On 12th November 1908, a new ship entered service with the United States Coast Guard. Although not dissimilar in design to preceding ocean-going American revenue cutters, the USCGC Seneca was constructed with an intended new role; that of ‘derelict destroyer’. The idea of the ‘derelict’; a vessel abandoned at sea; is one most closely associated with the 19th century and the Age of Sail. Most of us are familiar with the mystery of the Marie Celeste, which was discovered abandoned off the Azores in 1872. In fact, derelicts have existed as long as wooden ships have sailed the oceans, but as these pages will show, their preponderance only became a cause for international concern with the rise of transatlantic trade and communications during the last decades of the 1800s.
Derelicts can be distinguished from shipwrecks in that they do not immediately sink, but remain afloat or partially submerged after their abandonment, and if they are far out at sea, they may continue to travel with the winds and ocean currents for weeks, months, and possibly even years. Such cases as the Marie Celeste, which was discovered in working order but with no trace of the crew, are rare. Ships were more regularly abandoned due to seemingly irreparable damage. Crews were often rescued by passing ships, and the circumstances of their abandonment made known to authorities and in the vessels’ home ports. Sometimes, the derelicts were even salvaged.
Although iron had replaced wood in navies from the mid-19th century onward, cargo was commonly carried by wooden or wooden composite sailing ships into the first decades of the 20th. Although of stronger material, iron and later steel ships had a tendency to sink rapidly if their hulls were severely breached. The floatability of wooden ships after their abandonment depended partly on their age, the quality of their design and construction, but more than anything on their cargo. A wooden ship carrying wood; that is timber or lumber; as cargo had obvious greater flotation properties than an ingot-laden Spanish galleon because even when water-logged, its ligneous burden might still remain buoyant.
The problem of derelicts was a particular North Atlantic problem for three reasons. Firstly, the weather conditions were worse than in any other commonly traversed ocean, with storms and hurricanes regular occurrences. In a 40-year period between 1851 and 1890, there were almost 300 documented tropical storms and hurricanes, 19 occurring in 1887 alone [1]. Secondly, the North Atlantic was the busiest ocean for shipping. This was the case not only traded goods but also human cargoes. In fact, the 19th century saw an influx of European immigrants to the New World in the tens of millions, all of them hazardously borne by passenger ships through potentially derelict-strewn sea lanes. Thirdly, and most importantly, the North Atlantic was for most of the 19th century the most important route for the transportation of lumber.
The North American lumber trade had grown rapidly after East Coast settlers discovered the vast virgin forests covering most of New England. As early as the 1790s, the region was exporting 36 million feet of pine boards and 300 ship masts annually, with over 75 percent originating in Massachusetts and another 20 percent coming from New Hampshire [2]. By 1830, the settlement of Bangor in Maine, then part of Massachusetts, had become the world’s largest lumber shipping port and would alone move over 8.7 billion board feet of timber over the following sixty years. Still centred in the east, US Lumber production (measured in board feet) reached 5bn in 1850. And although the industry had largely relocated west of the Mississippi by 1900, a large proportion of the 35bn board feet of lumber produced that year was still being shipped from America’s Atlantic coast [2]. Much of this trade went to Europe, but there was also a big movement of lumber between North and South America through the hurricane belt of the West Indies.
Surprisingly, although steam had become the dominant means of coastal shipping in the US in 1894, the use of sailing vessels, the vast majority of them wooden-hulled, continued to grow until 1907, at which time they still made up nearly two-fifths of all coastal traffic. Moreover, sail remained the most common means of moving lumber along the East Coast in these years. Due to their speed, manoeuvrability, shallow draughts, and small crews, schooners were the preferred type of vessel for this work, and many of them were built locally in ports in Maine or New Jersey. Pine was among the most common lumber cargoes; ‘used for frames of brick face factories, houses, bridges, railroad trestles, planking and ceiling in new schooners, and railroad ties’ [3]. It wasn’t until World War One that the transportation of timber by timber-hulled ships went into steep decline.
Lumber-carrying derelicts were no doubt already a scourge during the first half of the 18th century. However, until the advent of modern communications, these phenomena would have been known only to seafaring communities. One of the earliest mentions of a floating shipwreck comes in the opening chapter of Wilkie Collins’ 1864 novel Armadale: ‘With the daybreak we saw the vessel, and the timber ship it was. She lay wallowing in the trough of the sea, her foremast and her mainmast both gone – a waterlogged wreck’ (p37). The author’s narrative regarding ‘La Grace de Dieu’ – caught in a storm on a voyage from Madeira to Lisbon – is highly fanciful. However, it is reasonable to assume the idea for this derelict had come to him through a real incident reported in the British press.
