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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."
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?
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.
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Inventor of the term 'pardon my French'.
also, who is to say these ships now 'belong' to the state of NY ? i never understood that, it should be finders keepers.
Perhaps not belong, but I would imagine they fall under the juristiction of the NY coast guard or port authority.
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.
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.
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
Preserving such historical sites is important for future generations.
Unfortunately, we have absolutely no idea how to preserve a ship under water.
In fact, we are sitting around helplessly watching the Titanic and the ships at Pearl Harbor disintegrate (which, BTW is a very bad thing - since the ships at Pearl still have a lot of fuel trapped within them). The only way we can "preserve" a ship is to raise it out of the water, and that can only be done under certain circumstances.
So +10 points for the thought, but -100 for complete inability do to anything about it.
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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.
but anyone with the money or power to go dig up ships has some ethics in them
Bzzzzzzz! Wrong...unfortunately. I've dove at least a dozen shipwrecks now in the great lakes, and ethics are pretty far from the mind of most people. If you want a great example of ethics, go read a book called "Deep Descent - Adventure and Death Diving The Andrea Doria". The Doria is one of the greatest wrecks in the world to dive. However...many people have foolishly died on the wreck in their efforts to collect something as stupid as china plates.
Salvers may be more ethical (I don't know any so I can't say) but I know that the mentality of a lot of divers is that it's finders keepers. There are underwater preserves in the great lakes, meaning that the shipwrecks are protected. But...most wrecks are found by private individuals and then pilfered of all the interesting stuff before they notify the government. So, when you actually get a chance to dive on the wreck most of the neat artifacts are gone. It's a shame...nothing can compare to the beauty of descended onto a wreck in the dark blue water and crawling through the hatches and seeing old tools, ropes...hundreds of years old. But a lot of divers only see a decoration in their living room.
Even a recent wreck (10 years old) - the US Coast Guard cutter The Mesquite - is in a protected area. When it was sunk, there were crew uniforms, utensils, logbooks - theres still a copy machine and a radio on the deck. A couple of years after the sinking you could find ad's in diving magazines of crew uniforms for sale from the mesquite. It's a HUGE debate in the diving community, about whether artifacts should stay on the wreck or if they should be collected...but ethics....hrm. More of a feeding frenzy on some wrecks...
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.
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 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: