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A group of friends in Castine have built a model of a Revolutionary War ship that two of them helped rediscover and excavate in the mud of Penobscot Bay more than 50 years ago.
To celebrate the United States’ 250th anniversary, the model — which depicts the ship being built in an 18th-century shipyard — is now on display at a local museum.
David Wyman and Don Small were teaching engineering courses at Maine Maritime Academy when, in the summer 1972, a program that involved students in solving real-world problems wanted to test a new sonar concept that could scan the ocean floor. The program, operating in collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, needed something to look for.
Enter Dean Mayhew, an Maine Maritime history professor who believed he had pinpointed the location of Defence, a private two-masted sailing ship hastily built and later intentionally sunk by its crew to evade British capture on the ill-fated 1779 Penobscot Expedition.
To Wyman and Small’s surprise, they found it, kicking off underwater excavation efforts that continued for nine summers and garnered national attention. Defence was the first Revolutionary War ship to be fully scientifically excavated, according to the Institute of Naval Archeology
“It was totally by accident,” Wyman said. “We were trying to teach students … [about] searching for things underwater, and we just happened to find it.”
Decades later, the model project began as Wyman’s method of double-checking his original construction drawings as he prepared to contribute to a book about the ship’s rediscovery. Now completed and on display at the Wilson Museum in Castine, the model is highlighting the area’s role in Revolutionary War history as the country’s 250th anniversary approaches.
It also provides a rare look inside how 18th-century warships were built and how everyday life was lived in the past, according to the museum.
To Wyman, Defence further stands out as a newly built vessel that went down through no fault of its own.
“Every other underwater archeological excavation that I’m aware of, of ships and stuff, is of a ship that had failed, that had sunk,” he said. “So all we’ve really got is examples of stuff that didn’t work.”
The Penobscot Expedition was likely the worst naval disaster in American history until Pearl Harbor, according to historians. In 1779, British forces had started building Fort George in Castine to help gain control of the region. American forces came up from Boston to push them out.
They laid siege to the fort, which inadvertently gave time for British reinforcements to arrive and chase them up the Penobscot River. The Americans destroyed their own ships and survivors walked back home through the woods to present-day Massachusetts. Tides and oxygen exposure in the river means other ships have long since decayed, Wyman said.
But Defence’s crew instead tried to hide in Stockton Harbor, an inlet off the town of Stockton Springs near the mouth of the river, hoping the British would sail by.
They didn’t, so the crew blew up a gunpowder magazine and the ship sank, settling under a layer of mud that kept out oxygen and preserved it.
Almost 200 years later, the Maine Maritime crew found three points above the seafloor where Mayhew thought they would be — two cannons, one bearing the year 1778, and a brick cookstove.
The time capsule they uncovered over the next nine years included shoes, belt buckles, buttons, utensils and navigational tools, most of which went to the Maine State Museum. After three years of excavation, the Institute of Nautical Archaeology at Texas A&M took over the project until 1980 with Maine Maritime and the Maine State Museum as partners.
Wyman couldn’t see the ship underwater — he recalled measuring blindly in a dense cloud of mud and swimming up to read the numbers — and it was slow work documenting it inch by inch.
Researchers also spent plenty of time trying to figure out the purpose of pieces they found, according to Bangor Daily News archives.
Resources and access to materials like iron were limited when it was built, shown by its mostly wood construction and brick stove.
Defence bears many signs of hasty construction, too, Wyman said, reflecting the urgency of the war effort. One of its structural pieces was still mostly covered with bark, for example, leading diving students to think it was a piece of driftwood; rocks were used as ballast.
Early American shipbuilding was also significantly different than it is today, according to Wyman and Small. The shipwright would make a half model from one piece of wood for the customer to review, then scale it up.
“No records were kept, there was no paper, no plans. So construction methods were pretty much a mystery at that time,” Small said.
In 1976, Wyman told the BDN he hoped to gather enough information to build a full-sized replica; the design and construction fascinated him, he said. While that didn’t happen with Defence, he did go on to design a ship named Virginia, a replica of Maine’s “first ship,” launched in 2022.
The team that worked on Defence’s excavation had never produced a full report, and realizing that time was running out as they got older, collaborator and friend Warren Riess recently organized members to write chapters for a forthcoming book.
Wyman was responsible for a chapter on the drawings and planned to check them by building a model. Friends Small, Steve Brookman, Walt Murphy and Dick Anderson thought that sounded like fun, which turned into three winters spent working together.
He and Wyman had long been involved with the Wilson Museum, which now has the completed model and surrounding shipyard scene on display.
“So this model turned into, instead of just a rudimentary structure to kind of prove my drawings, to something that ended up here in a glass case,” Wyman said.
The drawings mostly held together, though the ship had relaxed somewhat in the bay and measurements needed to be tweaked.
The model they created is larger than most, more like a small boat, in part because Wyman said he’s not an artist. But its size also makes it easier for viewers to see and explore.
It’s surrounded by the scenes of an early American shipyard like those that once built vessels along Castine’s own waterfront, which is visible through the window behind it.
The Maine State Museum also plans an exhibit on Defence featuring artifacts from the ship, after the Augusta building reopens, according to Julia Gray, the Castine museum’s executive director.
