Voyage to Bottom of Sea a Hunt for History

Scientists may have found remnants of one of the greatest shipping calamities in history, buried deep in the muck and mud on the floor of the Chukchi Sea off the northwestern coast of Alaska.

The murky images recorded by a remotely operated camera during a late-summer expedition show the outlines of at least two ships that sank more than a century ago. Their bows, decks and the ribs of their hulls are just barely discernible beneath a thick layer of silt, 60 feet below the surface.

It’s not the Titanic, and there are no riches. But the find is thought to represent part of the world’s finest collection of 19th-century whaling ships.

And the discovery may advance the cause of science.

Already, it has given NASA engineers a chance to test technology from the Mars Pathfinder mission underwater. And biologists hope to examine some of the rare species of marine plants growing on the vessels.

The story of how 31 whaling ships wound up at the bottom of the sea is the stuff of legend.

It was in late August of 1871 that a fierce wind bore down, blowing the Arctic ice pack toward shore. The wooden ships were trapped, imprisoned in a jumble of churning ice that crushed some of the boats. The captains of the fleet waited several weeks for a wind from offshore to free them, but it never came.

Faced with the prospect of being marooned in the Arctic during winter with only enough food for a few months, the whaling captains abandoned 32 ships and their cargo. All 1,219 men, women and children climbed into small boats and made it safely to seven rescue ships that were free of the ice a few miles away.

The disaster came at a time when whales had been hunted to near extinction and the whaling industry was winding down. The $1.5-million loss of the vessels and their cargo dealt a mortal blow to the New Bedford whaling industry.

“Although insurance money was recouped, it was not reinvested in whaling. It was invested in textile mills or other capital ventures,” said Anne Brengle, director of the New Bedford Whaling Museum.

A salvage crew managed to retrieve one of the vessels and take it back to San Francisco in the summer of 1872. But the remaining ships were lost. Natives stripped the wood from some of the vessels and burned others. Some of the ships were crushed by the sea ice. Still others were thought to have sunk in water deep enough to escape the grinding action of the ice.

This summer, a team of scientists from NASA, the Navy, the U.S. Minerals Management Service and Santa Clara University decided to include a search for the wreckage of the fleet as part of an undersea research expedition. The trip was made aboard the Coast Guard icebreaker Polar Star, which was traveling to the Arctic Ocean on a regular training run.

It was the first scientific survey of the wreckage site since the ships were lost 127 years ago, and the researchers weren’t sure what they would find. It was possible that there would be little more than scattered wood and debris, said Michele Hope, regional archeologist for the U.S. Minerals Management Service in Anchorage. She was pleased with what they found.

“Basically, we think we found two shipwrecks, since we know which wrecks went down and we knew what to look for,” Hope said. “A team of divers went down and verified that it was timber, that it was a ship.”

There are no plans to recover any of the ships, but the scientists hope to return next summer to map the site and to identify some of the wrecks.

The National Park Service wants the site designated as a national historic landmark.

And biologists hope to come back next year to study the rare organisms growing on the ships, said Phillip McGillivary, the science liaison officer with the Coast Guard’s western headquarters in Alameda, Calif.

“We want to know what the organisms are and if there’s anything useful we can get from them,” McGillivary said. Primitive fungi may be valuable in producing antiviral drugs and can help researchers learn more about life in extreme environments, he said.