Anchors in Time
ECU maritime studies students and faculty uncover North Carolina’s hidden war stories beneath the waves
East Carolina University maritime studies graduate student Cory van Hees tells how it happened.
“My dive buddy, Evan Olinger, and I were taking width measurements of Wharf Four to help delineate the site,” he says. The visibility is consistently pretty low in the Cape Fear; as a result, Olinger got disoriented, so they switched roles. Van Hees got disoriented, too, but spotted something.
“I came across several wooden frames barely sticking out of the clay mud with evidence of planking just barely visible on the surface,” he says. He wasn’t sure what it was, but he knew whom to ask. “Later that day, Dr. Jason Raupp was able to confirm this was a wreck, which may be La Fortuna. It was kind of overwhelming and a little emotional feeling once it set in.”
The group was working during a summer field school at Brunswick Town/Fort Anderson Historic Site, where ECU faculty, staff and students have uncovered numerous buildings and artifacts over the years. The field schools are part of the program in maritime studies.
A large section of the possible La Fortuna shipwreck sits on the beach. (Photo by ECU program in maritime studies)
But La Fortuna wasn’t the only former warship to get attention last summer. ECU maritime studies experts and students also worked at two other better-known sites, USS Patrol Craft 1084 in the Cape Fear River near Fayetteville and the USS Picket in the Tar River in Washington.
The Spanish Privateer and the War of Jenkins’ Ear
For nearly half a century, ECU’s program in maritime studies has uncovered forgotten links to centuries of conflict, commerce and innovation. This summer’s discovery of what might be La Fortuna grabbed headlines across the country.
A Spanish privateer, it exploded and sank while attacking the colonial port of Brunswick in 1748. The ship’s demise was part of a little-known but colorfully named conflict — the War of Jenkins’ Ear — a mid-18th-century struggle between Britain and Spain that spilled into the Carolinas and evolved into King George’s War.
Named for a British sea captain who allegedly lost his ear to Spanish forces, the war marked an era of privateers and raids up and down the Atlantic coast. When La Fortuna arrived at Brunswick Town with a Spanish raiding party, local militia, led by Capt. William Dry, fought back. In the chaos, the ship caught fire and blew up — killing its captain and crew and ending the invasion. Booty recovered from the wreck helped finance the building of St. Philip’s Church in Brunswick and St. James Church in Wilmington, officials say.
ECU’s team, led by Jason Raupp, an assistant professor, and research archaeologist Jeremy Borrelli, uncovered the timbers that tests revealed to be made of Mexican and/or Monterey cypress, woods native to Spain’s Central American colonies. The discovery, combined with the site’s location and nearby cannon finds, suggests the wreck is La Fortuna.
“La Fortuna connects North Carolina to a global story of empire, privateering and early warfare,” Borelli told McClatchy News.
Brunswick Town was a pre-Revolutionary port on the Cape Fear River that British troops destroyed in 1776, according to the N.C. Division of State Historic Sites and Properties. The ECU group uncovered three other shipwrecks at Brunswick Town. One may have been used for land reclamation; another could be a colonial flatboat — a watercraft historically used to transport people and goods between the port and nearby plantations; and the fourth remains unidentified. The team also found wharves, a historic causeway and artifacts tied to colonial life and trade.
To protect La Fortuna’s remains from erosion, the team recovered more than 40 timbers for conservation at the N.C. Office of State Archaeology’s Queen Anne’s Revenge Conservation Lab in Greenville. There, specialists will stabilize and study the wood before attempting to reconstruct the ship’s structure.
Archaeologists record the starboard side of the remaining structure of PC-1084. (Photo by Nathan Richards/ECU program in maritime studies)
The PC-1084 is used as a floating dock decades ago. (Archival photo)
The subchaser that came home to die
One of the last known World War II subchasers, PC-1084 patrolled the East Coast from New York to Cuba. Built by George Lawley & Sons in Neponset, Massachusetts, it was launched on Halloween 1942, according to a history compiled by the Fayetteville Area Transportation and Local History Museum. Patrol craft escorted convoys, hunted and destroyed submarines, sank small craft and shot down airplanes, among other duties.
After the war, hundreds of similar vessels were sold off as surplus. Records suggest Fayetteville businessman Richard Minges, a local Pepsi bottler, bought the 1084 in 1947 to use as a floating dock. Later accounts say it was tied up near a dance hall along the river at Breece’s Landing, serving as a mooring for a pleasure yacht that may or may not have existed.
Eventually, a hole appeared in the stern, the hull filled with water and the boat started listing. Local historian Bruce Daws told The Fayetteville Observer hypotheses for the origins of the hole ranged from a still exploding inside the boat to salvage hunters cutting it to look for scrap. No one knows for sure. Though the water is murky, students can explore the vessel and identify and visually scale gun placements, superstructures and other identifying features that have long since been removed from the ship.
It’s visible to motorists crossing the Cape Fear River on the Grove Street bridge.
“Ships like this often just fade away — tied up and forgotten. They weren’t built to last, and yet they’ve become fragile time capsules of World War II history,” Nathan Richards, distinguished professor of history in the Thomas Harriot College of Arts and Sciences, told McClatchy News.
