[Shannon Ricles] Welcome to the webinar today,
and thank you for joining us.
We are going to be doing Wrecked on the Chicamacomico,
a look at the shipwrecks of Wimble Shoals, North Carolina.
I am Shannon Ricles, the Education and Outreach Coordinator
for Monitor and Mallows Bay National Marine Sanctuaries.
And I will be your host today.
-: And I am Mark Losavio,
the Media and Outreach Coordinator
for Monitor and Mallows Bay-Potomac River.
And I will be your co-host today.
-: So this webinar is brought to you
by NOAA's Monitor National Marine Sanctuary
in collaboration with the North Carolina Office
of State Archeology.
-: Partnering since 1975,
NOAA and the state of North Carolina work to research,
honor, and protect the hallmarks
of North Carolina's underwater cultural heritage,
shipwrecks.
These shipwrecks hold information
about the ever-changing technologies
and cultural and physical landscapes.
They serve as a uniquely accessible underwater museum
and a memorial to generations of the mariners who lived,
died, worked, and fought off of our shores.
This is just one of the many webinars that we'll be hosting
in the coming months and years
with the Submerged NC Webinar Series in collaboration
with the North Carolina Office of State Archeology.
-: Now, Monitor is just one of 15 national marine sanctuaries
and two marine national monuments
in the National Marine Sanctuary System.
This system encompasses more than 620,000 square miles
of marine and Great Lakes waters from Washington state
to the Florida Keys, and from Lake Huron to American Samoa.
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-: So today we welcome our speaker, Allyson Ropp,
from the North Carolina Office of State Archeology.
And I will go ahead and hand over,
there you go.
-: Okay, so you're seeing the PowerPoint, right?
-: Yes, we are.
-: Hi everyone, my name is Allyson Ropp.
I am an archeologist with the state of North Carolina.
I'm also a Ph.D. student
at the Integrated Coastal Sciences Program
at East Carolina University
looking at shipwreck preservation.
But today we're gonna be talking about some research
that I did a few years ago on a number of shipwrecks
off of Chicamacomico, which is the Rodanthe area
of the Outer Banks.
So we're gonna go out to the beach today.
Okay.
So one of the most famous wrecks that I would say
is off of North Carolina is the SS Mirlo,
particularly, for the area that we're talking about.
The beach right there is named Mirlo Beach.
And so this vessel was a World War I tanker
sailing from Britain during the war effort
and it made it's way over to the United States
to pick up some oil from the Gulf Coast in New Orleans,
and was making its way back home to Britain
when it wrecked off of the shores of North Carolina
in the Wimble Shoals area.
And so we don't necessarily know what happened,
but what we do know, in terms of how it wrecked,
but what we do know is that the boat caught fire.
There were multiple explosions
that split their vessel in half.
So this is what it would've looked like as a full vessel.
So it's split it in half, the seas around the wreck
were burning as the oil is leaking out
from those explosions and that was being hauled
in the vessel, and the lifesaving crew
at Chicamacomico Life-Saving Station right on shore there
and the townspeople were just watching this happen.
This is happening in the middle of the day.
And so the crew banded together and were able
after multiple attempts to get one of these lifesaving boats
out there to rescue the crew.
And the crew themselves on the vessel
had attempted to get off.
So they had multiple lifeboats onboard.
One got off with a heavy load
and ended up flipping in the fiery sea.
A second one got off with not as many people
as it should have, and started to float off
to the south with the currents.
And a final one was able to get off with the captain,
and they were able to start making their way towards shore,
which is where they ran into the lifesavers,
the Coast Guardsmen from the shore.
And they were told what was going on.
And so they first went to rescue those guys
in the burning seas.
So with the water caught on fire, the boat had flipped over,
these guys were hanging onto the edge of the vessel
going under so they wouldn't catch on fire
coming up to breathe so they wouldn't drown.
And they were repeating this process over and over again
for a few hours.
And so the crew was able to get out there,
pulled these sailors out of the water,
they then tracked down that second vessel
that had been floating off, and finally were able to bring
all of these guys to shore, and they were able to rescue
all but nine sailors from this event.
And were since honored by both the American
and British governments for their effort
in saving the crew of this ship.
So this is only one of a number of wrecks
off of North Carolina.
And so Mark, we have a poll here and I want you guys
to tell me how many wrecks do you think there are
off of North Carolina?
So all of North Carolina, not just the area
that we're gonna be talking about today.
Mark: Right.
So how many shipwrecks are in North Carolina?
Between one and 500, between 500 and 1,000,
between 1,000 and 5,000, between 5,000 and 10,000
or more than 10,000?
We're already getting quite a few votes in,
but make sure you do so quickly
as I will close the poll here soon in a few seconds.
There's a lot of guesses going on here.
-: Perfect.
Mark: All right, I'll give it five more seconds.
Okay, last chance to vote.
