Steamship Sunk by 'Small Hole' Found 168 Years Later

There are echoes of the Titanic in the story of Le Lyonnais' demise. The English-built steamship designed to carry people and mail across the Atlantic was heading from America to Europe on its first return voyage on Nov. 2, 1856, when it collided with a sailing vessel. The ship suffered "a small hole" and sank days later, killing 116 of the 132 people on board, per Fox News and CBS News. Like the Titanic, Le Lyonnais was "a state-of-the-art ship for its time, with an iron hull and an early steam engine supplementing its sails," per the Boston Globe. And like the world's most famous shipwreck, Le Lyonnais proved rather hard to find.

Jennifer Sellitti and partner Joe Mazraani of New Jersey-based Atlantic Wreck Salvage searched for eight years before announcing the discovery of the wreck last week, 168 years after Le Lyonnais sank. It was the culmination of years of challenging work, including searches near the Nantucket Shoals, whose "bottom geology can mask [shipwrecks] on sonar records," Sellitti tells Fox. The steamship was thought to have gone down in that area but was ultimately found further out to sea on Georges Bank, about 200 miles off the coast of New Bedford, Massachusetts, per the Asbury Park Press. It lies in "very deep water" with poor visibility and is partially buried in sand, Sellitti tells the outlet.

It has "not survived well," Sellitti tells Fox, noting "the North Atlantic is notoriously brutal to shipwrecks." Still, "finding her felt like closure—like a way to help those who died so long ago to finally rest in peace." Among those killed in the sinking were Albert Sumner, the brother of abolitionist Sen. Charles Sumner, and John Gardiner Gibson, a sugar merchant and patriarch of a wealthy Bostonian family, per the Press. The 16 survivors "were stuck in a lifeboat for a week," per Fox. The team, which recovered various portholes from the vessel, plans to fully document the wreck over the coming years. (More shipwreck stories.)