What definitely didn’t play a role in the ship’s sinking is the infamous spook of the nearby Bermuda Triangle, whose boundaries lie in the vicinity of Bear Wreck. “He had done a lot of archival research, and he had the plans of the Cotopaxi and he had the court records of the relatives of the crew that perished in the incident, who sued the owner of the company.” Augustine Lighthouse Maritime Archaeological Program (LAMP), to CNN. “When I saw the research did, I was pretty impressed,” says Chuck Meide, director of the museum’s St. To further verify his findings, Barnette consulted researchers at a Smithsonian affiliate: the St. The situation went from “bad to catastrophic in very short order,” Barnette tells CNN. Augustine’s shallow waters, the already-fragile Cotopaxi and its crew probably met a swift but terrible end. Hit by a monstrous, fast-moving storm near St. In line with this theory, the team’s underwater excavations showed that even before the wreck, the vessel’s wooden hatch covers, intended to protect the cargo holds below deck from water, were in a state of disrepair. Operating under harsh financial pressures, the ship likely left port ill-equipped to tussle with a tropical tempest, explains Barnette to USA Today’s Joel Shannon. But one of the biggest clinchers manifested when British historian Guy Walters stumbled across a mention of a forgotten distress signal sent from the Cotopaxi on December 1, 1925, just a few dozen miles from the Florida shoreline.įrom there, a probable story fell into place. The coordinates of the ship’s probable route, as well as written descriptions of the machinery on board, lined up neatly with the location and array of artifacts found at Bear Wreck. The marine biologist’s biggest breakthrough actually came on land, when he and his colleagues began to dig through court records, insurance paperwork and historical documents filed around the time of the ship’s disappearance. Still, he says to CNN’s David Williams, the site lacked any sort of “smoking gun.”īarnette adds, “We didn’t have a bell with a name on it, or anything like that.”
Then, some 15 years ago, Barnette began exploring Bear Wreck in earnest, building off of the hunch that it seemed to fit the circumstances of the Cotopaxi’s untimely end. The site, called Bear Wreck by fishers and divers, had long been known to contain a sunken ship, but scientists had struggled to pinpoint the vessel’s identity.
Cotopaxi’s marine graveyard nearly 35 years ago. The discovery comes with an ironic twist: Researchers actually unknowingly homed in on the S.S. “I’ve done a countless number of shipwreck dives but this one truly stood out.” “It was incredibly exciting,” Michael Barnette, a marine biologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) who helped find the wreck, tells the Huffington Post’s Ed Mazza via email.
The group’s underwater quest will be featured in the February 9 premiere of the Science Channel’s “Shipwreck Secrets” series. Augustine, Florida, putting to bed decades of myths, ghost stories and seafaring lore that inevitably sprung up in the interim. Now, nearly a century later, a team of shipwreck hunters says it has finally identified the battered boat’s remains off the coast of St. Charting a course for Havana, Cuba, the ship ran afoul of a tropical storm brewing near the Bermuda Triangle two days later and promptly disappeared. Cotopaxi set sail from Charleston, South Carolina, with a cargo of coal and a crew of 32.
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