It wasn’t until the growth in transatlantic communications after the laying of the first undersea telegraph cables in the late 1860s that the problem of derelicts, previously the subject of patrons in port taverns, became a more international concern. In December 1883 the US Hydrographic Office (USHO), which had been established after the Civil War to improve navigational safety for the country’s navy and mercantile marine, began publishing monthly pilot charts. These charts included the latest information about the positions of derelicts and other ‘drifting debris’ reported by passing vessels. From this point onwards, certain named derelicts began to achieve public notoriety. An American press article published in July 1894 set out the gravity of the problem. It named a total of 18 notorious derelicts and as well as examples of ships rumoured to have been in violent collision with such vessels [4].
The USHO had set out the scale of the problem over the preceding seven years. Between 1887-1893, over 1,600 derelicts had been reported, averaging out at 19 a month and 232 annually [3]. Out of this total, roughly a third could be identified, and 80% of these identifiable derelicts belonged to just three countries – the US, Great Britain and Norway. The winter of 1887-8 was a particularly bad period – a single storm in February 1888 resulting in at least 20 reports of derelicts the following month. However, by far the worst year statistically was the last of these years, with 418 sightings; more than a quarter of the total; recorded in 1893. A series of three major hurricanes in August were responsible for a good many of these drifting wrecks. During this period, ‘the Atlantic was literally strewn with numerous Mary Celestes in various stages of disintegration’ [3].
The schooner Twenty-one Friends was one of the first derelicts of long duration documented by the USHO, drifting for an estimated 255 days between March of 1885 and December of 1886, during which time she was reported 22 times. The wreck of the Wyer G. Sargent stayed afloat for 615 days between March 1891 and December 1892, covering 5,500 miles and being logged 32 times by passing vessels. However, the record for dereliction at sea belongs to another Maine-built schooner, the Fannie E. Wolston. Abandoned in October 1891, she drifted for just over three years, during which time she traversed almost 9,000 miles of ocean and was observed 46 times.
The most valuable data available on the oceanic trajectories of these late 19th century derelicts is contained in the research of oceanographer Philip L. Richardson, who published a number of studies in the 1980s that mapped sightings of such vessels in relation to ocean currents [2]. Richardson’s research relied primarily on the case studies of ships that had remained afloat for over 200 days, including those mentioned above. By looking at where these derelicts were positioned when sighted by passing vessels, the researcher was able to identify loose patterns in their trajectories.
Richardson’s research debunked a popular myth at the turn of the 20th century that derelicts were inexorably drawn into the Sargasso Sea and held there indefinitely by the choking ‘sargassum’ weed. Situated within what is known as the North Atlantic Gyre, the Sargasso Sea is at the relatively calm centre of a variable, clockwise-rotating system of oceanic currents comprising the Gulf Stream, and in turn the North Atlantic, Canary, North Equatorial, and Antilles Currents. The association of derelicts with the Sargasso Sea may have originated with Jules Verne. In 20,000 Leagues under the Sea (1872), the area is described as containing ‘objects originating from all over: tree trunks ripped from the Rocky Mountains or the Andes and sent floating down the Amazon or the Mississippi, numerous pieces of wreckage, remnants of keels or undersides, bulwarks staved in and so weighed down with seashells and barnacles, they couldn’t rise to the surface of the ocean.’ This mythical association was revived by a number of stories at the turn of the 20th century; chief among them Crittenden Marriott’s Isle of Lost Ships (1909), where it is described as ‘the spot where ruined ships raked derelict from all the square miles of ocean form a great island.’
Contrary to Marriott’s imaginings, Richardson’s research shows that most vessels abandoned in latitudes on and above Cape Hatteras, the most hurricane-prone area of America’s eastern seaboard, were eventually pulled eastwards by the Gulf Stream even if initially some were drawn in a southerly direction by prevailing inshore currents. Within these immense drifts, derelicts were also known to make loops:
‘In general, derelicts entered the Gulf Stream north of 30°N and moved eastward in the Stream. When they reached the area south of the Grand Banks, near 40°N, 50°W, they split into two bands of trajectories. The first band reaches northeastward and then eastward, passing north of the Azores between 40° and 50°N. The second band extends southeastward and then westward near 25°N.’ [3]
The W. L. White is a good example of a looping easterly trajectory. Abandoned off Delaware Bay on 13th March 1888, the schooner drifted for an estimated 310 days, recrossing her own tracks several times before veering northeast and eventually running aground off Haskeir Island in the Scottish Hebrides, a total drift distance of around 5,900 miles. The Twenty-One Friends had followed a similar though less looped trajectory a few years earlier, but had wound up off the north-east tip of Spain. The schooner David W. Hunt, one of the victims of the great storm of February 1888, drifted as far south as Madeira after passing above the Azores. Pulled southwards west of the Azores, the Wyer C. Sargent looped and zigzagged in the mid-Atlantic before eventually sinking far from land sometime in December 1892.
