William Salthouse

Meet the site

The William Salthouse is the most important historic shipwreck in Port Phillip and one of the most significant in Australia, and it is the one Heads site that cannot be dived without a permit. She was a three-masted wooden barque of 251 tons, built at Liverpool in 1824 and 27 m long, which spent seventeen years in the British colonial trade before her owners, Green and Co., sent her on the first commercial voyage from Canada to the Australian colonies. She left Montreal on 17 June 1841 with £12,000 of cargo – barrels of salt beef and pork, flour, cider, wine, timber and building materials – and on 27 November 1841, entering Port Phillip in a strong south-westerly, struck a rock off Point Nepean. With eighteen inches of water in the hold within the hour she was run onto the Popes Eye sandbar and lost.

What makes her extraordinary is the state of the cargo. The lower hull and its contents were sealed in sand and survived; when divers found her in 1982 barrels were still stacked in the hold, and the site remains the only known example in Australia of an intact early-colonial merchant cargo in place. Looting followed the discovery, and in 1983 she became the first shipwreck in Victoria protected by a declared zone. Heritage Victoria and the Maritime Archaeology Association of Victoria stabilised the site in the 1990s with artificial seagrass mats and sandbags, which have rebuilt the mound and slowed the scour. Today, in the words of the Scuba Doctor listing, the wreck 'appears as a raised sand hill about 3 metres high'; the superstructure is gone but the lower hull and assorted cargo remain preserved in the sand, with frames, planking and the ends of barrels visible where the sand shifts.

Diving her is a privilege rather than a recreation: a permitted, supervised dive in 8–12 m on a fragile archaeological site where nothing may be touched and fins must stay off the bottom. Divers with an interest in maritime history should seek out a permitted heritage dive – they are run occasionally by Queenscliff operators and the MAAV – and everyone else should give the marked zone a wide berth. Penalties for entering without a permit are severe.

What you might see

Seagrass and artificial mats, leatherjackets, bluespotted goatfish, octopus, sea stars, pipefish, occasional cuttlefish

Location

On the sand bank about 700 m north-east of Popes Eye inside Port Phillip Heads, within a 250 m radius protected zone centred on -38.272943, 144.705493.