A Heavily Armed Ship

Once the site was mapped, the research team embarked on several expeditions to retrieve and analyze artifacts from the ship, hoping to learn about its crew and their way of life. As the clues came up from the sea floor, the team hoped to learn the name of the ship, its origin and, if they were lucky, the names of some of the crew members.

The cannons, musket balls, pistol parts and cutlass handles all painted a picture of a heavily armed ship. But both merchants and privateers could have carried such an armory. It was the wooden shovels that positively identified the wreck as a corsair.

The shovels were not fitted with metal because they were used to shovel tons of salt, which would have rusted metal parts. When privateers were not boarding enemy ships, they were cod fishing off the shoals of Newfoundland. Salt was the only means of preserving fish at the time. This evidence convinced the archaeologists that the vessel had once practiced wartime privateering, so the next step was to identify the ship.

The dates of the objects discovered in the wreck ranged from 1690 to 1740. This finding puzzled the team, because they knew that fittings on a ship of that period would have been replaced frequently.

Archives revealed that at least 30 shipwrecks were reported in the bay of St. Malo during that period. But none of the ships in the archive seemed to match. They were either sunk in the wrong place, armed with too few cannons or were the wrong size.

Veyrat and L'Hour finally settled on a possible identity for the shipwreck — the frigate Saint Jean Baptiste — which had sunk in the bay in 1713 after returning from Newfoundland.

One Ship or Two?

As the team worked to prove their hypothesis, they made a discovery that would collapse the theory. Buried in the sand in a zone identified as the ship's galley, they uncovered a puzzling group of small bones. They often found bones of rats, chickens or pigs in shipwrecks — remains of meals or stowaway animals — but these were different.

The bones were identified as those of a 6-month-old Barbary macaque, a monkey found only on the island of Gibraltar. It was impossible for a 6-month-old macaque from Gibraltar to have been living on a boat that had been in Newfoundland for seven months, as had the Saint Jean Baptiste . This was the first solid evidence that the site might consist of two wrecks instead of one.

The team used analysis of wood collected from 20 different parts of the wreck to test their new theory. Ring succession in wood is a signature that can be read like a bar code through dendrochronology, a highly precise dating technique. The wood samples confirmed that there was not just one vessel, but two. The first ship, located on the eastern side of the site, dated from 1678, the western ship from 1736.

As they continued to clear out the site, they could finally see how the two wrecks were arranged on the sea floor, each ship lying on its side.

Positive Identification

The team found two possible candidates for the identity of the older wreck — the Soleil, lost in 1692, and the Saint Esprit, lost in 1693. But there was only one ship on record that seemed to match the other ship. In the 1740s, a ship named the Sainte Famille wrecked in the bay as it was returning from Dominica.

Veyrat and L'Hour found information in the archives that positively identified the older ship. On Dec. 15, 1692, Pierre Gris, the captain of the frigate Saint Esprit, armed for privateering with 26 cannons, reported that his vessel ran onto a reef at 2 in the afternoon the day before, where it split and filled with water.

As the team worked to identify the second of the two ships, they discovered an enormous mass of metal bars. The mass yielded nearly a thousand 2 1/2-foot cast-iron ingots, weighing 110 pounds each. The bars, used as ballast, appeared to bear inscriptions. Many marks were illegible, but two were not. They read: Step 'n Onion 1746 and Potuxent 1747.

These dates ruled out the Sainte Famille as a candidate. But no other shipwrecks seemed to match up with the evidence and dates found on the western wreckage.

Finally, the archaeologists found a record that matched. On April 23, 1750, Jean-Pierre Lamer testified that he was captain of the ship L'Aimable Grenot when it hit stone, fell onto its starboard side and upset the ballast, making the ship impossible to right.

Finally the years of hard, dangerous work paid off. With their meticulous recovery and study of this one-of-a-kind shipwreck, Elisabeth Veyrat and Michel L'Hour not only solved a mystery, they provided evidence to the people of St. Malo that their legends are based in reality.