Man Roaming A Storm-Battered Beach Spots Amazing Maritime Treasure Emerging From The Sand

Where was O’Donoghue when he made this incredible find? Well, as a native of St. Augustine, Florida, he was strolling the picturesque shoreline of Crescent Beach in St. John’s County. It’s a seaside spot the man and his wife know well – or so they thought. That was until November 2020, when the sand unveiled its subterranean secret.

Peering at the odd vision before him, O’Donoghue spotted prongs made of metal and wood. There was some timber there as well. And while he and his wife eventually went back to their home, the discovery still stuck in O’Donoghue’s mind. What had they just uncovered? And why was the huge structure only visible now?

Naturally, O’Donoghue needed answers. So, he rocked up to Crescent Beach again the following day, eager to have another look at the strange shape. But the mystery would only deepen with this second sighting. You see, only hours on from that first trip to the shore, the unidentified object appeared to now be even further out of the sand. Was it emerging of its own accord?

Thankfully, buried objects don’t just rise from the ground without some form of assistance. And with that in mind, you’re probably wondering exactly what happened. Well, it’s believed that Hurricane Eta – which hit the north of Florida in November 2020 – may have played a significant role in the structure’s reappearance.

The storm – which started as a hurricane – also affected Central America and Cuba before hitting Florida. It actually battered the state on two separate occasions, as the weather system briefly passed over the Gulf of Mexico before eventually coming back. Talk about bad luck!

Yes, Eta dealt Florida a cruel hand. In St. Augustine, for instance, the tumultuous weather caused both flooding and higher tides than usual. Perhaps, then, a storm-stricken sea was responsible for O’Donoghue’s finding on Crescent Beach. Other factors could’ve contributed, too.

You see, Eta isn’t the only storm to have hit Florida in recent years. Hurricane Matthew made landfall back in 2016, while Hurricane Irma followed less than 12 months later. It was a horrible run for the Sunshine State, and it’s thought that many local beaches have suffered as a result of these natural disasters.

This erosion of Florida’s beaches has also had a major knock-on effect. In 2020 Chuck Meide – who works with the St. Augustine Lighthouse Archaeological Maritime Program – told The New York Times that any further “nor’easter” storms could now cause even more damage to the state. Sadly, flooding may become a bigger problem if the shores are lower than before.

And Meide provided a rather striking example of this destruction when speaking to the newspaper. Back in 2005, he noted, Crescent Beach’s dunes had measured up at roughly 12 feet. Only a decade and a half on, however, the sand had been worn down to sea level. That’s an eye-opening difference, wouldn’t you agree?

But the erosion can’t be just chalked up to the hurricanes that have hit Florida in the past. Climate change looks to have had a real effect, too. And the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has provided some truly shocking statistics about this problem.

In a 2016 document, the EPA claimed that Florida’s climate has increased in temperature by more than 1 ℉ over the last 100 years. But that seemingly small change has real consequences. The agency revealed, you see, that sea levels in the area have gone up roughly an inch every ten years. And it only gets worse. Apparently, Crescent Beach and other sandy shores like it may cease to exist altogether if nothing is done to preserve them.

If this current trajectory of decline carries on, then, it could lead to even higher sea levels in Florida. They may grow by up to four feet over the next century, the EPA claims. And if that should happen, more erosion and flooding will be on the cards. It’s a pretty worrying situation – and one that is devastatingly visible in the Sunshine State.

Take O’Donoghue’s discovery on Crescent Beach, for example. Some believe that it was rapid erosion triggered by Hurricane Eta that unveiled the sunken structure. And Don Resio, a professor of ocean engineering at the University of North Florida, certainly seems to be of that opinion. In fact, he told The New York Times that Eta was “the perfect storm for erosion.”

And Resio isn’t alone in linking extreme weather events to this rapid coastal wear and tear. His concerns are shared by Katie Nguyen, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Jacksonville, Florida. She told The New York Times that hurricanes are responsible for “several rounds of erosion-causing events along the northeast Florida Atlantic coast.”

But you may be wondering: what did the erosion actually unveil on Crescent Beach? Well, O’Donoghue was convinced that he’d found remnants of an old ship. This realization then led him to get in touch with St. Augustine’s Lighthouse Archaeological Maritime Program (LAMP). And in November 2020 the lucky guy filled the world in on his momentous discovery during an interview with Florida’s Action News Jax.

O’Donoghue said, “I just saw some timbers that were uncovered by erosion on the sand on the beach. [On] Sunday, more of it was exposed, so then I went ahead and contacted Chuck Meide at LAMP. And he sent somebody out, and right away I sent him pictures and he said, ‘Yeah! That’s a shipwreck.’”

Meide and his colleagues then got to work fairly quickly, turning up to view the wreckage just a day after O’Donoghue’s second visit to the beach. Then the team analyzed any timber and metal protruding from the sand, snapping photographs as they progressed. But this wasn’t LAMP’s first shipwreck investigation – far from it, in fact.

You see, LAMP exists for situations just like this one. The program even refers to itself on its Facebook page as the “research arm” of the St. Augustine Lighthouse & Maritime Museum. So, folks like Meide are always on the look-out for local finds – as well as others from outside the community. And sometimes they help to unearth some true gems.

The Crescent Beach wreckage definitely falls into that category, too. Yes, O’Donoghue’s discovery turned out to be a real jewel of Floridian history. The LAMP team initially struggled to pinpoint its precise age, although they eventually surmised that the boat was from the 19th century. And Meide explained why in a press release on the St. Augustine Lighthouse & Maritime Museum’s website.

Meide said, “Everything we’ve seen on [the ship] so far fits the hypothesis [that it’s from the 19th century]: wooden planking, wood timbers, iron fasteners. They look quite similar to other ships from the 1800s that we have seen.” And he gave even more detail while speaking to Action News Jax.

