Shipwrecks of Stellwagen Bank: Disaster in New England's National Marine Sanctuary
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About this ebook
Matthew Lawrence
John Galluzzo serves as the maritime heritage member on Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary's Advisory Council. He is the director of education and camping for the South Shore Natural Science Center in Norwell, Massachusetts, and the author of more than thirty-five books on the history and nature of the northeastern United States. In 2013, he was chosen by the National Marine Sanctuary Foundation as the volunteer of the year for Stellwagen Bank sanctuary. Matthew Lawrence is an archaeologist and maritime heritage coordinator at Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary. A graduate of East Carolina University's maritime studies program, Matthew's research interests are the American coasting trade, steam navigation and the African slave trade. In addition to the Stellwagen Bank sanctuary, he has conducted archaeological fieldwork at the American Samoa, Olympic Coast, Thunder Bay and Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuaries. Matthew is an avid diver who enjoys underwater videography. Deborah Marx is a maritime archaeologist working for NOAA's Office of National Marine Sanctuaries. She is a graduate of East Carolina University's program in maritime studies. Her recent research efforts are focused on the Battle of the Atlantic off the United States coast during World Wars I and II and U.S. Shipping Board steamships in Mallows Bay, Maryland. Deborah has extensive experience preparing National Register of Historic Places shipwreck nominations, having co-authored twelve successful listings.
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Shipwrecks of Stellwagen Bank - Matthew Lawrence
Sanctuary.
INTRODUCTION
Some of the most well-preserved remnants of our past lie on the seafloor in the form of shipwrecks. Sunken vessels provide windows into the past that let us explore and understand our maritime legacy. America’s maritime focus, its extensive inland waterways and access to the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans allowed the nation to grow and prosper through local and global maritime connections. Massachusetts’ sailors and merchants were prime players at the heart of a transportation network from the first European settlement in the area. For over four hundred years, ship-borne trade, migration and fishing passed through the mouth of Massachusetts Bay, crossing what is now Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary. Vessels of all shapes and sizes carried New Englanders between Cape Cod and Cape Ann to destinations far and wide. Tragically, many of these voyages came to an unfulfilled end with the loss of many lives and much property. Today, the physical remains of hundreds of these voyages now lie on the seafloor as tangible connections to our past. Designated by the U.S. Congress to preserve, protect and interpret this nation’s maritime legacy, Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary is like an underwater museum off the Massachusetts coast where fish now inhabit vessels once occupied by brave mariners and archaeological research reveals untold stories.
1
NEW ENGLAND’S MUSEUM IN THE SEA
STELLWAGEN BANK NATIONAL MARINE SANCTUARY
OFFICE OF NATIONAL MARINE SANCTUARIES
Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary is one of fourteen special underwater places, encompassing more than 170,000 square miles of U.S. marine and Great Lakes waters, managed for the American public by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Office of National Marine Sanctuaries. Similar to underwater national parks, national marine sanctuaries include some of the nation’s most iconic underwater areas. The first national marine sanctuary was designated in 1975 to protect the Civil War ironclad USS Monitor, sunk off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. National marine sanctuaries on America’s East Coast range from New England’s Stellwagen Bank to the coral reefs of the Florida Keys around to Flower Garden Banks sanctuary in the Gulf of Mexico. Sanctuaries surrounding the Channel Islands off Southern California and Washington’s Olympic Coast bookend a series of special ocean places along the West Coast. Far in the Pacific, there are sanctuaries in American Samoa’s waters and in the Hawaiian Islands, including the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument. Each sanctuary is unique, representing important biological and/or cultural aspects. The Office of National Marine Sanctuaries’ mission is to protect and enhance these natural and cultural treasures for future generations through research, management and education. National marine sanctuaries encourage visitors to experience the countless opportunities for exploration, recreation and contemplation.
The National Marine Sanctuary System encompasses fourteen of America’s special underwater places. NOAA/ONMS.
