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Outside Magazine April 2002
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Out There
The Ghost of Shipwrecks Future
Diving on lost ships is one thing. Exploring the boat that shadowed your life is a murkier adventure entirely.

By Patrick Symmes

Postcard from beyond: the Mohawk docks at Jacksonville, Florida.
IT WAS AN UGLY SHIP, AND STILL IS. The steamer Mohawk was a 387-foot workhorse on the weekly run to Havana, carrying freight and discount passengers in both directions. When it sailed out of New York for the last time, on January 24, 1935, the Mohawk had neither fame nor beauty, and it has taken a damn serious beating since then.

The first blow was administered by the Norwegian freighter Talisman, which slammed into the ship a few hours from Manhattan, slicing a deep gash in the bow. It took 70 minutes for the Mohawk to sink, enough time for most of the lifeboats to get away with most of the 164 people aboard, though not all. Forty-five lives ended on that icy night off the coast of New Jersey, and the Mohawk plunged 80 feet and cracked open on the sea floor. For most of the world, the story ended then and there.

But the awkward little ship never had a final resting place, nor any peace. Sitting upright on the silty bottom, the wreck's tallest parts—the bridge and smokestack—were still hazards in the busy New Jersey shipping channels. Soon two tugboats were dispatched to wire-drag the wreck, forcing a heavy steel cable back and forth through the superstructure, snapping the deck plates apart, ripping the bridge from the hull, and scattering debris into the currents. A few years later, in World War II, the Coast Guard pummeled the Mohawk with depth charges; German U-boats had been hiding alongside wrecks in these waters, dodging sonar behind their bulky silhouettes.

With insult heaped on injury, the Mohawk was left to the mercy of the Atlantic. Decade by decade, the ocean shoved, pulled, twisted, flipped, and buried the ruins of the old boat and its rusting cargo of car parts and china. When scuba diving became a mass sport in the 1960s, a few visitors dropped onto the wreckage, but by the 1990s, as technology—advanced GPS, inexpensive side-scan sonar, and nitrox gas mixtures—made it easier to explore wrecks, a new wave of divers began to pick its bones. Hundreds of thousands of certified divers live along the Middle Atlantic seaboard, and nowadays a dozen or more of them can be found crawling over the vessel on any given summer Sunday.

Inevitably, those divers come back up with something: some trophy, some artifact, some souvenir. If they are lucky, or determined, they might find a porthole, bring it up, clean it, and slap it on the mantelpiece. Weekend by weekend, storm by storm, man and the elements are reducing the Mohawk to a memory. This would not concern me in the least, except that my uncle died on the S.S. Mohawk.


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Patrick Symmes last reported for Outside from Dahab, Egypt.