HMS Somerset - Provincelands Cape Cod Seashore Visitor Center - Provincetown, MA - Massachusetts Historical Markers on Waymarking.com

just as the moon rose over the bay
were swinging wide at her moorings lay
the Somerset, British man-of-war;
a phantom ship, with each mast and spar
across the moon like a prison bar,
and a huge Blackhawk, that was magnified
by its own reflection in the tide.

From Paul Revere’s ride
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Of all the enemy ships that halted Provincetown Harbor during the Revolutionary war, perhaps the most fearsome was a huge British man-of-war HMS Somerset. With her sixty-four mounted guns in crew of 400, she symbolized British tyranny wherever she appeared along the New England coast.

On November 2, 1778, a tempest drove the Somerset into the shallow Pete Hill bars that lay just offshore (about 3 miles / 5km to your right). Fifty crew men drowned as storm waves battered the great ship, yet most survived to be taken prisoner by Cape Cod militia. After stripping the frigate of its armament, defiant patriots burned the ship down to the waterline.

Fragments of the Somerset remained buried along the shore, where wave action occasionally exposes them to view.

(lower left)
Built in Chatham, England in 1748, the Somerset saw action in the French and Indian war and the Revolutionary war. She transported some of the soldiers who marched on Lexington in Concorde in her guns were heard at Bunker Hill.

(lower right)
Shifting sands uncovered vestiges of the ship near here in the 1880s