Local paper had an article about some artifiacts that have been revealed over the past few years.
What I didn't realize that this Revolutionary-era find is quite significant, it marks the second worst naval defeat in our US history...number 1 being Pearl Harbor.
Here's a cut/paste of the local article in today's paper....
Editor’s Note: All U.S. military wrecks are the property of the government and it is a federal crime to disturb them in any way without prior permission. Anyone caught in possession of or in the process of collecting historic artifacts from the Penobscot River associated with the Penobscot Expedition will be prosecuted.
History is hiding in the murky waters of the Penobscot River.
Artifacts from the Penobscot Expedition of 1779 - the largest Revolutionary War naval expedition and worst naval defeat in United States history until Pearl Harbor - offer a peek into the country’s beginnings.
The battle, which ended with the loss of between 30 and 40 commissioned naval ships and sloops of war by the hands of their own crews, left everything from smoking pipes and shoe buckles to swivel guns and cannons along the bottom of the Penobscot River between Castine and Bangor.
Although findings are generally few and far between, some items that are possibly from the Penobscot Expedition emerged as recently as two months ago.
Relics from the naval disaster remain embedded in the river’s thick mud and are sometimes visible at low tide but often go unnoticed by unsuspecting residents. Others sit on the bottom of the river just feet from the surface but are hidden from view by the thick, murky and fast-flowing tidal waters of the state’s largest river.
A handful of men have pursued these hidden treasures over the last 228 years, including Robert Neyland, head of the underwater archaeology branch of the Naval Historical Center, but for the most part remnants of the vessels lost in the historic battle have never been found.
Even so, "none of it is abandoned property," Neyland said. Federal laws "provide civil penalties for unauthorized taking of materials from federally recognized wrecks."
The property clause of the U.S. Constitution establishes ownership of all U.S. military craft, sunken or otherwise, as indefinite no matter where they are located, and more recent laws provide severe punishments, he said.
The river was listed as a national historic district in 1972 to protect the archaeological integrity of any Penobscot Expedition site from development and opportunistic relic hunters.
The battle
Nearly three years after the Continental Congress declared independence from England, U.S. leaders got word that 800 or more British troops had begun constructing Fort George in Castine, known in 1779 as the peninsula of Maja-Bagaduce or Bagaduce.
The area was part of Massachusetts, so that state’s General Assembly sent a fleet of 19 armed vessels, including the Continental Navy frigate Warren, the brigs Diligent and Providence and a dozen privateers, and more than 20 transports to retake Castine.
The armada arrived on July 25, 1779, at the mouth of the Penobscot River. After a two-week stalemate and just as Continental naval forces under the command of Commodore Dudley Saltonstall planned to attack, British reinforcements arrived. Saltonstall, who later was tried by court martial for cowardice and was dismissed from the Navy, decided not to fight and instead fled up the Penobscot River.
The British warships overtook a dozen ships as the rest of the armed Continental ships headed farther up the river, with nine or 10 making it as far as Bangor where "the falls" stopped their progress.
The ships were burned or run ashore Aug. 13 and 14, 1779, to keep them and their cargo from falling into enemy hands.
When the Department of the Navy was asked by local historians in the late 1990s for assistance in locating some of the scuttled expedition ships, the agency wrote back:
"[Saltonstall’s ship] the Warren lies … near Winterport. We understood that the Providence, which had been John Paul Jones’ first command, with three Massachusetts Navy ships and five privateers lies near Bangor. The Active may be near the mouth of the Kenduskeag Stream. The Diligent is believed to be near the Chamberlain Bridge. I believe the transports being slower than the war ships would tend to lie near Sandy Point below Bangor and Brewer."
Former state Rep. Richard Campbell of Holden read the letter to the Maine Legislature in May 1999 just before a law protecting the historic artifacts passed.
The 1962 book "Brewer, Orrington, Holden, Eddington: History and Families" also says both Josiah Brewer and John Brewer, the founding fathers of the city of Brewer, played roles in the expedition.
"Colonel [John] Brewer witnessed the destruction of a large part of the fleet. The ships … were all blown up or set on fire by their crews," the book states. "There was no role of honor but without a doubt, men from New Worcester [Brewer] took part in the action at that time."
According to the journal of Lt. Col. Paul Revere, who also was tried by court martial and acquitted, he left his boat, Spring Bird, somewhere near Frankfort. The Defence ran into an inlet at Stockton Springs, and the Samuel and the Warren made it as far as Winterport, historians believe.
Anything of value was thrown overboard to prevent capture by the English and the boats were burned, many exploding when their gunpowder kegs were ignited. The smoke could be seen for miles.
American Gen. Solomon Lovell wrote that the scene had "as much confusion as can possibly be conceived."
The Massachusetts Navy was basically annihilated, nearly 500 Continental soldiers were dead and the Americans had suffered a defeat that was heard worldwide.
Treasures discovered
The day after the ships were burned, British "Maj. George Ulmer, then having a command of Camden, was up the river, at my house, with a large boat and a party of soldiers, getting what remained from the destruction of the vessels," John Brewer’s firsthand accounts stated as printed Aug. 13, 1846, in a Bangor Whig and Courier article.
According to the Department of Defence Legacy Resource Program, the English recovered 50 to 60 cannons and American Gen. Peleg Wadsworth was able to recover eight cannons.
In summer 1809, Ebenezer Clifford of Exeter, N.H., arrived in Bangor and recovered approximately 30 cannons and a few tons of cannonballs.
It also is recorded that numerous objects were found in August 1876 during dredging in Bangor harbor. Few historic documents remain of the dredging, but cannons pulled from the water are on display around Bangor and Brewer.
Some cannons, cannonballs and shot remain with the Bangor Museum and Center for History.
In 1953, a crane removed four cannons, but lost a fifth, during the building of the Joshua Chamberlain Bridge.
John Cayford, a local welder and later author, became interested in the expedition after seeing the cannons emerge from the river in 1953 and delved into maps, records and journals of the battle.
Over the next 20 years, he searched most of the river and claims to have located timbers from the Providence in the waters near Castine and the charred hull and a cannon from the Warren in Winterport.
While searching in Frankfort for Revere’s boat, Cayford met an elderly Bangor woman who pointed out the Winterport site, which is where he reportedly hit his jackpot in 1958.
"At last … our long search paid off with the discovery of a bronze six-pound cannon, still shiny after two centuries underwater," Cayford said in a 1974 American Heritage article.
It was identified as a rare Revere cannon by its Massachusetts seal emblem. Cayford gave it to Fort Edgecomb in Wiscasset, where it is on permanent display.
In summer 1972, students from Maine Maritime Academy and Massachusetts Institute of Technology located the Defence in Devereaux Cove in Stockton Springs.
Warren Riess, research associate professor of history and marine sciences at the University of Maine in Orono, was a student when the ship’s location was first pinpointed. The remains sit about 50 feet below the high-tide mark and are totally visible at low tide.
During a five-year recovery project, divers brought hundreds of artifacts to the surface including "cannonballs, barrel staves, sections of planking, shoes, spoons, pottery pieces, buttons, beef bones and numerous other bits and pieces," according to a July 1976 Bangor Daily News article.
"We found the medicine chest for the ship," Riess said recently. "That was the coolest thing ever."
