A team of American divers and wreck researchers have discovered at the bottom of the North Atlantic the remains of a French steamship sunk in 1856 after a collision with an American sailing ship, a forgotten disaster that left 114 dead.
The Lyonnais, a technical gem for the time built in 1855, was sailing towards France in early November 1856, returning from a maiden voyage from Le Havre to New York, Jennifer Sellitti of the Atlantic Wreck Salvage association told AFP.
Divers from the D/V Tenacious group found the wreck in August after two decades of searching, she added.
The ship, which had an iron hull, was positively identified on the ocean floor 200 miles (320 kilometers) off New Bedford on the Massachusetts coast (northeast), in an area called Georges Bank.
Ms Sellitti’s association did not say exactly where Le Lyonnais is located.
“It’s obviously not in the condition it was in (when it was sailing). It’s really in pieces,” the official acknowledged in a telephone interview.
Buried wrecks
Because “the North Atlantic is a very hostile place for a shipwreck (because of) storms, tides (…) and shifting sands which completely bury wrecks.”
It was thanks to the dimensions of an engine cylinder that Le Lyonnais was able to be formally identified, certified Ms Sellitti.
The ship, which was powered by sail and steam, was built in 1855 by an English shipyard, Laird & Sons, which had built it for the French company Compagnie franco-américaine.
A portion of the Lyonnais engine cylinder.
Photo Andrew Donn / Atlantic Wreck Salvage / AFP
For France, it was a question of developing transatlantic transport of passengers, mail and goods.
“The 1850s marked the beginning of the transition from sail to steam” and “France was then seeking to set up a first transatlantic line,” explained Jennifer Sellitti.
The Lyonnais, after crossing from Le Havre to New York with freight and mail, was returning to the great port of Normandy with its first passengers, most of them French.
But on the evening of November 2, 1856, the ship carrying 132 passengers and crew collided with the American sailing ship, the Adriatic, which was sailing between the coasts of the states of Maine (northeast) and Georgia (southeast).
“Collision inevitable”
Jonathan Durham, the captain of the Adriatic, had testified after the disaster, quoted in the New York Times of November 19, 1856: around 11 p.m., on a starry but “foggy” night, the Lyonnais had “suddenly changed course, making a collision inevitable.”
Seriously damaged, the Adriatic continued on its way, with Captain Durham managing to reach the port of Gloucester, Massachusetts, two days later.
The French ship, according to Captain Durham, also continued its crossing, with several holes in the hull.
The Lyonnais sank a few days later, no one knows where, and less than twenty people were rescued by another boat.
Jennifer Sellitti has written a book about the disaster, which was “a really big story at the time”: The Adriatic Affair: A Maritime Hit-and-Run Off the Coast of Nantucket (Schiffer Publishing) is due out in the United States on February 28, 2025.
168 years ago, American Captain Durham was arrested and tried in France and the accident raised many legal questions regarding maritime transport.
The disaster also features in Jules Verne’s famous novel “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea” (1869) and had an impact on international news in the late 1850s, according to Ms Sellitti.
Before “everyone stopped talking about it at the time of the Civil War” from 1861, she notes.
