Ten Shipwrecks Found Decades (or Centuries) Later

In 1915, Ernest Shackleton's ship Endurance was trapped and slowly crushed by pack ice in Antarctica's Weddell Sea. It sank on November 21. Its crew survived an epic ordeal on the ice and in open boats, and all were eventually rescued in 1916. The ship itself stayed lost for more than a century, under some of the most hostile sea ice on Earth.

The Endurance22 expedition, organized and funded by the Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust, sailed from Cape Town in February 2022 aboard the South African icebreaker S.A. Agulhas II. Its search box was built around the position recorded by Endurance's captain, Frank Worsley, with a sextant and theodolite as the ship went down. Using underwater drones, the team found the wreck on March 5, 2022, and announced it four days later.

Endurance sits nearly 10,000 feet (about 3,000 meters) down, a few miles from Worsley's logged position, a tribute to his navigation. It is in a remarkable state of preservation, with its name still clearly readable on the stern. The wreck is a protected historic site under the Antarctic Treaty, and the team filmed and mapped it without disturbing anything.

On September 12, 1857, the 280-foot side-wheel steamer SS Central America sank in a hurricane about 150 miles off the Carolinas. Of the 578 people aboard, 425 died, including the ship's commander, William Lewis Herndon, who stayed with the ship after helping get women and children off. The Naval Academy later raised a granite monument in his honor.

The ship was also carrying tons of gold from the California Gold Rush, coins and assayers' bars headed for New York banks. Its loss helped feed the financial Panic of 1857. For more than a century, the wreck lay somewhere in deep water off the Southeast coast.

In the 1980s, an engineer named Tommy Thompson and his Columbus-America Discovery Group used probability-based search methods to narrow down the likely location, and in 1988 they found it about 7,200 feet down with a remotely operated vehicle. A bronze bell stamped with its maker's name and the year 1853 helped confirm the identity. The recovered gold was estimated at $100 million to $150 million, and one ingot later sold for $8 million. The aftermath was messy: investors sued, Thompson became a fugitive and was arrested in 2015, and he spent years in custody afterward.

On August 10, 1628, the Swedish warship Vasa set out on its maiden voyage from Stockholm, heavily armed and lavishly carved to show off the power of King Gustavus Adolphus. It made it less than a mile. A gust of wind heeled it over, water rushed through its open gunports, and it sank in the harbor. About 30 people are thought to have died.

The ship lay in Stockholm's harbor for more than three centuries. In 1956, an amateur archaeologist named Anders Franzén, who had searched for years using a simple coring device he had made himself, finally struck a large wooden object and located the hull. Divers spent two years digging tunnels under it for lifting cables, and on April 24, 1961, Vasa broke the surface again, 333 years after it went down.

Vasa survived so well because of where it sank. The cold, brackish water of the Baltic lacked the shipworms that devour wooden wrecks in saltier seas, and the ship was brand new and intact when it sank. After decades of conservation, it now stands in its own museum in Stockholm, which calls it the world's only preserved 17th-century ship.

On November 29, 1925, the cargo steamer SS Cotopaxi left Charleston, South Carolina, bound for Havana with a load of coal and a crew of 32. Two days later, it sent a distress call in a tropical storm, reporting that it was listing and taking on water. Then nothing. None of the crew was ever found.

Because its route crossed the region later branded the Bermuda Triangle, the Cotopaxi became part of that legend. Steven Spielberg's 1977 film Close Encounters of the Third Kind even shows the ship turning up in the Gobi Desert, supposedly dropped there by aliens.

The truth was much closer to home. Fishers and divers off St. Augustine, Florida, had long known a wreck they called the Bear Wreck, but no one knew which ship it was. Michael Barnette, a marine biologist, spent about 15 years on the question. With no bell or nameplate to settle it, he relied on paperwork: court and insurance records, the ship's plans and its likely route. They matched the wreck's machinery and location. In January 2020 his team announced that the Bear Wreck was the Cotopaxi. The likeliest explanation is mundane and sad: a worn ship, a powerful storm and a quick sinking.

