Two o’clock in the morning. January 23, 1781. A nor’easter is tearing through Block Island Sound with the fury only a Long Island winter can conjure — blinding snow, mountainous seas, gale-force winds that bend iron and splinter oak. Somewhere in that darkness, 650 British sailors aboard one of the Royal Navy’s most powerful warships are losing their battle with the Atlantic. The ship’s lanterns offer nothing against the black wall of weather. The helmsman fights the wheel. The captain, George Balfour, orders her forward, still hunting for a corridor back to open water.
They never find it.
At 4 a.m., a lookout screams over the gale. Breakers. Too close. No room to turn a ship 170 feet long displacing 1,659 tons. The HMS Culloden — pride of the Royal Navy, veteran of the Battle of Cape St. Vincent, a weapon of empire carrying 74 cannons — drives her hull into the sandy bottom off a desolate spit of land at the eastern edge of Long Island.
She would never sail again.
Today, the place is called Culloden Point. The wreck lies in 15 to 25 feet of water in Fort Pond Bay, protected as a National Historic Landmark and listed on both the State and Federal Registers of Historic Places. It is Long Island’s first official underwater archaeological park. For the divers who descend on it in summer — navigating shallow, seaweed-covered rocks, sometimes finding nothing but shifting sand — it is one of the most evocative dives on the East Coast. For anyone who cares about the history of this island, it is sacred ground.
This is its story.
A Ship Named After a Massacre
To understand the HMS Culloden, you have to understand what the name meant.
The Battle of Culloden Moor — April 16, 1746 — was the last pitched land battle fought on British soil, and it was a slaughter. In less than an hour, the Duke of Cumberland’s Hanoverian forces crushed the Jacobite Highland Army of Bonnie Prince Charlie. Roughly 1,500 Scots were killed, many cut down while fleeing, with English forces given orders to show no quarter. The aftermath — scorched villages, executed prisoners, a systematic campaign to destroy Highland culture — earned Cumberland the lasting nickname “Butcher.” For the British Crown, however, it was a triumph. Culloden ended the Jacobite threat forever. It was a name to brandish.
The Royal Navy named four ships after the battle. The fourth — the one that matters here — was built at Deptford Dockyard, England, and launched on May 18, 1776 (History Press, Long Island and the Sea). That same year, the American colonies declared independence. The ship named for a Highland massacre would spend most of its service life trying to suppress another rebellion.
She was a 74-gun third-rate ship of the line. In the late 18th century’s naval hierarchy, 74-gun ships were the workhorses of deep-water warfare — large enough to deliver devastating broadside firepower, nimble enough to operate independently. The Culloden carried 28 eighteen-pounders on her upper gun deck, 28 twenty-four-pounders below, 18 nine-pounders on the quarterdeck, and room for hundreds of tons of provisions, ammunition, and stores. She was, in every measurable sense, a floating city built for war.
From Gibraltar to Gardiner’s Bay: The Road to Montauk
Before arriving on Long Island’s doorstep, the Culloden had already seen the world’s war. Under the command of Captain George Balfour, she participated in action off Cape St. Vincent on the Spanish coast, patrolled the Caribbean around St. Christopher (modern St. Kitts), and harried merchant vessels trading with France in the waters off Mauritius. Her career was the curriculum vitae of empire at its most aggressive.
In August 1780, Admiral George Rodney sailed the Culloden to New York City to join the North American station. The strategic situation was deteriorating for Britain. A French army of 6,000 men had landed in Newport, Rhode Island that July, representing the most significant European military intervention of the American Revolution. The Culloden’s mission became clear: maintain the blockade of Newport, deny the French freedom of movement, and prevent their fleet from reinforcing the colonial cause (Wikipedia, HMS Culloden (1776)).
By January 1781, the Culloden and a squadron of British warships — part of Vice Admiral Marriot Arbuthnot’s fleet — were anchored in Gardiner’s Bay, sheltered on the lee side of the North Fork while their officers and men, by some accounts, enjoyed the hospitality of East Hampton and Gardiner’s Island. Jeannette Edwards Rattray, in her indispensable local history Ship Ashore, captured the odd, almost surreal domesticity of British occupiers enjoying North Shore hospitality while a revolution raged around them.
Then, on January 20, word arrived: French ships were preparing to leave Newport and run the blockade.
Arbuthnot dispatched the Culloden and three other ships in pursuit. Within 72 hours, the most consequential shipwreck in Long Island’s history would be complete.
The Night of the Wreck
What happened next has been reconstructed from multiple sources — court martial records, letters, historical accounts — and the picture is one of a ship overwhelmed by nature in the critical final hours of a dangerous mission.
