Belinho 1 Shipwreck

The Belinho 1 Shipwreck

Ana Almeida,  João Sá, Alexandre Sá, Ivone Magalhães, Alexandre Monteiro, Tânia Casimiro, and Filipe Castro

 

Country: Portugal

Place: Praia do Belinho, Esposende

Coordinates (approximate): Lat. ; Long.

Type: Unknown

Identified: No

Dated:  1500-1550

 

Introduction

In the winter of 2014 a storm exposed the remains of a shipwreck. Pewter plates, ship timbers and iron concretions were thrown on the eroded beach at Praia do Belinho, Esposende, Portugal.

 

Figure 1. The Belinho 1 site (Ana Almeida and Ivone Magalhães).

 

A second possible shipwreck site – suggested by a large number of amphorae shards – appeared nearby and the two probable shipwreck sites were designated as Belinho 1 and Belinho 2.

The finders, João and Alexandre Sá, were involved in the project from the beginning and are in charge of the site recording.

A team from the Centro de História de Além-Mar at Universidade Nova de Lisboa, under the direction of José Bettencourt (2014), was contracted by the municipality of Esposende to record the most diagnostic timbers washed ashore in 2014.

The recording of the hull remains started in 2015, under the responsibility of the Municipality of Esposende and the Instituto de Arqueologia e Paleociências (IAP), and integrated in the scope of ForSEAdiscovery, a Marie Curie grant (agreement no.: 607545) directed by Ana Crespo Solana and Nigel Nayling. The work was supervised by expert shipwright António José Samuel, from Vila do Conde. All timbers were recorded and published online (Castro et al. 2015), and the site was surveyed by a team of divers.

In 2017 the site was surveyed again, this time by a team from the University of Porto under the direction of João Tasso de Souza, in spite of bureaucratic difficulties posed by the Portuguese cultural agency, Direção Geral do Património Cultural (DGPC). Inexplicably, the Portuguese cultural agency (DGPC) never gave the team permission to survey and record the shipwreck site. The most important artifacts were photographed and positioned, and the municipality made a site map with the positions of the most important features observed  (Figure 2).

 

Figure 2. Belinho 1 map with ethe most important features (Luis Carvalho, Ana Almeida, Alexandre Sá, Alexandre Monteiro, Flávio Biscaia).

 

Work continued on the artifacts washed ashore, which were conserved and curated by the municipality of Esposende (Casimiro et al. 2024), together with the timbers that washed ashore from 2014 onwards (Almeida et al. 2017, 2020, 2022; Martins et al. 2017, 2020; Suarez et al. 2019).

In 2025 the municipality managed to get a special permit to salvage two bronze guns, which were threatened by divers, and raised them. They are in storage at Esposende.

 

Figure 3. Sketch with the bonze guns in situ (Alexandre Monteiro).

 

In 2026 a number of storms have changed the coast drastically in the shipwreck area and we fear that most of the timber structure may be lost.

The municipality wants to make a museum and exhibit the finds of this interesting context. 

 

Team

Ana Almeida and Ivone Magalhães, Câmara Municipal de Esposende.

João Sá and Alexandre Sá, Finders.

Ana Crespo Solana, Nigel Nayling, Jemma Bezant, António Carmo (Samuel), Isis Farias, Isabel Gonçalves, Peter Groenendijk, Adolfo Martins, António Santos, Koldo Trapaga, ForSEAdiscovery.

Mário and Rosa Varela Gomes, Alexandre Monteiro, Tânia Casimiro, Joana Golçalves, Flávio Biscaia, Instituto de Arqueologia e Paleociências.

Filipe Castro, Chris Dostal, Texas A&M University.

 

Story of the Ship

Not much is known about the story of this ship (Barros 2015). The cargo suggests that it was sailing south, from some north European harbor, and the artillery and cargo place its loss sometime in the first half of the 16th century.

 

Loss

We do not have information about the ship’s loss. its location suggests a common shipwreck model with the ship being driven ashore during a storm.

 

Find

There was an information about the existence of an anchor and two bronze guns in this the area on the archives of Esposende municipality, and it is possible that part of this site may have been periodically exposed, mostly during the winter, when the sediments tend to disappear, but the first artifacts were reported by sculptor João Sá in the winter of 2014.

From 2015 onwards we tried to map this site and record the timbers and guns still in situ, but the site is vert shallow and the sea breaks right on top. Moreover, the visibility is low and the bottom is rocky, with parallel geologic strata lying perpendicularly to the coast. The swell is strong most days of the year and the site is covered during the summer. The work is therefore difficult and requires planning.

