Among the enemy ships that haunted Provincetown Harbor during the Revolutionary War, the huge British man-of-war H.M.S. Somerset was perhaps the most fearsome. With 64 mounted guns and a crew of 400, she symbolized British tyranny wherever she appeared along the New England coast. 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 British who marched on Lexington and Concord, and her guns were heard at Bunker Hill. On November 2, 1778, a tempest drove her onto the shallow Peaked Hill Bars just offshore. Fifty crewmen drowned as storm waves battered the great ship, but most survived and were 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 remain buried along the shore, where wave action occasionally exposes them to view.