“It’s most likely that a ship that we find on our coast was probably a merchant ship,” Meide explained. “So, it was probably a cargo ship – carrying goods – again in the 1800s. Think of [it] like a Walmart semi-truck. A ship that was carrying a bunch of... could be hardware, could be flour, could be all kinds of different commodities.”

From what the group could tell, the ship had been constructed in one of three places: either America, the United Kingdom or Canada. How did they come to that conclusion? It was apparently all down to the measurements, as the wood was outlined in inches and feet. Presumably, then, the vessel had been constructed in a nation that uses imperial units rather than metric.

But the conditions on Crescent Beach threatened to put the analysis of the ship in jeopardy. Owing to the tide, Meide and his team couldn’t focus on any given section of the wreckage for a prolonged period. Instead, they just had to look at what the sand uncovered. The group first inspected buried timbers measuring up to 20 feet. This was good news, as just 24 hours beforehand they’d only had five feet or so to work with. Then, by the end of the month, the wreck had disappeared completely under the shore again.

Mind you, Meide had an idea in place to see the true scale of the ship. According to The New York Times, he and his colleagues planned to construct a 3D image of the vessel from the information they’d gathered. As far as the maritime archaeologist was concerned, that was the next best thing to viewing the real McCoy.

Meide told the newspaper, “We’ll never see the wreck all open at the same time here on the beach, but we will on our computer screen.” Still, with that said, did the LAMP team have any suggestions as to which ship they’d been analyzing? Or could they tell us why it had been sentenced to such a cruel fate beneath the sand?

Well, in the end, the experts’ investigations pointed them in one direction. “It’s built solid enough to be a lumber vessel,” Meide revealed. “[It] has the right fastenings to be a ship from the 1800s and the right timbers for a ship of the 1800s. The Caroline Eddy is our prime suspect.” And, luckily, we do know a bit about that boat. Documentation proves that it was first constructed back in 1862, for instance. It also apparently played a role in the Civil War.

Then, in the postbellum period, the Caroline Eddy was bought by a trader – which makes some of Meide’s previous comments seem more legit. But what happened from there? And how did the vessel end up on the Florida beach? Luckily, the Fort Matanzas National Monument Facebook page had answers.

The Monument’s social media team posted on the site, “In late August 1880 the Caroline Eddy left Fernandina bound for New York with a cargo of lumber. She sailed into a hurricane, was driven south and went ashore near Matanzas. Her crew survived after clinging to the rigging for two days and a night.” Sounds intense!

And the Caroline Eddy’s captain, George W. Warren, had shared his account of the wreck once he was safely back on dry land. He recalled to The Memphis Daily Appeal, “It was a sea like a mountain. It was a pretty big-sized sea – a bigger one than I care to see again.” But while this is an incredible story, we can’t forget one thing.

Basically, the evidence that Meide and his team uncovered only suggested that the wreckage is that of the Caroline Eddy. Beyond the measurements and materials, there wasn’t any cargo that could be used to confirm its identity. Yet while that may have been a setback to the researchers, there were still other avenues to explore in solving the mystery.

The LAMP group have sent off samples of the wreck for isotope analysis, for instance. Then, when that’s done, they’ll be able to confirm if the wood originates from Maine – the birthplace of the Caroline Eddy – or somewhere else. It’s an unapologetically technical process, and Meide provided an interesting comparison when describing the work.

Meide told The New York Times, “It’s kind of like this is a crime scene investigation. We are piecing together all of these facts that we can identify from all our forensic tests.” That’d make for an intriguing episode of CSI! As we alluded to earlier, though, this wasn’t the group’s first rodeo when it comes to shipwrecks.

Another notable project began back in 2015, when members of LAMP uncovered a buried ship on a different St. Augustine beach. This find was dubbed the “Anniversary Wreck,” as the city was celebrating its 450th birthday that year. And from then until the end of the decade, Meide and company slowly picked away at the mystery.

Unlike the wreck on Crescent Beach, though, there was underwater cargo to be found here. Doorknobs, bricks, irons, tacks, locks, stone blocks and cauldrons were all salvaged from the deep. Remnants of a Wedgwood dinner plate were uncovered, too, and this gave the LAMP team a clue as to the ship’s age. You see, that piece of crockery was reportedly manufactured from the mid 18th century in England.

Keeping that in mind, it’s thought that the Anniversary Wreck could be one of St. Augustine’s earliest “merchant shipwrecks.” What an impressive discovery! Meide certainly appeared to be excited with the find as he spoke to The Florida Times-Union in 2019. And one thing in particular really interested him.

Meide explained, “It gives us a great insight into consumer behavior here in St. Augustine.” He added, “[It shows] what it was like to be someone living in St. Augustine at this time period – through what they bought. In the future, someone will probably want to look through Amazon records and see what people were buying. This is kind of like that.”

“This is like finding a Walmart truck wrecked and preserved, hundreds of years in the future,” Meide added. “This is the stuff we know was coming into St. Augustine. This, presumably, was the stuff people asked for and wanted and that merchants knew they could sell.”

And there may be more to come in the future. Yes, as the beaches in Florida continue to wear away, the Anniversary Wreck and the Crescent Beach remains could be joined by the remnants of further ships. Deep-sea swimmer Steven D. Singer told The New York Times that close to 4,000 old sunken boats have been recorded on Florida’s coastline.

If that number goes up in the next few years, you can be sure that LAMP will be hard at work. And perhaps more people should start scanning their local coastlines just like O’Donoghue did on Crescent Beach. After all, there are plenty of treasures out there waiting to be found. As Meide told The New York Times, “There’s a lot of buried history on our beaches and offshore.”