And there we go.
It's now closed and here are the results.
Allyson, can you see that?
-: I see a button.
I don't know what it does.
Ah.
Mark: No worries, I'll read it to you.
-: Okay.
Mark: Looks like the most selected answer
is between 1,000 and 5,000
and in second place between 5,000 and 10,000.
And then third place is more than 10,000.
-: Okay, you guys are pretty spot on.
It's about 5,000 that we know of
historically from the records.
Obviously, we don't have account of all of the shipwrecks.
We probably are missing some that have wrecked
and nobody knew about.
And this was made by the National Geographic
and this just gives you a breadth of the entire state.
And so all of these lifts and all of these little dots
along the shoreline and even in the sounds
and up the rivers are all of the shipwrecks
that we know about, at least historically.
Some we have verified archeologically.
So we know about 5,000.
In the area that we're talking about today,
there's about 200 and so we're looking specifically
at Wimble Shoals, which is right here.
There's five fan oblique-shaped bars
right off of what is now Rodanthe, Salvo, and Waves
in this area of Hatteras Island on the Outer Banks.
And these are ever-shifting sandbars.
They were first denoted in the 1700s
and named after a cartographer named James Wimble.
And we're pretty confident based on the geological record
that they're used in the maps that we have
from that time period in the 1700s,
that these shoals are the remnants
of a previously lost cape.
So like Cape Hatteras and like Cape Lookout,
there used to be a cape up here called Cape Kenrick
that eventually became submerged and washed away enough
to form an inlet at what is now Chicamacomico
or what is now Rodanthe,
which was the Chicamacomico inlet.
And so these bars out here extend about 15 to 17 meters
and they extend about 15 to 17 kilometers
and they extend about 10 kilometers offshore.
And so this area that we're looking at is pretty active.
You can see there's another shoal
just north of Wimble Shoals
and we have some shoals south of it.
But we are looking at this area between Oregon Inlet
and the south of the, what is called the Tri-Town Area
on the Outer Banks.
And so, as I said, we have about 200 wrecks in this area
that I looked at as part of this study
to understand the different wreck stories
and the historical information that we have
about a lot of these shipwrecks and what they can tell us
about wrecking trends in the area.
And so this was done as part of a larger study
to understand shipwrecks on Wimble Shoals specifically,
but I wanted to expand it to see how these shoals
and just the general nature of this part of the Outer Banks
was impacting, or did it have any impact
on how ships had wrecked throughout the time periods we have
for these various wrecks.
And so these just gives you a sense of the different types
of wrecking events that we can have out there.
So most are driven ashore, which as you see here
with the Kohler over here on the right
and another one here on the left.
And this one in the middle, some were lost during war,
still see today.
And so this is one that you can see right in that area
off of Mirlo Beach.
If you just go out there and you can look out into the water
and you can see this boiler sticking up.
The remains of our Kohler here appear every so often.
And so, I just answered it, but Mark, we have another poll.
What is causing most of these shipwrecks in North Carolina,
do you guys think?
So we have A, sandbars and shoals,
B, the weather and storms, C, currents,
D, sailors or human activities,
E, none of the above, or F, all of the above.
So, what's causing most of these wrecks to occur?
Mark: Alright, we've got a pretty distinct trend
going on here, so I'm not very surprised.
We have a very smart and well-informed audience
that I'm very proud to be a part of.
So I will leave this poll open for,
I'll give it five more seconds for you guys
to put in your votes.
Alright, I'll go ahead and close this now.
And so it looks like 66% said all of the above
and most of the other votes went to sandbars and shoals.
-: Oh, pretty good guys, that's about accurate.
So we will start with the environment
as one of the major drivers of wrecking events in this area,
which did lead to some of the other human-made errors
in terms of wrecking.
So what we have in this area of North Carolina
off of the Outer Banks is we have these multiple
different currents and streams coming together.
So we've got the Gulf Stream coming up from the south,
there's a big orange one and we have the cooler water
is coming down from the Labrador Current
and the shelf waters from the north
and they're mixing right in this area,
which you can see in this picture.
That's why there's all this murky sandy looking water
right here by Hatteras Island.
It's where those different currents are coming together
and that creates distinct wave patterns
that are hard to predict that creates different,
you have hot and cold interacting not only in the water
but in the air that can lead to more storm generation.
And with all of these currents
and all of this water movement,
you're having a lot of sand movement
that contributes to the shifting shorelines.
And so what captains had to do in this environment
is they had to basically pick their poison.
Did they want, depending on their direction of travel,
did they wanna go way out here and possibly get stuck
in the Gulf stream if they're going south
or did they wanna thread this needle between the shoreline
and the shoals to try to make it around this
and avoid all of these different currents
that they were facing.
But another consideration here is just the sheer amount
of traffic that was happening off the coastline
of North Carolina and continues to happen today.
