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Hudson River Shipwrecks Secretly Mapped
jonerik writes "According to this article in the New York Times (registration required) more than 200 shipwreck sites lying beneath New York's Hudson River have been mapped by sonar. In fact, scientists feel confident that the location of every Hudson shipwreck between Manhattan and Troy has now been pinpointed, adding that the nearly oxygen-free mud of the Hudson nearly guarantees that many of the wrecks and their contents are almost perfectly preserved. The hitch? For the time being the maps - paid for as part of the $186 million Hudson River Estuary Plan - are not being published since state officials are nervous about the prospect of so many shipwrecks suddenly being opened up to salvagers on one of the U.S.'s busiest rivers. 'We don't want to ring the dinner bell for people who have ulterior motives and don't behave responsibly,' says Mark L. Peckham, a historic preservation coordinator at the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation. In the meantime, state officials are now attempting to determine the historical significance of the wrecks and how they might be protected, which should hopefully lead to the publication of the Hudson River maps at some future date."
they don't want to publish the areas of the shipwrecks, but anyone with the money or power to go dig up ships has some ethics in them.
also, who is to say these ships now 'belong' to the state of NY ? i never understood that, it should be finders keepers.
Runnin' On Empty
Um.
Henry Hudson was exploring the river in 1609. What do you mean by *old*, exactly?
The government should make the bottom of the river a national park. This would ensure that the ships are preserved as long as our country. Imagine if the Greeks or Egyptians had done this.
I wonder how many pairs of shoes will be found encased in concrete when the salvage gold rush begins.
Life is tough. It's tougher if you're stupid. --John Wayne
Are the artifacts down there worth all the shots you'd have to get to swim in the Hudson?
I'm selling rights to the Hudson River bottom on ebay, any takers? Also up for sale is a bridge in Brooklyn, good condition, barely used!
It's a serious disappointment that society has arrived (not recently) at a state where truly worthwhile information is rightfully withheld because we, as humans, can't treat things with respect.
-
Inventor of the term 'pardon my French'.
. . . are not being published since state officials are nervous about the prospect of so many shipwrecks suddenly being opened up to salvagers on one of the U.S.'s busiest rivers. 'We don't want to ring the dinner bell for people who have ulterior motives and don't behave responsibly,' says Mark L. Peckham . . .
Could someone with some knowledge of major salvage work give some words on wether or not a permit is required?
I think i recall how US Navy technology found the wrecked of the Titanic. Despite that US funds were used to find the wreckage a French company brought up a small peice of it and therefore claimed rights to salvage. This left many people angry, especially relatives of passengers on that wreck who want their loved ones remains to be left alone. This bears similarity to this case here as responsible salvage companies need to be selected and given scrict guidelines on recovery procedure on a busy waterway.
-Foxxz
The Hudson (according to some) is loaded with PCB's from old General Electric dumping in the river. While they continue to fight the legal and environmental battle to decide how that's going to be handled...
The last thing they need is a bunch of yahoo's with treasure maps digging around in the sediment and silt looking for treasure while dredging up 80 years worth of PCB's.
The biggest opponents to cleaning the PCB's out of the river point to the environmental impact of disturbing all of this sediment. Imagine the nightmare when Joe Adventurer goes out and starts digging up the River.
Here, from the very the first sentence of the article, "Scientists mapping the bottom of the Hudson River with sonar say they have found nearly every single ship that ever foundered in the river over the last 400 years or more."
So I'd say from 400 yrs or so.
...in a Cessna 172 and the ceiling of the NYC airspace down south of the GWBridge is 1000 ft, so we'd fly down the NYC side at 600 ft and down and around the statue of Liberty, then up the NJ side to Alpine tower. I haven't flown in years, but Im sure the regulations are MUCH stricter since 9/11.
On a second note, how many PCBs are in the riverbed and would be disturbed and brought downstream. Dont know if they'd "stir up" the environmentalists by suggesting going down for the wrecks/moving them.
