Rhode Island Shipwrecks

Rhode Island, the Ocean State, has more shipwrecks per square mile than any other state. The south coast and Block Island are the resting places of many shipwrecks, with many more located in Narragansett Bay. The record of shipwrecks in Rhode Island begins immediately after the arrival of Europeans in the early 17th century with the grounding of a Dutch trading vessel, and thousands more vessels came to grief in its waters in the following centuries, through bad weather, human error, equipment failure, and military action. Some of these shipwrecks were epic disasters, with many fatalities and the total loss of the vessel; others were relatively minor misfortunes in which the ships were salvageable. Many shipwrecks from the 19th century on into the 20th were captured in the dramatic images gathered here. These pictures show the variety of vessels that travelled Rhode Island’s waters back when the ocean was the primary transportation corridor and the many ways in which they met misfortune.

Rhode Island, the Ocean State, has more shipwrecks per square mile than any other state. The south coast and Block Island are the resting places of many shipwrecks, with many more located in Narragansett Bay. The record of shipwrecks in Rhode Island begins immediately after the arrival of Europeans in the early 17th century with the grounding of a Dutch trading vessel, and thousands more vessels came to grief in its waters in the following centuries, through bad weather, human error, equipment failure, and military action. Some of these shipwrecks were epic disasters, with many fatalities and the total loss of the vessel; others were relatively minor misfortunes in which the ships were salvageable. Many shipwrecks from the 19th century on into the 20th were captured in the dramatic images gathered here. These pictures show the variety of vessels that travelled Rhode Island's waters back when the ocean was the primary transportation corridor and the many ways in which they met misfortune.

Two days after Christmas in 1738, a British merchant ship traveling from Rotterdam to Philadelphia grounded in a blizzard on the northern tip of Block Island, twelve miles off the Rhode Island coast. The ship carried emigrants from the Palatinate and its neighboring territories in what is now southwest Germany. The 105 passengers and crew on board-sick, frozen, and starving-were all that remained of the 340 men, women, and children who had left their homeland the previous spring. They now found themselves castaways, on the verge of death, and at the mercy of a community of strangers whose language they did not speak. Shortly after the wreck, rumors began to circulate that the passengers had been mistreated by the ship's crew and by some of the islanders. The stories persisted, transforming over time as stories do and, in less than a hundred years, two terrifying versions of the event had emerged. In one account, the crew murdered the captain, extorted money from the passengers by prolonging the voyage and withholding food, then abandoned ship. In the other, the islanders lured the ship ashore with a false signal light, then murdered and robbed all on board. Some claimed the ship was set ablaze to hide evidence of these crimes, their stories fueled by reports of a fiery ghost ship first seen drifting in Block Island Sound on the one-year anniversary of the wreck. These tales became known as the legend of the Palatine, the name given to the ship in later years, when its original name had been long forgotten. The flaming apparition was nicknamed the Palatine Light. The eerie phenomenon has been witnessed by hundreds of people over the centuries, and numerous scientific theories have been offered as to its origin. Its continued reappearances, along with the attention of some of nineteenth-century America's most notable writers-among them Richard Henry Dana Sr., John Greenleaf Whittier, Edward Everett Hale, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson-has helped keep the legend alive. This despite evidence that the vessel, whose actual name was the Princess Augusta, was never abandoned, lured ashore, or destroyed by fire. So how did the rumors begin? What really happened to the Princess Augusta and the passengers she carried on her final, fatal voyage? Through years of painstaking research, Jill Farinelli reconstructs the origins of one of New England's most chilling maritime mysteries.

How could a perfectly sound U.S. military fighter plane simply vanish from formation on a training flight? Why did the crew of a speeding train choose death over salvation? What really happened one foggy night in 1929 when the Coast Guard fired on a rumrunner in Narragansett Bay? Do guardian angels really exist? Can an airplane be jinxed? In his latest book, Jim Ignasher chronicles twenty-three long-forgotten tales of disaster in the Ocean State. His research includes declassified government reports, which allow for some stories to be told in their entirety for the first time. Collectively, these tales present heroes and villains, adventure and the human condition, strange happenings and unsolved mysteries.