Digitizing 1778 HMS Somerset shipwreck

Digitizing a 1778 Shipwreck on Cape Cod

The mighty British man-of-war HMS Somerset was wrecked off Truro, Massachusetts in 1778 during the Revolutionary War. With 64 mounted guns and a crew of about 400, the Somerset was was a very large British warship. It was involved in several notable battles of the Seven Years War and the American Revolutionary War.

On the night of 18 April 1775, Paul Revere rowed across Boston's Back Bay, quietly passing the anchored HMS Somerset in the darkness. Once he reached land, Revere jumped on a horse, and rode to spread the alarm of the next day's battles in Lexington and Concord. Had the night sentry on board the HMS Somerset been more alert to the nearby rowboat, the course of American history could have been dramatically different.

The HMS Somerset also served as the flagship of Admiral Samuel Graves at the Battle of Bunker Hill. During the battle, the Somerset fired its guns toward the American's newly constructed fortification. However, the vessel's cannons could not be elevated high enough to reach the hilltop ramparts and proved little more than a loud nuisance to the Americans preparing for battle.

The HMS Somerset was wrecked when she ran aground on Cape Cod in a storm in 1778. At least 21 sailors perished attempting to escape the foundering ship via long boat. However, many of the crew survived the violent grounding. As the sky cleared the following day, a detachment of militia marched to the site and, under the command of Captain Enoch Hallett, the survivors of Somerset were taken as prisoners of war.

The ship was visible for some years but eventually was swallowed by the shifting sands of Cape Cod. A few days ago, the currents on Cape Cod uncovered the wreck of H.M.S. Somerset. More than a dozen heavy, water-soaked ship timbers were sticking out of the sand at low tide recently. The timbers, most likely uncovered by the heavy winter storms, last poked up out of the sand about five years ago. They also appeared once in the 1970s and once in the 1870s.

The National Park Service is taking the opportunity to have the wreck scanned.

Land surveyors hired by the Cape Cod National Seashore created the first digital archive of the remaining visible timbers of the wreck using a three-dimensional laser scanner. The surveyors also identified the wreck's exact longitude and latitude measurements using global positioning, according to the Cape Cod Times.

The idea is to create the first permanent digital archive of the wreck of a ship that played a critical role along the East Coast during the War of American Independence. The digital archive can be used by future researchers and historians. It provides precise, 3-D images of the wreck if it were to ever be destroyed — or disappear, never to return.

You can read more at http://www.boston.com/news/local/breaking_news/2010/04/_by_stefanie_ge.html