Earlier this month, a crew of researchers set out on a mission to find the wreck of a cannery ship that sank in Southeast Alaska over 100 years ago. But trying to find and identify a shipwreck involves a lot more than just looking in the water.
Researcher Shawn Dilles examines a photo of a site where the Star of Bengal may have wrecked.
“When we first ran across the chain, it was obvious on the sounder that we had found it. I mean, it was very, very distinctive,” Decker said.“I felt 89% sure that it was the chain from the Bengal,” he said. Decker and the Southeast Preservation Divers had been searching for the wreck in the hopes of revisiting its history and registering it as a historic site. Decker says he became interested in shipwreck diving over the course of his 38 years as a commercial harvest diver.
and headed for the site of the wreck. That includes Decker, marine archaeologist Jenya Anichenko, writer and visual artist Tessa Hulls, artist and musician Ray Troll, researcher Shawn Dilles, remote sensing specialist Sean Adams, and Endeavour owners Patsy Clark Urschel and Bill Urschel. The crew is using an instrument called a magnetometer. It is light enough to be mounted on a drone and flown in a grid to try and sense the location of a wreck like the Bengal. Adams says it’s typically used for detecting unexploded bombs or artillery shells buried under the ground. In this case, he’s hoping it could point the crew in the general direction of the wreck.
“I think the Nolan Center played a critical role in this,” Dilles said. “I’ve looked in archives all over the country and seen some of these photos, but not those two critical photos. We still don’t know exactly who took them and what day, but it’s a very reasonable guess, I think, to think it was a week after or so — within a week of the wreck and taken by the burial party.”
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