© Hons/APThis August 2015 photo taken from video provided by Roger Pawlowski, shows the bow of the sunken ship Bay State in Lake Ontario near Fair Haven, New York.
The wreck site of one of the earliest propeller-driven steamships to sail the Great Lakes has been found in Lake Ontario more than 150 years after it sank in a storm, killing everyone on board, a team of New York-based shipwreck hunters said on Tuesday.
Jim Kennard and Roger Pawlowski, both of the Rochester area, said the wreck of the
Bay State is in water hundreds of feet deep, about seven miles off Fair Haven in central New York, 155 miles west of Albany. The
Bay State departed nearby Oswego in November 1862 with a cargo of general merchandise destined for Ohio. But a storm turned into a gale, forcing the ship's captain to turn back. "That was the beginning of the end," Kennard, who has been searching for shipwrecks since 1970, told the Associated Press.
The 137 ft-long, two-tiered ship vessel started coming apart, losing sections of its upper decks to the high winds and waves before eventually sinking and leaving a debris field about a quarter-mile long on the lake bottom. Seven passengers and between nine and 11 crew members were lost. Kennard said records of the exact number of crew were not kept, but the captain and at least four crewmen were from Oswego.
The Bay State, owned by a Cleveland, Ohio, company, was built in Buffalo in 1852, a decade after the first propeller-driven steamers joined paddle-wheelers on the Great Lakes, the explorers said.
Kennard and Pawlowski, with underwriting support from National Museum of the Great Lakes in Toledo, Ohio, were searching for wrecks along the lake's south-eastern shore in late August when their side-scan sonar revealed a debris field in several hundred feet of water about seven miles from shore. At the eastern end of the field the sonar detected a large object, which turned out to have the same dimensions as the
Bay State, Kennard said.
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