Wreck Discovered of French Steamship that Sank in Atlantic in 1856

People watch the Cunard flagship Queen Mary 2 navigating towards Liverpool, on September 6, 2024 to celebrate the milestone of its 400th transatlantic crossing. (Photo by Paul ELLIS / AFP)
People watch the Cunard flagship Queen Mary 2 navigating towards Liverpool, on September 6, 2024 to celebrate the milestone of its 400th transatlantic crossing. (Photo by Paul ELLIS / AFP)
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Wreck Discovered of French Steamship that Sank in Atlantic in 1856

People watch the Cunard flagship Queen Mary 2 navigating towards Liverpool, on September 6, 2024 to celebrate the milestone of its 400th transatlantic crossing. (Photo by Paul ELLIS / AFP)
People watch the Cunard flagship Queen Mary 2 navigating towards Liverpool, on September 6, 2024 to celebrate the milestone of its 400th transatlantic crossing. (Photo by Paul ELLIS / AFP)

A US dive team has discovered the wreck of a French steamship, Le Lyonnais, that sank in the Atlantic Ocean in 1856 after a "hit-and-run" collision with an American sailing vessel, claiming 114 lives.

Le Lyonnais, which was built in 1855 and was considered state-of-the-art at the time, was returning to France after completing its maiden voyage from Le Havre to New York when the disaster occurred.

Jennifer Sellitti of Atlantic Wreck Salvage, a New Jersey-based company, said a team on the dive boat D/V Tenacious discovered the wreckage of Le Lyonnais last month after a two-decade search, Agence France Presse reported.

Sellitti said divers positively identified the ship in waters 200 miles (320 kilometers) off of New Bedford, Massachusetts, in an area known as the Georges Bank. They are not revealing the exact location for now.

"She certainly doesn't look as good as she used to," Sellitti told AFP. "She was really broken apart.

"The North Atlantic is a brutal place to be a shipwreck -- storms, tides," she said. "The Nantucket shoals are known for shifting sands that just completely bury wrecks."

Sellitti said measurements of an engine cylinder were key to identifying the vessel.

The iron-hulled Le Lyonnais, which had both sails and a steam engine, was built by a British shipmaker, Laird & Sons, for Compagnie Franco-Americaine to provide passenger and mail service across the Atlantic.

"The 1850s was the beginning of the transition from sail to steam," Sellitti said. "This was an early attempt by France to have its first successful passenger line."

Le Lyonnais had sailed to New York carrying cargo and mail, she said, and was returning to Le Havre with its first passengers, most of whom were French.

- Hit-and-run -

On the night of November 2, 1856, Le Lyonnais, carrying 132 passengers and crew, collided with the Adriatic, an American barque which was sailing from Maine to Georgia.

Jonathan Durham, the Adriatic's captain, in a statement published in the November 19, 1856 edition of The New York Times, said it was around 11:00 pm on a starlit but "hazy" night when Le Lyonnais "suddenly changed her course, which rendered a collision inevitable."

Durham said the Adriatic suffered significant damage but managed to make it to Gloucester, Massachusetts two days later while Le Lyonnais continued on its way.

The French ship had, in fact, suffered extensive damage -- a hole at the water line and another one lower, probably near its coal bunkers, Sellitti said.

It sank several days later. The handful of survivors were picked up by another ship.

Sellitti, whose book about the incident, "The Adriatic Affair: A Maritime Hit-and-Run Off the Coast of Nantucket," comes out in February 2025, said the sinking of Le Lyonnais was "a really big deal at the time."

The American captain was arrested and put on trial in France, she said, and the collision raised a number of novel maritime liability questions such as what happens when a sailing vessel meets a steamship at sea.

The disaster, which is mentioned in Jules Verne's novel "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea," was the focus of much international attention, she said, but when the US Civil War broke out in 1861 "everybody stopped talking about this and went on to the Civil War."



Researchers Document Huge Drop in African Elephants in a Half Century

 Elephants walk at the Amboseli National Park in Kajiado County, Kenya, April 4, 2024. REUTERS/Monicah Mwangi/File Photo
Elephants walk at the Amboseli National Park in Kajiado County, Kenya, April 4, 2024. REUTERS/Monicah Mwangi/File Photo
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Researchers Document Huge Drop in African Elephants in a Half Century

 Elephants walk at the Amboseli National Park in Kajiado County, Kenya, April 4, 2024. REUTERS/Monicah Mwangi/File Photo
Elephants walk at the Amboseli National Park in Kajiado County, Kenya, April 4, 2024. REUTERS/Monicah Mwangi/File Photo

African elephants are Earth's largest land animals, remarkable mammals that are very intelligent and highly social. They also are in peril. Fresh evidence of this comes in a study that documents alarming population declines at numerous sites across the continent over about a half century.

Researchers unveiled on Monday what they called the most comprehensive assessment of the status of the two African elephant species - the savanna elephant and forest elephant - using data on population surveys conducted at 475 sites in 37 countries from 1964 through 2016.

The savanna elephant populations fell by about 70% on average at the surveyed sites and the forest elephant populations dropped by about 90% on average at the surveyed sites, with poaching and habitat loss the main drivers. All told, there was a 77% population decrease on average at the various surveyed sites, spanning both species, Reuters reported.

Elephants vanished at some sites while their populations increased in other places thanks to conservation efforts.

"A lot of the lost populations won't come back, and many low-density populations face continued pressures. We likely will lose more populations going forward," said George Wittemyer, a Colorado State University professor of wildlife conservation and chair of the scientific board of the conservation group Save the Elephants, who helped lead the study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Poaching typically involves people killing elephants for their tusks, which are sold illegally on an international black market driven mostly by ivory demand in China and other parts of Asia. Agricultural expansion is the top factor in habitat loss.

The forest elephant population is estimated to be about a third that of savanna elephants. Poaching has affected forest elephants disproportionately and has ravaged populations of both species in northern and eastern Africa.

"We have lost a number of elephant populations across many countries, but the northern Sahel region of Africa - for example in Mali, Chad and Nigeria - has been particularly hard hit. High pressure and limited protection have culminated in populations being extirpated," Wittemyer said.

But in southern Africa, elephant populations rose at 42% of the surveyed sites.

"We have seen real success in a number of places across Africa, but particularly in southern Africa, with strong growth in populations in Botswana, Zimbabwe and Namibia. For populations showing positive trends, we have had active stewardship and management by the governments or outside groups that have taken on a management role," Wittemyer said.

The study did not track a continent-wide population tally because the various surveys employed different methodologies over different time frames to estimate local elephant population density, making a unified head count impossible. Instead, it assessed population trends at each of the surveyed sites.

A population estimate by conservationists conducted separately from this study put the two species combined at between 415,000 and 540,000 elephants as of 2016, the last year of the study period. It remains the most recent comprehensive continent-wide estimate.

"The loss of large mammals is a significant ecological issue for Africa and the planet," said conservation ecologist and study co-author Dave Balfour, a research associate in the Centre for African Conservation Ecology at Nelson Mandela University in South Africa.

The world's third extant elephant species, the slightly smaller Asian elephant, faces its own population crisis, with similar factors at play as in Africa.

Of African elephants, Wittemyer said, "While the trends are not good, it is important to recognize the successes we have had and continue to have. Learning how and where we can be successful in conserving elephants is as important as recognizing the severity of the decline they have experienced."

Wittemyer added of these elephants: "Not only one of the most sentient and intelligent species we share the planet with, but also an incredibly important part of ecosystems in Africa that structures the balance between forest and grasslands, serves as a critical disperser of seeds, and is a species on which a multitude of other species depend on for survival."