In 1992, the U.S. Congress designated an 842-square-mile area at the mouth of Massachusetts Bay as the tenth national marine sanctuary. The Gerry E. Studds Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary (SBNMS) is named in honor of the influential Massachusetts congressman and ocean advocate who authored the National Marine Sanctuaries Reauthorization and Improvement Act of 1992. The sanctuary encompasses Stellwagen Bank and Basin, Tillies Bank and Basin and the southern portion of Jeffreys Ledge. Its open-ocean scenic beauty, located between Cape Ann and Cape Cod, hides shallow banks and deep basins that create varied habitats supporting a rich diversity of marine life, including twenty-two species of marine mammals and more than eighty species of fish. The sanctuary is a special place held in trust for the American public; as such, sanctuary regulations afford historical resources protection unavailable in other federal waters off Massachusetts. Sanctuary regulations prohibit moving, removing or injuring or any attempt to move, remove or injure a sanctuary historical resource, including shipwrecks, artifacts and other submerged archaeological sites.
Federal legislation requires that the Office of National Marine Sanctuaries inventory, manage and interpret the National Marine Sanctuary System’s historic properties, including archaeological sites, building understanding of this nation’s past and linking those stories to local communities today. Most of the American maritime experience has representation in the National Marine Sanctuary System, allowing for a holistic approach to studying and interpreting the nation’s maritime landscape.
Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary spans the mouth of Massachusetts Bay between Cape Ann and Cape Cod. NOAA/ONMS.
In 2002, NOAA’s Office of National Marine Sanctuaries established the Maritime Heritage Program to help sanctuaries meet their historic preservation mandates and promote maritime heritage appreciation throughout the entire nation. The program created a structure with personnel designated at individual sanctuaries and at NOAA headquarters working to support local, regional and national initiatives. These projects range from surveys to locate shipwrecks to creating exhibits with local museums. The Maritime Heritage Program links together all sanctuaries in the system through a common bond and promotes the enjoyment and appreciation of not only physical resources like shipwrecks but also intangible items like oral histories and traditional knowledge held by indigenous cultures. Maritime heritage adds a human dimension to the National Marine Sanctuary System, connecting people to their watery world and creating stewards for this blue planet.
WHEN MAMMOTHS ROAMED STELLWAGEN BANK
Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary has a rich and diverse collection of shipwrecks due to its lengthy Euro-American maritime tradition; however, humanity has had a much longer relationship with the area. Native Americans likely visited Stellwagen Bank sanctuary when lowered sea levels exposed dry land following the last ice age. Around twenty thousand years ago, the Laurentide ice sheet extended across northern North America, reaching as far south as Nantucket. This ice sheet locked away tremendous quantities of water, lowering global sea levels as much as one hundred meters. A warming period beginning eighteen thousand years ago caused the ice sheet to recede north, uncovering the continental shelf. While the area’s climate was not as warm as it is today, Stellwagen Bank’s environment was similar to present-day Cape Cod, with lakes, swamps, marshes and beaches. Spruce and poplar trees, as well as grasses, likely covered Stellwagen Bank and supported grazing mammals that ranged in size from small deer to mastodons. Fishermen have found the teeth of these massive animals in their nets hauled in Stellwagen Bank’s vicinity. It’s likely that Paleoamericans also hunted marine mammals along the shoreline for food and raw materials for clothing, shelter and tools. During this time, Stellwagen Bank was connected to Cape Cod, creating a peninsula that sheltered a shallow sea to its west, while Jeffreys Ledge projected into the Atlantic connected to Cape Ann in the north. One of the nation’s oldest and largest Paleoamerican inhabitation sites lies at Bull Brook in Ipswich, Massachusetts, not far from the sanctuary’s northwestern corner. Archaeologists have hypothesized that Paleoamericans may have hunted caribou along the coastal margins and possibly onto Jeffreys Ledge.¹
Exactly how long Stellwagen Bank and Jeffreys Ledge remained connected to their respective capes has yet to be determined. Roughly ten thousand years ago, the melting and retreating ice sheet raised sea levels further, inundating Stellwagen Bank. As water slowly covered the bank, wind, currents and waves reshaped the bank’s glacial deposits through erosion and re-deposition. While this process destroyed Stellwagen Bank’s rich littoral environment, Native American communities did not lack for resources, as the rich marine ecosystem rimming Massachusetts Bay provided for increasingly complex cultures. Potentially, Native Americans may have returned to sanctuary waters in pursuit of marine mammals. Archaeological investigations at Caddy Park in Quincy, Massachusetts, revealed a whale tail atlatl weight, stone tools for boat building and even long blades that might have been used to butcher animals with thick layers of blubber.²
SANCTUARY EXPLORATION AND EXPLOITATION
Europeans likely first entered into Stellwagen Bank sanctuary’s maritime history in the late sixteenth century, when fishing vessels from France, England and Portugal likely sheltered behind Cape Ann after being blown off the Grand Banks. These fishermen undoubtedly recognized the bounty available from the Gulf of Maine’s productive waters, leading to official explorations by Bartholomew Gosnold, Martin Pring and John Smith. These initial forays paved the way for the European colonization of New England and the establishment of the English colony at Plymouth, Massachusetts, with the arrival of the Mayflower in 1620. From that period on, the region became a locus for a variety of human maritime activities. Fishery resources harvested from Stellwagen Bank played an important role as a trade commodity that ensured the success of the early English settlements. The abundance of cod, mackerel and herring allowed colonists to fish relatively close to shore from small sailing vessels such as pinks and shallops. A vital trading network soon developed that spanned the Atlantic world and formed the basis for the region’s maritime-based economy. An abundance of timber and access to deep-water ports also ushered in the beginning of a lucrative shipbuilding industry that prospered well into the nineteenth century.