Relive the BBS Past - One Byte at a Time! www.ssabbs.com
I think that from a historical significance perspective, this is not a Bad Thing(tm). Allow the museums etc first shot at those wrecks of historical interest before the vultures descend.
this is getting old and so are you
blog
All other things aside, I find that declaring the contents of a publicly-funded project to be secret is food for thought. As big as I am on openess, I can understand the decision to hold off for now.
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My take is that the information is public knowledge, but releasing it would destroy public safety and public history. What needs to be done is a massive, organized effort to salvage and record the vast wealth of finds. Maybe private companies could be involved.
Interesting to think of - I wonder what other cases of withheld public information may be justifiable . .
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
Kartchner Caverns is a perfect example of a case when a state government spent a lot of money and effort researching and protecting a site of significant (in this case) natural importance without disclosing any of the information to the public until the "right" time. In this case, even the fact that the money was being spent, and what it was being spent on was, from my understanding, kept completely secret.
I'm sure there will be people on here screaming that the government has no right to keep the fruits of labor paid for by taxpayers money a secret, but it sounds like NY, just like Arizona, is doing it to protect the sites they have invested a lot of time and energy in.
Ah yes, those pesky Indians with large sailing vessels. Which ones were those, exactly?
Dredging the river will decimate the shipwrecks
or salvaging the shipwrecks will spread PCBs back into the river, which is one of the big problems with dredging
More info is at the EPA. The article doesn't really mention this, which seems odd, since the PCB/Dredging issue has been a hell of a hot topic in the Upper Hudson Valley for the past year or two.
_sig_ is away
I think it's extremely cool that they found 200 year old perishable goods like leather and potatos preserved by the mud.
In think it would be even cooler if there was a similar project in europe or the middle east - places that have way more history than the US.
The oldest ships you'll find in the Hudson are going to be ~2 hundred years old. Imagine finding a shipwreck in the mediteranean, red sea, black sea, or caspian sea thats ~2 thousand years old!!
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
track7.org has all kinds of interesting stuff!
I guess they have the right since they did all the mapping... but I still think it's funny that they are keeping stuff a secret so the "Indiana Jones" types can plunder the wreaks first. "...That belongs in a museum!!!" -Indiana Jones
Yeah, but the thing you have to realize is that many of the scientists will actually take the time to document what, where, when, location etc.... in an effort to preserve the history and data in the wreck so that further research can be done.
I have dived before on wrecks and there are some folks I have seen that literally have no respect for the graves that many of these wrecks are or for the history of those wrecks. These people are out to tear off whatever trinket they can and sometimes those trinkets can be of great historical value. Furthermore, if not properly restored or stored, they can disintegrate loosing whatever value they retained.
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i was a tour guide on the hudson for new york waterway for awhile.
;-P
there is supposedly pirates treasure.
it would be nice to find one of these, called "General Washington's Watch Chain."
maybe a german u-boat?
or relics from the age of steamboats.
the hudson is also pretty deep in places. off of west point, for example (206 feet), or near bear mountain bridge (165 feet). it is an ancient river, as old as the appalachians. some of it was carved during the last ice age, and is similar to a norwegian fjord. plenty of room down there.
check this gem out, bannerman's island. an old arms dealer from the spanish american war blew up the castle he built with his business profits by locating his arsenal right next to his castle on his private island. oops. i've kayaked around it and can make out weird shapes in the shallow muck between the island and the shore. wonder what you would find near there!
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Actually there's a whole set of rules in admiralty for salvage rights over wrecks. This has come up more and more often as folks like Ballard locate old wrecks like Spanish galleons loaded with gold more easily. The disputes can get a little complicated.
Think of the ship at the bottom as not lost but in long-term storage. Just because someone can get to it before you can doesn't make it theirs. Access is not ownership. But if someone finds the wreck, they should be able to sell that information to the owner.
No, I can't justify these ancient rules. Changes may be in the wind.
I work for the outfit that is doing this survey and a couple others here in the keys plus one each in Portugal and Morocco (RPM, not Mel Fisher's). Putting aside the overseas projects, since that involves several more layers of bureaucracy, and not knowing the laws covering the Hudson, I can only give you an idea of what happens here.