So this is a map of all of the different tracks
that have ships and this is just zoomed into North Carolina.
And you can see there are distinct lines of travel
that are happening up and down our shorelines,
and this has been going on for decades.
There's accounts from Kinnakeet,
which is now modern-day Avon,
which is just south of where we're talking,
in this area, that the townspeople could look out
in the 1800s and see 75 to 80 ships per day passing.
So that's a lot of traffic happening up and down.
And if you have captains that aren't familiar with the area,
the shoals that are always moving,
making decisions on the fly as storms blow in,
it can lead to a lot of interactions
and eventually shipwrecking in that area.
And so what all of these wrecks ended up leading to
was the eventual development of the Lifesaving Service
in the United States.
While it came out of wrecks across the country,
there were some major wrecks that happened in North Carolina
that drove the formation of the Lifesaving Service.
So this is just the locations
of all of the lifesaving stations that were ever-present
in North Carolina as well as the lighthouses.
And so the area that we're looking at,
we're looking between Oregon Inlet and Gull Shoals
on Hatteras Island.
And so some are still there,
you can still see the Chicamacomico Station
if you go out to Rodanthe today.
They do really cool reenactments
of how all of the Lifesaving Service equipment functions.
And I believe the Oregon Inlet Station is still present
and it's now a part of the park service.
But a lot of these places,
so they're within walking distance of one another.
And so crew members from Chicamacomico
would pace halfway between New Inlet and Chicamacomico,
and halfway between Gull Shoals and Chicamacomico.
And they would meet up with their neighboring stations
to ensure that they were covering the breadth
of the shoreline as they're looking out
for shipwrecks offshore.
Now, as we'll see in some of the stories here in a minute,
they couldn't necessarily see all of the time
because of how bad the weather got out there
and they were just using their lanterns.
And while the lighthouses can be seen offshore,
they're not just shedding light down the entire stretch
of this island, you can just spot the light flashing.
So we'll get started with our earliest wreck here,
the Pocahontas.
Pocahontas was built in Baltimore in 1829
for the Maryland and Virginia Steamboat Company.
It was 138-foot vessel
that could accommodate a hundred passengers.
And so throughout it's life it was pretty lucky.
It didn't crash earlier, it hit a couple of storms,
but no serious damage.
And at one point it even carried a Siamese Princess
when she was visiting the United States.
And during the Civil War it became a horse transport
and was part of the Burnside Expedition.
And so in January of 1862, the ferry had big commission
to haul horses from Baltimore down to Hatteras.
And all of these horses, they're about 113,
were a part of the fourth regiment of the Rhode Island unit.
And what happened?
So they hit a storm in the Wimble Shoals area
and it was driven aground.
And so the boiler blew.
So we have our boiler here.
So this exploded, the steering gave out,
so they had lost complete control of the ship.
The hull started to leak,
and when they were about 10 miles offshore,
they started pushing these horses over,
which you can see in this illustration here,
you've got horses and people all running a shore
as the ship out there is breaking up.
And so they were able to get all but 24 of the horses off
because there were a few that were stuck down in the hold
and they couldn't get them out.
And all the crew member were saved.
So in this instance, most of them just washed ashore,
but the ship was completely gone.
So the Lifesaving Service was not involved,
as I can tell in this rescue.
They made their way ashore themselves.
And so our next one is the Annie E. Blackman.
This one was built in 1883 in New Jersey
as a three-masted schooner for coal and lumber transport
along the Eastern Seaboard.
She spent six years sailing up and down,
and had only one major collision during her life.
In the fall of 1888, 1889, excuse me,
she left Philadelphia for Jacksonville, Florida
laden with coal.
And she was lost about two to three miles off of New Inlet,
which is above Rodanthe.
So that's an inlet that is no longer present,
where the Pea Island lifesaving
or Pea Island visitor center is.
So it's no longer there, it's since closed.
But that's the general area in which the Blackman wrecked.
So in this case, the storm completely drove the ship ashore.
It was completely leaking.
And unfortunately, there was only one survivor
in this instance.
And this was the captain.
And the captain just happened to have
the only life vest aboard
and was able to float towards shore
as his fellow crewman drowned and the ship was lost.
So he was able to float in and floated into the inlet
and just happened to come across a pole within the inlet.
And he tied himself to that pole
for the remainder of the night and just walked in circles
around the pole as the storm was raging around him.
Now the Lifesaving Service had been keeping an eye out
that night because of the major storm
that was blowing through, but because of the weather
they couldn't see anything.
So they didn't know that the Blackman had ran aground
and had wrecked at night until they went out
the following morning, and they saw the remains of the ship
and they came across the captain in the inlet
who was still walking around the pole.
They were able to get him off the pole,
and fed, and warm.
But the ship was a complete loss.
So we have the Strathairly here,
which is out of New England.
It was built in New Castle, England.
