She is the earliest ship to participate in the first decades of English settlement in the New World to have survived to the present day.

A rough, six-week voyage ended in a storm off Orleans, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod when the heavily loaded Sparrow-Hawk was driven onto the isolated Nauset Beach.

Keel, planks, rudder and other hull elements from the Sparrow-Hawk were found in good condition, removed from the beach and carefully reconstructed for subsequent exhibition.

Several of the best naval architects of the 1860s in Boston collaborated on the reconstruction of Sparrow-Hawk, which received widespread exhibition during the next few years.

Certainly, she was of a minimum size that any Company would choose to send across the Atlantic with settlers and passengers, many of whom would be unfamiliar with the great ocean and its sometimes violent weather.

[1] After six weeks, the Sparrow-Hawk reached the coast of Massachusetts, and was wrecked at Potanumaquut Harbor Cape Cod.

[2][3] Sparrow-Hawk was buried in the sand and marsh mud of an Orleans, Massachusetts, beach that came to be known as "Old Ship Harbor".

Although a single fierce storm in this area can move sand to a depth of six feet, it is judged that it took several years for the Sparrow-Hawk to be completely buried.

By August 1863, Sparrow-Hawk was once again buried beneath the surface for a few months after which she was exposed once again, and then removed above the high water mark.

"[6] The English ship of the period whose known dimensions are nearest to those of the Sparrow-Hawk is one built at Rye, East Sussex, England, in 1609.

As submitted by Dolliver & Sleeper - "Only a practised mechanical eye could detect a little inequality in her sides, in consequence of her having had a heel to port.

"She had a square stern, and no doubt bulwarks as far forward as the waist ; but the outline of the rest of her decks was probably protected by an open rail."

[7][8][9] Dennison J. Lawlor was a famous Boston Naval architect who produced a line plan in which the Sparrow-Hawk had two masts.

Paintings of small square stern ships of this period show an overhang aft, instead of a flat transom, with an outboard rudder as drawn by Lawlor.