Sunken 19-Century Schooner Is Found

The explorer who found the wreck of the Titanic has discovered a 19th-Century schooner, two vintage rail cars and, possibly, the site of Benedict Arnold’s Revolutionary War gunboat in Lake Champlain, it was announced Thursday.

A team led by Robert Ballard of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod found the schooner Sarah Ellen apparently upright and virtually intact on the lake floor under about 300 feet of water, officials said.

The 73-foot-long, two-masted commercial schooner sank in a storm on Dec. 16, 1860, killing its 21-year-old captain and his bride. The vessel, the first traditional commercial lake schooner to be found in Lake Champlain, was carrying stone.

Expect Key Information

“We won’t find a treasure trove of gold. What we will find is a treasure trove of information,” said Art Cohn, director of the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum.

The researchers also found two railroad cars believed to have fallen off a schooner, the General Scott, while being transported across the lake during a storm in 1849 or 1850. The cars are believed to be among the oldest known in existence.

The team also identified several sites that might be the resting spot for the Providence, a 54-foot battleship in Benedict Arnold’s fleet that was lost on Oct. 12, 1776, during the Revolutionary War’s Battle of Valcour Island, before Arnold became a traitor.

The discoveries were made during an expedition that ended Tuesday during which researchers used sonar to search the bottom of the 120-mile-long lake located in northwest Vermont and northeast New York state.

The search was part of an educational project involving deep-water exploration called Project Jason. Ballard and his colleagues use remote-controlled cameras like those used to explore the Titanic to broadcast live underwater explorations to students in museums in the United States and Canada.

The team plans to return to Lake Champlain next spring for the project’s second expedition--exploring the remains in Lake Champlain and previously discovered wrecks of the War of 1812 warships Hamilton and Scourge in Lake Ontario.

Ballard, who found the Titanic in September, 1985, also located the remains of the German battleship Bismarck off the coast of France in June.