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The sub and its weapon worked incredibly well during tests conducted by Holland, tests that irritated the impatient Fenians. Angered because they felt he was taking too much time with his experiments and trial runs with the ram, the Fenians decided to snatch it. On a dark night in November of 1883, a group of maddened Irish tanked up on good whiskey at a Brooklyn saloon. After becoming properly fortified, they borrowed a tugboat and sneaked up to the dock where the Fenian Ram was moored and towed her away.
Enjoying the moment in an alcoholic haze, they became carried away and decided to make off with the small experimental sub, too. Then they headed up the East River toward Long Island Sound, intending to hide the two subs up a small river near New Haven, Co
By the time they reached Whitestone Point, the wind had begun to blow strongly from the north and heavily buffeted the small convoy. The Fenians failed to notice that the model boat’s hatch cover on the turret had not been tightened down, and water began spilling through the cracks. Rapidly filling, the little sub foundered in the rising waves, snapped her tow-line, and headed to the bottom, 110 feet below. Unaware of the loss, they calmly continued on their way to New Haven.
Happily, the Fenian Ram still survives in a museum in Paterson, New Jersey.
I took up the challenge of searching for the little sub. Ralph Wilbanks hauled his boat, Diversity, up to New York from Charleston, and we stayed on the New York Maritime College cadet training cargo ship in the passengers’ staterooms and ate with the cadets in their cafeteria. I am indebted to Admiral David Brown, dean of the college, whose courtesy and hospitality were a godsend to the project. The college maintenance people helpfully lifted Ralph’s boat in and out of the water and provided space at the dock.
The sidescan sonar revealed many pieces of junk on the river bottom in the area off Whitestone Point, where the sub reportedly sank — though how the Fenians could claim they knew the spot, during a dark and windy night in choppy water in the days before depth sounders, is a mystery to me. I doubt whether they even knew the sub was missing until they reached New Haven.
Many of the anomalies the sidescan picked up were fifty-five-gallon steel drums. We could not help but wonder if one of them contained Jimmy Hoffa. We also recorded a few small cabin cruisers and sailboats on the bottom and imagined them with missing bodies inside. No one was in the mood to dive and find out. The riverbed was littered with so much metallic trash, it was difficult to pick out a small sub under the river mud with the magnetometer since no sign of it appeared on the sonar. After three days of fruitlessly cruising up and down the scenic East River, we packed up and called it a day.
Was the little sub covered over by mud? Did it lie under the Whitestone Bridge, whose steel girders threw the mag into hysterics? Or does it lie farther out in Long Island Sound?
I’m not ready to throw in the towel just yet. I hope to return someday and pick up the search where the river fans out into the Sound.
Continuing my self-inflicted orgy of shipwreck hunting, I then launched a search for the Confederate raider Georgia, which had a short but successful career, capturing nine Union merchant ships from 1862 to 1864. Though not quite as fascinating as that of Alabama or Florida, which we found under the James River in Virginia in 1984, her history made her famous, and, as one of the first sea raiders, her exploits inspired the German raiders of two world wars.
During her cruise, she almost started a war with Morocco, when a group of her officers went ashore and were assaulted by the locals before they barely escaped back to the ship with their bodies still intact. Disturbed by the indignity, the captain of the Georgia ordered the guns ma
A few months later, no longer considered fit to sail the seas as a raiding cruiser, she was sold and put into service as a mail packet between Lisbon and the Cape Verde Islands, where she was soon captured by a ship of the Union navy as a prize of war and returned to the United States. After a legal battle between the United States and Britain, she was sold to a series of shipping companies, before finally being bought by the Gulf-port Steamship Company for passenger and cargo service between Halifax and Portland, Maine.
When on a passage south from Nova Scotia in January of 1875, the old steamship, still named Georgia, struck the rocks known as the Triangles ten miles west of Tenants Harbor, Maine. The crew and passengers took to the lifeboats and rowed through a snowstorm to shore. No lives were lost, but the ship became a total wreck and was abandoned. She was the last of the Confederate raiders to die.
Historian Michael Higgins produced a small mountain of research on Georgia and her grounding, contacted me, and, soft touch that I am, I agreed to arrange a search off Maine for the remains of the fabled ship. After arriving in Tenants Harbor with Ralph, Wes Hall, and Craig Dirgo, we settled into a hotel reminiscent of a Steinbeck Monterey fish ca
I ordered my all-time favorite from my childhood, a chocolate malt with chocolate ice cream churned in a metal canister by a 1930s mixer. One sip and I was in paradise.
Early next morning, with Ralph at the helm, Diversity swept out toward Triangle Rocks, dodging literally hundreds of colorfully painted buoys attached to lobster traps. Every lobsterman has his own distinct color-coded buoy, and more and more they are being purchased by collectors.
Wes ma
There were a few small mag hits, but nothing showed on the sidescan sonar. After crisscrossing the Triangles three times, we stared at one another in surprised disappointment. We had come up empty. There was no indication of a shipwreck to be found.
We knew we were in the right spot. The only other rocks were too far out of the area, according to the old reports. Just to play it safe, we checked those out, too. How could an iron-hulled wreck the size of Georgia simply disappear?
The answer came from local historians whom we consulted after the unsuccessful hunt. Since urchin and scallop divers had been all over those rocks for many years without sighting wreckage, the only answer was that Georgia had been salvaged. Records from the 1870s and 1880s are sparse, but it was suggested that, owing to the extreme economic hardships of the citizens of Maine at the time, they’d pulled up almost every pound of her, including the keel and boilers, which they sold for scrap.
Curses, foiled again.
Shipwreck junkies that we were, the gang continued on to Saybrook, Co
The son of a Co