For reasons we never understood, the Portuguese cultural agency (DGPC) has made it very difficult for us to get permits and plan our work. Stories of personal jealousies and petty politics have made it almost impossible to continue this project As mentioned above, after 2019 the cultural agency never gave us a permit to work, and never explained why it boycotts this project. Repeated complaints never got us anywhere, and the arrogance and irresponsibility of the state archaeologists has prevailed.

 

Site Formation Process

The sandy beach of Belinho is probably geologically recent, and the deposition of sediment may have covered this site during the last centuries, until a pronounced erosive process started thinning the sediment blade in the area, in the 1980s. In 2014 a large storm exposed the site and pushed a number of artifacts ashore, which were recovered and placed in wet storage at the municipality of Esposende. 

 

Tumulus

The site exposed consisted of scatter of artifacts and timbers concentrated in a 20 x 40 m area. The rocky bottom crevices are full of sediment in the summer but since the storm of 2014 the sediment seems to clear substantially in the winter, exposing timbers, an anchor, several iron guns, two bronze guns, and an important number of artifacts.

 

Ballast

It is difficult to identify the ballast in this area, which is partially covered with pebbles.  There are, however, stones present, namely of granite, that clearly are not part of the geological make up of this region.

 

Ship Fittings

So far we have found a series of artifacts that were part of the ship fittings, and necessary to ensure its safe voyage.

 

Anchors

One large anchor was found on the site (Figure 3).

 

Guns

A number of guns have been located on this site, although there might be more. Two bronze guns were lodged between two rocks and recovered in 2025 (Figures 3 and 4).

 

Figure 4. Bronze guns. 3D models by Flavio Biscaia and Beatrice Frabetti (2026).

 

Hull Remains

The most important feature of the shipwreck are the hull remains. A series of disarticulated timbers washed ashore from 2014 onwards, which consist of part of the stern structure, a part of the keelson and maststep, the sternpost, a floor timber form the central portion of the ship, and some other relevant hull components.

Around 80 pieces of timber were found disarticulated and presented vestiges of the dynamic process that dismantling the structure to which they belonged (Figure 6). All these pieces are eroded and broken, with the exception of the stern heel, which is almost intact. Their typology can be included in the early modern Iberian Atlantic shipbuilding tradition, even though they present some aspects not previously observed, namely with regard to the caulking and the protection of the outer surface of the planking.

All timbers were stored in tanks built by Esposende municipality and divided into groups, which encompassed elements of the longitudinal structure, elements of the transverse structure, planking elements, and non-diagnostic elements.

The timber were analyzed from the point of view of the morphology of the trees from which they were cut, and from the point of view of the shipbuilding, in search of clues to identify the place and the period in which this ship was constructed. The timber morphology report is the subject of Adolfo Martins' doctoral thesis, under the guidance of Nigel Nayling at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David (Martins et al. 2017).

The longitudinal structure elements preserved consisted of a fragment of the keel, a fragment of the sternpost, the stern heel, and a fragment of the keelson that contains the maststep. The timbers washed ashore in 2014 and 2015 presented geometric characteristics that indicate that they belong to the area from amidships to the stern (Figure 5).

Figure 5. Generic model of a ship of this period with the timbers positioned (Filipe Castro and Miguel Martins).

 

A section of the keel measuring 9 m was recovered from this area, along with part of the sternpost, and the stern heel – a knee-shaped timber that reinforced the connection of the keel to the sternpost. They also suggest that the flat of the floor timber amidships – the measure of the horizontal part of the base of the master frame – measured around 2.70 m (Figure 7).

 

Figure 6. Port side planking (Filipe Castro).

 

Considering the characteristics of the merchant ships of this time, this measure suggests a vessel with a beam two to three times that value (5.4 to 8.1 m), a keel more or less twice the value of the beam (10.8 to 16.2 m), and a length overall of about 16.2 to 24.3 m.

Although the dimensions inferred indicate a small vessel with about 50 to 100 tons, the sections of the transversal structure suggest a larger vessel. The keel section, the frames, the room and space – the distance between the frames – and planking thickness are closer to the averages observed on the San Diego (1600) or Emanuel Point I (1559) vessels, whose lengths were closer to 33 m. The measures indicated here are preliminary estimates.

Table 1 indicates the timbers measurements recorded in 2015 by the ForSEADiscovery team (Castro et al. 2015).

