POOLE, ENGLAND—After ten years of research and excavation, a seventeenth-century ship known as the Swash Channel Wreck has been identified as The Fame, an armed Dutch merchant vessel, by a team of scientists from Bournemouth University. BBC News reports that The Fame’s crew may have planned to stop in Poole on its way from Amsterdam to the West Indies when it foundered and broke up during a storm in 1631. Tree-ring dating of the Swash Channel Wreck’s timbers suggests that the wood in the hull came from trees cut down between 1619 and 1639 in the Netherlands or Germany. Historic records indicate that all 45 people on board The Fame, and its master, John Jacobson Botemaker, were rescued, but the ship became a danger to other ships navigating the channel. Its contents and cannon are thought to have been salvaged, though it is also possible that it had been traveling without any cargo. “Everything fits, although you can never be sure,” explained marine archaeologist Dave Parham. To read about the discovery of a long-lost shipwreck in Canadian waters, go to “Franklin’s Last Voyage.”