And so when this vessel wrecked,
it was on route from Baltimore,
from Cuba with a load of iron ore.
It ran into some fog and ran aground.
They were able to alert the Lifesaving Station,
but again, the Lifesaving Station at Chicamacomico
wasn't able to do anything because of that dense fog.
And so when the fog lifted,
they had noticed from shore that the mast had broken.
The life vessels or lifeboats had all been broken up.
The vessel had split in half.
And they were eventually informed that at that point,
three members of the crew had died.
So because the ship was so close to shore,
the lifesaving station, instead of launching the boats
as they did in the case of the Mirlo,
were able to use a Lyle gun,
which is basically just shooting out a shot line
to the vessel so they could tie it off too
and then haul sailors in from the wrecking ship.
This eventually failed.
They were never able to get the shot line out there
and the ship continued to break up.
And all of the wave action
and at that point the crew members
with the available life vests jumped overboard
and started to swim to shore.
Only seven of the crew that were on this vessel survived.
This vessel has been found and documented
with a joint effort between CSI,
the Coastal Studies Institute here in North Carolina,
the East Carolina program in maritime studies
and NOAA to document this wreck off of Rodanthe.
So the George L. Fessenden was a Maine built
three-masted schooner.
It was built in 1874.
It had a very long career and went all the way around
the Eastern Seaboard down into the Gulf.
It has a really interesting career.
So this vessel carried everything from coal and timber
to molasses and sugar, and at one point it lost
its complete cargo of molasses and no one is really sure
how that molasses was lost.
And a separate occasion, the captain,
they had pulled into port and sat there for a few days,
and the captain had completely disappeared,
and they had no idea where he had went.
And they eventually learned that he had checked himself
into a psychiatric hospital.
But in April of 1898, she had been loaded with stone
from Philadelphia for Fort Caswell in Southport.
And, at this point, she's sailing down from Philadelphia,
making good time and at some point put into Hampton Roads
and the records don't tell us why,
no one really knows what this vessel
was doing in Hampton Roads.
But it went in and then it came out a few days later,
and it started sailing south again to get to Southport.
And about four miles northeast
of the Chicamacomico Life-Saving Station
the vessel anchored.
And again, no one knows why. The Lifesaving Station saw it.
So they were sitting there and they were watching it
waiting to see if it raised any distress flags
so they could go out and help.
A passing steamer had noticed that they were in distress,
and wanted to stop by and help get the crew off the vessel,
but the crew refused to leave the vessel.
So we now have this vessel
that's just sitting there anchored, potentially in distress,
potentially not in distress.
And a major storm blows in and completely wrecks the vessel
washing away four of the crew members,
including the captain.
And at this point in this anchoring the anchor chain breaks,
the vessel's being driven ashore, and at this point
the Lifesaving Station steps in, and are able to get in
to help get the remaining crew off the vessel.
And so what they learned when they got the crew aboard
is that the captain had drowned,
he had been washed overboard during the storm.
The remaining crew had reported that the ship was rotten.
So it probably wasn't in great sailing condition.
And unfortunately,
the sailors didn't really know each other.
It's unclear if they even spoke the same language.
So they didn't really know what to do
at any point in time to convince the captain
to wave the distress signal or even once the storm blew up.
So it's a really interesting events
in the life of this vessel.
So we have the Alfred Brarbook,
which was another three-masted schooner out of Maine.
It was built in 1873.
Pretty uneventful career.
So in 1899, the vessel was loaded with ice from Maine
to Charleston, South Carolina when it ran aground,
ran into a gale and a snowstorm off of North Carolina.
And this one happened to be spotted by a patrolman
that was walking up and down the beach as they did.
And they were able to get help.
And because it was so close to shore,
the Lifesaving Station could use the Lyle gun
to save the crew.
But the vessel and the cargo were a total loss.
So the Montana here was a three-masted schooner
built in New Jersey.
Again, pretty uneventful career.
So in 1904, she had been loaded with salt from Charleston
to sail to New York.
In a storm, again, we had our ship run aground
about a quarter mile north
of the Pea Island Life-Saving Station
about 300 yards from shore.
And in this case, because it was a pretty visible storm
that they could see through the lifesaving,
the vessel was able to signal ashore
and take shelter in the rigging.
And at that point, they were able to get out there and help.
And so the Lifesaving Station was able to use the Lyle gun,
again, to save the crew members.
But in that waiting period,
one of the crew members were lost.
So the Loring C. Ballard is again another one you can see
on the beaches at the Outer Bank, it's near Ramp 23.
And this is what it looks like at various times,
at various tides.
So this is another Maine built, three-masted schooner.
It was built in 1884, had a long career.
And so in April of 1915, she left Portland, Maine
for South Carolina and ballast.
So she wasn't carrying anything on her way
down to South Carolina.
