JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
You know how sometimes a storm blows through, and when it's over, you're left cleaning up broken branches?
SACHA PFEIFFER, HOST:
Or picking up your trash cans?
SUMMERS: I do. Well, on Nantucket, the nor'easter that ripped through over the weekend uncovered - get this - a shipwreck.
PFEIFFER: The editor of the Nantucket Current, Jason Graziadei, was covering the storm when an intriguing message came in.
JASON GRAZIADEI: Got a tip from a reader, David Dehart, who said, you know, I think I've come across what looks like a shipwreck on the South Shore. We traded some messages, and he told...
PFEIFFER: So he went down to the beach.
GRAZIADEI: And sure enough, it was right there where David said it was.
PFEIFFER: A pretty large piece of wood, which to Graziadei, definitely looked like a ship.
GRAZIADEI: You could see the fastenings and, you know, sort of the curved wood, and very clear to me that it was a shipwreck fragment.
SUMMERS: So he was sure it was a shipwreck, but what ship was it, and when was it from?
PFEIFFER: That's part of the mystery. Graziadei had a theory, though, that it could be from the Warren Sawyer, a schooner that wrecked on Nantucket in 1884.
DAVID ROBINSON: Well, it's clearly a portion of a vessel. It's not the entire wreck.
SUMMERS: That's David Robinson. He's the director of Massachusetts Board of Underwater Archaeological Resources. Part of the Warren Sawyer wreck was exposed back in 2022, and based on what he's seen in photos and on video, he says the new Nantucket wreckage could be more of that schooner. Keywords there, could be.
ROBINSON: Well, I can with 100% confidence tell you that I wouldn't be 100% confident. And that's because the way that the Warren Sawyer was built, lots of ships were built like that. The Warren Sawyer was kind of like the 19th century version of an 18-wheeler. And the waterways were like the highways that those 18-wheelers travel on today.
PFEIFFER: That means there were a lot of ships like the Warren Sawyer.
SUMMERS: And many of them sailed the seas around Nantucket.
GRAZIADEI: The island does have a long history with shipwrecks. It's sort of nickname is the graveyard of the Atlantic. It's got as many as 700 shipwrecks all around the island.
PFEIFFER: So this isn't exactly an unexpected thing to find there.
SUMMERS: Although I got to say, it's probably still pretty special to head to the beach and find a 19th century ship sticking out of the sand.
GRAZIADEI: Over the past few days, as the storm sort of subsided, we've seen dozens of people going to visit this shipwreck. You know, we took a video by drone the other day of, you know, people walking all around it, dogs. We said it's a shipwreck party.
PFEIFFER: A shipwreck party on a stretch of beach already known for good times.
GRAZIADEI: Where the shipwreck became exposed is right at the area where you drive on with your car. So all summer, people had been literally driving over this spot where the shipwreck became exposed.
SUMMERS: So if you find yourself lucky enough to be on the beach in Nantucket, keep your eyes peeled for more of the Warren Sawyer or other casualties of the graveyard of the Atlantic.
(SOUNDBITE OF RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS SONG, "UNDER THE BRIDGE") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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