A small number of derelicts are recorded as having passed through the Sargasso Sea during their lonely drifts. Among these were the Wolston, the Italian bark Vincenzo Perrotta (1887-1889) and the schooner Ida Francis (1886-7). Abandoned 600 miles northeast of Bermuda, the Perrotta’s near 3,000 mile 18-month odyssey came to an end on the fringing reefs of Watling Island (San Salvador) in the Bahamas. The Francis also ended up in Bahamian waters after an erratic, largely westward drift. Abandoned just north of Cape Hatteras, the Wolston passed close to the Bahamas before rejoining the Gulf Stream and completing a remarkable circuit of the North Atlantic Gyre.
One of the most unusual derelict trajectories was that of the Fred B. Taylor [3]. The ship was cut in two by a collision in June 1892 at roughly 40°N and 69°W. Curiously, the forward and after sections of the ship then proceeded to drift in opposite directions. The bow went south for 340 miles, eventually foundering east of Delaware Bay, while the stern drifted north and then west for a similar distance, though at a much quicker pace, finally grounding at Cape Porpoise on the coast of Maine. These contrasting trajectories could partly be explained by the different geometries and buoyancies of the two hull pieces. The case of the Taylor also shows how a derelict could break up into smaller pieces of hazardous flotsam.
The problem of a dispersed lumber cargo had been illustrated in December 1887 when the steamship Miranda had encountered a severe storm somewhere east of Cape Cod. At the time, the ship was towing a 550ft raft laden 27,000 spruce logs. The steamer survived the storm but the tow-line and raft did not, and the logs, some of which were 100ft in length, were dispersed in clusters across a wide area, even reaching as far as the Azores. One of the witnesses to this incident, the German bark Bremen, suffered damage to her sheathing and rudder after becoming trapped for five days in the midst of this floating forest.
Running into an intact derelict could potentially result in an even worse fate. According to the USHO, there were 28 reported collisions with derelicts between 1887-1893 [3]. Fifteen vessels recorded being seriously damaged and six others had to be abandoned. Some of these documented victims of derelicts appear to have struck stationary wrecks lying in shallow waters rather than drifting ones out at sea.In fact, it’s fair to say the risks from derelicts were probably overstated, as tired mariners had little way of knowing precisely what object they had collided with after dark or in poor visibility; submerged rocks or a large whale were other possibilities. A British parliamentary committee into ‘floating derelicts’ which examined the USHO data in 1894 concluded the risk of such collisions to be small, though it did not rule out one being responsible for the disabling of the schooner Joseph Baymore off the coast of North Carolina in June 1887 [5].
Nevertheless, many steamer captains took the risk of collisions seriously enough to attempt to hasten the end of any derelicts they came across. For an unarmed ship, the easiest recourse was fire. Of those recorded by the UHSO, 76 sighted derelicts were reported to have been set alight [3]. However, the timbers of derelicts were often too waterlogged for any fire to take hold, and the result was often that wrecks burned down to the waterline but remained afloat, while making their hulls even less visible to other passing ships. The derelict Boston schooner Alma Cummings was supposedly boarded and set afire five times by passing steamers in an effort to hasten her sinking, but her charred remains eventually washed up on the coast of Panama after a surviving an estimated 587 days at sea. The Wolston was also set ablaze at some point by the crew of the steamship Lord Charlemont, using supplies of paraffin and tar, evidently to no avail [4].
There was also pressure on politicians from shipping companies and other maritime authorities to address the issue. Derelicts were apparently discussed at The International Marine Conference held in Washington in 1889, but a proposal to apportion geographical areas of the Atlantic, thus dividing the labour and cost of removing such vessels between the leading maritime powers, could not be agreed on. In 1896, despite having dismissed the threat of derelicts as negligible at committee level two years earlier, the British parliament passed the Derelict Vessels (Report) Act, which legally obliged ships’ masters and commanders to report the whereabouts of any such vessel to the Lloyd’s agent at their next port of call. It’s unclear if any person was ever convicted of failing to do this, for which they would have been subject ‘to a penalty not exceeding five pounds’ [6]. The British position was still that hunting down and destroying derelicts was unnecessary and impractical.
