In Photos: Century-Old Sunken Ship Found

Cruising cutter

mcculloch shipwreck — (Image credit: Mare Island Museum)

The McCulloch had a 20-year career that included battles in the Spanish-American war and patrols along the Alaskan coast. The ship met its end on the foggy morning of June 13, 1917, when it collided with the SS Governor, a passenger steamship.

McCulloch sinks

According to accounts of the accident, the crew stood at attention in their lifeboats as their ship went down.

One casualty

Everyone made it off the vessel alive, but one crewmember, John Arvid Johansson, died a few days later. Robert Grassow, a carpenter aboard the McCulloch, described finding a badly injured Johansson in his bunk and bringing him off the boat: “There was nobody else around, so I took some of the wreckage away and there was a piece of wood eight inches long stuck in his side. The master-at-arms passed the word for men to carry him to a surf boat.”

First clues

A previous multibeam sonar survey conducted in 2015 identified a shipwreck site off Point Conception, California.

Search tools

Then in October 2016, researchers sent this VideoRay Mission Specialist remotely operated vehicle (ROV) down to the seafloor to investigate further.

Torpedo tube

The researchers first confirmed that the sunken vessel they found was in fact the McColloch by identifying its 15-inch torpedo tube molded into the bow stem, now covered with anemones.

Propeller blade

They spotted other notable features like this blade from the ship's 11-foot bronze propeller, now sticking out of the seafloor sediment.

Ghost ship full of life

Today, the wreck hosts a diversity of marine creatures. The vermillion rockfish shown here is swimming around a skylight collapsed inside the officer's quarters.

[Read the full story on the McCulloch shipwreck]

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Megan has been writing for Live Science and Space.com since 2012. Her interests range from archaeology to space exploration, and she has a bachelor's degree in English and art history from New York University. Megan spent two years as a reporter on the national desk at NewsCore. She has watched dinosaur auctions, witnessed rocket launches, licked ancient pottery sherds in Cyprus and flown in zero gravity. Follow her on Twitter and Google+.