The Wreck of the Lively

In the early 1980s, a Broome charter boat operator advised the Western Australian Maritime Museum that he had seen man-made objects lying on top of the Mermaid atoll in the Rowley Shoals at low tide. Maritime archaeologists found two anchors, three and a half metres long, lying together on the reef top. Their shape showed they had been made in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. Iron knees which once fastened the deck to the walls of a wooden sailing ship were seen nearby.

Further pieces of wreckage were strewn around a nearby underwater gully. They included two whalers trypots, once used for boiling down whale blubber to produce whale oil; five iron cannon; and a third anchor, among other artefacts. The wreck is believed to be of a 240-tonne ship known as the Lively, armed with 10 cannon, fastened with iron bolts and sheathed with copper, which embarked on a whaling voyage to the southern hemisphere around 1808-09.