The US government took a more sanguine view, authorising its navy to salvage or destroy derelicts reported off the country’s East Coast. One of the first ships so employed was the USS Yantic in 1889. This seems to have met with only limited success, the gunboat’s skipper Commander C. H. Rockwell observing that ‘lumber-laden derelicts are very tenacious, and can only be overcome by repeated blows from explosives of great power’ [7]. The tenacity of derelicts was further evinced by a chance encounter the cruiser USS San Francisco had with the waterlogged wreck of the abandoned schooner Drisko in October 1893. After towing the vessel proved impossible, the decision was made to sink her with ‘34-pound guncotton torpedoes’. After eight of these explosive devices failed to do the job, the order was given for the 4,000-ton cruiser to ram the Drisko. The violence of this finally broke the hull in two, and the settling remains were further fragmented with shellfire (Richardson, 1985). According to the USHO, a total of eleven US Navy ships took part in operations against reported derelicts between 1887-93, destroying 27 abandoned vessels, and failing to find 21 others [8]. Also among these early ‘destroyers’ were the experimental ‘dynamite gun cruiser’ Vesuvius, the harbour-defence ram Katahdin, and the old Civil War sloop Kearsage [4].
The introduction of the Seneca came in the midst of a revolution in communications at sea. The development of wireless telegraphy was a game-changer for derelict hunting, as passing ships could quickly relay the position of an abandoned vessel to shore stations, which in turn could alert the relevant port authorities. By the end of 1910, an estimated 300 mercantile marine vessels had been fitted with telegraphic communications [9]. However, by this time, the menace of the North Atlantic derelict was already beginning to recede as the East Coast lumber industry went into decline, and wooden lumber schooners were slowly replaced by metal-hulled steamships. By 1913, the Seneca had been reassigned to the International Ice Patrol, hunting icebergs in the wake of the Titanic disaster. On the United States’ entry into WWI, she took part in convoys and anti-submarine patrols.
Nevertheless, North Atlantic derelicts were still making headlines in the 1920s. A news article published in February 1925 detailed the transatlantic peregrinations of the Canadian four-masted schooner Governor Parr. Abandoned at the beginning of October 1923 while on a voyage from Nova Scotia to Buenos Aires, the vessel had ‘zigzagged across the steamer lanes several times’ on her eastward drift, attempts at towing her into port and destroying her by fire both having proved unsuccessful. ‘As her cargo is hard pine, which resists absorption of water’, the report concluded, ‘she may keep afloat for several years’ [10]. The Parr was reportedly still afloat somewhere between the Azores and Portugal at the end of July 1925 [11].
References
[1] Fernandez-Partagas, J. and Diaz, H. F. (1996) ‘Atlantic Hurricanes in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century’ Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 77(12), pp2899-2906
[2] Wynn, G. (1974) ‘On the History of Lumbering in Northeastern America 1820-1960’, Acadiensis: Journal Of The History Of The Atlantic Region, 3(2), pp122-129
[3] Richardson, P. L. (1985) ‘Drifting Derelicts in the North Atlantic 1883-1902’ Prog. Oceanog. 14, pp463-483
[4] ‘Recent Derelict Ships’ (1894), The Warwick Argus, 21st July. Available at: https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/76646579
[5] Floating Derelicts Committee (1894), Parliamentary Papers, 1850-1908 Volume 76, HM Stationery Office
[6] The Menace of the Derelict (1936). Available at: https://www.shippingwondersoftheworld.com/derelictiships.html
[7] ‘Notable Derelicts in The North Atlantic’ (1889), Science, Vol XIV, July-Dec.
[8] USHO (1894) Wrecks and Derelicts in the North Atlantic Ocean, 1887 to 1893, US Gov. Printing Off.
[9] Burns, R. (n.d.) Maritime Wireless Telegraphy Communications Beyond Visual Range. Available at: https://maritimearchaeologytrust.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Wireless.pdf
[10] ‘Wandering Derelict’ (1925), Maryborough Chronicle, 17th February. Available at: https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/153125329
[11] ‘Dangerous Derelicts’ (1925) The Gnowangerup Star, 12th September. Available at: https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/158907686
Bow Creek to Anatahan 