The British warship HMS Northumberland was built in 1679 as part of a wave of naval modernisation overseen by Samuel Pepys, a decade after he had stopped writing his celebrated diary and gone on to become the Royal Navy’s most senior administrator.
Twenty-four years later, after the ship had taken part in many of the major naval battles of its day, it was at the bottom of the North Sea, a victim of the Great Storm of 1703, one of the deadliest weather disasters in British history.
Now, more than three centuries later, the Northumberland is giving up its secrets thanks to shifting sands off the Kent coast, which have exposed a large section of its hull.
A survey has revealed that the ship is in a remarkable state of preservation, with not only its timbers but ropes and even unopened casks having been protected from erosion and decay in the sand.
The survey, funded by Historic England, which oversees protected wreck sites around the country, found that much more of the ship’s hull remains than was previously thought, potentially making the wreck of the Northumberland one of the best-preserved wooden warships in the UK. Other artefacts detected on the seabed include copper cauldrons, seven iron cannon and part of a wooden gun carriage.
As more of the Northumberland is revealed, however, archaeologists say they are in a race against time to learn all they can from what has been called a “Stuart time capsule” before its timbers are claimed by the sea.
The wreck of the Northumberland, one of more than a dozen navy ships lost during the Great Storm, was first located in 1980 in the Goodwin Sands, an area of shallow water off the coast of Deal, in eastern Kent. Hefin Meara, a marine archaeologist at Historic England, said the area, while difficult to access and dive, “is brilliant for preserving material like this”.
He said: “We’re incredibly lucky that because this site has been covered for so long, the sand has kept it in really, really good condition. That rope, for instance, is as fresh as it was on the day the ship sailed, and we’ve got very well preserved casks and barrels and similar – at this stage we just don’t know what is in them.”
While the survey found that parts of the wreck were standing proud of the seabed, Meara said there was “still quite a lot of the ship surviving even deeper into the sand”. “There is a lot of archaeology at this site, and there is a huge amount we can learn from it,” he added.
That includes answering questions such as how ships were made and fitted out at a key time in British naval history, when Pepys, as secretary to the admiralty, was trying to professionalise it into a modern fighting force.
Meara said the wealth of organic material surviving was unusual. “Cannon iron can survive well at wreck sites, but it is quite rare to come across the wooden carriages that they were sitting on. There are many, many things like that that give us the opportunity to drill down and find out more.”
Among very well preserved naval wrecks, marine archaeologists and historians can look to the Mary Rose, from the early 16th century, and other ships from the later 17th and 18th centuries, he said. “This one fills in the gap.”
Unlike the Mary Rose, however, cost and practicalities mean there are no plans to recover the Northumberland. “We have these incredibly dynamic seabed environments where wrecks can be buried for hundreds of years – and then that sand cover moves away,” Meara said.
“Suddenly the wreckage is exposed to marine biological organisms and chemical processes operating on things like iron. A wreck that can survive in incredibly good condition for centuries will decay very, very quickly [once exposed]. So we have a small window of opportunity to go and discover what is there, and answer those questions. We are now at the mercy of the elements, and it is a race to see what we can save.”