Following the discovery of a metal-coated rudder from an 18th-century warship wrecked off Sicily in 1718, reported on Divernet last month, an Irish dive-team has been in touch about its own Italian-linked rudder find last summer.
The rare copper-sheathed rudder found by the divers has been linked to a British merchant ship called the Recovery. The 30m-long vessel was reportedly laden with valuable Italian statues and other treasures when it was swept off course and sank in a storm off Carnsore Point, Wexford on Ireland’s south-east coast in 1787.
Six of the crew died in the sinking, including two of the captain’s sons.
The divers found the rudder at a depth of about 20m in a relatively featureless area of seabed. It lay some 200m from where earlier magnetometer surveys had led them to believe that the Recovery’s timber hull lies buried in 2-3m of sand. A range of marble, other stone and bronze artefacts are thought to remain onboard.
The location of an unidentified vessel had been confirmed by a series of multi-beam sonar surveys undertaken from the research vessel Keary as part of the INFOMAR long-term mapping of the Irish seabed run by Geological Survey Ireland and its partners.
The 6.8m-long rudder blade was found complete with its bronze pintles (attachment bolts) and part of the sternpost still attached – suggesting that the ship had met a sudden, violent end.
Very few examples of such rudders are thought to survive, and the dive-team have been contacting maritime museums around the world in the hope of establishing just how rare their find is.
Before the age of iron and steel ships, timber merchant vessels would sometimes be coated in copper to protect their hulls. The Royal Navy would adopt the practice to make its warships faster – though not until the 1850s.
Recovery was built in Chester in 1773 and around that time, as the dive-team have learnt, only about 200 of the 10,000 ships in the British merchant fleet were copper-clad.
Uninsured cargo
The ship was heading from London to Dublin carrying artworks including marble and other stone statues bought in Italy by the Earl of Charlemont during a nine-year European grand tour. He had obtained the sculptures to adorn the Custom House that was being built in the Irish capital at the time, but his valuable cargo is thought to have been uninsured.
Recovery was also said to have been carrying “a quantity of rich and rare curiosities of art and nature” collected in Europe by Irish banker John La Touche who, like the Earl of Charlemont, was reputed to be among the richest men in Europe.
Although no official manifest has been found, further treasures thought to be on the ship included the entire household contents of Daniel Corneille, the returning Governor of St Helena.
The dive-team of five is led by local maritime researcher Edmond O’Byrne, who also runs a drysuit repair and sales business. He has spent some 40 years searching for the Recovery, ever since stories about the ship first captured his imagination.
“We were among the first aqualung divers in this corner of Ireland,” O'Byrne told Divernet. “We found mainly wrecks from the world wars but then I heard about Recovery in 1985. The ship was long thought to have sunk in the shallows, but we found a newspaper report from the time indicating that it had been lost in deeper waters.
“Of course we had no GPS and the best we could do at that time was use magnetometers.”
Anchors and teapots
It is now thought that the buried ship had parted with its anchors, which would have made any magnetometer signals weak at best. The team located what they believe is one of the Recovery’s anchors and chain in the vicinity last year.
It was not until 2021 that the team came across a site at which timbers were protruding from the sandy seabed. They recovered one piece of wood for analysis, reported their discovery, and went on to find items including an ornate copper teapot, an inkwell and pieces of a cast-iron stove in the area.
‘Significant discovery’
“I’m 99% sure that it’s the Recovery,” O’Byrne told Ireland's National Monuments Service, but so far the NMS has remained unmoved at the prospect of excavating the site. It has stated that it has no plans to attempt to identify the wreck as long as it remains naturally protected by sand, and has committed itself no further than saying that it would “keep the situation under review”.
The divers, who operate under a no-disturbance licence, would naturally welcome the chance to be able to work with maritime archaeologists on excavating the wreck-site – so finding the rudder last summer provided their cause with fresh impetus. “It was very exciting – we never expected that,” says O’Byrne.
Museum discussions apart, he is hoping that Divernet readers might have information that would help to set the discovery in context. If a copper-clad rudder from the 18th century can be proven to be as rare a find as the team believes, this might encourage the authorities to think again about the potential advantages of authorising a wreck excavation.
Maritime Institute of Ireland president Joe Varley has paid tribute to the diving team and called their rudder discovery “very significant”, and the divers hope that the item might one day be raised for conservation and display.
Anyone with information on the rarity or otherwise of the dive-team’s find can contact Edmond O’Byrne at edmondobyrne@gmail.com, or call 0868 173477.
Also on Divernet: SICILY DIVER FINDS SHALLOW RUDDER, DEEP GUN, DIVERS’ TUDOR GUN HAUL CAUSED BRITISH-IRISH RIFT, THE SHOCK OF THE LUSITANIA, MALIN HEAD, IRELAND’S WRECK-DIVING MAGNET
