Perhaps this could fall under the category of Archeology.

HMS Ontario was a British warship from the Revolutionary War that may have had American prisoners on board. The ship sunk in a storm on Lake Ontario in 1780 and was discovered this year! (2 page story)
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25145600/

There's now an incredible silent video on YouTube. Spooky and haunting. Better than the Disneyland pirate ride!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zF_5RtN3nvU

What's also cool is the stern of the ship near the end of the video - creepy too. Notice how the video is black & white but color becomes noticeable as they pan up the mast, I think this is because deep water images in dim light lack color.

There are a lot of wrecks in the Great Lakes but this is the oldest. The ship is under 500 feet of calm, cold water despite occasional violent storms above and that likely helped preserve her. I'm sure they expected to find just a few ribs and spars and maybe some rubble on the bottom if anything, instead there is this extremely well-preserved ship, basically intact.

The Royal Navy considers their lost ships officially grave sites. While not disturbing it, I hope the explorers get permission to use submersible robot cameras for some interior photography.

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Man, that is one well preserved ship. Yeah, they probably were pretty surprised when the images started coming back although the sidescan sonar probably hinted that it was in good shape.

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We may hope that another ship of the same age will soon come to light. This time an American ship, the Bonhomme Richard of John Paul Jones, wrecked in the North Sea off the Yorkshire coast in 1799. See: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/jun/16/usa
It will not be in anything like the same condition as the Ontario, as the North Sea is shallower and stormier than the eponymous lake.

This is not the first ancient ship to be discovered in reasonable condition. The Mary Rose, Henry the Eighth's flagship, lost in 1549, had only half its hull left but still was in extraordinary shape, with a multitude of artifacts - and skeletons! - aboard. See: http://www.maryrose.org/
Or the Vasa, the personal project of King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, lost to a puff of wind in 1628, now preserved like the Mary Rose in its own museum, with a similar wealth of artefacts.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasa_(ship)
or, in Swedish: http://www.vasamuseet.se/

In the UK, the wrecks of naval ships are indeed considered to be war graves, by the Protection of Military Remains Act of 1986, which brought up to date several previous Acts of Parliament, but only applies to wrecks since 1914.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protect...ry_Remains_Act
Hence, the Mary Rose and other older wrecks, the relatives of whose victims may be assumed to be dead too, are fair game to the archeologist. Forunately another Act, the Protection of Wrecks Act of 1973 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protect...recks_Act_1973) does allow such relicts to be preserved from wildcat diving and speculative excavation. If Canada has similar laws, then no doubt the Ontario will eventually give up its secrets, though probably not its dead.

John

Outstanding preservation--in line with the similarly-pristine U.S.S. Hamilton wreck from 1812.

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Cool! Underwater archeology is a job I would love to do!

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Am I the only one who thinks that it would be more of an honor to those brave men (of both sides) to bring them up and give them a proper funeral and burial?

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T. Anderson

Thanks for the posts Chip and JohnD. Very interesting!

Possibly.

Burial at sea is a naval tradition and many sailors would prefer Davy Jones' locker to pushing up daisies. I be one of them. Arrh.

Revolutionary War Vessel Found Intact !

That kinda freaked me.

Revolutionary War Era Vessel Found Intact

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Why is that?

Your revision is correct, but so is the original. The vessel was a warship used during that war. Other vessels not engaged in the war but in existence at that time would be 'RW era'.

Unless I missed the point of your freak-out.

Mary Rose &c. very cool; ditto.

Just wanted to add: the Holy Grail of marine archeaology would be a rowed warship (especially a pentaconter, bireme or trireme from the Athenian era or earlier), with intact artefacts and hull in sufficiently good condition that the ship can be accurately reconstructed in its entirety. This is not impossible:

• a late Bronze age merchant vessel from about 1300 B.C., the Uluburun ship, was discovered in near perfect condition and has been reconstructed with its cargo (including copper ingots from the ancient Cypriot copper mines, probably bound for ancient Egypt, plus a great variety of other cargo),
• the Cape Gelidonya ship from about 1200 B.C. was found well preserved (one of my former professors helped excavate this ship),
• two Phoenician merchant vessels from about 750 B.C. have been found in good condition; they appear to have been carrying wine from Phoenicia to Egypt or Carthage in convoy when they foundered in a storm,
• a ram once attached to the prow of a rowed warship from about 200 B.C. has been recovered in perfect condition from Athlit, Israel.
• a merchant vessel from about 700 A.D. Yassi Ada ship, has been excavated in good condition,
• etc.

