Archaeologists were at work on Gwynn’s Island Monday and Wednesday, searching for artifacts related to the 1776 Battle of Cricket Hill in the waters of Hills Bay.

Guided by a map of the battle drawn contemporaneously by Thomas Jefferson, Brendan Burke of the St. Augustine Lighthouse and Maritime Museum and Adam Parker of Search Inc. performed a remote sensing survey as a first step in searching for the artifacts. They swept a marine magnetometer and a Klein 3900 sidescan sonar back and forth across the bottom in a grid pattern to look for evidence of Governor Lord Dunmore’s Floating City, which set sail from York County after the governor was chased from Williamsburg in 1775 and ended up at Gwynn’s Island.

The archaeologists, who were joined ashore by Clyde Smith, vice chairman of Virginia’s Board of Historic Resources, and special projects director for Clive Cussler’s National Underwater and Marine Agency (NUMA), said they had come across a numb...