John Smith’s map of New England, reprinted in 1635, indicated good fishing grounds on Stellwagen Bank. Map reproduction courtesy of the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library.
European maritime conflict created opportunities for New England’s colonial merchant fleet to trade with the Atlantic world. While hostile blockades of America’s ports during the American Revolutionary War and the War of 1812 created temporary impediments to free-flowing maritime trade that originated in Massachusetts’ maritime communities and spanned the globe, fishing remained one of the most lucrative ventures, and the ports of Gloucester, Boston and Provincetown were some of the top places to land one’s catch taken off Stellwagen Bank. Whaling also provided New Englanders with a valuable export commodity. Initially, large pods of right whales inhabited the waters surrounding Stellwagen Bank. The animals’ seasonal proximity to shore allowed fishermen to hunt them using rowed small boats. As the inshore fishery overexploited the local whale population, whalers sailed farther out into the Atlantic to hunt their quarry. During the nineteenth century, whaling activities became a global enterprise, where large ships pursued whales into the vast reaches of the Pacific Ocean. Oftentimes, these voyages took two or more years, ending only when the hold was full of whale oil. The whaleship would then return to one of the many ports around Massachusetts Bay and sell its hard-earned cargo to Boston merchants for export.
Like generations before him, a Portuguese dory fisherman hand lines for cod off Cape Cod in 1942. Library of Congress, FSA/OWI Collection, LC-USW38-002175-E.
New England developed its cultural identity through its maritime interaction with other societies around the globe. This cultural exchange was made possible by the international trading and whaling voyages that originated and returned to communities on the sanctuary’s doorstep. Vessels from Boston, Salem and other Massachusetts ports transited through the sanctuary on the way to the Far East, Europe and the Caribbean. In addition to the commodities exchanged with Europe, tens of thousands of Europeans immigrated to the United States on vessels that passed through the sanctuary’s waters on the way to Boston.
The Provincetown whaling steamer A.B. Nickerson hunted fin whales in Massachusetts Bay near Stellwagen Bank. Fall River Marine Museum.
Increasing maritime traffic in the nineteenth century, expansion of the American nation and development of the U.S. federal government led to efforts to make waterborne movement of goods and people safer. Created in 1807, the U.S. Coast Survey, a predecessor to NOAA and the nation’s first science agency, was responsible for charting America’s waterways to reduce shipping casualties and guide mariners in and out of busy ports. From the seventeenth century onward, coastal fishermen and mariners were aware of the underwater bank spanning the mouth of Massachusetts Bay. Not only was Middle Bank
a productive fishing ground, but it also provided a navigation check to those transiting into the bay in low visibility. Scientific charting of Middle Bank
was finally undertaken by Lieutenant Henry S. Stellwagen, on loan to the Coast Survey from the U.S. Navy, who was dispatched to the area to assess lighthouse and lifesaving station locations. In the fall of 1854, while in command of the USCSS Bibb, his survey party used a sounding lead and careful navigation to establish the bank’s extents, surrounding depths