NOAA and the 1871 Lost Whaling Fleet | Drain the Oceans

I had known about this story for decades. The disaster of 1871 was one of the things that basically ended Yankee whaling in the early 20th century because it was such a devastating loss. What was still there, if anything, was still there, was a question that needed to be answered. I was the mission coordinator.

Once we got there, it was deeply personal. We were going out; we were going to essentially develop a map of the seabed between Point Franklin and Wainwright. I remember sitting on the after deck of the vessel we were on and thinking to myself, you know, this is the same place where the whalers tucked in. They were here, and now we're here. And that was a very powerful experience for me.

One of the first things we did was to scan using sonar. With sonar, you're basically bouncing sound waves off the seabed and building a picture from the returning signal. What you're looking for are straight lines, which are rare in nature.

What's it look like on the screen? Suddenly you see these straight lines and then more horizontal figures, blocks and like that. That looks interesting. That could be a piece of a shipwreck. The sonar picked up six features that appeared to be manmade. So the sonar can be a bit misleading. Is it a provocatively shaped group of rocks, or is that the outline of a hull? That's when you need to put eyes on. Diving was not an option.

You're literally in water that's just above freezing. You get into that water, and it hurts. To avoid diving, we created a drop camera system that can be lowered to the seabed. We started to drag the drop camera around, trying to get a better view of what was there.

See that? What is that? Suddenly this structure appeared. It was a mass of heavy wood. You could see sections of the hull that were there, indicating some of that structure had survived. You had the broken ends of the ribs of the frames that have been gnawed by the ice but is covered in marine growth. You had some stone ballast as well that helped stabilize that ship when it was afloat.

You go, okay, we've got a shipwreck. Pieces of copper sheathing were visible on sections of planking next to the 70-foot long hull. It was clear evidence that what we were looking at was a vessel that had at least been built in the 19th century. We now knew a shipwreck could survive underwater off the North Alaskan coast.