Strange Schooner Found in Lake Ontario

During what was their final survey scan of the season, two American explorers, Jim Kennard and Dan Scoville, came upon a surprising finding deep in the waters of Lake Ontario. As their scans indicated, at the edge of their images, there was a peculiar object rising straight from the bottom of the lake. Later scans obtained a better position of the item, and, two weeks afterwards, helped by a remote operated vehicle, the researchers explored and imaged it beneath the waves.

It turned up to be a 17-meter (55-foot) long schooner from the early 19^th century lying some 150 meters (500 feet) under the surface of the southern part of the lake, to the west of Rochester. Even more peculiar was the fact that the schooner was found to be the only dagger-board one discovered in the Great Lakes, but since, as Kennard explains, this type of vessels were only used during a short period at the beginning of the 1800s, it is somewhat understandable.

 

The dagger-board of this kind of ships was a wood panel extended through the keel that served for better stability. It could be raised when reaching shallow harbors, permitting the schooner to get to places and perform loading operations where other ships couldn't. Although this ship was discovered to be very well preserved, given the conditions, its origin could not be identified. No documents attesting the sinking were found, and the schooner had no written name, anchor, tiller, cabin or other usable items that could help pinpointing it.

 

So far, the leading theory is that it was being transformed into a barge or some other sort of sailing boat as it broke loose during a large storm. It got carried away to the lake's inner areas where it sank at some point. This is one of the oldest of the 4,700 shipwrecks found in the Great Lakes (around 550 were uncovered in Lake Ontario), according to historians. The oldest one yet is the British warship HMS Ontario, sunk in 1780, also found by Kennard and Scoville in May 2008.