A beachcomber found the wreck of a ship uncovered by winter gales on  a beach in North Carolina.   Originally though to the an 18th century Royal Navy ship, the wreck has now been identified as dating from the 1600s, making it the oldest wreck found on the North Carolina Coast.

Beachcomber stumbles upon historic shipwreck

Ray Midgett hunts the Corolla beaches on the Outer Banks of North Carolina almost every day.

“Beachcombing, or metal detecting, or relic hunting is in my blood,” said Midgett, a retired government worker who hits the sand between October and April.

“There are so many shipwrecks up here, it’s just beautiful.”

Midgett drives his pickup truck right onto the beach using the access road near the Currituck Beach Lighthouse. With a metal detector and shovel in tow, he’s uncovered everything from antique coins to wedding rings.

Yet his biggest discovery came in December when he located the remains of a historic shipwreck.

The wreckage, hidden under the sand for centuries, became fully exposed after a winter of brutal Nor’easters, making it the oldest shipwreck found off the coast of North Carolina.

But historians had to act fast to recover the ship, according to Meghan Agresto, site manager of the Currituck Beach Lighthouse.

Archaeologists originally thought the wreck could be the HMS Swift, a British Navy ship from the late 18th century that originally ran around in the southern Chesapeake Bay off Virginia’s coast.

The HMS Swift drifted to the Outer Banks, where it was looted once it hit shore, then disabled by the looters so it wouldn’t resurface.

After further examination of the ship’s 12-ton skeleton — complete with wooden peg fasteners — archaeologists determined that it was not the HMS Swift, but most likely a merchant’s ship dating to the mid- to late-1600s.

That makes it the oldest shipwreck found along the state’s coast.

“History is the one thing we have that has a reasonable amount of certainty attached to it,” said Joseph Schwarzer, director of North Carolina Maritime Museums. “It tells us where we’ve been, it tells us what’s happening, and it’s a directional sign for where you need to go next.”

Before the Corolla Beach discovery, the oldest shipwreck found along the state’s coast was Queen Anne’s Revenge, the presumed flagship of Blackbeard the pirate said to have run aground in 1718, according to the North Carolina Maritime Museums.