took less than four. The next run of tides will likely cover her again—anyone heading out to look should view the timbers from the beach and leave them exactly where they lie.