In January of 1742, while sailing around waters south of Florida in search of Spanish vessels to "sink, burn or destroy" the British Royal Navy’s HMS Tyger ran aground at Garden Key in what’s now Dry Tortugas National Park.
The roughly 130-foot long vessel was a 50-gun — or cannon — "fourth-rate ship-of-the-line" with a crew of nearly 300 men. It had been in service for 95 years when it ran aground and was later burned and sunk by its crew to prevent it from falling into Spanish hands.
This was during the Anglo-Spanish War, also known as the War of Jenkins’ Ear, which was basically a dispute between Britain and Spain over access to markets in early Spanish America.
The Jenkins’ Ear moniker comes from an incident nearly a decade before 1742 when Spanish privateers boarded the British brig Rebecca off the coast of Florida and the Spanish commander cut off the Rebecca's captain’s left ear, telling him to "Go, and tell your King that I will do the same, if he dares to do the same."
What unfolded after the Tyger ran aground at Garden Key is a fascinating narrative that is compiled in a new paper published in the International Journal of Nautical Archaeology titled “Hunting HMS Tyger, 1742: Identifying a Ship-of-the-Line in Dry Tortugas National Park” co-authored by Andrew Van Slyke & Joshua Marano.
Put simply, the crew stripped the Tyger of many of its cannons, and literally parts of it, to fortify their position on land. And over the course of 66 days the captain and crew worked to survive, and fend off Spanish ships, before finally hobbling together a means of leaving Garden Key and heading for safety in Jamaica. You can read further details here or in the paper linked above. You can see more photos of the expedition here.
The paper’s co-authors and their team picked up on archeological efforts in the early 1990s, which had identified what was clearly an English vessel that went down in what is now Dry Tortugas National Park, to positively ID that vessel’s remains as the HMS Tyger.
To get a sense of the Tyger and its crew's story, and the archeological efforts that go into this kind of identification, we talk with the maritime archeologist who was the team lead for the HMS Tyger.
Guest:
Joshua Marano is a Maritime Archeologist with South Florida National Parks, and Acting Supervisory Park Ranger at the Fort Monroe National Monument, and team lead for the HMS Tyger identification effort.
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