By the winter of 1780-81, the Revolutionary War was starting to wind to a close, but British troops still occupied Long Island and New York City. American and French forces controlled the Eastern Seaboard north of New York all the way to Nova Scotia, which left Gardiner’s Bay as the last safe stopping-off point for British ships.
The British left naval ships in Gardiner’s Bay for much of the Revolutionary War, to protect the northeastern end of British-controlled territory. That particular winter, the Royal Oak and the Culloden, two such ships, were in the bay.
They were anchored there to monitor nearby French ships and to pursue them in case of any movement. On Jan. 22, 1781, three French ships left the waters near Rhode Island, prompting the British fleet to send the 74-gun Culloden in pursuit. During the chase, a heavy snowstorm overtook the Culloden, pushing it into Shagwong Reef off Montauk.
An attempt was made to guide the Culloden into the calm waters of Fort Pond Bay, but it sank near the eastern boundary of the bay, giving the spot the name Culloden Point. No lives were lost that day, but the ship and many of her cannons could not be recovered.
One hundred and ninety-two years later, in 1973, Carlton Davidson (1922-2011), a scuba diver, found one of the nine-and-a-half-foot gun barrels on the bottom of Fort Pond Bay and had it raised with a barge and crane.
This photo, courtesy of the East Hampton Star archive, shows Davidson, left, with his wife, Helen, accepting a receipt for his donation of the cannon to the East Hampton Historical Society in 1974 from Edwin L. Sherrill Jr., chairman of the East Hampton Town Marine Museum in Amagansett. The cannon weighed a whopping 6,328 pounds and was inscribed with the initials of King George III. The cannon was later installed at the Marine Museum.
Julia Tyson is a librarian and archivist in the East Hampton Library’s Long Island Collection.
