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Shipwrecks, Sea Raiders, and Maritime Disasters along the Delmarva Coast, 1632–2004
Cowinner, John Lyman Book Award in U.S. Maritime History, North American Society for Oceanic History Nor'easters, blizzards, and hurricanes. Spanish galleons, German U-boats, and presidential yachts. Pirates and privateers. The ephemeral and deadly nature of islands, dunes, inlets, and shoals. The history of the Delmarva Peninsula's Atlantic coast is rich with tales of fantasy and adventure, heroism and tragedy, greed and charity. Claiming more than 2,300 vessels since 1632, it rivals North Carolina's Outer Banks for the infamous title "The Graveyard of the Atlantic." Maritime historian Donald G. Shomette brings these stories to life. Featuring the accounts of twenty-five ill-starred vessels―some notorious and some forgotten until now―this anthology provides a fascinating history of a local maritime culture and charts how the catastrophic events along this shore significantly affected U.S. merchant shipping as a whole. Shomette weaves together history, folklore, and legend in accounts of the tragic loss of the 1750 Spanish treasure fleet, the British blockade of the Delaware in the American Revolution, the depredations of Confederate commerce raiders during the Civil War, the Billy Mitchell affair, the Hurricane of 1933, and the Nazi U-boat offensive of World War II. His appendix provides a complete catalog of all 2,300 recorded wrecks, including coordinates and location descriptions where available. A vivid montage of seafaring adventures and pivotal events in American history, this volume makes an essential contribution to the library of the history buff, wreck diver, and local adventurer.
- GenresHistory
448 pages, Hardcover
First published November 8, 2007
3 people are currently reading
30 people want to read
About the author
Donald G. Shomette
17 books10 followersDonald G. Shomette is a marine archaeologist and cultural resource manager.
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August 15, 2025
Ship disasters are inevitably part of the life and culture of any coastal area – something that is certainly true for the stretch of Mid-Atlantic coastline along the shores of Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia. Donald Shomette, a marine archaeologist who has written extensively about the nautical history of the Chesapeake region, takes on this topic in a thoroughly researched 2007 book with the somewhat awkward title of Shipwrecks, Sea Raiders, and Maritime Disasters Along the Delmarva Coast, 1632-2004.
Shomette tells a great many stories about Delmarva coastal shipwrecks, starting in the colonial era and proceeding forward toward the present day. I found myself relating the stories Shomette told to my own experiences visiting the Delmarva beaches. For instance, many Delaware beachgoers of today know that, just north of the Indian River Inlet, there is an area called “Coin Beach.” This part of the Sussex County coastline has a vivid and cherished folkloric reputation as the site of a treasure-laden shipwreck that inevitably – sooner or later – is going to make some fortunate resident or vacationer rich beyond the dreams of avarice. Sometimes, the treasure-hunters with their metal detectors seem to outnumber those visitors who are just swimming or sunbathing!
But as Shomette explains, the true story behind “Coin Beach” is at once more prosaic and more interesting than a Pirates of the Caribbean-style fantasy about “finding buried treasure.” The source of the coins on “Coin Beach” was a particularly ill-fated ship – the Faithful Steward, which left Derry/Londonderry in northern Ireland in the summer of 1785, bound for Philadelphia. Many of the 249 people on board were impoverished Irish immigrants hoping to make a start in the New World.
But their hopes were dashed on September 1, 1785 – when, amidst stormy weather, the Faithful Steward struck the Mohoba Bank 150 yards from shore, near Indian River Inlet. The ship capsized, and 181 of the unfortunate souls on board perished (93 women and children among them). Shomette provides a moving description of the human costs of this maritime disaster:
By the following morning, the beach presented a panorama of destruction as far north as Cape Henlopen. The bodies of drowned men, women, and children lay in the surf line, washing to and fro with every wave. Other corpses, pale and bloated with water, lay higher on the sands, carried there by the last high tide….On the shoal beyond, the broken and lifeless carcass ofFaithful Steward shivered with every swell. (p. 99).
It is a sad story, and it is made worse by the knowledge that the ship’s captain and first mate had drunk themselves insensate just as their ship was entering treacherous waters in the midst of a major sea storm. Treasure be damned: Shomette wants readers to keep their minds on what really matters. While “The loss of Faithful Steward would become one of the most enduring tales of the Delmarva coast”, until the ill-fated vessel “evolved into a veritable treasure ship, the lure of which would draw fortune hunters from near and far”, Shomette reminds the reader of “the historic proportions of the loss of so many lives” in what remains “the worst single maritime disaster in Delaware history” (p. 100). The coins on Coin Beach are no lost pirate treasure; rather, they are the painstakingly saved pennies of poor people who never got the chance to make the new beginning of which they had dreamed.
