Mystery Ship That Went Missing 120 Years Ago With 32 Crew Members Found In Australia
The steamship SS Nemesis was transporting coal to Melbourne in 1904 when it got caught in a powerful storm off New South Wales and vanished.
The mystery behind a missing ship that vanished around 120 years ago off the coast of Australia has finally been solved. According to the New York Post, the steamship SS Nemesis was transporting coal to Melbourne in 1904 when it got caught in a powerful storm off New South Wales and vanished along with 32 crew members. In the following weeks, bodies of crew members and fragments of the ship's wreckage washed ashore, but the location of the 240-foot vessel remained a mystery.
Now, almost 120 years after, Subsea Professional Marine Services, a remote sensing company searching the ocean floor off the coast of Sydney for lost cargo, accidentally stumbled upon the missing shipwreck. According to the Post, the wreck was found completely untouched, nearly 525 feet underwater.
Officials suspected the wreck might be the SS Nemesis but it wasn't officially confirmed until last year when CSIRO, Australia's national science agency, was able to capture underwater imagery that showed the distinctive features of the ship.
"Our visual inspection of the wreck using the drop camera showed some key structures were still intact and identifiable, including two of the ship's anchors lying on the seafloor," Phil Vandenbossche, a CSIRO hydrographic surveyor on board the voyage, said in a statement.
The discovery also revealed that the vessel went down because its engine became overwhelmed due to the storm. Experts believe the steamship began to sink so quickly after being struck by a large wave that the crew did not have time to deploy lifeboats.