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Wreck May Be Confederate Ship

The Florida Aquarium

Archaeologist John Morris takes notes on the wreckage found in the Hillsborough River.

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By RAY REYES

The Tampa Tribune

Published: May 20, 2008

TAMPA - At low tide, the Hillsborough River recedes enough to reveal wood beams poking through the water.

To the untrained eye, the barnacle-encrusted wood appears to be nothing more than a neglected boat mooring.

"It looks like an old dock," said Tom Wagner, spokesman for The Florida Aquarium in downtown Tampa.

The beams could be part of something far more interesting.

The planks are the remains of a ship between 80 and 100 feet long, Wagner said. A team of divers and underwater archaeologists from the aquarium who discovered the wreck near Lowry Park Zoo think it could be a sunken Confederate vessel.

Archaeologists are taking measurements and checking nautical records. Wagner said the find could be the first Confederate blockade runner, a ship designed to outrun the Union blockade of Tampa Bay, found in Florida.

The aquarium will announce more details of the find this week.

Tampa didn't play a big role in the Civil War, but oral histories allude to the Hillsborough River's use as a supply route for Confederate soldiers camped farther inland, Wagner said.

During the Civil War, Union soldiers attacked and burned three Confederate blockade runners in the Tampa area, said archaeologist John W. "Billy" Morris, the principal investigator for the project.

The burned wreckage of the ship near Lowry Park is "exactly where the historical records say the ships were destroyed," Morris said.

The ship has features of a 19th century sloop, which places it during the Civil War, he said, though some elements of its design share similarities with vessels built in the 1920s.

In 2007, aquarium divers studied the wreck of the USS Narcissus, which sank off Egmont Key after a boiler-room explosion Jan. 3, 1866. The 82-foot Union tugboat, which took part in two Civil War naval operations, was on its way to be decommissioned in New York. Twenty-nine Navy crew members perished in the blast and were never found.

The Narcissus participated in the Battle of Mobile Bay on Dec. 7, 1864, where Union Adm. David Farragut immortalized the phrase, "Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!"

The wreck of the Narcissus and the remains of the boat in the Hillsborough River could eventually be featured in an exhibit showcasing Civil War-era ships, Wagner said. The research project to explore the bottom of local waterways is funded through state grants.

Depending on the story that archaeologists can tease out of the Hillsborough River wreck, that boat might be re-created in diagrams or rebuilt as a full-scale replica. It would take 18 to 36 months to create such an exhibit, Wagner said.

Scientists have no plans to excavate or raise the ship. Pieces of wood have been removed from the site for analysis, Wagner said.

"They're going to leave it there for the most part," he said. "The decay is pretty severe. There's not really enough left."

Reporter Neil Johnson contributed to this report. Reporter Ray Reyes can be reached at rreyes@tampatrib.com or (813) 259-7920.

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