The wreckage of the Le Lyonnaise, a French passenger steamship that sank in 1856 after colliding with another vessel has been discovered off the coast of Massachusetts by a dive team from Atlantic Wreck Salvage.
Colorised illustrated drawing of the sinking of Le Lyonnais on 27 December 1856, The Times of London (from Jennifer Sellitti's collection)
Le Lyonnais was built in 1855, at a time when ships were making the transition from sail to steam. Equipped with sails and a horizontal steam engine, it is an early example of a passenger liner with two mid-19th century innovations: a screw propeller and an iron hull.
It was in service carrying cabin-class passengers and cargo between New York and Le Havre, France, when on 2 November 1856, on its first return voyage from the Americas, it collided with the Maine-built barque Adriatic, which was sailing from Belfast, Maine, to Savannah, Georgia.
The collision left the French passenger liner with a gaping hole in its hull, which eventually led to its sinking. More than 100 people lost their lives in the sinking of Le Lyonnais. In the meantime, the Adriatic was able to sail to Gloucester, Massachusetts, for repairs.
Search
Shipwreck hunter Eric Takakjian began searching for the Le Lyonnais in the late 2000s. In 2016, Atlantic Wreck Salvage owners Jennifer Sellitti and Joe Mazraani joined the effort with their New Jersey-based dive vessel, D/V Tenacious.
Partly because historical newspaper articles suggested the ship had sunk on Nantucket Shoals, it took the team eight years to locate the wreck. However, after carefully studying legal documents and survivors’ accounts, they concluded that Le Lyonnais actually sank further out to sea on Georges Bank, some 200 miles from New Bedford, Massachusetts.
The team conducted side-scan surveys of potential targets in 2022 and 2023, after which they narrowed the search down to a number of potential candidates. After returning to the area to search in August, they managed to identify one of the targets as being Le Lyonnais. They knew they had found the right ship because of a number of distinctive features, such as its horizontal steam engine. The Le Lyonnais was one of the first ships to be equipped with this type of engine.
Sellitti said the wreck lies “very buried” in the sand in very deep water. The team hasn't disclosed the exact location or depth because it will return to the ship to further catalogue the artefacts.
Despite the ship’s poor condition, its historical significance makes the discovery noteworthy. ”Being one of the first French passenger steamships to have a regularly scheduled run crossing the Atlantic and an early transitional steamship make Le Lyonnais’ discovery significant,” Takakjian told Newsweek.
Book
Sellitti describes the wreck in a forthcoming book she wrote about the sinking of Le Lyonnais and the hunt for Captain Jonathan Durham. The book includes an epilogue that chronicles what it takes to chase shipwrecks far from shore in the often-punishing North Atlantic, the search for and discovery of Le Lyonnais, and how it changed their lives.
