Qualla: Swash Channel Wreck

Swash Channel Wreck: Introduction

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Geni, CC BY-SA 4.0. In March 1990, a Dutch dredger called Scaldis was working near Buoy No 3 in the Swash Channel, just outside the mouth of Poole Harbour. It hit something. The crew brought up substantial timbers and a single iron cannon, which was eventually carted off to the Poole Museum store. At the time, the local maritime archaeologists were busy with another wreck, and nobody followed up. The timbers had been resting in sand for nearly four centuries: the remains of an armed merchantman built around 1628, probably Dutch, which had gone down outside the harbour with its forecastle and elaborate baroque carvings still attached. It would be another twenty years before the truth of what had been found became fully clear.

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Image: Geni | CC BY-SA 4.0

Swash Channel Wreck: What the Wood Knew

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Geni, CC BY-SA 4.0. When archaeologists eventually examined the timbers, dendrochronology gave them a date. The wood had been felled around 1628, in forests on the border between what is now the Netherlands and Germany. The vessel had been about forty metres long, perhaps six hundred tonnes, a subst...

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Image: Geni | CC BY-SA 4.0

Swash Channel Wreck: Rediscovery in 2004

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Geni, CC BY-SA 4.0. Fourteen years after the Scaldis hit the obstruction, in 2004, Wessex Archaeology was hired by the Poole Harbour Commissioners and Poole Borough Council to conduct a geophysical survey of the area. Side-scan sonar picked up an anomaly in roughly the same place. In 2005 Wessex Arc...

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Image: Geni | CC BY-SA 4.0

Swash Channel Wreck: The Largest Underwater Excavation Since the Mary Rose

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Geni, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 2010, English Heritage agreed to fund a full excavation. The project went to a Bournemouth University team led by marine archaeologists, and it became the largest underwater excavation in the United Kingdom since the raising of Henry VIII's Mary Rose three decades earlier. The...

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Image: Geni | CC BY-SA 4.0

Swash Channel Wreck: Mermen and Cherubim

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Geni, CC BY-SA 4.0. More than a thousand artefacts came up from the sand by 2010, and that figure grew as the excavation continued. Rigging blocks, barrels, pottery, leather shoes worn by long-dead sailors, wooden bowls and pewter tankards used in the galley. But the carvings were what stunned the a...

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Image: Geni | CC BY-SA 4.0

Swash Channel Wreck: The Edge of Globalisation

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Geni, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Fame went down at the moment when European trade was becoming global for the first time. Dutch East India ships, English East India ships, Spanish galleons all crossed the same oceans now. A merchantman built on the Dutch-German border in 1628, sheathed against tropical worms...

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Image: Geni | CC BY-SA 4.0