Sometimes, Shomette sees a certain symbolic element in a maritime disaster, as with a 1915 incident when the Age of Sail and the Age of Steam collided, quite literally. The sailing ship involved was the Elizabeth Palmer, a five-masted schooner (a “five-poler”), and one of the largest ships of her kind ever built. Linked with her forever, in nautical history, is the S.S. Washingtonian, a 360-foot steamship built at Sparrows Point, Maryland.
The Elizabeth Palmer was heading south from Portland (Maine) toward Norfolk, Virginia; the Washingtonian, after a trip through the Panama Canal, was bound north toward the Delaware Breakwater, and then Philadelphia. Twenty miles off Fenwick Island, Delaware, the sailing ship’s captain saw the oncoming Washingtonian, but “kept to his course”, knowing that “the international navigational rules of the road stated clearly that a steam vessel must yield right of way to a vessel under sails at all times” (p. 209). Meanwhile, the captain and crew of the Washingtonian failed to realize that “the great schooner, with all sails set, was moving as fast as eight knots…on a collision course” (p. 210).
After the resulting collision, the steamship Washingtonian sank within about ten minutes; the schooner Elizabeth Palmer, about an hour later. Miraculously, only one life was lost, a crewman on the Washingtonian. Today, the “dark and battered hulk of Washingtonian…constitutes one of the most visited wreck sites on the Eastern seaboard, where lucky divers can snag a good-sized lobster and touch an emblematic moment in history without even knowing it” (p. 212). Shomette’s book abounds in engaging details like this one.
As the book continues on toward the modern era, the theme of treasure-hunting and its discontents becomes more prevalent. With his expertise as a marine archaeologist, Shomette seems genuinely offended, even outraged, by the shoddy practices that he sees at work among overambitious, “X-marks-the-spot” types eager to snag a find that will bring them both money and publicity. His anger at those who take a fast-buck approach to salvaging shipwrecks like those of the Delmarva coast comes through perhaps most clearly in his recounting of efforts to salvage the legendary De Braak.
Anyone who has spent significant time along the Delaware shore probably knows the story of the De Braak. A Dutch brig-sloop built in 1781, she was captured by the British at Falmouth, England, in 1794, and was rechristened H.M.S. Braak. Four years later, she was off Cape Henlopen when a squall capsized the ship, killing 48 of those on board. For many years, people on shore could see part of the wreckage of the De Braak sticking out of the water. As with Coin Beach, treasure legends centering around the De Braak grew and became part of the lore of the region; I remember that there was even a De Braak Inn in the coastal town of Lewes, Delaware.
But the De Braak ceased being local Diamond State folklore and became national and world news in 1986, when a Reno-based salvage firm, supported by a politically well-connected real-estate developer, made a go-for-broke attempt to raise the De Braak, fueled in part by rumours that the ship might contain as much as $500 million in coins. Shomette’s description of what happened then makes for painful reading:
The lift began at 8:30 pm at slack tide. Instead of being raised a foot and a half per minute, as originally planned, the ship’s fragile bones were raised at a gut-wrenching thirty feet per minute. Then a friction brake on the crane failed just as the keel of HMS DeBraak broke the surface. For forty-five minutes, the hull was awash and beaten by the swells, with countless artifacts being swept back into the deep. Finally the recovery resumed, and a seventy-foot-long, twenty-two-foot-wide section of ship emerged from the black sea, hanging with its starboard side almost vertical. Archaeologists watched in horror as artifacts of all kinds were seen to splash back into the water. The disaster was then promoted to catastrophe as the cables beneath the hull began to slice through the ancient, soft, worm-eaten wood “like a knife through hot butter.” More artifacts spilled into the water. At 10:30 pm, that which remained was lowered onto the hull of a waiting barge, breaking the keel and deadwoods even further. (pp. 301-02)
Shomette seems to agree with those who called this episode “the greatest maritime archaeological disaster in American history” (p. 301). And, as with the false rumours of vast treasures aboard the Faithful Steward that wrecked off Coin Beach in 1785, the realities of what was on board the De Braak turned out to be humble indeed – nothing like the fevered $500 million dreams of ambitious treasure-hunters. Indeed, Shomette spends much of the latter part of his book critiquing the manner in which, in spite of federal legislation meant to protect historically significant shipwrecks from exploitation, “treasure hunts on the Delmarva coast…continue unabated, fueled by the lure of Spanish gold” (p. 303).