Table 1 - Main timbers sections from Belinho 1 ship

timber	sided	molded	preserved
Keel	22-24 cm	19 cm	879 cm
sternpost	22,24 cm	19 cm	290 cm
stern heel	18 cm	15-56 cm	281 cm
floor timbers	15-18 cm	18 cm	282-321 cm
Y-frames	21-26,5 cm	18-23 cm	140-223 cm
futtocks	16-18 cm	16-19,5 cm	102-112 cm
knees	21-22 cm	20-23 cm	134-153 cm
waterway	16 cm	10 cm	396 cm
hull planking	9-44 cm	6-7 cm	153-332 cm

 

The central floor timbers and the futtock fragments present vestiges of dovetail joints, a construction trait that is typical of the Atlantic construction tradition, with archaeological parallels in both Iberian and northern European vessels. The fastening pattern of the planks to the frames, with iron nails and treenails, has parallels in the northern region of the Iberian Peninsula.

The existence of a stern heel probably not associated with a stern knee – a curved piece that connected the keel and the sternpost in Iberian ships – is not exclusive of the Iberian Peninsula shipbuilding tradition. The geometry of the Belinho 1 stern knee, with the posterior corner cut at an angle, has archaeological parallels in the Basque ship San Juan, lost in 1565 in Newfoundland, and the early seventeenth century Fuxa shipwreck, lost in Cuba and of unknown origin. In most ships believed to be Iberian the stern heel and knee have a contact surface rounded, without angles. The angle of the sternpost with the keel is 75.6 degrees, a value consistent with the historical and archaeological parallels considered (Table 2). Spanish ships also seem to have lower sternpost angles than the Portuguese ones, even though the sample of values we have is rather small.

 

Table 2 – Sternpost angle with the horizontal

ship	country	date	Angle (degrees)
San Diego	Spain	1600	60
Western Ledge Reef	Spain	ca. 1600	63-65
Nau de Garcia de Palácio	Spain	1587	64-65
San Esteban	Spain	1554	65
Nau de Escalante Mendoza	Spain	1575	71
San Juan	Spain	1565	72-73
Nau de M. Fernandez	Portugal	1616	74
Belinho 1	?	1500-1550 ?	75,6
Nau de F. Oliveira	Portugal	ca. 1580	77-78
Navio do Corpo Santo	Portugal?	ca. 1400	78

 

The protection of the hull planking is unique, with no published archaeological parallels. The boards were prepared on the outer face with triangular incisions and horizontal or sub-horizontal carved slits, following the wood grain, 5-7 mm deep and coated with a fatty substance whose analysis is still pending.

A significant number of small nail marks indicates the existence of an outer sheathing, with wood planks or with lead straps. The irregularity of the sheathing nails (or tacks) suggests that the hull was protected with lead sheathing. Moreover, half a hundred sheets of lead, similar to those found in the Angra D shipwreck, were found in the area of the shipwreck. Both the inner and outer surfaces of the planks had irregular saw marks, suggesting they had been sawn by hand, as well as adze marks – as it is characteristic of ships of the 16^th and 17^th centuries.

The maststep is an extension of the keelson, wider and notched over the floor timbers. This geometry is typical of both Iberian and North European vessels.

 

Cargo

So far we have identified a large number of pewter and copper plates, copper chandeliers,  and other artifacts (Figure 7).

 

Figure 7. Artifacts from the Belinho 1 shipwreck (Ana Almeida).

 

Personal Items

A concretion containing a sward, another containing an axe, and a small fragment of chain mail are probably personal artifacts.

 

Rigging

No rigging parts were found so far.

 

Reconstruction

The timbers available for study are only the ones that washed ashore at Belinho beach over the years. A substantial part of the hull is still in situ, trapped between the rocks and partially covered by sediment during the summer months.

The location of this shipwreck makes it very difficult to study, partly due to the lack of visibility, and partly because of the constant waves that break over the site.

The timbers that were recovered and are kept in water tanks by the Municipality of Esposende were characteristic of the ship’s lower hull and allowed for a tentative reconstruction, based on the only measurement that could be obtained from the site: the flat of the floor timber near amidships.

With the information we could recover in spite of the difficulties posed by the cultural agency (DGPC, now PCIP), it is possible to have an idea of the ship’s size (Figure 8).

 

 

Figure 8. Sketch of the bottom of the Belinho 1 ship from the frames that washed ashore (Filipe Castro).

 

Beam: Estimated  7 m.

Keel Length: Estimated  15 m.

Length Overall: Estimated  21 m.

Number of Masts: Unknown, possibly three plus bowsprit.