It ran into a hurricane about a half a mile
from Gull Shoal's Lifesaving Station.
And over time, as they were waiting to be rescued,
'cause it took a while to get the Lyle gun out there,
it just kept being driven, and driven ashore,
and the crew were all saved.
But as you can see, the vessel was not,
I'm sure there were some salvage operations that happened,
but this is what we can see today when we go out there.
The Elizabeth is an American-built steamer.
She's built in 1904.
And in 1919, in March, she was loaded with sugar
in the West Indies to be sailed to New York.
And so this one actually did run aground on Wimble Shoals.
And so those shoals can get really shallow out there
depending on the draft of the vessel and at certain tides.
And so she ran aground three miles offshore on the shoals,
and began to take on water.
Because she was so far away, while they did alert
the Lifesaving Station,
the crew couldn't make any significant efforts
to get out there to save the crew and the cargo.
Eventually, the next day a tug from Norfolk had arrived
to help rescue the crew that was on the vessel.
And so all of the crew were saved.
They don't mention anything about the cargo of sugar,
presumably, it was lost with the vessel.
Now, I think this one is really a cool one
and one day I hope we can find it.
So the Governor Ames was built in Maine in 1888,
it's the first five-masted schooner
to ever sail in the ocean.
So at this point in the 1880s
there had been five-masted schooners
that were sailing around on the Great Lakes,
but none had sailed the ocean.
And this was the first one, and this is actually
what it looked like in the 1800s.
She had a long storied career, she traveled the world,
she sailed from Australia all the way to England,
up and down the Atlantic seaboard, down to South America,
up and down the west coast.
And during the 14-year career, she had several incidences
including one on her maiden voyage.
They did not build the mast that you see there tall enough
to support the entirety of the vessel.
So went out on its maiden voyage
and began to have issues immediately.
So it went back into port so it could be fixed.
Now, in December of 1919, it left Georgia for New York
with railroad ties when it ran aground,
again, on Wimble Shoals two days later
and was sitting in heavy seas.
And so there are harrowing accounts of this story
from the only survivor of this wreck.
And he put it in very dramatic terms
about what was happening on the vessel
as the railroad ties were flailing about in the sea,
the masts were coming down, waves were washing over.
And so he's hanging on to various different pieces
of the ship at this time.
So he starts out on the bow string here at one point,
he goes up into the rafters at one point,
and then soon gets washes overboard and is hanging on
to a hatch covering and floating pieces of timber
that are coming off of the vessel.
And two days later, he's picked up by a passing vessel
and he makes it to shore and he's telling everybody
this story and has written a whole account of it
for the newspapers.
So it's just a really interesting account
of someone living through the wrecking event
and telling the story, which is not something,
we see a lot of, particularly in the 1920s.
And so our last one is another one that we can see
on the beach every so often.
This is the G.A. Kohler.
And so this was built in 1919, it's a four-masted schooner
and it sailed up and down from New York to South America.
It wasn't originally called the G.A. Kohler,
it was renamed this in 1923, after a tobacco magnet
who owned the share of the company
that purchased the vessel.
And at this point, they turned it
into a true sailing vessel.
So when it was built originally, it had auxiliary engines
to support the sailing.
So when the winds weren't blowing,
they could still maneuver the vessel,
they could still go on their way.
But in 1923, with this renaming and this repurposing,
they removed those and it was just solely a sailing vessel.
And so in August of 1933, I'm sorry, yeah, 1933,
it left Baltimore for the West Indies
and we're not sure what it was carrying,
but it ran into a storm off of North Carolina
and the captain said, "Oh, okay,
we'll anchor and wait the storm out."
But at some point, the storm just picked up
and became too heavy.
And at that point, they dropped the anchor
about 12 miles off, and they just kept getting driven
into shore, which you can see here.
So this is right after the wrecking event,
that vessel is clearly on the beach.
And so the vessel, over time and during the storm,
had become so buried that they couldn't get it out.
Obviously, the crew was able to get off
'cause at this point they were on shore.
But what we have today is every so often,
we can see the remains of a vessel appear on the beach.
It is still in a place where at points in time,
the vessel will go completely under the sand,
at points in time it'll be completely exposed,
but it is there and can still be seen.
So what do all of these stories
and the ones I didn't tell you,
tell us about how wrecking was occurring
in all of the different time periods
and driving factors of these vessels.
And so what I did was take the 200 plus vessels we had.
So we had 204 stories in this case or accounts of wrecks
in this area, and I plotted them.
Unfortunately, 74 I was not able to plot
because we didn't have specific locations
for where this vessel or this wrecking occurred.
And so what you see here is where all these vessels are
across the shoals and even beyond the shoals out here.
So how are these distributed in relation to the shoreline?
And I think what's really obvious upon first look
is that a lot of them are on shore.
Or very close to shore, at least at the scale
that this map's at.
And so how I did this, we broke it up
into a couple of distinct areas.
