The Nautical Museum on Bridge Street occupies a boathouse built in 1789 by Captain George Quayle, standing in the shadow of Bridge House, the Quayle family's Castletown home. Manx National Heritage opened it as a museum in June 1951, and for more than two hundred years the boathouse's below-ground cellar concealed the Peggy, a schooner built by Quayle in 1791 and rediscovered there, entombed, in the 1930s; it is recognised as the earliest surviving schooner and the only surviving shallop of its kind. The museum's Quayle Gallery tells the personal story of George Quayle and his family alongside the Peggy's own history, drawing on objects recovered during archaeological work at the site, including an eighteenth-century microscope and a flintlock pistol mechanism.