The F.J. King was a 144-foot, three-masted cargo schooner that was built in Ohio back in 1867, but sunk when a powerful gale tore into the vessel – and now researchers have confirmed they have found it
After decades of searching, the wreckage of a “ghost ship” that sank during a ferocious storm almost 140 years ago has finally been found.
The F.J. King was finally located off Bailey’s Harbor, a small community of 280 people on Wisconsin’s Door Peninsula that stretches into Lake Michigan.
A team led by researcher Brandon Baillod found the remains on 28 June, the Wisconsin Historical Society and the Wisconsin Underwater Archaeology Association confirmed on Monday.
Baillod told The Associated Press that the discovery came after decades of researchers scouring the depths of Lake Michigan.
The 144-foot, three-masted cargo schooner was built in Ohio back in 1867. It was carrying iron ore from Escanaba, Michigan, to Chicago on 15 September 1886, when a powerful gale tore into the vessel.
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Ten-foot waves then obliterated the ship’s seams and its stern deckhouse was also blown away.
Despite Captain William Griffin and his men’s tireless efforts to pump water out of the ship, it sank around 2 a.m. The crew was eventually rescued by another passing vessel and taken to Bailey’s Harbor.
There had been conflicting reports about the F.J. King’s location which had long hampered researchers’ efforts to find the sunken boat. Ever since the 1970s, shipwreck hunters have combed the area but came up empty-handed – earning the F.J. King a reputation as a “ghost ship”.
Baillod, meanwhile, suspected Captain Griffin may have been disoriented in the storm when he reported where the ship sank. Instead, he decided to focus on a two-square-mile area based on a lighthouse keeper’s report.
His team’s search ended when a side-scan radar revealed a large object, 140-feet long, located half a mile from the keeper’s reported sighting.
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“A few of us had to pinch each other,” Baillod said in the announcement. “After all the previous searches, we couldn’t believe we had actually found it, and so quickly.”
It comes after researchers confirmed the existence of a shipwreck believed to contain one of history’s greatest lost treasures, sparking a multi-billion-pound legal battle over its ownership.
The Spanish galleon San Jose, laden with gold, silver and emeralds estimated to be worth around £16 billion, had been lost beneath the Caribbean waters for more than 300 years.
However, academics in Colombia have now definitively identified the wreckage found near Baru Island, off the coast of Cartagena, in 2015 as the legendary ship that sank in 1708 following a fierce battle with the Royal Navy, according to The Telegraph.
Known as the “holy grail of shipwrecks”, the San Jose was transporting treasure from Peru to Spain to finance the Spanish side of the War of the Spanish Succession when it was intercepted by a British squadron led by Charles Wager, who later became First Lord of the Admiralty.
During the clash, the ship’s powder magazines detonated, sending it and its valuable cargo to the ocean floor.
The vessel was presumed lost forever until an expedition in 2015 used underwater drones to capture images of the wreckage on the seabed. Now, experts are confident that the mystery has finally been solved.
“This body of evidence substantiates the identification of the wreck as the San José Galleon, a hypothesis that has been put forward since its initial discovery in 2015,” the academics said.