And so we have a 500-yard buffer here,
which is our purple line.
So all of these points in green,
close to shore, or right on the shore.
And so this was the distance that,
I picked this distance 'cause this is the distance
of the Lifesaving Service
that use a Lyle gun to rescue them.
And almost all of our wrecks are onshore
or were driven ashore at this time.
The area between these two lines here
encompasses the rest of the three-mile state buffer.
So this blue line, this further line out here
is the three-mile buffer.
So the state manages all the submerged bottom lands
within three-miles of the coast on the Eastern Seaboard.
And so all of these wrecks here in the middle
are those that were labeled as nearshore.
So they were close enough that the crew could get out there,
and sail out there, and rescue them if needed
or they could make it ashore themselves.
The red here are offshore,
so everything past that three-mile limit
it's declared offshore.
And these were the ones where they're pretty much left
to their own devices in terms of being rescued.
So there's a handful and they're all spaced out fairly well.
So this just gives you a zoomed-in view
of how many of those wrecks are occurring
right on our shoreline.
Again, we haven't found a lot of 'em.
That's not to say that the communities
that we're living out here during these times
weren't salvaging that wood that was washing a shore
and using it for structures.
Because there were people living out there
and they did need supplies and sometimes all you got
were the shipwrecks coming to shore.
So how are these distributed temporarily across this space?
So, time, you can see there's a distinct jump
in the 1800s.
So these are in 10-year increments here, in our decades.
And you can see there's a distinct increase
in the 1800s as compared to the 1700s.
We do have a fair number that were reported during
the revolutionary war-time period,
but most of them are from those 1800s.
And this is just due to the sheer amount of shipping
that was happening during this time.
There were just so many more boats that were on the waters
during the 1800s than the 1900s, trade was happening daily.
There was accounts from the people living on the island
saying that they could see 75 to 80 vessels a day
sailing up and down, indicates that.
We do see a drop in the 1850s and 1860s
that is likely related to the increased war
or the Civil War that was happening in the 1860s.
Where are you putting your efforts during that time?
So we're seeing less movement during that time period.
We do have high numbers in the early 1900s,
which are all these green dots.
And those are scattered throughout and you can see
that's when they start to get further offshore.
That's because that's when we had more steam,
we had less sail.
So they're able to navigate in these waters a little better
than a sailing vessel.
So, the Mirlo and other the wrecks are further offshore
because they have the ability to navigate out there.
So looking at it in the month breakdown,
not related to the points you're seeing on the map,
but just looking at the number of counts we have two peaks.
We have a peak in the winter here
and we have a peak in the late summer, early fall.
And those are related, I believe, to the storm season.
So, late summer, early fall we have the hurricane season,
and we have a number of stories talking about
a hurricane appearing, and strong winds, and strong storms
that are driving wrecks ashore.
But we have significantly more in the winter
and that's when we get a lot of northeasters,
and the northern gales blowing in.
And those snow storms that are happening or were happening
contributing to these wrecking events.
Okay, so how are they spaced by what we know
about how they wrecked?
Now this is a little murky because some of these
could be related to one another, run aground
is probably connected to having a storm present.
While there may have been some that ran aground
just because they didn't know the area,
they could have also ran aground in a storm.
So these divisions were based off of what we were seeing
in the records and a lot of them did occur
because we ran aground in a storm.
We don't know, there's a number of about 60
that we have no idea how they wrecked.
They just wrecked.
And we have a few war losses that are plotted,
including closer to shore, which that is, I believe,
the Pocahontas up there.
So, what about the direction of travel?
And so the direction of travel,
most of them were unknown
just because of what they're reporting to the lifesavers
in terms of what the crew may or may not have known
about where they were going.
But really we have distinct patterns in north and south.
Our south ones are all closer to shore
where our northern ones start to spread out
and move away from shore.
We do have one coming from the west,
it was sailing from England and I believe it was then
going to head south, but they reported
that they were sailing west.
And so we have a second one too.
And so in thinking about this with the Gulf Stream,
the different currents and whatnot offshore,
it does make sense that our southern ones they're picking,
do we wanna be closer to shore and those shorelines
or do we wanna get stuck in this massive
and very fast-moving Gulf Stream
that would inhibit their ability to go south?
So they made a decision to sail closer to shore,
which introduced them to all of these shoals
that are moving and the maps may not have kept up with it,
in terms of a decision that they had to make.
And so what can we learn from all of this
in terms of just general understanding of wrecking
in this area is that a lot of them
are clustered very close to shore
and then the numbers significantly decreased
as you move away from shore.
Most of them were occurring during the 19th century,
which is when we were seeing most of the vessels
out on the water to begin with.
Wrecks tended to occur in the first four months of the year,
in the last four months of the year, again,
tied to potentially those seasonal storm patterns
that are happening.