The Titanic sank in the early hours of April 15, 1912, on its maiden voyage from Southampton to New York, after striking an iceberg. About 1,500 people died. For decades afterward, the wreck was a famous blank on the map: the ship's reported position was imprecise, and the water was more than two miles deep.

Several searches came up empty, including well-publicized expeditions in the early 1980s. Then, on September 1, 1985, a joint American and French team led by Robert Ballard of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and Jean-Louis Michel of the French research agency IFREMER found it. Rather than sweeping for the hull with sonar, they towed a camera sled called Argo, looking for the trail of debris that a sinking ship scatters across the seabed. Ballard had learned that technique surveying the wrecks of two sunken U.S. Navy submarines for the Navy.

The wreck lies about 12,500 feet (3,800 meters) down, roughly 350 nautical miles off Newfoundland, broken into two main sections nearly 2,000 feet apart. A plaque placed in 1986 asks that the site be left undisturbed in memory of the dead, and the U.S. and U.K. have since agreed to protect it.

In July 1945, the heavy cruiser USS Indianapolis carried components for the atomic bomb Little Boy to the island of Tinian. Shortly after midnight on July 30, days after that delivery, it was struck by two torpedoes from the Japanese submarine I-58 and sank in about 12 minutes. Of 1,195 men aboard, roughly 300 went down with the ship. The rest spent days in the water with too few lifeboats, facing exposure, dehydration and shark attacks. Only 316 survived.

The ship's captain, Charles McVay III, was court-martialed after the war. Decades later, Congress declared him exonerated, and the Navy entered that finding into his record in 2001.

The wreck itself eluded searchers for 72 years, partly because no one knew precisely where the ship had been. A Naval History and Heritage Command historian found the key in an unexpected place: the log of a landing ship, LST-779, which had passed Indianapolis about 11 hours before the attack. It suggested the cruiser was farther west than assumed. On August 19, 2017, a team funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, working from the research vessel Petrel, found the wreck about 18,000 feet (5,500 meters) down.

Endurance was not the only Shackleton ship to disappear. In 1921, the explorer bought a small Norwegian sealer, renamed it Quest, and set off on what became his last expedition. On January 5, 1922, while the ship lay at anchor at Grytviken on the island of South Georgia, Shackleton died of a heart attack at 47. He was buried there.

Quest outlived him by four decades. It went back to work as a sealer, took part in Arctic rescues and expeditions, and served in World War II. On May 5, 1962, after being holed by ice during a seal hunt off Labrador, it sank. The crew was taken off safely, and the wreck's position was known only roughly.

In June 2024, the 150th anniversary year of Shackleton's birth, an expedition led by the Royal Canadian Geographical Society went looking. Shipwreck hunter David Mearns directed the search. The team narrowed it down using the logs of a Norwegian rescue ship, which had recorded electronic navigation readings at the time of the sinking. On June 9, sonar picked out the ship sitting upright and largely intact about 1,280 feet (390 meters) down. Features such as its bow, wheelhouse and fallen foremast matched Quest's plans.

In 1845, Sir John Franklin sailed from England with two ships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, and 129 men to find the Northwest Passage through the Canadian Arctic. By September 1846, both ships were locked in ice off King William Island. In April 1848, the survivors abandoned them and set out on foot. None made it home. For more than 150 years, the expedition was the great unsolved disaster of polar exploration, and dozens of searches failed to find the ships.

Inuit had always held part of the answer. Their accounts, passed down for generations, described one ship sinking in deep water west of King William Island and another drifting south.

Modern searchers took them seriously. In September 2014, a search led by Parks Canada found Erebus in the area where Inuit testimony had pointed. In September 2016, an Arctic Research Foundation team found Terror in a bay already named Terror Bay, south of King William Island. Parks Canada credits Inuit knowledge, combined with modern technology, for both finds. The wrecks are now a national historic site, and Canada and Inuit jointly own them, a fitting end for a story that Inuit kept alive.