Cast iron propeller from the cargo ship the Lucy Miller, which sank on ledges off Petit Manan Island, Maine in 1893. Built in Philadelphia in 1876, it is believed to have been the first sail and steam powered commercial vessel. This was a four bladed, 96" diameter propeller before hitting the ledge.? Fishermen's Voice Photo

In 1869, a fierce snowstorm drove the half-bark Aerolite onto Baker Island Bar. The ship was a total loss except for some riggings and sails.

On a November night in 1886, the 73-foot Nova Scotia schooner Water Lily, carrying a load of dry pine lumber, was forced into Baker Island in a gale and was totally wrecked.

In January 1887, the Afton, from the Maritime Provinces, wrecked on Baker Island Bar in a snowstorm. The life-saving station saved all four of the crew.

Lime in the cargo on the schooner Byrtle from Saint John, New Brunswick, was ablaze when it ran aground on Baker’s south side in 1892. The 95-foot schooner Lucerne, also hailing from Saint John, was discovered unmanned and wrecked on Baker Island in December 1893.

In 1898, a man lost his boat at Baker in a snowstorm and froze one side of his face trying to save it. The 124-foot American schooner Three Sisters ran aground at Baker in August 1908.
In October 1921, the American schooner Seth Nyman was sailing in fog when the same island wrecked it on a passage to Blue Hill from Machias.

Maritime disaster has long been, and remains today, a fact of life in this – and any – coastal area.
The area around Baker Island has historically acted as a “ship trap” for mariners attempting to make for Frenchman Bay, Southwest Harbor, or the Cranberries, as well as for vessels passing the Maine coast that strayed too far to landward, due to the way the island itself or the bar to its north jut into the sea.

The Baker Island disasters are included in a new assessment that inventories vessels wrecked near or in Acadia National Park, in an area bounded by Isle au Haut to the west and Prospect Harbor to the east.

The month-long assessment was conducted in 2008 by Franklin Price of Bass Harbor and co-authors Joshua Daniel, Kristen Chasse, and John Stallings. The project received an LL Bean Acadia Research Fellowship funded the Acadia Maritime Cultural Resources Inventory, and uses historic records to provide a synopsis of known wrecks and abandonments.

The area’s earliest recorded wreck occurred during a storm in 1672, somewhere in Frenchman’s Bay. The name of the shallop, a small sailing craft, and the exact location where it sank, is unknown. The crew transferred the cargo to land and burned the vessel so that no one else would get it, because, in that era, the British and French, and for a short time the Dutch, were vying for ownership of the coastline.

Most recorded wrecks in Maine occurred between the 1880s and 1910, when the ocean was the trader’s predominant highway.

“Schooner captains were like truckers,” Price said. “It’s easier for us to find historical instances of these wrecks because they were so frequent. Most newspapers had a maritime happenings section.”

A graduate of Mount Desert Island High School, Price is a senior archeologist for the Florida Bureau of Archaeological Research in Tallahassee. His research interests include shipwreck patterning, submerged prehistoric landscapes, and micro-artifact recovery. Former projects include artifact recovery and underwater mapping of an early 18th century wreck thought to be Blackbeard’s flagship, Queen Anne’s Revenge.

This past summer, Price worked on a dive project on prehistoric shipwrecks for the state of Florida’s Bureau of Archeological Research, which maintains an extensive underwater archeological preserve system. He also carved out some time to travel to Sweden, where he helped with the archeology of a 17th century wreck.

In 2006-2007, Price conducted an interview survey of fishermen in this area for the Institute for Maritime History and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

C?Franklin Price stands with the bare bones of a wreck at Seal Cove. ??Tony Menzietti photo

“What I think is great about this research and the fishermen surveys is that we have such a rich maritime heritage in this area, and we’re still tied to the ocean,” he said. “All the fishermen have helped out enormously in sharing the information they have.”

The 2008 assessment, although of limited scope, “opens a window into the possibilities for study that these shipwrecks provide,” the report says. “The wealth of material, the diversity of the sources, and the centuries of history involved illustrate the great potential that this resource has for education, archeology and research.”

