The Hamburg was abandoned years ago, but now flash flooding has brought it back to the surface. Photo: YouTube//Screenshot
Canada’s East Coast is a rough place to sail. Over the centuries, many a ship has met its end in the area, and heavy rains recently exposed a sailing ship that has been hidden for over a century.
Summerville, Nova Scotia is a tiny little town. The water off its coast is connected to the Bay of Fundy — a place with some of the biggest tide swings in the world — and the beach completely disappears under nearly 50 feet of water on a high tide.
A few months ago, however, flash flooding pushed a huge amount of sand off the beach, and one of three abandoned vessels became visible at low tide.
“Most people thought that was the wharf, but they didn’t know there was three ships buried in the sand,” Wilfred Ogilvie told the Global News.
According to reports, the ships were visible until sometime in the ’70s.
“They even had a big bunkhouse here because between the (gypsum) quarry and the docks and everything that was here,” Ogilvie remembered. “There was close to 100 men used to work here.”
Ogilvie said that the boat that was uncovered is likely the Hamburg, “a three-masted wooden vessel with square sails built in nearby Hantsport and launched in 1886.”
When the Hamburg was built, ship nails were made from wood.
“They didn’t use much steel like bolts and things. In those days everything was wood, of course,” Ogilvie explained.
Once the steam engine was invented, though, the Hamburg and her sails were abandoned at the wharf where wrecked ships were kept. That wharf burned down in 1936, but the wrecks remained there.
“And for years they sat there and probably sunk pretty well every day,” Ogilvie said. “And then the gravel started building in around them, and finding their little holes, and (they) were pretty well buried as we’ve seen here today.”
