Divers Discover the Long-Lost Wreckage of a Passenger Steamship That Sank in a Hit-and-Run in 1856

On November 2, 1856, the passenger steamship Le Lyonnais was sailing off the coast of Massachusetts when it collided with a sailing vessel called the Adriatic.

The Adriatic suffered minor damage and continued on. Le Lyonnais, meanwhile, had a small hole in its hull. Crews tried to patch it, but they ultimately couldn’t stop water from pouring in. Three days later, Le Lyonnais sank beneath the surface. Just 16 of the vessel’s 132 passengers were rescued.

The exact location of Le Lyonnais’ final resting place in the Atlantic has been a mystery for the last 168 years—until now. In August, a team of shipwreck hunters discovered the vessel on the seafloor roughly 200 miles from New Bedford, Massachusetts.

Shipwreck hunter Eric Takakjian started looking for Le Lyonnais in the late 2000s, according to the Asbury Park Press’ Dan Radel. In 2016, Jennifer Sellitti and Joe Mazraani, who own Atlantic Wreck Salvage, joined the search with their New Jersey-based dive vessel, the D/V Tenacious.

“I very quickly just became obsessed with this ship and her story,” Sellitti tells the Boston Globe’s Jeremy C. Fox. “And every little piece of information I uncovered was this sort of … unraveling of what really is an incredible story about this collision.”

The group took eight years to find Le Lyonnais, in part because historic newspaper articles suggested the ship sank on Nantucket Shoals. But the team found court documents and survivor accounts that suggested the ship actually sank farther out to sea on the Georges Banks.

In 2022 and 2023, the team began using side-scan sonar to study the seafloor. This helped them narrow the search area and identify a promising target. In August, they dove to the wreck and confirmed it was Le Lyonnais.

They knew they’d found the right ship because of several distinctive features, including the horizontal steam engine, the iron hull plates and part of the rigging system. The engine cylinder measured 57 inches, which matched Le Lyonnais’ records.

“Those clues with the location, sonar data and measurements further solidified that we were diving the lost French liner,” Mazraani tells the Asbury Park Press.

The team members are keeping the exact location of the wreck a secret, but they did reveal that it’s buried in sand in deep water. They plan to return to the site in the future to continue documenting its artifacts.

Built in England in 1855 for Compagnie Franco-Americaine, Le Lyonnais had sails and a steam engine. The vessel, which transported passengers and cargo, set sail the following year.

The collision occurred as Le Lyonnais was making the return journey across the Atlantic from the United States to France. The Adriatic, meanwhile, was on its way from Maine to Georgia.

After the accident, the crew aboard the Adriatic assumed Le Lyonnais was fit to continue on its course. The Adriatic headed to Gloucester, Massachusetts, for repairs, leaving the crew aboard Le Lyonnais to fend for themselves.

A few weeks after the collision, the Adriatic’s captain, Jonathan Durham, said in a statement published in the New York Times (then the New-York Daily Times) that the crew “hailed the steamer, and requested them not to leave us, but received no answer.” The captain was later put on trial in France for the accident, per the Boston Globe.

Sellitti describes the wreck as a “hit-and-run” in a forthcoming book she wrote about the ordeal.

“Being able to find this ship, I felt like I was giving closure to the people who suffered there,” Sellitti tells the New York Times’ Hank Sanders.

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Sarah Kuta is a writer and editor based in Longmont, Colorado. She covers history, science, travel, food and beverage, sustainability, economics and other topics.