A 19th-century commercial sailing ship has been found sitting upright with its twin masts still intact in deep, frigid waters off the southern shore of Lake Ontario.
Shipwreck explorers Jim Kennard and Dan Scoville said they found the schooner Milan in summer 2005 about 8km offshore. This year, they videotaped the 28m-long vessel using an unmanned submersible built with the help of college students.
”It’s not unheard of to have well-preserved ships, but this one is in so good a shape,” Scoville said on Monday. ”It almost looks like it could be floated.”
The Milan was hauling 1 000 barrels of salt when it sprung a leak and sank in October 1849. Its crew of nine was rescued by a passing ship, along with a Newfoundland dog.
The ship sits evenly on the lake bed, its masts extending 21m up in a dark, almost oxygen-free setting. Its rigging and sails have long disintegrated, but much else appears largely undamaged.
Both anchors are firmly in place near the bow. The tiller, a large handle for turning the rudder, is intact.
”If a ship goes down in a big storm, it usually gets broken up,” Scoville said. ”If it goes down on a nice day, it usually breaks when it hits the bottom. This one looks like it just drifted down and set upon the bottom nice and easy.”
At those depths, and with the water being so cold, there is not a lot of oxygen or light, he added. ”It basically helps preserve the wood. If a shipwreck is in shallow, fresh water, the ice will get it or storms will beat it up.”
Built in 1845, the Milan ferried corn, flour, wheat, salt and lumber to ports on lakes Ontario and Erie. It was sailing to Cleveland from western New York state when crew members said they were awakened by splashing water, historical records show.
Hundreds of ships have been wrecked in Lake Ontario’s harbours and along its shores, but fewer than 200 have been lost in the lake, which is 240m deep in places, Scoville estimated. About 100 wrecks have been found, he said.
The Milan is ”the oldest and the prettiest” of at least five wrecks that Scoville and Kennard, both electrical engineers and deep-water divers, have discovered since teaming up five years ago. They undertook months of historical research before announcing their find this month.
An obscure newspaper reference to the sinking got the pair started on the Milan‘s trail three years ago, and they used sonar equipment to finally locate it.
Because many Ontario shipwrecks lie in water too deep to dive safely, they enlisted a team of seniors at Rochester Institute of Technology last fall to help them build a remote-operated vehicle equipped with cameras to explore the Milan.
Most wrecks and their contents found on the American side of the lake belong to New York. ”It would be illegal to take anything off the ship without a permit from the state,” Scoville said. — Sapa-AP