DURHAM, NORTH CAROLINA—A shipwreck that could date to the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century has been detected by a research expedition made up of scientists from Duke University, North Carolina State University, and the University of Oregon aboard the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution ship Atlantis. The team was looking for a mooring that had been lost on a previous expedition with a robotic autonomous underwater vehicle and a manned submersible when they found an iron chain, ship timbers, red bricks that may have formed a cooking hearth, glass bottles, an unglazed pottery jug, a metal compass, and an instrument that might be an octant or a sextant. “Lying more than a mile down in near-freezing temperatures, the site is undisturbed and well preserved,” Bruce Terrell, chief archaeologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Marine Heritage Program, said in a press release. “We discovered a shipwreck but, ironically, the lost mooring was never found,” added expedition leader Cindy Van Dover, director of the Duke University Marine Laboratory. To read more about underwater discoveries, go to "History's 10 Greatest Wrecks."