The three British ships — the Bedford, the America, and the Culloden — were attempting to exit Block Island Sound and reach the open Atlantic. The Bedford, leading the formation, turned back at midnight when her captain determined they had not cleared Montauk Point and could not safely proceed in the storm. The America followed. Captain Balfour pressed on in the Culloden.
In a fierce northeast storm accompanied by snow and gale-force winds, the Culloden lost part of her rudder when she first scraped bottom, either at Gin Beach or Shagwong Reef. Already crippled, Balfour managed to steer his wounded ship into what he hoped were the calmer waters of Fort Pond Bay. But the hull was compromised, water was pouring in, and there was no saving her. The captain managed to steer her into the calmer waters of Fort Pond Bay despite a hole in her side, but there the warship went aground again.
In the dark of night, the crew could barely make out the shoreline but they were convinced that they had hit the shores of Block Island. At daybreak on January 24, though, they realized they were actually offshore of a place known as Will’s Point on the south shore of Fort Pond Bay in Montauk, Long Island.
Six hundred fifty men waded and rowed to the beach at the tip of Long Island in January. Remarkably — miraculously, in the context of 18th-century naval disasters — every single one survived. In a history full of catastrophic loss of life at sea, the Culloden grounding stands out for the improbable mercy of its human outcome.
What awaited them on shore was something close to nothing. In 1781, Montauk was not a town. It was a 20-mile stretch of pastureland, seasonally occupied by herders who drove East Hampton’s cattle out to fatten on the grass each spring. Three wooden shelters — First House, Second House, Third House — marked the only structures for miles. It was January. Those buildings were empty. The Montaukett tribe was nearby. But it’s unlikely they got involved. Six hundred fifty British sailors in uniform, stranded on an empty beach in the dead of winter, with their warship filling with seawater fifty feet offshore.
The Salvage, the Burning, and the Court Martial
Over the following weeks, the British conducted an organized and thorough salvage operation. The British conducted salvage operations on the ship throughout March, retrieving all 28 eighteen-pounder guns from the upper deck, and all 18 nine-pounders from the quarterdeck. The larger cannons were pushed into the sea and the ship was then burned to the waterline and abandoned.
The burning was deliberate and final. The admiralty’s calculus was simple: anything recoverable was recovered, everything else was denied to the enemy. Balfour gave the order himself. The smoke rising from Fort Pond Bay in those winter weeks of 1781 was the funeral pyre of a 74-gun ship of the line, one of the most powerful weapons Britain deployed in the Western Hemisphere during the Revolutionary War.
Balfour was subsequently tried in a court martial proceeding for the loss of the Culloden. Captain Balfour was eventually tried in a court-martial proceeding for the loss of the Culloden and was eventually honorably acquitted. The verdict acknowledged the near-impossible conditions he faced. No captain can sail a ship of the line through a nor’easter when the rudder has been torn away.
History has been somewhat more complicated in its assessments. The wreck, when studied by archaeologists, raised questions about the quality of the ship’s original construction. The Culloden shipwreck site may provide material insight into the political conditions existent in the British Admiralty during this period — specifically, the strength and organization of the Royal Navy at the end of the Seven Years’ War and its subsequent dissipation through mismanagement and corruption under Lord Sandwich’s control of the Admiralty. Shortcuts in the shipyards of 18th-century England, it turns out, may have made a ship already fighting for its life in extreme weather even more vulnerable to catastrophic structural failure.
Long Island After the Battle It Never Had
The grounding of the Culloden is one of those historical events that changed nothing on the surface and everything underneath. The ship was supposed to engage French vessels supporting the colonial cause. It never fired a single shot. Just 11 months later, British Army Officer Charles Cornwallis would hand over his sword to General George Washington at Yorktown, and the war would be over. The Culloden had gone down eleven months before the British Empire itself went down in America.
The broader geopolitical narrative of the North Shore during the Revolution is too often overlooked. Long Island was under British occupation for most of the war — from the fall of New York in 1776 through the end of hostilities. The British fleet anchored in Gardiner’s Bay was not an abstraction; it was an occupying force that lived among the North Shore’s farming communities, commandeered resources, and integrated itself awkwardly into a society that would shortly be liberated. The Culloden’s men walking off that beach in January 1781 were walking through occupied territory that was, in its heart, hostile.
The point where the Culloden came to rest had previously been known as Will’s Point — named, local records suggest, after an Indigenous herder called Will Indian referenced in early East Hampton Town records. The grounding gave it a new name. Culloden Point is what it has been called ever since.
Fifty-eight years after the ship went aground, the Amistad, with her crew of Africans led by Cinque, anchored off the very same spot. In 1839, the Amistad — carrying kidnapped Africans who had seized control of the ship from their would-be enslavers — was captured by the USS Washington at Culloden Point. The same ground that witnessed the failure of British imperial naval power in 1781 would witness a defining moment in the history of American slavery and law in 1839. The same point. Different centuries. Same extraordinary resonance.
