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Officially No. The wreck, known as 15563, was identified as the Industry, the only whaling vessel known to have sunk in the Gulf of Mexico.
On Wednesday, scientists announced they were confident the wreck was Industry, which was built in 1815 and capsized in a storm on May 26, 1836. Its rediscovery—and the newly discovered fate of its crew, which likely included Black Americans, white Americans, and Native Americans—opens a window into the antebellum maritime and racial life of the United States.
The ship’s remains were first documented in 2011, when a geological data company scanning an oil lease area identified the carcass of a ship at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. Following standard procedures, the company reported its finding to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, which registered the wreck as No. 15563 and left it alone.
The world’s seabeds are covered with shipwrecks, and oil contractors come across them all the time. But James P. Delgado, senior vice president of Search Inc., a firm that manages cultural resources such as archaeological sites and artifacts, was concerned because the oil contractor’s description mentioned a test factory, a type of furnace specific to whaling. ships.
When the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration needed to test new equipment in the Gulf of Mexico, he asked Search Inc. if there were any shipwrecks it wanted to explore.
Maritime archaeologist Dr. From his office last month, Delgado led the crew of NOAA’s Okeanos Explorer, which piloted a remote-controlled vehicle around the wreck, approximately 70 miles from the mouth of the Mississippi River, under 6,000 feet of water. . Vehicle, Dr. He moved back and forth repeatedly in precise models, collecting images and data where Delgado and other researchers created an extremely detailed three-dimensional model known as orthomosaic.
They examined the size of the ship (20 feet by 64 feet); body shape (characteristic of the early 1800s); materials (no distinctive green color indicating the presence of oxidized copper); and test workshops (insulated with large amounts of bricks, showing that the furnaces operate at the scorching temperatures needed to produce oil from whale oil).
All matched, along with location, to what researchers knew about the Industry.
Whaling was booming as the industry set sail, and Westport, Mass. It brought together Black Americans, white Americans, and Native Americans in northern coastal towns such as A prominent shipbuilder was Paul Cuffe, the son of a freed slave and a member of the Wampanoag tribe, and one of Cuffe’s own sons, William, was in the crew of Industry.
Lee Blake, president of the New Bedford Historical Society and a descendant of Cuffe, said that the Cuffe family “chartered nearly all Blacks and Indians on their ship and ensured that all these people were paid equally according to their rank on the ship.” “This, of course, is a completely different way of looking at work at a time when you have Southern ports enslaving Native Americans and African Americans.”
The racial makeup of Industry’s crew limited their options when they were in trouble, as Black members could be imprisoned and potentially sold into slavery if they had docked in a Southern port. Most whalers avoided the Gulf of Mexico altogether; According to research by historian Judith Lund, who works for the New Bedford Whaling Museum, only 214 whaling expeditions are known to have been made in the Bay from the 1780s to the 1870s.
Until now, historians did not know what happened to Industry’s crew.
Robin Winters, a librarian at the Westport Free Public Library, told Dr. When he began digging in September at Delgado’s request, all he knew was that the ship sank somewhere in the Gulf in 1836. The passenger manifest sank with it. Documents from the Starbuck whaling family determined that the captain was “Soule.”
For months Miss Winters remained dry. It then reached Jim Borzilleri, a Nantucket researcher who found a mention in a news report from Captain Soule aboard a Nantucket-based ship named Elizabeth in the 1830s.
Ms. Winters said Soule was a common surname in New England at the time, but the reference caught her attention. “Hmm, I thought it might be too good to be true that the crew and captain were taken by Brig Elizabeth,” she said.
He asked Mr Borzilleri to see if Industry and Elizabeth were together.
He called again 10 minutes later.
He read to Mrs Winters a small “maritime news” note stuck towards the end of the June 22, 1836 edition of the Nantucket Inquirer and Mirror: Elizabeth returned home on June 17 with 375 barrels of whale oil and “Passenger Captain Soule and the crew of the Westport ship Industry, On May 26, she capsized off the coast of Balize with 310 Bbl oil.”
In other words, the Industry crew was rescued by chance from another ship from the North by chance.
Dr. Delgado said that the most interesting discoveries in marine archeology are not always the ships whose names appear in textbooks, but instead “these ships that appeal to everyday experience.”
“And with that, we remembered that history wasn’t the big names,” he added.
Dr. “When we find a ship, it’s like a book suddenly opened in many ways,” Delgado said. “And not every page may be there, but when they are, it’s kind of like ‘Wow’.”
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