Shomette’s enthusiasm for research is unmistakable, and his research into his topic is exhaustive. Even the footnotes can be fun and illuminating. When, for example, I was reading the hair-raising story of the German U-boat U-103’s attack on the oil tanker India Arrow east of Chincoteague, Virginia, in February of 1942 – 26 of the 38 men on board India Arrow died when the tanker was torpedoed – I flipped to the relevant footnote page and learned that “It was reported soon afterward that the submarine…had been sighted and sunk further up the coast by aerial bombardment”, with the air crew that had reported the engagement being “awarded special commendations at Governor’s Island, New York”; in fact, however, “U-103 would not be eliminated until an Allied bombing raid on the Nazi sub pens at Kiel, Germany, destroyed her on April 15, 1945” (p. 406). Shomette’s research is that thorough.
Published by the Johns Hopkins University Press at Baltimore, Shipwrecks, Sea Raiders, and Maritime Disasters Along the Delmarva Coast, 1632-2004 provides an informative look at the history of the region, and it could be a good book to take along on one’s summertime holiday journey, anywhere from Lewes, Delaware, through Ocean City, Maryland, and down toward Chincoteague or Cape Charles in Virginia.
Shomette tells a great many stories about Delmarva coastal shipwrecks, starting in the colonial era and proceeding forward toward the present day. I found myself relating the stories Shomette told to my own experiences visiting the Delmarva beaches. For instance, many Delaware beachgoers of today know that, just north of the Indian River Inlet, there is an area called “Coin Beach.” This part of the Sussex County coastline has a vivid and cherished folkloric reputation as the site of a treasure-laden shipwreck that inevitably – sooner or later – is going to make some fortunate resident or vacationer rich beyond the dreams of avarice. Sometimes, the treasure-hunters with their metal detectors seem to outnumber those visitors who are just swimming or sunbathing!
But as Shomette explains, the true story behind “Coin Beach” is at once more prosaic and more interesting than a Pirates of the Caribbean-style fantasy about “finding buried treasure.” The source of the coins on “Coin Beach” was a particularly ill-fated ship – the Faithful Steward, which left Derry/Londonderry in northern Ireland in the summer of 1785, bound for Philadelphia. Many of the 249 people on board were impoverished Irish immigrants hoping to make a start in the New World.
But their hopes were dashed on September 1, 1785 – when, amidst stormy weather, the Faithful Steward struck the Mohoba Bank 150 yards from shore, near Indian River Inlet. The ship capsized, and 181 of the unfortunate souls on board perished (93 women and children among them). Shomette provides a moving description of the human costs of this maritime disaster:
By the following morning, the beach presented a panorama of destruction as far north as Cape Henlopen. The bodies of drowned men, women, and children lay in the surf line, washing to and fro with every wave. Other corpses, pale and bloated with water, lay higher on the sands, carried there by the last high tide….On the shoal beyond, the broken and lifeless carcass ofFaithful Steward shivered with every swell. (p. 99).
It is a sad story, and it is made worse by the knowledge that the ship’s captain and first mate had drunk themselves insensate just as their ship was entering treacherous waters in the midst of a major sea storm. Treasure be damned: Shomette wants readers to keep their minds on what really matters. While “The loss of Faithful Steward would become one of the most enduring tales of the Delmarva coast”, until the ill-fated vessel “evolved into a veritable treasure ship, the lure of which would draw fortune hunters from near and far”, Shomette reminds the reader of “the historic proportions of the loss of so many lives” in what remains “the worst single maritime disaster in Delaware history” (p. 100). The coins on Coin Beach are no lost pirate treasure; rather, they are the painstakingly saved pennies of poor people who never got the chance to make the new beginning of which they had dreamed.
Sometimes, Shomette sees a certain symbolic element in a maritime disaster, as with a 1915 incident when the Age of Sail and the Age of Steam collided, quite literally. The sailing ship involved was the Elizabeth Palmer, a five-masted schooner (a “five-poler”), and one of the largest ships of her kind ever built. Linked with her forever, in nautical history, is the S.S. Washingtonian, a 360-foot steamship built at Sparrows Point, Maryland.
The Elizabeth Palmer was heading south from Portland (Maine) toward Norfolk, Virginia; the Washingtonian, after a trip through the Panama Canal, was bound north toward the Delaware Breakwater, and then Philadelphia. Twenty miles off Fenwick Island, Delaware, the sailing ship’s captain saw the oncoming Washingtonian, but “kept to his course”, knowing that “the international navigational rules of the road stated clearly that a steam vessel must yield right of way to a vessel under sails at all times” (p. 209). Meanwhile, the captain and crew of the Washingtonian failed to realize that “the great schooner, with all sails set, was moving as fast as eight knots…on a collision course” (p. 210).