We don't see a distinct reason for wrecking
and that may be because there were compounding issues,
if you have a storm, you lose control of your vessel,
you're probably gonna run aground.
And so captains, and crew, and lifesavers
that were reporting these incidents
were just doing the best they could
in what they could come up with.
And so in terms of the direction of travel,
we're seeing southbound vessels tend to be closer to shore.
Northbound vessels tend to cover all three areas,
but are moving offshore a little bit further
because they can utilize that Gulf Stream
to help push them further north.
And so overall, I think what this shows
is that you can use those stories and those accounts
to understand larger wreck patterns
and this has been taken up by other researchers
to understand wrecking patterns on the interior side
of Hatteras Island in the same area for the Pamlico Sound.
And seeing some different trends or comparing those trends
helps us understand potentially
where some of these wrecks could be,
but also just the general nature of the area.
So with that, I would love to take any questions
that you have about shipwrecks on Wimble Shoals.
Mark: Shannon, before we, or can we actually go back
to Allyson's presentation and can we flip back to the map?
We have a couple of questions in the chat about the map
that you were showing in the last few slides.
Can you just talk us through some of what we're seeing here?
Like are these numbers in feet or fathoms?
-: Yeah.
These are in feet, I believe.
They might be meters.
That's a great question.
This is a NOAA chart.
I believe they're meters actually,
I need to zoom to that one.
Hold on, we're gonna go way back to the beginning.
They're in meters.
Mark: Perfect.
Thank you, so much.
-: All right, anything else Mark?
Mark: Sorry, didn't mean to cut you off.
-: No.
Anything else, Mark, you wanted to ask
before we take our presentation back?
Mark: The only other question
which I don't think it's necessarily map-relevant,
but the MAB, when you say that,
are you talking about the Mid-Atlantic Bight?
-: Yes, that is what that current is.
Mark: Perfect, thank you so much.
-: All right.
Okay, I will take the screen back.
So if you haven't downloaded Allyson's bio
from the chat box, you might wanna do that right now.
And in that bio, you're gonna find some more information
about Allyson and some links
that might be of interest to you.
And as Allyson said, please enter your questions
into the chat box and we're gonna try to feed her
as many as we can in the next few minutes.
So Allyson, one of the questions that came across was,
are there shipwrecks out there, iron ships,
that are maybe better preserved than others?
And what would be optimal conditions
to actually preserve those ships?
-: That's a good question.
We do know that different environments
result in different levels of preservation,
for iron and wood vessels.
And so typically, the way it goes
is the warmer, saltier waters are more degrading
than colder, fresher waters for a way to think about it.
And the deeper it is, the less wave activity
and physical processes are impacting the structure
of the wreck.
Shannon: Okay, perfect.
-: Now, what we're learning is that there's some differences
or there's other factors that are influencing it.
So it may look pretty solid,
but there may be factors we don't understand.
The Titanic, I think is a great example of this.
We thought that cold, deep water that it's in
where it can't be touched by people
would leave it pretty solid.
But we're now understanding microbial corrosion
a little bit more, which is contributing
to some of that collapse.
So there's a lot of factors we still don't understand
and how they work together.
So yeah, I hope that answers your question.
Shannon: All right.
Mark, do you have another question?
Mark: Yes.
Can you talk a little bit more about the ratio
of the northbound wrecks versus the southbound wrecks?
Like which side do we find more on and maybe why?
-: We see a little bit more on the southbound
than the northbound.
There are about 60, I think it was like 62 to 45,
it broke down to 31% were traveling south,
and 23% were traveling north.
And that, I think, gets into the decisions
that captains were having to make
in terms of that southbound travel.
If they're traveling from the north to the south,
you've got more supplies that are being manufactured
in the north, right?
So they need to transport those goods to the south.
And with that, captains are making decisions on where to go.
And then the northbound ones,
some may have swung way further,
maybe the northbound ones were less,
what's the word I'm looking for, apt to wreck,
because they were a little bit further off
or more experienced captains
or they just happened to be traveling north
at a specific time of year.
I didn't look at comparing time of year to travel direction,
which would be an interesting study to look at.
But there were travel seasons and so the southbound ones,
I think we're just seeing more southbound ones
just because of the sheer amount of manufacturing
that was happening in the north to bring it to the south.
And there may also be a temporal component.
And again, I didn't get into this.
Shannon: Okay, thank you.
Two questions that go hand in hand with each other.
Somebody wants to know if there are any slave ships
that were lost in that area.
And second, are there any U-boats
that might be lost in that area as well?
-: I do not know if there are any slave ships.
That's again, not to say that we don't know
of all of the wrecks that wrecked in this area.
As I said at the beginning,
there could be more than 5,000 wrecks off of North Carolina.
That's just what we've been historically able to document.
So there very well could be a slave ship out there,
there very well could not be a slave ship out there
off of the shores of North Carolina.