Just about anything inside the reef is within the Floida Keys National Marine Sanctuary (FKNMS), so we have to pull a permit from them as well as from NOAA. FKNMS is a joint state / federal authority and NOAA of course is federal. In some areas we are allowed to do non-invasive surveys, such as towing magnetometers, a sidescan sonar or a sub-bottom profiler. Any excavation, which is done scientifically and with respect for the site, requires a separate permit. All data collected, whether from towed surveys or excavation must be shared with the permitting agency but is otherwise proprietary.
Hey, it's expensive to do this kind of work and there are plenty of treasure hunters that would love to get a hold of some of our "numbers". But as the article points out, those wrecks are mostly the workaday variety and probably of little commercial value. I think they are doing the right thing by holding back until the historically significant sites can be identified and protected even if the Hudson is not exactly a diving hot spot.
I don't know much about salvage rights and admiralty law, but maybe there's a relevant portion of some state statute regulating shipping and commerce on the Hudson and what happens to sunken ships? *shrug
More interestingly - what about GE and the whole PCB issue? I see a few problems with anybody digging anything up on a large scale:
a.) Scenic Hudson (or maybe it was another group, I forget) doesn't want anybody stirring up silt in the Hudson for the purposes of GE dredging the PCB-filled mud, so I can't think that they'd think lightly of lots of treasure hunters doing ths same thing.
b.) GE argued from the start that the biggest harm in removing the silt would be that it stirred up all of the PCBs which, over time, have become more benign (or at least less latent on the surface of the mud). Stirring them up, they said, would put them back into the fish, etc... this might relieve GE from its primary argument against dredging, so I've got to think they'd be considering it carefully.
c.) No matter what Scenic Hudson and GE think today about the Hudson, it is well-established that the silt is still chock full of PCBs, and as such, would qualify for treatment as a "hazardous material" upon its removal from the Hudson. Part of the dredging issue was figuring out what lucky Upstate NY town was going to host the geomembrane-protected "silt dump" for disposal of the stuff so it wouldn't leach into the ground and contaminate groundwater, etc. The rule of NIMBY has applied thus far, as far as I know... It would therefore follow that anybody trying to dig up ships would run into a big problem of what to do with the dirt they dug through. (Granted, it's not the whole Hudson, but it still creates an issue if you do anything but leave it there.)
That's my purse! I don't know you! -- Bobby Hill
Well, yes and no. I do not know all the issues involved, suffice to say it is complex, so if you want a real answer see a lawyer.
That out of the way, the insurance company only owns the wreck until the abandon it. If you try to salvage a wreck and the insurance company can prove they are in the process of trying to get it, then it belongs to them, and they can decide what to pay you for your efforts (read they will screw you).
However if you salavege a wreck long after it happens, and the insurance company has made no effort to get it, then it is assumed the insurance company has decided that the cost to salavage the wreck is greater than the benifits of doing so, and it is yours for the taking.
The key is while the insurance company is making efforts to raise the wreck it belongs to them. I wouldn't start any salavage operation without consulting a lawyer. International waters are a little more tricky, if you can get the loot to the right country you might be able to salvage it from under the insurance company.
Insurance companies generally don't bother with salvage unless they suspect the operation will turn up something other than the loot. Evidence that they don't have to pay the claim due to fraud is worth more than the claim itself if it keeps others from fraud. In minnesota they have divers bring up all outboards dropped overboard even though it often costs more than the claim because it teaches people that throwing a moter overboard will not get them a new one.
The hitch? For the time being the maps - paid for as part of the $186 million Hudson River Estuary Plan - are not being published since state officials are nervous about the prospect of so many shipwrecks suddenly being opened up to salvagers on one of the U.S.'s busiest rivers. 'We don't want to ring the dinner bell for people who have ulterior motives and don't behave responsibly'....
Geez, with over 200 wrecks, couldn't you just drag an anchor down the river and disturb at least a few? Or would suggesting that make this post a ``troll''?
moto411.com
Note: This is posted as AC because my employer is directly involved.
What I don't understand is why the City of New York is doing it this way.
I'm employed by my local city government and within the last several years we've been developing a Geographic Information System. GIS is basically digital photos of the entire city with various meta data attached (street names; water, sewer, & electric lines; zoning info; etc.).
