The team behind the find consisted of Roger Pawlowski, Roland “Chip” Stevens and Jim Kennard.
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The ship, which was built in America but owned by Canadians, sank in 1803.
Kennard estimates there to be about 200 wrecks left undiscovered in Lake Ontario, and says he plans to continue to keep searching.
A team of underwater explorers says it has found the second-oldest confirmed shipwreck in the Great Lakes. This one is a different matter, though.
The 18th-century ship, named Lady Washington, was made on Lake Erie in Pennsylvania in 1798 then used to ferry goods between New York, Pennsylvania, and Ontario.
Placed on skids and pulled by oxen, it crossed the Isthmus of Niagara after its acquisition by merchants of Canada.
“This one is very special”.
The 53-foot-long ship was carrying at least five people and a cargo of merchandise, including goods from India, when it set sail from Kingston, Ontario, for its homeport of Niagara, Ontario, on November 6, 1803.
And previous year, Mr. Kennard and Mr. Pawlowski discovered the wreckage of the Bay State, a propeller-driven steamship bound for Toledo with passengers and cargo that sank near Fair Haven during a storm in 1862.
At least three crew members and two merchants were on the sloop.
Kennard said that modern records stated that pieces of the ship and some of the cargo washed ashore near Oswego the next day.
The Washington, a single-masted sloop, is the second-oldest shipwreck found in the great lakes. The Museum backs Kennard’s team in their explorations. Across the Great Lakes, more than 6,000 vessels have wrecked, burned, or sunk over the past 236 years. The team behind the discovery announced their find in a statement today, saying the shipwreck concerns the vessel “Washington”, which has always been known to have sank during a storm.
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The discovery of a ship that was built in the 18th century is a big deal for historians – it gives them a look at how ships were constructed between the American Revolution and the War of 1812, the museum’s Archaeological Director Carrie Sowden told The Associated Press. It was also Kennard, with another diver, who located the wreckage in 2008.
