Attorneys representing the state want court approval to publicly identify the name of a ship that sank off Bar Harbor in the 1890s.
The ship — which court documents say is located approximately 120 feet below the surface of the ocean within six nautical miles of Bar Harbor — is the subject of a federal court claim filed by JJM LLC, a company based in Southwest Harbor that is trying to establish legal salvage rights to the ship and its contents.
The state has argued in court that it, not JJM, legally owns the abandoned wreckage. It lies within the state’s coastal waters on submerged lands owned by the state, and that the federal Abandoned Shipwreck Act of 1988 assigns ownership of such vessels to the state, state attorneys said.
Now the state is arguing that a prior court order that barred disclosure of details about the ship, such as its name and exact location, should be amended to allow the state to publicly identify the ship by name.
Key to the arguments in the case about whether the state can claim ownership of the wreck under the 1988 law, or whether JJM can claim it, is establishing if the ship has legally been abandoned, the state argues. Publicly identifying the ship can help establish whether there might be other entities that can claim ownership of the sunken boat.
“Party anonymity is warranted only in exceptional circumstances not present in this fight over an abandoned and submerged vessel,” the state said in a motion to unseal the name of the ship.
Benjamin Ford, a lawyer representing JJM in the court claim, said that his client is opposed to releasing the name of the ship. Without going into specifics, he said doing so could make it easier for people to figure out where it sank.
Not only would this increase the risk of disturbance of the wreckage site, but it could pose a safety threat to casual divers who are tempted to try to find it for themselves, Ford said.
“It’s particularly risky for recreational divers,” he said.
A diver hired by JJM who found the vessel on Nov. 5, 2023, wrote in a court affidavit that at a depth of 120 feet, natural visibility was “zero.” He swam with a tether to maintain physical contact with an anchor he dropped from the surface. Even with an underwater flashlight, he could only see about 10 feet in any direction.
At the wreckage site, he found “numerous” granite pavers among the ship’s debris, he wrote. He said he only spent 12 minutes at the bottom because the depth of the dive made his air supply run low.
Ford said there are a few random items at the wreckage site such as cups or saucers, but that his client is interested only in the cargo of granite pavers. Old shipwreck sites are fairly common in Maine, he said, and random ship supplies generally are not considered valuable.
Any non-cargo items that his client might recover would be donated to a museum or some other entity that would preserve them for the public, he said.
“It is just about a bunch of granite,” Ford said of his client’s interest in salvaging the shipwreck. “Pavers from a shipwreck are generally more intriguing than pavers from Home Depot.”
Because the ship sank more than 50 years ago, in the 1890s, it may be eligible for listing in the National Register of Historic Places, state officials have said.
Court documents describe the ship as likely a 20- to 30-foot-tall, 90- to 100-foot-long two-mast sailing vessel with a wooden hull, 90 to 100 feet long.
In a quirk of federal maritime law, JJM is required to serve the sunken vessel with an arrest warrant as part of its legal claim over the shipwreck. The company took photos last April of a JJM representative holding a warrant sealed in a plastic bag and tied to a brick just before they dropped it over the side of a boat to meet this legal requirement.
The state is not seeking court approval to reveal the exact location of the ship. If someone were to find the submerged ship on their own, the court has granted temporary custodianship of the wreckage to JJM LLC, which bars anyone from disturbing either the ship or its contents while the ownership issue is being decided, state attorneys said.
“Revealing only the presumed name of the [ship], as opposed to the coordinates, is not a ready invitation to pillaging,” they wrote.