Graduate student Harley Drange is now piecing together the ship’s postwar life as part of his master’s thesis project, tracing its transformation from a subchaser to a relic of industrial reuse.
“Being able to set foot on the PC-1084, it’s not what you might call one of the sexy ships. It wasn’t one of the aircraft carriers, battleships — one of those big-name ships everybody loves — but it was the working ship. It really was the backbone of the U.S. Navy during the world wars. Without these ships, the convoys were at risk.”
Meanwhile, ECU researchers are documenting its rapid decay. “We saw bulkheads collapsing, decking subsiding, even steel plating folding back like a can,” Richards says. “It’s changing before our eyes.”
Ethan Whiten (foreground) uses a total station prism to assist in the digital recording of PC-1084. In the distance, Krysta Rogers and Ian Shoemaker record deck structure around a fallen tree. (Photo by Nathan Richards/ECU program in maritime studies)
Graduate student Harley Drange enters the water to record the Picket. (Photo by Rebecca Kelley/ECU)
About ECU’s program in maritime studies
Founded in 1981, East Carolina University’s program in maritime studies is one of the nation’s leading graduate programs in underwater archaeology. Based in the Department of History, the program combines coursework in historical research, field techniques and artifact conservation. Students and faculty have investigated hundreds of shipwrecks along the East Coast and around the world, from pirate ships to World War II submarines.
A Civil War gunboat emerges
Farther east, ECU students at another field school found themselves face-to-face with a ghost from the Civil War — the USS Picket, a 130-foot Union gunboat that exploded and sank in 1862 near Washington, North Carolina.
The Picket began as the Winslow, an iron-hulled New York canal barge built in 1845. As the Civil War erupted, forces on each side raced to turn civilian craft into warships. Wrapping the barge in a wooden gunboat hull was an unusual approach. Graduate student Rebecca Kelley, who is documenting the Picket’s design for her master’s thesis, said only a few vessels were ever built this way, and the Picket is the only one left to study.
In the 1960s, Gordon Watts, who worked for the state at the time and later became an ECU faculty member, was involved in the first work at the site, which for decades has been a training site for diving, water safety and how to dive on a black water site, where you might have 2 inches of visibility.
From then until recently, the wreck lay buried in the Tar River mud near the old U.S. 17 bridge. But changes in the river’s current have scoured away nearly 7 feet of sediment, revealing parts of the ship unseen since the war. What divers found astonished them: a “ship within a ship,” built in haste during the Union’s desperate drive to expand its fleet.
Allyson Ropp, a doctoral student at ECU, first dived on Picket when she was a master’s student. She was with the group this summer helping guide new divers.
“When I remember diving on it 10 years ago, there was, like, nothing exposed. Maybe some of the framing was sticking out, and so going back this past summer what stood out was how much was exposed. You could fit inside the shipwreck and you had maybe 2 or 3 extra feet of timbers sticking out above you. It shows how much sediment is able to move up and down the rivers.”
The Picket’s last battle was a dramatic one. Serving as a flagship in Union operations along North Carolina’s coast, it fired one cannon during a Confederate attack before a violent explosion — perhaps from its boiler or powder magazine — tore it apart, killing 19 crew members.
Drange, a Californian who’s been diving for only a year, got his first experience in black water diving on Picket. “It’s a little ominous where parts of the ship just appear right in front of you, but it was definitely a great learning experience,” he said. “You can definitely tell toward the stern where the iron hull met the wooden hull. And it was one of the areas we actually focused on quite a bit, trying to figure out how the two hulls were connected.”
Richards said as many as 40 wrecks might lay in the mud between the old and new U.S. 17 bridges.
In situ yellow metal sheathing and sheathing tacks on the starboard stern outer hull planks of the Picket. (Photo by Krysta Rogers/ECU)
An internal view of an in situ stern hawse pipe on the starboard of the Picket. (Photo by Krysta Rogers/ECU)
From left, Nathan Richards, Liam O’Brien and Allyson Ropp take measurements on PC-1084 on the Cape Fear River near Fayetteville.
(Photo by ECU program in maritime studies)
Telling their stories before it’s too late
Whether buried in the Tar, beached along the Cape Fear or just a few remaining timbers near the sandy coast, these shipwrecks share one thing in common: They’re disappearing fast. Each discovery adds another layer to understanding how war, commerce and human ambition have shaped North Carolina.
“There’s about 5,000 wrecks that have been documented wrecking in North Carolina waters, stretching all the way from the Graveyard of the Atlantic all the way to the mountains,” Ropp says. “Jason Raupp and I were talking about doing a project on a wreck up on the French Broad River (in western North Carolina), and who would ever think there’s a wreck in the French Broad River?
“We kind of forget what’s under the water unless it’s really big and exciting. But all of those wrecks have stories that connect us to our history and are important and can show us something about how we as North Carolinians use the water, how past people used the water and why we are connected to the water and care about it.”
– Lacey Gray contributed to this story.