Lost 1609 - English merchant ship (galleon), flagship of the Virginia Company's Third Supply fleet
Sea Venture was the flagship of the relief fleet that the Virginia Company sent from Plymouth in 1609 to rescue its struggling Jamestown settlement. Aboard were the fleet's admiral Sir George Somers, the new governor Sir Thomas Gates, Captain Christopher Newport, the minister Richard Buck, John Rolfe (later husband of Pocahontas) and William Strachey, who would write the most vivid account of the voyage. In late July a hurricane scattered the fleet. Sea Venture, her seams opened by the strain, took on water faster than her people could pump it out, and after days of bailing Somers sighted Bermuda and drove her onto the reef rather than let her founder.
She wedged between two coral heads about half a mile off St Catherine's Point, and everyone aboard reached shore with much of the stores. The castaways spent ten months on the islands and used timber from the wreck and Bermuda cedar to build two pinnaces, Deliverance and Patience, which sailed for Virginia on 10 May 1610 and found the Jamestown survivors close to starvation. Accounts of the wreck reached London and are traditionally linked to Shakespeare's The Tempest.
Edmund Downing, an American diver descended from one of the passengers, found the remains in October 1958, and they were identified the following year with help from Teddy Tucker and the Smithsonian's Mendel Peterson. Allan 'Smokey' Wingood reopened the site for the Bermuda Maritime Museum from 1978, and the Sea Venture Trust, under archaeologist Jon Adams, completed the excavation and recording in the early 1980s. Little more than part of the lower hull survives; the finds - pewter, stoneware, early West of England storage jars, and even a scrap of Roman pottery in the ballast - are held by the National Museum of Bermuda.
The Sea Venture cannot be dived recreationally: the Custodian of Historic Wrecks has classified it as a restricted wreck, closed to recreational divers, and the site is not normally buoyed. In any case there is little to see: a short stretch of blackened hull timbers in about 25-30 ft of water, which were covered with jute sandbags in 2015 to protect them from shipworm. The finds are displayed at the National Museum of Bermuda at Dockyard, and a replica of Deliverance stood on Ordnance Island in St George's for many years.