Team identifies mystery 1889 ship wreck

WILMINGTON, Del. -- One day two years ago, Art Trembanis, an associate professor of geological sciences at the University of Delaware, sent his students on a field trip to the waters off Cape Henlopen.

Their goal: to learn to use the high-tech equipment, such as side scan sonar, that coastal geologists use to survey the ocean bottom.

He told them to tow the device around Breakwater Harbor and along the waters of the Cape Henlopen shoreline. When they came back to Newark, they told him that it went well. And "Oh, by the way, we saw a shipwreck."

Trembanis was intrigued. He went on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration database of shipwrecks. Nothing was listed for the spot where the students had seen a very clear image of a massive ship hull.

"It was a bit of a head-scratcher," Trembanis said.

Now, two years later, with the help of oceanography graduate student Carter DuVal and state archaeologist Craig Lukezic, the team believes it has identified the ship, along with when and how it sank.

Tracking down a shipwreck might seem like an easy task, but since European settlement, hundreds of ships have run aground, foundered and sunk along the Delaware Coast and entrance to the Delaware Bay and River.

Two of Delaware's most famous shipwrecks -- the H.M.S. deBraak and the Roosevelt Inlet shipwreck -- both went down within sight of land. The mystery wreck the students found appeared to have done the same thing.

While the deBraak and the Roosevelt Inlet wreck date from the 18th century, this latest discovery comes from the 19th century and the Golden Age of Sail.

What Trembanis noticed right off was how big a vessel it must have been -- 215 feet long, or about the length of five-and-a-half school buses lined up end to end, he said. Compare that to the University of Delaware's research vessel Hugh Sharp, at 146 feet.

And as a coastal geologist who has studied sand movement, Trembanis figured the shoreline today -- and the wreck site -- probably was much different in the 19th century. One reason: Cape Henlopen has gone through a rapid transition, cutting inland as the point of Cape Henlopen has extended north and formed a hook. Cape Henlopen is the end of the line for Delaware's coastal conveyor belt of sand -- the sand that moves along the shoreline from Indian River Inlet, north along the ocean coast to Lewes.

Amid this natural movement of sand, there was another influence: construction of the Delaware Bay outer breakwater in the 1820s. Trembanis said it caused the sand spit that we know as the cape to begin to form. The cape, by the way, grows to the north at a rate of about 27 feet a year, he said.

And storms constantly are moving sand and reconfiguring the bottom, he said. Add to that Hen and Chicken Shoal -- a huge sandbar right where the ocean meets Delaware Bay.

"The currents are very, very strong here," Trembanis said.

So along came DuVal, who had an interest in shipwrecks and history. It was DuVal, who started pulling the clues together to determine what the wreck was.

DuVal started looking closely at the images of the wreck site -- 215 feet long by 45 feet wide. He noticed there didn't appear to be cargo inside. There was also what appeared to be damage on one side.

He discovered something right off the bat: "There're hundreds of shipwrecks here."

He went to books and newspaper accounts and decided the most likely candidate was a three-masted, square-rigged schooner: the W.R. Grace. Built in Maine, the ship had the right dimensions.

But there were two immediate problems. When DuVal started doing his research, he discovered that NOAA already had mapped the shipwreck in a 2007 survey, but hadn't identified it. It hadn't been mapped on earlier charts, another curiosity for a ship that went down so long ago. And, as he did his work, he discovered that the team of amateur archaeologists already had identified a shipwreck -- off Beach Plum Island -- as the Grace.

Turns out that identification wasn't accurate because the dimensions of that ship, which sits at the edge of the beach, aren't quite right.

In insurance records from Lloyd's of London, he discovered a ship that was built in 1873. It was the right size and turned out to be the Grace. He found it was wood, clad in a special copper, zinc alloy -- something that might have helped preserve the hull over all these years. And he learned that the cargo of 7,000 empty oil barrels from France were bound for Philadelphia, to be filled with oil and shipped to Japan.

The ship had set anchor during a hurricane in September 1889, he said. And then it drug anchor and ran around bow first. That, he said, was the right orientation for his shipwreck. As the wind lashed at the ship, the crew cut away the masts to keep it from rolling. Crews from the Cape Henlopen Life Saving Station tried three times to drive their surf boards through the waves to rescue the crew. They couldn't make it through so they resorted to the breeches buoy -- a line shot through a cannon and rigged with a chairlike device.

"Miraculously," DuVal said, "they were able to pull everybody off that ship."

In the days and weeks that followed, the ship was declared a loss and the oil barrels were recovered along with anything else of value, and sold at auction. The ship was left where it sat.

Some time later, a schooner bound from Savannah, Ga., to Providence, R.I., collided with the wreck of the W.R. Grace, he said. That explained a piece that was missing from the ship in the side scan.

State officials don't have special plans for the wreck site, although it is protected under state law.

"We plan to keep it preserved in place," said Lukezic.

As for the lesson the wreck gives coastal geologists: "We know the shoreline has moved away from it," Trembanis said.