After the resulting collision, the steamship Washingtonian sank within about ten minutes; the schooner Elizabeth Palmer, about an hour later. Miraculously, only one life was lost, a crewman on the Washingtonian. Today, the “dark and battered hulk of Washingtonian…constitutes one of the most visited wreck sites on the Eastern seaboard, where lucky divers can snag a good-sized lobster and touch an emblematic moment in history without even knowing it” (p. 212). Shomette’s book abounds in engaging details like this one.
As the book continues on toward the modern era, the theme of treasure-hunting and its discontents becomes more prevalent. With his expertise as a marine archaeologist, Shomette seems genuinely offended, even outraged, by the shoddy practices that he sees at work among overambitious, “X-marks-the-spot” types eager to snag a find that will bring them both money and publicity. His anger at those who take a fast-buck approach to salvaging shipwrecks like those of the Delmarva coast comes through perhaps most clearly in his recounting of efforts to salvage the legendary De Braak.
Anyone who has spent significant time along the Delaware shore probably knows the story of the De Braak. A Dutch brig-sloop built in 1781, she was captured by the British at Falmouth, England, in 1794, and was rechristened H.M.S. Braak. Four years later, she was off Cape Henlopen when a squall capsized the ship, killing 48 of those on board. For many years, people on shore could see part of the wreckage of the De Braak sticking out of the water. As with Coin Beach, treasure legends centering around the De Braak grew and became part of the lore of the region; I remember that there was even a De Braak Inn in the coastal town of Lewes, Delaware.
But the De Braak ceased being local Diamond State folklore and became national and world news in 1986, when a Reno-based salvage firm, supported by a politically well-connected real-estate developer, made a go-for-broke attempt to raise the De Braak, fueled in part by rumours that the ship might contain as much as $500 million in coins. Shomette’s description of what happened then makes for painful reading:
The lift began at 8:30 pm at slack tide. Instead of being raised a foot and a half per minute, as originally planned, the ship’s fragile bones were raised at a gut-wrenching thirty feet per minute. Then a friction brake on the crane failed just as the keel of HMS DeBraak broke the surface. For forty-five minutes, the hull was awash and beaten by the swells, with countless artifacts being swept back into the deep. Finally the recovery resumed, and a seventy-foot-long, twenty-two-foot-wide section of ship emerged from the black sea, hanging with its starboard side almost vertical. Archaeologists watched in horror as artifacts of all kinds were seen to splash back into the water. The disaster was then promoted to catastrophe as the cables beneath the hull began to slice through the ancient, soft, worm-eaten wood “like a knife through hot butter.” More artifacts spilled into the water. At 10:30 pm, that which remained was lowered onto the hull of a waiting barge, breaking the keel and deadwoods even further. (pp. 301-02)
Shomette seems to agree with those who called this episode “the greatest maritime archaeological disaster in American history” (p. 301). And, as with the false rumours of vast treasures aboard the Faithful Steward that wrecked off Coin Beach in 1785, the realities of what was on board the De Braak turned out to be humble indeed – nothing like the fevered $500 million dreams of ambitious treasure-hunters. Indeed, Shomette spends much of the latter part of his book critiquing the manner in which, in spite of federal legislation meant to protect historically significant shipwrecks from exploitation, “treasure hunts on the Delmarva coast…continue unabated, fueled by the lure of Spanish gold” (p. 303).
Shomette’s enthusiasm for research is unmistakable, and his research into his topic is exhaustive. Even the footnotes can be fun and illuminating. When, for example, I was reading the hair-raising story of the German U-boat U-103’s attack on the oil tanker India Arrow east of Chincoteague, Virginia, in February of 1942 – 26 of the 38 men on board India Arrow died when the tanker was torpedoed – I flipped to the relevant footnote page and learned that “It was reported soon afterward that the submarine…had been sighted and sunk further up the coast by aerial bombardment”, with the air crew that had reported the engagement being “awarded special commendations at Governor’s Island, New York”; in fact, however, “U-103 would not be eliminated until an Allied bombing raid on the Nazi sub pens at Kiel, Germany, destroyed her on April 15, 1945” (p. 406). Shomette’s research is that thorough.
Published by the Johns Hopkins University Press at Baltimore, Shipwrecks, Sea Raiders, and Maritime Disasters Along the Delmarva Coast, 1632-2004 provides an informative look at the history of the region, and it could be a good book to take along on one’s summertime holiday journey, anywhere from Lewes, Delaware, through Ocean City, Maryland, and down toward Chincoteague or Cape Charles in Virginia.
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