The reason why such a find would be so important for historians is that the exact design of biremes and triremes has been the focus of a huge controversy for almost a century. See for example:
J. S. Morrison, J. F. Coates, and N. B. Rankov,
The Athenian Trireme: The History and Reconstruction of an Ancient Greek Warship

Note: the well-known reconstructed galley is in fact largely hypothetical (although a lot of thought went into the design).

Note: the design of Medieval galleys was quite different and much better understood.

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Ah yes, the Olympias. I actually made it in 3d. It's not quite done though and it sucks.

I too would really like somebody to find a trireme intact and answer the design question. I think the Olympias got it wrong. I think the bottom row of oars sit too low and any kind of chop is going to fill it up pretty quickly. The ones they built for Ben Hur had all the oars coming out of the outriggers. I'm not sure how that would work either.

Maybe the Olympias is right and the bottom rowers would just plug their holes and take a break. But then there's also not room for quarters for the rowers or the soldiers or even the captain.

Yeah, somebody needs to find one. Maybe buried with some king or something.

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For those who don't know, Olympias is the reconstructed trireme (thoughtfully designed but based mostly on surviving images and written documentation plus supposition, not on archeological finds--- although the dimensions of the vessel are based upon excavations of boatsheds, so some things are firmer than others).

Yes, but it's pretty clear from contemporary documents that these vessels were not considered suitable for rough weather. But I agree, even if we think of them as sailing along coastlines (and drawn up on the nearest sandy beach when a storm came along), it's a bit hard to understand how fleets of biremes got to the scene of the fight. Some speculate that some kind of leather covering was used to seal the lower openings and that the ships were sail-powered when not "cleared for battle". From written documents, it does seem that many of the big naval battles occured in protected waters.

Yes, this is a big part of the mystery.

I probably should have mentioned that Lionel Casson was one of the first to write extensively about the problem of how biremes and triremes worked. We do know that this innovative design was considered a huge advance over the venerable pentaconter. And Arthur Clarke was very intrigued by the idea that the Mediterranean Sea contains well-preserved shipwrecks in deep water, even before discoveries like the Uluburun ship.

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Chris Hillman

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The title got me puzzled. I thought it was a revolutionary vessel [innovative] for its time, so I spent many minutes trying to figure out what could be revolutionary in it.

Cool, anyway.

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That's funny. No big deal but the second line I wrote reiterates the idea:

"HMS Ontario was a British warship from the Revolutionary War."

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Yeah, my bad. I jumped to the link without taking the time to read the post, stupid jerk I am.

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K,
No, because there is nothing left to bring up. Bodies in the sea are rapidly returned to their elements and into other animals.

By a coincidence, this week's New Scientist features the work of Canadian marine entomologist, Dr.Gail Anderson. http://www.newscientist.com/channel/...the-waves.html In the style of the terrestial 'body farms', she has left pigs carcases on the sea floor and observed their decomposition. Of a 25kg pig, after 21 days only the bones remain. Human remains wouldn't last much longer, she says, although her experiment has not included human bodies yet.

John

Dr. Robert Ballard's 1989 expedition to the wreck of the German battleship Bismarck found pairs of boots and leather belts lying on the bottom. This was all that remained of sailors who went down with the ship. Apparently leather is preserved but all else quickly disappears as the human body is mostly water and the calcium from bones soon vanishes.

It should be noted that bones have been found in other sunken WWII ships in shallower water. I'm not sure why.

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"Insignificant molehill sometimes more important than conspicuous mountain." - Charlie Chan

Indeed leather is preserved! It's as pickled as a embalmed corpse, when it is tanned. Else we would have more than smelly feet and our trousers would fall down!