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A Canadian dive team found more than they expected when they searched for a shipwreck in Lake Ontario.
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The team was diving to find a 1917 shipwreck, but instead they believe they have stumbled upon a ship that is probably 100 years old.
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The two-masted schooner was completely intact – a rarity found on a Great Lakes shipwreck.
A team of five divers descended 300 feet into the dark waters of Lake Ontario near Toronto and found more than they ever dreamed of. As the team investigates what they believe may be a ship that went missing in 1917, they believe it is probably 100 years old.
Divers found the upright two-masted schooner, with both masts still fully intact, in what the Ontario Underwater Council called “an exceptional state of preservation for a Great Lakes vessel.” After some preliminary research, the team believes the ship may date from an under-documented period of Great Lakes shipbuilding between 1800 and 1850.
“It took us a moment to calm down because it’s a big deal to find an old wreck that’s all in one piece,” said Heison Chuck, president of the Ontario Underwater Council. CBC. “It’s got its shape. It hasn’t broken both masts. We’ve seen two masts standing, which is very rare. In all the ones I’ve dove in, either they’ve fallen, because the boats come up against them, the lankers break them, [or] Divers damage them.
A fiber-optic cable survey of the lake from Buffalo to Toronto alerted experts to an anomaly sitting on the lakebed, experts speculated. fast city The ship, an 1884-built schooner, was lost in 1917.
Now, though, they don’t think it could be a recent wreck.
James Connolly, a Trent University archaeologist and diver, said there were features that were not common on ships built after 1850, a period that experienced a technological leap for Great Lakes vessels. Ships after 1850 had metal rigging, while one found is a rope-rigger. “That immediately puts it in the first half of 19th Century,” Connolly said.
Other features differed from what the team expected to find, including the lack of a wheel on the ship’s aft deck, an early windlass design, and a centerboard winch that became the standard running keel for Great Lakes ships in the 1850s.
While the 1850s may have seen the modern boon for shipbuilding on the Great Lakes, the previous 50 years helped kickstart the lake-voyaging trade, even if the ships built were usually lost due to storms and accidents. Much of the history of the era has also been lost.
“It’s deep enough that I don’t think anyone’s ever been to it,” Chuck said. “I think we were the first group and that joy was just overwhelming.”
Not everyone is so easily convinced. Great Lakes shipwreck expert and Indiana University professor Charles Bicker said. CBC It would be too early to say that this ship dates from 1800 to 1850. “I don’t want to devalue it,” he said. “They might be able to identify the vessel, maybe identify the shipyard, and it would be useful to see an actual intact vessel at the bottom. We have very little in terms of diagrams, and tonnage, and information from these vessels, and the older you go, the less information we have.”
Layers of aggressive quagga mussels cover much of the woodwork, obscuring detail. “Where a wreck can survive for centuries,” Connolly said, “we now only have decades to study it before biological and environmental factors take their toll.”
The team plans to explore the wreck further in hopes of obtaining more detailed measurements, photography, and wood samples to pinpoint the ship’s age and history.
“We don’t know, but if it really is that era,” Chuck said, “from 1800 to 1850, I think we’ll have more of a celebration because we’ve hit the jackpot where there’s very little history or documented material that studies shipwrecks, ships or shipbuilding in that era.”
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