Naval history molders under the Penobscot

While scuba diving in the Penobscot River four years ago, Brent Phinney came across a large pile of wood that would turn out to be far more valuable than the old sunken logs he was looking to retrieve.

Groping his way through the murky darkness, his flashlight providing little more than 5 feet of visibility, Phinney spotted the oak planking of a ship. Resting on the wood, which showed evidence of charring, was a cannon ball. Crawling hand-over-hand along the wreck, he found more planking and several more cannon balls. When he ran out of air, Phinney got another tank and went down again.

An experienced diver and amateur river historian who owns a steel-fabrication business on the site of an old boatyard in Brewer, Phinney knew immediately what sort of treasure he had stumbled across in only 15 feet of water, not far from shore. The blackened planking and closely fitted wooden ribs were the remains of one of the colonial warships sunk in the infamous Penobscot Expedition of 1779.

Phinney rushed to call Warren Riess, a researcher from the University of Maine’s Darling Marine Center in South Bristol. Riess already had spent several years investigating the whereabouts of the 40 or so ships chased by the British upriver from Castine and scuttled along the way by their own crews in what is regarded as the nation’s biggest naval defeat next to Pearl Harbor.

Riess, in fact, already had recovered spoons and a large copper cauldron from the wreck of the Defence, one of the American ships sunk in Searsport.

“I told Warren what I found and to get up here fast and bring this stuff out of the river,” Phinney said recently. “But he told me that’s not the way it’s done, and that I had to be patient. He showed me the ropes, and I’ve been hooked ever since on this project. It’s fascinating. This is our country’s history, and there are people in Bangor and Brewer who don’t even know that a part of the American Revolution took place right here in the river, right under their noses.”

After a decade of work, Riess was forced to leave the project recently when he was unable to get the necessary funding from the university or the state. The project is now in the hands of the underwater archaeological unit of the Naval Historical Center in Washington, D.C. Although Riess said he regrets having to give up his pet project – professionally, at least – he said the Navy has the skills, resources and historical interest necessary to see that the work is done properly.

“For them, this is really a special project because those wrecks in the river represent the very beginnings of the U.S. Navy,” said Riess, who estimates there are 10 wrecks in the river near Bangor and Brewer. “The Warren, the flagship of the fleet which was sunk downriver in Winterport, was one of the first 13 frigates built for the Continental Navy. It’s the only one that is accessible because the others were lost in the ocean. It is extremely significant in the nation’s history, and there it sits, in little pieces in the river.”

The Phinney site, which records suggest may contain the remains of either the Hazard or the Tyrranicide, has yielded enough interesting objects over the last two summers to make its namesake fantasize about what secrets the 100-foot-long hulk might hold. In 1999, while mapping and exploring the site, the Navy archaeologists recovered seven artifacts, including a brass shoe buckle from one of the crewmen. Last summer, the team brought up 242 artifacts of varying materials. There were fragments of ceramics, glass, brick, coal, stone, iron, silver, copper alloy such as bronze or brass, and wood. There were clay-pipe fragments, too, as well as a large, charred wooden pulley that is evidence of the fire set by the colonial crew in order to keep the ship out of the hands of its British pursuers.

The most fascinating object of all, however, was a silver coin dug last summer from the ship’s mud-filled mast step. Dated 1708, the extremely well-preserved coin, about the size of a half-dollar, bears the finely wrought crest of Philip V of Spain, an ornate “V” surmounted by a crown. The other side is stamped with what experts believe to be a royal shield, which also has a crown on top.

Suzanne Davis, a curator with the Naval Historical Center, said most of the artifacts, including many iron-shot cannon balls, have undergone complete conservation treatment and are now stored at the Washington Navy Yard. The good condition of the items, she said, is probably due to the freshwater environment of the site, the low temperatures of the river, and the fine silt sediment that prevents oxygen from reaching materials scattered about the wreck.

Although the Navy archaeological team expects to return to the Penobscot River in early September, the next step in the shipwreck research is still uncertain.

“Right now we have too much work and too few staff,” said Barbara Voulgaris, who heads the Navy’s six-person crew.

At the moment, the team is also responsible for researching the remains of the Civil War submarine the Hunley, which was recovered in 30 feet of muddy water off Charleston, S.C., last summer, as well as continuing its ambitious remote sensing survey of the D-Day beaches of Normandy.

“But the Penobscot Expedition is definitely a priority for us,” said Voulgaris, just back from France. “Here you have one of the worst routs ever suffered by the Navy, and most people in the U.S. aren’t even aware of what happened. There’s a very interesting story in that river. Those wrecks would be extremely important to the cultural heritage of the country. They represent part of the birth of the nation.”

Riess said the Navy probably has several years of mapping and records research left to do, not only to pinpoint the location of the wrecks, and establish their identities, but to decipher which ships belong to the federal government, which fall under state purview, and which are the independent warships known as privateers.

“The trick is to determine which ship is which,” he said. “And when all that is figured out, and the history of what happened out there is complete, then I would imagine everything could be exhibited locally one day.”

People like Phinney, one of a few knowledgeable locals who have worked with Riess and the Navy over the years, would rather not have to wait a decade or more to put together a public exhibit. Although he understands that underwater archaeology can be a painstakingly slow process, he’s tired of watching research boats drag side-scan sonars and magnetometers up and down the river. He already knows where some of the wrecks are, he said, and could put the Navy over the sites in no time. There are a couple of cannons just waiting to be resurrected from his Brewer site, he said, and three more big guns lie under 30 feet of water on another wreck in the middle of the river, near the Joshua Chamberlain Bridge.

He would love to explore the Bangor site of the Spring Bird, the ship that Paul Revere was on during the embarrassing naval rout, and see if the famous patriot and silversmith left some valuable trinkets behind when he fled the burning vessel and rowed frantically for shore. Looking for one of those swivel guns listed as armaments in the historical record of the fleet? Phinney said he knows just where to find one.

“We’ve got to get this stuff up at some point so we can show it to the people,” Phinney said with a shrug. “I’ll tell you what, if they could find the money somehow to build a museum, I could bring you to sites with enough stuff to fill the whole place. That’s our history down there, and I really want people to have a chance to see it.”

Tom Weber’s column appears Wednesday and Saturday.