But instead of surrendering he escaped on the land side with all hands, and a deeply disappointed Lt. Davidson flashed a white signal of surrender and scuttled her in 14 feet of water about three-quarters of a mile offshore. The America spotted her and the Wissahickon pursued her, blew a hole through her hull and damaged her propeller and rudder. yacht America (of America Cup fame) and the USS Wissahickon, she had 140 men on board and an arsenal of guns and gun carriages in her hold. At the time of her fateful encounter with the U.S. She was built in Glasgow in 1862, a sleek vessel apparently designed for speed, and it’s very like she was headed for Charleston to receive her officers on the night of March 19, 1863. SS Georgiana was an iron-hulled propeller steamer with a jib, two raked masts, and a “demi-woman” figurehead on her clipper bow. The Anchor Wreck sits in 100 feet of water just off Bull’s Bay. It’s possible the salvage crew couldn’t bring it up, and maybe they slipped their anchors in the attempt. Apparently, the owners of the submerged Leif Eriksson, which cost $200,000 to build in 1889, sold it to a scrap company for $5. The three anchors could be explained in light of a subsequent New York newspaper report. The Carolina coast was locked in a solid sheet of ice and the local newspapers did not report the incident. The City of Everett picked up the 20 or so survivors from the wreck and, with heavy damages, limped back to New York. Its cigar-shaped bow plowed into the Leif Eriksson as the storm howled all around, and the Leif Eriksson sank within minutes. The fog was thick when the City of Everett appeared out of nowhere, an early ancestor of the oil tanker, launched from New York and bound for Texas. A severe winter storm was in progress as it headed from its last stop in Cuba and passed through Carolina waters, with ice, snow and punishing winds lashing the coast.

In 2007 a marine biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration found a story about the sinking of the Leif Eriksson in 1905 off the South Carolina coast. However, it was a New York newspaper that shed the first ray of light on the possible identity of Anchor Wreck.

Typically underwater sleuths rely on local newspaper accounts to help identify sunken treasures. Divers brought up a valve stamped Goteberg, a city in Norway, but since ships do tend to get around and pick up souvenirs at various ports, that was an inconclusive piece of evidence. And that was only one small fraction of a larger riddle that may now be solved, after many years of seeking the identity of the ship itself. It sits in 80 feet of water with visibility at 30 to 35 feet, generally considered poor, but divers still have a good chance of seeing stingrays.Īnchor Wreck got its name from the three anchors that are strewn about a single ship, notwithstanding the common practice of one anchor per boat. Apparently, it was a mid-19th-century paddle wheeler, with surrounding artifacts from that era, but who can say whether it ran any Civil War blockades, went down in a hurricane, or collided with another nearby popular wreck, the City of Richmond. The Governor is the name used to refer to a Civil War-era wreck 22 miles off the coast of Murrells Inlet, though some dive shops call it Civil War Wreck because the ship’s identity has never been firmly established. Divers dream of doing the detective work to discover the past lives of ships that sleep in the deep, and achieving some degree of local fame by solving some of history’s mysteries. Along the South Carolina coast, underwater explorers have discovered countless Civil War wrecks, merchant vessels sunk in hurricanes, and in one case two ships that long ago collided and sank together.

Civil war myrtle beach