The Wreck Today: Sand, History, and the Divers Who Chase It
The remains of this historic shipwreck have been lying in the shifting sands of Fort Pond Bay for over 200 years, often completely buried, and sometimes with just a few timbers exposed to indicate the wreck site.
In the 1970s, divers recovered a 6,328-pound cannon from the site. That cannon is now housed at the East Hampton Town Marine Museum. Its recovery brought renewed attention to the Culloden and led to its designation as a protected archaeological site under both state and federal law. It is illegal to remove anything from the wreck — a regulation enforced with surveillance cameras mounted at the site.
The Long Island Divers Association (lidaonline.com) has been the primary steward of public access to the wreck for decades. The organization championed diver shoreline access to the site and arranged for the construction of a staircase down the steep bluff overlooking the beach, replacing the old system of rappelling ropes. A compass heading of 330 degrees from the large boulder on the beach will bring a diver to the wreck in 15 to 25 feet of water — if the sand hasn’t buried it again.
The dive is described by those who have made it as both humbling and elusive. The difficult shore entry, the sometimes marginal visibility, and the elusiveness of the wreck itself in the shifting sands all combine to make this a greater challenge than it would appear. Divers find scattered timbers, occasional artifacts that surface through the sand after storms, and the peculiar silence of standing at the bottom of a shallow bay over the scattered bones of an 18th-century man-of-war. There are no dramatic structures to swim through, no intact hull to circumnavigate. What remains is scattered and low-lying and deeply buried. But the weight of what happened here is heavy enough to feel through the water.
Culloden Point Preserve, owned by East Hampton Town, commemorates the site on land. The address for visiting the dive site: take Exit 70 toward NY-27, follow to Sunrise Hwy E, turn left onto Edgemere Street, continue to Culloden Place, Blackberry Drive, Pine Tree Drive, Soundview Drive onto a dirt road, approximately a quarter mile to the water.
What the Wreck Tells Us
Three centuries of salt and sand have compressed the story of the HMS Culloden into something almost minimal — a scatter of timbers in shallow water, a name on a map, a cannon in a museum. But the full arc of the story is anything but minimal.
A ship built in a corrupt shipyard, named for a massacre, deployed to crush a revolution, arrives at the tip of Long Island in the middle of the night, in a blizzard, with 650 men aboard, and founders on a sandbar a few hundred feet from shore. Every man lives. The ship is stripped and burned. Eleven months later, the empire it served surrenders at Yorktown. The point where it wrecked goes on to witness one of the most consequential moments in American abolitionist history. And today, the wreck sits protected by federal law in fifteen feet of water, visited each summer by divers who take nothing but photographs.
History rarely resolves itself so cleanly. The Culloden’s wreck is the rare case where the physical remnant and the historical meaning have found each other in the same shallow bay. It is Long Island’s most dramatic piece of the American Revolutionary story, and one of the most underappreciated maritime sites on the entire East Coast.
It is worth knowing. Worth visiting. Worth remembering.
Dive the Site: Long Island Divers Association – HMS Culloden | Culloden Point Preserve, East Hampton Town
Learn More: Montauk Library Archives – Culloden Point | California Diver Magazine – Shore Dive into History
Sources
- Wikipedia – HMS Culloden (1776): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Culloden_(1776)
- Wikipedia – Culloden Point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culloden_Point
- Long Island Divers Association – HMS Culloden Dive Site: https://www.lidaonline.com/hmsculloden
- The East Hampton Star – What’s In A Name?: Culloden Point: https://www.easthamptonstar.com/archive/whats-name-culloden-point
- Montauk Library – Throwback Thursday at Culloden Point: https://montauklibrary.org/throwback-thursday-at-culloden-point/
- California Diver Magazine – Wreck of the HMS Culloden: An East Coast Shore Dive into History: https://californiadiver.com/wreck-of-the-hms-culloden-a-shore-dive-into-history/
- Dan’s Papers – AI and the Culloden Shipwreck off Montauk: https://www.danspapers.com/2025/11/ai-and-the-culloden-shipwreck/
- 27East.com – Diving Into History: Long Island Divers Descend on Culloden Point: https://www.27east.com/east-hampton-press/article_e4aed4ff-95ee-597e-b5e9-f2ec2af59625.html
- Bleyer, Bill. Long Island and the Sea. The History Press, 2019.
- Rattray, Jeannette Edwards. Ship Ashore: A Record of Maritime Disasters off Montauk and Eastern Long Island. Coward-McCann, 1955.
