French ship that sank in 1856 found off Massachusetts coast

A French ocean liner that sank in 1856, killing more than 100 people, was found last month at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, said D/V Tenacious, a New Jersey-based shipwreck hunting group.

The ship Le Lyonnais, built in England in 1855, was traveling from the United States to France when it collided with the Adriatic, an American sailing ship, killing 114 of the 132 passengers on board the Lyonnais, D/V Tenacious said on September 4. The Adriatic never stopped.

For more than a century and a half, wreck hunters were baffled by the location of the ship’s final resting place. Then, on August 24, seven wreck hunters from the D/V Tenacious confirmed finding the wreck about 140 miles (225 kilometers) east of Nantucket, Massachusetts.

“Finding that ship gave me the feeling of being able to close the page on the suffering of the people who were victims of it,” said Jennifer Sellitti, 50. A lawyer and historian, she wrote a book about the Lyonnais sinking called “The Adriatic Affair: A Hit and Run Off the Coast of Nantucket.”

D/V Tenacious said he would not disclose the exact location of the wreck because he did not want others to rush to the site. He plans to return to the dive site to learn more about the vessel.

On November 2, 1856, the crews of the Lyonnais and the Adriatic realized too late that they were about to collide.

“The steamer continued on her course, which would have carried her by our stern,” wrote the Adriatic’s anonymous captain in a statement that appeared on the front page of The New York Times — then called The New-York Daily Times — on November 19, 1856. “We attempted to save ourselves by tacking, but it was too late and a few minutes later we were in collision with the steamer.”

The Adriatic, slightly damaged by the collision, did not stop and headed for the nearest port, Gloucester, Massachusetts, where it ran aground two days later, the captain said. The crew initially made no mention of the collision with the Lyonnais, believing the damage to the Lyonnais to be insignificant, Sellitti said.

In reality, the Lyonnais’ hull was punctured, Sellitti said. The damage looked like small holes that the crew tried to patch. But the crew struggled to keep the ship moving and it began to drift slowly beneath the surface. By the third day after the collision, Nov. 5, the ship had sunk, she said.

In the 1850s, shipbuilders abandoned sailing ships in favor of steam propulsion, Sellitti says. The crash instantly became international news because it sparked difficult debates about technological and geopolitical issues, Sellitti says.

When sailing ships and steamships meet, which has the right of way? How do two ships from different nations behave in international waters? And should the captain of the Adriatic be held responsible?

In 2023, the D/V Tenacious conducted sonar surveys of the ocean floor of the Georges Bank area of ​​the Atlantic Ocean and discovered two shipwrecks that may be the Le Lyonnais. In August, crews conducted a dive at one location but soon discovered that it was the remains of a completely different wreck.

On the dive to the second location, Joe Mazraani, 46, a criminal lawyer who also hunts shipwrecks, noted that the wreck had the Lyonnais design: a horizontal steam engine, sails and the same engine cylinder width.

“I never thought we would be able to solve this problem in three years,” he said.

Mazraani said it was “sobering” to spend time with something that had likely not been seen since the day it happened, during a catastrophic event that caused incomprehensible pain and suffering.

“Another terrible calamity has occurred at sea,” read the front page of the New York Daily Times on November 15, 1856. “The captain and about forty persons took a place on a raft which is said to have been destroyed very soon, with the loss of many lives.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.