This month's featured object is a wooden fragment, measuring about 5 inches long and 1.5 inches wide, of the HMS Somerset, a British warship that saw action in both the Seven Years’ War and the American Revolution before being wrecked in a storm 244 years ago. The Somerset was anchored in Boston Harbor on the night of April 18, 1775 when Paul Revere was rowed from Boston to Charlestown on the first leg of his now famous journey. Henry W. Longfellow’s poem Paul Revere’s Ride, which is largely responsible for Revere’s later fame, depicted the scene in the following passage:
Then he said 'Good-night!' and with muffled oar
Silently rowed to the Charlestown shore,
Just as the moon rose over the bay,
Where swinging wide at her moorings lay
The Somerset, British man-of-war;
A phantom ship, with each mast and spar
Across the moon like a prison bar,
And a huge black hulk, that was magnified
By its own reflection in the tide.
Some weeks after Revere’s ride, the Somerset played a role in the Battle of Bunker Hill in June 1775 when it ineffectually bombarded the defensive works being constructed on Breed’s Hill by American militiamen. On November 2, 1778, the Somerset was cruising off the coast of Massachusetts looking for French ships when it was caught in a storm and grounded on a sandbar off Cape Cod near Provincetown. Most of the crew survived the wreck and were taken prisoner, and eighteen cannon were salvaged and later used to fortify Castle Island in Boston Harbor, an operation commanded by none other than Paul Revere, who was then a lieutenant colonel in the Massachusetts militia.
This piece of the ship was given as a souvenir to Henry W. Longfellow by Mr. James Gifford of Provincetown, Massachusetts. Gifford, a town officer and local historian, presented the relic to Longfellow in 1872, along with a card giving some details about the piece (also pictured above). The card includes erroneous information about the date of the wreck – given as November 5, 1778, three days after it occurred, and the number of crew who perished, which is now generally agreed to be 21. Portions of the Somerset have been exposed by the elements only three times since the wreck; in the winter of 1885-1886, in 1973, and most recently in 2010. The ship's remains are a protected archeological resource and are still considered sovereign property of the United Kingdom.
For more information on the wreck of the Somerset, visit Cape Cod National Seashore's web site at: Shipwrecks - Cape Cod National Seashore (U.S. National Park Service) (nps.gov)