A team of underwater explorers using two midget submarines say they have discovered the wreckage of a paddle-wheel steamer that sank in a wild storm off the far northern California coast 129 years ago.
It was the worst disaster in California maritime history - 221 people died on a Sunday afternoon, July 30, 1865, when the ship Brother Jonathan, bound from San Francisco to Victoria, B.C., hit an uncharted rock near Crescent City.Only 19 people - 11 of them crew members - survived the wreck in a single lifeboat.
The captain is said to have complained that the ship was overloaded. Some say the Brother Jonathan carried $2 million in gold, $250,000 payroll for the U.S. Army troops in the Northwest, 346 barrels of whiskey, two camels, a horse or all of the above.
"It is difficult to separate fact from fiction," said William Kooiman, of the San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park.
The seas were so high and the storm was so fierce and the Brother Jonathan sank so quickly that no one was ever sure where the wreck was. Treasure hunters have been looking for the ship for more than 127 years.
But Thursday, Donald Knight, a 51-year-old archeologist and deep-water explorer from Los Angeles County, showed a video of the hulk and displayed artifacts at a radio station in Crescent City.
"It seems to be all in one piece and it's most definitely the Brother Jonathan," Knight said. "It is the culmination of a 19-year search," he said.
He described what his firm, Deep Sea Research Inc., had found as "historically and archeologically extremely valuable."
"Also," he said, "we have found a maritime graveyard, the last resting place of 221 lives."
Knight's videotape showed that the ship is sitting upright on the ocean floor.
"You can see the hub of the paddle wheel on the port side, part of the steam boiler, part of the engine. It says `Morgan Iron Works, New York,"' said Dwight Gregory, news director of radio station KPOD in Crescent City, who got a preview of the 19-minute tape.
Knight also produced some china plates, a spike from the hull and a medicine bottle that he said had come from the wreckage.
But he would not say exactly where the Brother Jonathan lay on the sea bottom. "I'm not at liberty to disclose the location," he said.