Long story short - it required photographs taken during VERY expensive fly-overs. Not only is the city going to use the GIS information internally (police, fire, planning, and engineering departments), but in an effort to recoup some of the costs the city is planning on selling the information to local businesses. How do you sell information that is publicly owned? Simple - don't let the public own it.
What they're doing is leasing access to the GIS data, but allowing a 3rd party (the ones who did the fly-overs) to actually own it. The city is then under no legal obligation to allow the public to get to it for free.
Why couldn't New York do the same and allow whoever did the sonar scans to own the data?
The Hudson is VERY heavily polluted with PCBs dumped by GE over the years. It got to the point where the govt. (EPA) has told GE to dredge the river and clean it out. GE's response is that the PCBs are now 'safely' underneath the bottom of the river, and dredging will do more harm than good, as dredging will stir up all the crap and get it back into the river again.
On the one hand, you can't fault GE for this line of thinking, as much of the dumping was done before the harm in PCBs were realized. On the other, if you treat an area like a sewer, you should own up to doing some sort of cleanup.
All that being said, there will be a big ecological impact if you're digging up ships buried for 400 years, well below where the PCBs are.
The bottom of the Hudson is littered with wrecks containing priceless cargo from the Golden Age of industrialism in upstate New York.
Imagine the riches that await:
Raising the ships was difficult. Preserving the ships after they were raised has been a major effort (costing a small fortune) and requiring many thousands of man hours. It is wonderful that the wrecks were raised, but I don't think either the UK or Sweden could have coped with more than one every ten years or so.
Steel and iron ships are actually harder than wood to raise once they are over a certain page where the hull is substantially oxidised and what you end up with is almost impossible to treat (iron oxide crumbles).
See my journal, I write things there
Nope, then you've got to maintain presence (which means monthly or more frequent dives into water with two inch visibility, freezing temperatures, and, in some parts, currents strong enough to rip your arms off your body if you move wrong.) and you've got to otherwise show "good faith" attempts to salvage. You also need to make sure that nobody else already has rights to that ship. That can take you to Lloyd's, admiralty courts of a dozen nations, etc. Oh, by the way, you've also got to prove which wreck it is. Not so easy to do under those circumstances.
It may be *possible* to get and hold rights to wreck but it's by no means easy.
Rustin
And, yes, I am currently on the edge of a team with a pending effort to retrieve a wreck in the Hudson.
Data is the lever, rigor the fulcrum, brains the force that drives it all.
Okay, you out-of-towners are starting to get on my nerves.
Let's get this out of the way once and for all.
First of all, the only extensively documented case of this kind of thing was with the Irish gangs over in Hell's Kitchen. They had a guy on their crew who was trained (in prison, yet) as a butcher, so when they killed somebody, they would have this guy come in and chop up the body. Then they would take the parts to Ward's Island (where the East River meets the Harlem at the northern tip of Manhattan) and drop the body bits into the stream right by a water treatment plant. This would ensure that what littel was left got ripped up and washed way out to sea. Keep in mind that this would not work as well these days as now the population density of Roosevelt Island (in the middle of the East River at about Midtown) is much higher and people spend more time by the water.
Yes, people are killed and dumped in the river. This is frequent enough that every spring the NYPD divers prepare for the annual "crop" of bodies that have swollen up over the winter and pop to the surface as the weather warms up.
The primary variable is how well the large cavities like the lungs and intestines have been punctured. If you do the job "right" and make sure that those are open to the water (and the body weighted down), the gases will tend to bubble out and the body stay submerged. Of course, with DNA testing all bets are off as one floating bit of tissue can be enough; *if* spotted.
Keep in mind that, contrary to popular misconception, there is quite a lot of sealife around NYC (I used to collect seashells half a block from 23rd street) so if a body is down long enough, it will be GONE.
Why the East River and not the Hudson? The East has historically been closer to more nasty bits like the Lower East Side and the docks in Brooklyn and Queens. However, given the Mafia action along the old port facilities and institutional sites (Javits anybody?), each side has most likely seen its share of activity.
There. Now can we get back to arguing about salvage?
Rustin
Data is the lever, rigor the fulcrum, brains the force that drives it all.