1856 French steamship wreck discovered off New England coast

Thumbnail courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Recently, French steamship Le Lyonnais was found at the bottom of the ocean 200 miles off New Bedford, Massachusetts. 

On Nov. 5, 1856, the French steamship Le Lyonnais was lost forever when a maritime disaster took place, sending the ship to the bottom of the ocean off the coast of Massachusetts. Decades later, a marine salvage crew found the wreck of Le Lyonnais about 200 miles off New Bedford, Massachusetts in late August of this year. The discovery of the steamship follows years of work to locate it and also represents a new beginning, said Jennifer Sellitti, a spokesperson for Atlantic Wreck Salvage. According to Sellitti, the next steps are to document the wreck site, map it, and determine what artifacts can be brought to the surface.

Le Lyonnais was about 260 feet in length and its function was to carry passengers and cargo between New York and France, Sellitti explained. The ship had sails but it was also equipped with a horizontal steam engine and an iron hull, making the ship an example of how innovation changed shipping in the mid-1800’s. 

The ship was supposed to be returning to the French city of Le Havre from the United States. This disaster occurred when the ship collided with the Maine-built barque Adriatic, which was en route from Belfast, Maine to Savannah, Georgia, according to Atlantic Wreck Salvage’s research. On Nov. 2 1856, crew members for Le Lyonnais and The Adriatic realized too late that they were about to collide with the barque. Of the 132 passengers and crew on board the ship, 114 died. After the accident, the Adriatic made it back to New England for repairs while Le Lyonnais was left at the bottom of the ocean. 

The Adriatic, which only ended up with minor damage from the collision, did not stop, and it rerouted itself to the nearest port, home to Gloucester, Massachusetts, where it ended up two days later, the captain said. The crew of The Adriatic initially made no mention of the collision with Le Lyonnais, believing the damage to be insignificant, which is why there was no immediate search and rescue deployed for the ship. 

In reality, Le Lyonnais was punctured. The damage looked like small holes, which the crew attempted to patch unsuccessfully. The crew struggled to keep the ship moving, and it began to slowly drift below the surface. By the third day after the collision, on Nov. 5, the ship had sunk, Sellittti said. “The steamer continued her course, which would have carried her by our stern,” the captain of the Adriatic (who was unnamed) wrote in a statement that was on the front page of The New York Times—then called The New-York Daily Times—on Nov. 19 1856. “We endeavored to save ourselves by tacking, but it was too late and in a few minutes we were afoul, striking the steamer,” he would go on to tell.

The salvage crew found Le Lyonnais by doing historical research and using sonar technology to narrow down the site of the ship’s final resting place. The ship is likely to deteriorate once it is raised, Sellitti said. The historical nature of the ship makes its discovery significant, “Being one of the first French passenger steamships to have a regularly scheduled run crossing the Atlantic and an early transitional steamship make Le Lyonnais’ discovery significant,” Takajian stated.