Price and his colleagues found evidence of 155 wrecks scattered throughout the study area.
Sources included historical societies, local libraries, maritime material from the Fogler Library at the University of Maine at Orono, museums, the Maine Bureau of Parks and Lands, the United States Coast Guard, Acadia National Park’s William Otis Sawtelle Collections and Research Center, NOAA’s list of wrecks and obstructions, the publication Merchant Vessels of the United States 1908-1978 and 1981, the Mystic Seaport Museum’s digitized collection of vessel registries, American Lloyds to 1900 and the American Bureau of Shipping to 1900, shipping lists, Captain’s Protests, receipts, correspondence, and U.S. Lifesaving Station correspondence.

Contemporary newspapers were the most fruitful source of information. Under headings such as “Marine Journal” and “Marine List” in the 1800s, local newspapers routinely listed maritime disasters on the local, national, and international levels. Sometimes wrecks were reported as paragraphs in state, county, or town happenings, which would mean researchers would have to read the entire newspaper.

The team also interviewed local residents, especially commercial fishermen. Ten people offered information on 20 potential shipwreck or abandonment sites, anchors, and historic dump sites.
Price dove on several of the sites.

“It’s not what you would expect,” he said. “It might be a few ribs, or a keel.”

There could be any number of boats that sank but were obliterated over the centuries by storms and the harsh shoreline, and will remain forever unknown.

“The wildly destructive nature of the ocean along this rocky coast could easily batter a wreck and sweep away the pieces,” the report says.

Still, the report adds, some larger artifacts, such as iron or steel machinery or anchors, are less likely to move far. Artifacts may also find their way into the rocks, and be trapped for long periods of time. As a result, the report says, the rocky parts of the coast may still hold small enclaves of maritime debris.

The wrecks mostly involved trading vessels early on, then yachts and fishing boats in the 20th century. Many of the trading vessels were from Canada, still a British colony, that were sailing from Nova Scotia and New Brunswick to Boston, and were blown off-course to crash into Maine’s islands and ledges. The historical record illustrates the changes in ship design, from brigs and barques to schooners, to motorized vessels.

“Many fishing boats may have gone unrecorded,” he said.

Unlike the star-quality Black- beard type of shipwreck, Maine’s are “more mundane,” Price said.

“These were the workhorses, bringing goods from place to place,” he said. “But any wreck can tell you about life at the time. To me, they’re all of interest.”

Even a single part of a ship, such as the keel, can yield useful information, he said.

“Especially in the 1700s and before, there are holes in our knowledge about ship construction,” he said. “So this data would help us learn more about shipbuilding in general.”

It is not uncommon for local fishermen and divers to come upon artifacts, hauled up in their nets, sitting on the sea floor, or washed onto shore. A hawse-pipe ashore and some keel lead might be artifacts of the Nellie J Crocker of Calais, wrecked on Schoodic Island in a thick fog.

One informant reported bringing up part of a keel in his scallop drag. Another saw a partially buried hull structure off Ship Harbor while diving. Fishermen reported dragging up artifacts off Baker Island that included an anchor, an old hauling block, propellers, and a prehistoric artifact.

Submerged material near Long Ledge including a sunken anchor, and timbers with brass fasteners, could be from any of the vessels that met disaster there—the brig Ava in an 1860 snowstorm, the schooner Amaranth grounded in 1868, the schooner Burpee C in 1892, the schooner Agnes in 1907, the Ida M in 1904, or some undiscovered or forever unknown ship.

Price stresses that artifacts on wrecked vessels are not up for grabs because the state owns historic vessels, while more recent wrecks belong to the original owner or the insurer. Maine is not a state that issues treasure-hunting permits. For Price, the work is both an adventure and a glimpse of history.

“It’s exciting work,” said Price. “It’s the sort of thing that’s fascinating.”

The work, he says, helps to raise public awareness not only of the history of wrecking events in general but of the rich maritime history of this part of the Maine coast.

“This is something that’s not just in the past,” he said. “It’s part of a heritage.”