A company on Mount Desert Island that has gone to court to claim a sunken ship is trying to track down a company that insured the vessel shortly before it sank in Somes Sound more than 130 years ago.
If JJM LLC can track down the company, or its corporate successor, that insured the cargo schooner before it sank, it may be able to demonstrate that the ship was not legally abandoned.
The state has countered JJM’s claim by saying that it should rightfully inherit ownership of the shipwreck, which it can only do if the ship has been legally abandoned and is either embedded in state land at the bottom of a lake or the ocean, or if it rests on those submerged lands and is eligible for listing in the National Register of Historic Places, according to documents filed in federal court.
The salvage firm filed suit against the National Park Service in September after the service determined the shipwreck is eligible for listing in the National Register.
Information about the company’s efforts, and about the location and current state of the sunken ship, is contained in multiple documents that were uploaded last week to the federal courts’ publicly accessible online document database.
The ship, which is named Delhi but is sometimes referred to as Delphini in historical records, sank in Somes Sound in April 1893 after it was loaded with 32,000 granite paving stones in Hall Quarry, a village on the western shore of the fjord that nearly divides MDI in two, the documents indicate.
One of the records is an excerpt from a 1978 book — titled ‘Hall Quarry: The Little Town That Wasn’t There’ — cited by JJM in court filings. The excerpt describes how the loaded ship set sail, but on its way out of the sound struck a “big ice cake” floating in the water. The impact pushed in a rotten porthole, causing water to flow in and sink the ship, according to the book.
“Everything was lost,” the authors wrote. “The people got out; that’s all — everything went down.”
The ship is partially submerged in sediment at a depth of 120 feet and roughly 500 feet from shore at the bottom of the sound, according to court documents. Papers filed earlier in the case indicated the wreck was located “within six nautical miles of Bar Harbor.”
Some of the documents in the case have been sealed — the name of the vessel was not disclosed for months — and JJM representatives have said they want to keep the exact location of the ship confidential to prevent others from visiting the site.
The potential financial value of the ship’s contents has not been identified in court documents, but representatives of JJM and state and federal officials have said there also is some historic interest in the ship and its contents.
“There’s strong interest among historians and museums to preserve these items,” Benjamin Ford, JJM’s attorney, wrote in an August email to officials with an insurance company that may have inherited a loss claim from the ship’s original insurer.
The ship’s eligibility for listing in the National Register makes JJM’s claim “more challenging,” Ford wrote. The intervention of an insurer who could file a legal claim to recover the loss from 1893 would give JJM a “stronger argument” that the wreck was never fully abandoned.
“Our client wants both to preserve the artifacts and recover the granite pavers,” Ford wrote in the email, a copy of which is included in court documents. “The plan would be to sell the pavers to cover preservation costs.”
Ford did not return a message seeking comment about his efforts to find a corporate successor to the potential 19th-century insurance claim on the sunken ship.
The insurance company that Ford contacted, however, later told state officials that it “‘has no insurance policies or records of documents related to Delhi as referenced in your subpoena,’ and has not filed a claim or otherwise moved to intervene,” according to court documents filed Friday by the state attorney general’s office.
The wrecked ship and its sunken cargo were abandoned, and therefore are subject to the federal Abandoned Ship Act, because there was no financial incentive for the owners at the time to try to salvage them, the state argued. And because much of the ship itself, as well as the pavers it carried, are embedded in the state’s submerged lands, the wreck should be listed in the National Register and designated the property of the state, the AG’s office wrote.
The state has filed a motion of summary judgment, asking the federal court to rule in its favor. JJM’s responses to the state’s motion are due on Dec. 12.
