A team from Atlantic Wreck Salvage is in awe after coming across a steamship that has been gone from the face of the earth for 168 years.
The AWS team recently announced they discovered the wreck of the Le Lyonnais off the southeast coast of Massachusetts. AWS found the wreck using a ship called the D/V Tenacious.
The Le Lyonnais (the name refers to the French city of Lyon) was built in 1855 and had a career of barely a year; it sank on November 2, 1856, as it set out to return to the port of Le Havre in France. The sinking was caused by a collision with the ship the Adriatic, another steamer built in North America. The Adriatic survived the hit with just scratches and steamed on to its destination.
Le Lyonnais was left in worse shape. Though it suffered only a small hole, that was enough to sink the ship after several days. Yet somehow most of the passengers and crew died. Of 132 aboard, 114 perished. Those who managed to get into a lifeboat were adrift at sea for a week before being rescued.
Jennifer Sellitti works for AWS and told media it was “difficult to explain” how it felt to the crew when they found the French ship. Along with her partner Joe Mazraani, Sellitti has been searching for Le Lyonnais for eight years. She said the team felt a “mixture of relief and joy,” but that was tempered by the thought of what they were going to do next after their search had finally reached its goal. Sellitti said she spent so many years studying the history of the ship, its passengers, and the stories of those who survived, that finding the ship felt like she had helped close the chapter on a tragic story.
Sellitti is a public defender in New Jersey for her day job. She said she always believed the wreck existed but was never certain that she and her team would be the ones to locate it. She described the North Atlantic as “brutal to shipwrecks” because the currents and frequent storms can tear ships apart underwater just as much as they wreak havoc on those still floating on the surface. Many ancient shipwrecks are permanently buried under sand, she added.
The topography of the Nantucket Shoals was quite tricky, Sellitti said, because it can mask sonar signatures of ships.