U-boats, I do not believe in the immediate area
that we are looking at there is a U-boat,
there are four off of North Carolina,
but I think they're further north and further south
than this immediate area, if I'm remembering
where they are correctly.
Shannon: Okay.
Mark, do you have another question?
Mark: Yeah, I'm sorry, there's so many
really good questions in the chat.
It's hard to pick one.
So your chart earlier ended at the 1960s and 70s
and I guess maybe this is more of a what is archeology
versus what isn't, but is there anything to note,
are there shipwrecks that have occurred more recently,
80s, 90s, early 2000s?
Do you look at those or are they notable
or anything like that?
-: Well, yes, there have been,
there was one a few years ago that was stranded
by Oregon Inlet that has since been removed
in the last year.
So in archeological sense, anything that is older
than 50 years is considered historic,
which makes it open to archeological research.
And so that's not to say there aren't wrecks
that are happening today a lot,
if they make it to that 50-year mark,
that means that people have claimed everything.
For the most part, people have gotten everything they want
out of the wreck and have since left it alone.
A lot of efforts are made to salvage vessels
or remove them for safety reasons,
considering that if they make it ashore
it's in Cape Hatteras National Seashore.
The vessel that came ashore a few years ago,
they removed it for safety reasons
as that iron and steel was degrading.
They didn't want people climbing on it and getting hurt.
So that whole vessel was picked up
off the beach and scrapped.
So there are vessels
that are still wrecking out there today,
and we know about some of them,
we don't know about all of them.
We haven't studied many of them, but maybe one day
a young person listening to this talk could go study them.
Shannon: There you go.
All right, Allyson, I think we have a time
for maybe one more question.
And this one may be a little complicated,
but answer it if you can.
So you study all of these wrecks
that are in the three-mile limit
of the North Carolina state waters.
And first off, why is it important to study them
and second off, what do you do with that information
once you gather it?
-: Yes.
So why we study shipwrecks, a lot of them,
even if we don't think about it, hold a history
that we don't necessarily have in written record.
While we do, in this case, have a lot of lifesaving stories
of the Lifesaving Service coming in
and helping people get off the vessels.
What's left on the shipwrecks
can inform our understanding of society at the time
that we may not be able to piece together
from a written record.
And in some cases, they can show us technological advances.
In some cases, they can show us
what were the goods that people wanted.
So for example, looking at the cargo of a blockade runner
during the Civil War can show us what people
really were driving for in that area, during that time.
So they hold bits of information
that we might not be able to piece together
from the written record.
And as to what we do with this information,
once we've figured stuff out, we try to get it out
to the public through talks like this,
through article publications, depending on if artifacts
were recovered or the amount of information we have
can make it into museum displays.
So I know the Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum
out in Hatteras,
their mission is to tell these wreck stories
from the Outer Banks and they're currently in an overhaul,
but I encourage you all to go out
to the Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum
if you can get out there.
And these stories are put on display
to tell what happened and what we learned about the history
of that time period.
Shannon: Okay, perfect.
And that leads us into our next slide.
If we did not get to your question
or if you have additional ones,
you can always send them to Allyson
at the email address listed on the slide.
You can also learn more about the North Carolina Office
of State Archeology and all those shipwrecks
that she's talking about and more at the URL
that's listed there at the bottom of the slide.
Mark: A video recording of this presentation
will be made available
on the sanctuary's webinar archive page.
Found that the URL listed right here at the top.
In addition, the webinar will be archived
on Monitor National Marine Sanctuary's website.
You can click on the multimedia section in the toolbar
to access this webinar box.
It usually takes about 10 days to be posted.
You can also find future webinars in this same section.
And don't worry, all of this information will be sent to you
in a follow-up email once the recording is ready to view.
Shannon: And lastly, of course, we invite you
to follow us on social media to stay in touch
with what's happening in the sanctuary.
And Mark, I'm gonna let you put a little plug here
for the events that we have happening this week.
Mark: Well, yes, we are joining Ironclad Distillery
for their commemoration of the Battle of Hampton Roads,
which will be Thursday from 3:00 to 8:00 PM
and then we'll be having a family day at The Mariners Museum
from 11:00 to 4:00.
We'll be showing off a lot of the really cool
outreach technology that we would be working on
to try and bring the sanctuary into your hands.
So I really encourage you all to come and visit us.
Shannon: All right, thank you, Mark.
And lastly, as you exit the webinar,
there is a short survey for formal and informal educators.
If you are an educator, NOAA would really appreciate it
if you would just take a minute or two
to complete the survey.
Your answers will help NOAA develop future webinars
to meet your needs.
And your participation is voluntary
and your answers will be completely anonymous.
So once again, Allyson, we really wanna thank you
for an excellent presentation and thank all of you
for taking the time to join us today.
Have a wonderful day.
And this concludes the presentation for all.