A team of scientists and technicians have uncovered the remnants of a shipwreck thought to be hundreds of years old about 200 miles off the coast of Louisiana, a scene complete with artifacts like navigational equipment, glass bottles, ceramic plates, and boxes of muskets. The discovery was made by researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, acting at the request of the Interior Department's Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, which regulates offshore drilling. NOAA paid for the 56-day expedition, which wrapped up last month and was used to map and provide images of little-known features and habitats of the Gulf of Mexico.
Without knowing what it was, Shell Oil Company identified the wreckage -- more than 4,000 feet below sea level -- using sound waves during a routine oil and gas survey late last year, a process that is required by federal regulators as part of the process for issuing permits for deepwater drilling. Officials were reluctant to give full details of the position of the wreckage, in part to avoid attracting too much attention to the area.
Using underwater robots equipped with lights and high-definition cameras, NOAA investigators were used to provide a glimpse at the ship's remnants. As a new twist, the agency, which focuses on the conditions of the oceans and the atmosphere, streamed the expedition live on the Internet.
More than 80,000 people tuned in, with some pointing out what they saw and lending advice to maritime archeologists, scientists and resource managers involved in the project, said Fred Gorell, public affairs officer for NOAA's Office of Ocean Exploration and Research.
Jack Irion, a maritime archeologist with BOEM, described the find as "pretty unusual, just on the fact that it's in pretty pristine condition."
"It's never been disturbed in almost 200 years" Irion said. "It's pretty much sitting on the seafloor as it sank."
Irion compared it to the remnants of the so-called Mardi Gras shipwreck, which investigators tracked down on the bottom of the Gulf in 2009, about 35 miles off the Louisiana coast.
That wreckage appeared to match records of a vessel that capsized in 1813, a two-masted schooner about 55-to-60 feet long that was found near the Mardi Gras oil and gas pipeline system.
Still, clear differences were apparent. "This one is actually larger and better armed," Irion said of the recent discovery, which has at least three cannons and appears to be more than 80-feet-long.
"That sort of speaks to the time when the Gulf of Mexico was a fairly dangerous place, with fairly high incidents of piracy, which of course recalls Jean Lafitte and his band of brothers, which is certainly one possibility that we can't ignore," the marine archeologist said, recalling the privateer who became known as "the king of Barataria."
Some clues that led researchers to estimate the ship's age included the visible artifacts. Irion observed ceramic bowls, plates and cups that appeared to be made from green shell-edged pearl, he said, a type of common ceramic that was popular in the U.S. in the early 1800s. And the anchor "clearly comes from a time before the anchor chain was used," also caught his eye, suggesting that it's from "still fairly early in the century."
"A pretty interesting, wide variety of types" of bottles were also visible," including beer and wine bottles, which Irion said may give insight to the makeup of the crew, as well as a large, cast-iron stove. He said the stove was "surprisingly rare to find that from any period in any part of the 1800s, and to my knowledge only about five or six have been recovered from shipwrecks around the world."
Because of how deep beneath the sea the items are, recovering the artifacts would be an expensive and technical challenge, he said, costing as much as $10 million. As part of the nearly two-month expedition, researchers came across three other shipwrecks, but Irion said this discovery was easily the highlight.
With records of more than 3,000 vessels that have sank in the Gulf, researchers are weighing options to continue studying the remnants and possibly perform an analysis of the artifacts to get a better idea of the ship, though Irion said that his initial work has not produced any leads.
"Unfortunately, this one being so far offshore, it would seem likely that there were no survivors to come back and report it missing," he said, speculating that it "simply didn't show up wherever it was going" and adding that he hasn't matched the remnants with records of any known shipwrecks from the time period.
In the meantime, Irion said he was happy to have the help of the tens of thousands who tuned in online to watch the process unfold, which was also where he got the best look.
"This was done in such an unusual way," he said. "In my past experience, I'm out on the ship at the time that all this was going on, and in this case I was actually sitting in my living room watching it."
Richard Thompson can be reached at firstname.lastname@example.org or 504.826.3496.