Throughout a household journey to Level Farms Provincial Park north of Goderich, Ont., in 2023, Lucas Atchison was utilizing a steel detector that he acquired as a present for his birthday, when he discovered one thing large and previous.
“We had been on the seaside, we acquired our steel detector out, and as quickly as we set it up, ding! It was a spike from the shipwreck,” Lucas mentioned, who’s now 10.
He recollects alerting his dad, who at first thought the spike could have been used to tie up a ship. However Lucas wasn’t satisfied, and the pair began digging deeper. What they discovered was extra spikes connected to wooden.
“Then Dad instructed me, ‘Lucas it is a shipwreck,'” the boy defined. “After I awoke that morning I didn’t anticipate finding a shipwreck!”
Dad Jason Atchison mentioned they reported the discover to provincial parks employees, after which reached out to the Ontario Marine Heritage Committee (OMHC), a non-profit volunteer group devoted to recording and preserving marine historical past.
This week, with Lucas holding a detailed eye on the work, excavation on the shipwreck started with an OMHC crew digging to see precisely what Lucas discovered.
Excavation work begins
The approvals course of to dig takes time, with regulatory necessities needing to be met, in response to marine archeologist Scarlett Janusas and marine historian Patrick Folkes.
They first met the Atchisons within the fall of 2023 on the seaside to indicate them the place they need to be wanting. Then, on Wednesday, a group of volunteers from the OMHC arrived with heavy equipment provided by the provincial park, after which switching at hand shovels, trowels and brushes to see what the sand had buried.
To this point, Janusas mentioned they discovered a smaller portion of the ship than they’d hoped, however decided the part was frames from the facet of the ship.
“We had double frames, which appears to counsel that it was stronger-built ship and we imagine that it was a schooner,” mentioned Janusas. “A schooner is often a two-masted crusing vessel, often wood.”
Perhaps the St. Anthony?
There wasn’t sufficient of the ship to definitively decide its identification, however Folkes says one candidate is the schooner St. Anthony.
“[It] was wrecked in October of 1856 on a voyage … from Chicago to Buffalo, New York, with a load of grain,” he mentioned. “It was described as having gone ashore 4 miles north of Goderich, which inserts about the place this wreckage is, and this may solely characterize a really small piece.”
The volunteers will full scale drawings of the wreck, together with a plan view (from on prime) and profile (facet view) of the wreck.
Folkes says that nineteenth century insurance coverage necessities would specify what number of fasteners, or spikes, ought to be positioned within the frames and at what distance. These particulars, he mentioned, will assist decide the ship’s age.
What comes subsequent could be shocking. The volunteers will then rebury the ship to protect it.
“We fill the outlet again in, bury it and create an anaerobic surroundings, i.e. with out oxygen, so you have no type of parasites in there or another organisms that may eat or destroy the wreckage,” mentioned Janusas.
“It isn’t an ideal answer nevertheless it does keep the construction of that ship in all probability for at the least one other 50 years.”
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