During the Battle of Brooklyn the Continentals sunk lots of ships in the East River and the Hudson, trying to block British ships movement. It didn’t work, but supposedly they piled up as many sunken ships as they could.
In the full article, it says that in the late 18th and early 19th centuries there was cribbing built to extend Manhattan and that the ship may have been deliberately used as fill.
That’s what I was thinking too.
Now if it were 300+ years old, perhaps it carried pirate booty as well. New York at that time was THE port for pirates, even more so than the Carolinas.