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Wrecked ships along the coast of Maine occasionally come into view when beach sands reveal them or legal disputes arise over them.
But those ships are just a few among hundreds of wrecks along the coast, some that haven’t been identified and others that have never been found.
There are hundreds of shipwrecks known to lie in Penobscot Bay alone, and hundreds more dot Maine waters, relics of centuries of maritime history in the state.
Waters off of Portland, Penobscot Bay and River and the Eastport area are clustered areas for shipwrecks along the coast, according to federal navigation data.
Less than a century ago, the hulking wrecks of older ships were a common sight around the state, according to the Maine Maritime Museum in Bath; by the 1990s, they were a novelty, and are now rare.
But many others remain preserved below the surface. Some are still being rediscovered, revealing new information about past battles and daily life – like the Margaretta, a Revolutionary War schooner reportedly burned by the British. Researchers said last year they had likely located the sunken schooner in Sawyer Cove in Jonesport.
Another known wreck is the ship Tay, which wrecked on Mount Desert Island in 1911 and later washed up on Sand Beach, where it now rests below the sand. Also at MDI, the ship Delhi sank in Somes Sound in 1893 and is now the subject of a federal court case of who owns it.
The Defiance, an 18th-century cargo ship, reappears periodically from the sands of York Beach. Then there’s the mysterious “Passy Wreck” in Belfast, an unidentified ship that may have been a merchant schooner abandoned in the early 1900s. Local high school students visit each year to look for archeological clues.
There are likely more than a thousand other shipwrecks along the state’s coastline, maritime historian Warren Riess previously told the BDN. A local group of scuba diva enthusiasts who call themselves the Mid-Coast Aqua Nuts documented close to 400 in Penobscot Bay alone by 2021, according to past BDN reporting.
A model of the Revolutionary War ship Defence was recently completed by a group of friends in Castine, some of whom were involved in finding and excavating it.
Defence was among the American ships that sailed to Penobscot Bay in 1779 as part of the ill-fated Penobscot Expedition, which aimed to dislodge the British from a fort under construction in Castine they the British hoped would help them control eastern Maine and beyond.
But the Americans were slow to attack, allowing British reinforcements to arrive and chase them up Penobscot Bay. The Americans destroyed their own ships so the British couldn’t benefit from capturing them. Defence settled under mud in Stockton Harbor, an inlet off the town of Stockton Springs, that preserved it for almost two centuries until Maine Maritime Academy researchers found it in 1972, kicking off years of excavation work.
A British ship from the other side of that same expedition later wrecked in Maine waters, too: the 16-gun sloop HMS Albany. At some point after the expedition, it was demoted to a prison ship.
It wrecked in a 1782 storm on the Northern Triangles, a ledge in Penobscot Bay between Metinic and Matinicus islands, after delivering prisoners to Boston, according to the Journal of the American Revolution.
Southern Maine waters claimed earlier victims, like the British merchant ship Nottingham Galley, which hit a ledge on Boon Island six miles off of York in December 1710. The crew was stranded there for more than three weeks and cannibalized one of their members who died of exposure.
Another famous southern Maine wreck is the Annie C. Maguire, which hit a ledge right next to Portland Head Light on Christmas Eve 1886. The lighthouse keeper, Joshua Strout, and his family, used a ladder as a gangplank to get the crew to safety.
The area also saw ships lost in more recent conflicts, like the USS Eagle PE-56, an American warship torpedoed by a German submarine in World War II. The strike killed 49 members of its 62-person crew. Researchers found the wreck off Cape Elizabeth in 2018 after years of searching.
But some of Maine’s famous shipwrecks have never been found.
Searchers have looked on and off for decades for the Angel Gabriel, a galleon that carried settlers to Colonial Pemaquid and was torn from its anchor one night in 1635 while most passengers were spending the night on land.
Then there’s the Royal Tar, a steamship carrying a circus that caught fire off of Vinalhaven in 1836. Some escaped, but 32 people died – along with circus animals.
Meanwhile, ships continue to wreck or be abandoned along the coast and tidal rivers. Four are set to be removed from Maine waters by 2027 through a private grant.
