The state of Maine on Tuesday asked a judge to give it possession of a shipwreck off the coast of Bar Harbor.
The Delhi, loaded with 32,000 granite pavers, sank in 1893 off Mount Desert Island. In March 2024, JJM LLC filed a salvage rights claim to the ship in U.S. District Court of Maine in Bangor.
The company is seeking ownership rights to the wreckage, but the state challenged that claim, saying that federal law has established that unclaimed shipwrecks lying in state waters are the property of the state.
The state asked a judge to decide the case before a trial and give it the ship’s title. After hearing roughly 30 minutes of arguments Tuesday, Judge John Nivison will issue a written opinion in the coming weeks.
It’s been more than 130 years since the ship sank and no company has claimed the ship’s title since the lawsuit was filed two years ago, despite the state’s efforts to publicize the wreck, Assistant Attorney General Lauren Parker said.
The ship is abandoned, she said. The passage of time since it sank and no one claiming the original title confirms that, Parker said.
The ship 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, court documents said.
“We are talking about a pile of stones underneath the pile of trash,” JJM attorney Ben Ford said. “This is not a shipwreck in the sense that one might imagine a shipwreck to be. The Delhi is no longer there.”
How much of the Delhi remains above the ocean floor is in dispute. One diver reported about 20 to 30 feet of the ship remained, while a diver for JJM saw significantly less, Parker said. The company argued the ship is not intact.
Excavating the wreck would require more than hand tools, and it is at least partially embedded in the ocean floor, Parker said.
The salvage company maintains that the wreck is not embedded, Ford said.
A JJM diver was able to pick up a granite paver by hand and return it to the surface in a basket, Ford said. There are definitely pavers on the surface of the ocean floor, but some may be under garbage that has accumulated on top of the wreck, he said.
The ship is not historic, Ford told the Bangor Daily News after the hearing. It was a common type of ship, similar to a “beat up old F-150,” he said.
What is of note is the artifacts on the ship, as well as the granite pavers. JJM wants to recover the pavers and artifacts and then donate the artifacts to museums, Ford said.
“This is not a situation where JJM wants to rape and pillage the sea floor,” Ford said. “This is a situation where JJM says, ‘Hey, we can make an economic argument for recovering these artifacts and exchanging these pavers.’”
People ask JJM why it cares about the wreck and if there is something else down there, but there are no gold coins in the wreck, just the granite pavers, Ford said.
The salvage firm filed suit in September against the National Park Service after the service determined the shipwreck is eligible for listing in the National Register. That lawsuit is still pending.
