New Jersey's Watery Graveyard Yields A Shipwreck In Brick

Superstorm Sandy left a lot of destruction in its wake, but the storm also has turned up items that history long forgot.

That appears to be the situation again, as work on the steel revetment wall being installed along the beach in Brick Township came to a halt this week after what appears to be a shipwreck from the 1800s was discovered in the Normandy Beach section.

Workers trying to drill as part of the wall project hit an obstruction that broke the drill, Brick Mayor John Ducey told 94.3 The Point. They brought in a second drill but before going back to work, decided to investigate.

“The state is coming out to investigate exactly what it is,” Ducey said by email Friday evening. “The project is on hold until they figure out what it is.”

Preliminary suggestions are that it is a whaling ship.

Ducey said the steel wall project has been halted until archaeologists have time to examine the ship and a decision is made on what to do with it.

According to the New Jersey Historical Divers Association, there are estimates that as many as 7,200 ships may have been wrecked on the shoals and sandbars off the New Jersey coast, but only a small percentage of them have been found.

In an article from 2009 on NJ.com, Dan Lieb, president of the divers association, said nor’easters have helped earn the state a reputation for being among the top 10 most dangerous passages in the world. Lieb said he’s seen estimates as high as 7,200 wrecks but figures the remains of only 2,500 remain on the ocean floor.

Lieb has led the divers association’s efforts to establish the New Jersey Shipwreck Museum at the Information Age Science and History Learning Center in Wall, which opened in 2006, and has investigated and identified more than a dozen shipwrecks off the New Jersey coast.

“I would bet that New Jersey has more shipwrecks than any other state in the country, including the Carolinas, which are known as the Graveyard of the Atlantic,” Deborah Whitcraft, curator of the Museum of New Jersey Maritime History in Beach Haven, told New Jersey Monthly magazine in 2009. “I would put New Jersey up against them any day.”

(PHOTO Credit: Township of Brick)