Qualla: Diamond (1823 ship)

Diamond (1823 ship): Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

She left New York on 12 December 1824 with about thirty passengers, a cargo of cotton and potash and apples, the international mail, and a captain named Henry Macy. Three weeks later, on 2 January 1825, she struck a reef nobody had seen called Sarn Badrig - St Patrick's Causeway - off the Welsh coast in Cardigan Bay. She sank in 14 metres of water, masts and spars sticking up clear above the surface. Lifeboats from Barmouth rowed out and saved most of the passengers. The Diamond, three-masted square-rigger, 120 feet long, one of the first ships to run a scheduled passenger and cargo service between Britain and the United States - the ancestor of every Atlantic liner that followed - had been afloat fourteen months.

Read more: Diamond (1823 ship) on Qualla

Diamond (1823 ship): The Sarn

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Sarn Badrig is one of three long, low submarine ridges that run out into Cardigan Bay from the Welsh shore - linear features of glacial deposit that became, in Welsh folklore, the embankments of the drowned kingdom of Cantre'r Gwaelod. For sailors approaching the coast in the era...

Read more: Diamond (1823 ship) on Qualla

Diamond (1823 ship): The Discovery

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 2000, two local divers - Tony Iles and his daughter Helen - found something on the seabed with a magnetometer. They dived it. They found wooden frames reinforced with iron, a hull stretching more than 150 feet, and pins of yellow metal. Yellow metal is the bright copper-zinc a...

Read more: Diamond (1823 ship) on Qualla

Diamond (1823 ship): The Doubt

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

It almost certainly is not the Diamond. Ian Cundy of the Malvern Archaeological Diving Unit was licensed to survey the site in July 2002, and what he found did not match. The Diamond was 120 feet long; the wreck is closer to 160 feet. The Diamond was a standard white-oak-and-locu...

Read more: Diamond (1823 ship) on Qualla

Diamond (1823 ship): What Remains

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The unknown ship that the Welsh government designated as the Diamond is still protected. The Diamond's actual resting place, somewhere on or near Sarn Badrig, is still unmarked. The bay has eaten too many vessels for any one of them to be easily picked out from the rest. The reef...

Read more: Diamond (1823 ship) on Qualla