More than 120 years after a coal-carrying schooner sank in Long Island Sound off Waterford, the ship was identified last week by a diver who discovered the wreck.

Local wreck-divers discovered the remains seven years ago off Goshen Point, where Harkness Memorial State Park is now, but weren't able to identify them until archives from The Day and Naugatuck Daily News finally led to the story of the shipwreck.

Mark Munro, who was among three divers from Sound Underwater Survey who discovered the remains, dug up the news archives last week and solved the mystery that had stumped divers since 2012: the remains belonged to the Oscar C. Aiken, a 74-foot-long Newport-bound schooner last seen on Oct. 23, 1898.

The Aiken foundered about a mile and a half east of Bartlett Reef after running through a gale in The Race and striking a rock near Plum Island, N.Y., that wrecked its rudder, according to a report in The Day on Oct. 25, 1898.

Capt. Howard Orr and his crew escaped the wreck in a small boat and reached the Connecticut shore safely, where they watched with Goshen Point residents as the Aiken sank in 70 feet of water, The Day reported at the time.

Since that October day, the schooner had not been seen until Munro and fellow divers Larry Lawrence and Pat Casey dove into the Sound to locate the wreckage, which Munro described as "a pile of nut coal 80 feet long, 30 feet wide, and 4 feet tall."

Amid the coal, which is what Munro and Lawrence said wreck divers typically find in the area from sunken cargo, sat a few noteworthy artifacts: a deadeye, or wooden disc with holes in it, used for ropes in the ship's rigging; a sounding lead, used to determine water depth; and a hawsepipe, a tube that an anchor line runs through.

Lawrence, who has been wreck diving in the area since the early 1970s, said he was surprised to find the wreckage so intact. "The opportunity to find a lot of this stuff is rare because many of the wooden parts of ships are typically eaten up by worms," he said. "It was nice to see a little more to one of these wrecks then you normally see."

The diver said that making discoveries like these feels like traveling back in time.

"The part that gets me the most is when you get to the bottom and you see an object and you reach out to put your hand on it and wonder 'Who was the last person to touch this?" Lawrence said. "It's like reaching back through time and shaking hands with somebody from 100 years ago."

Though Sound Underwater Survey divers have found many wrecks that have yet to be identified, Munro said the Aiken is likely the oldest they've found.

Munro said the overall wreck site could be described as a "smudge shipwreck" — a name for ship wreckage that appears as a smudge on a sonar record.

The divers were able to find the Aiken wreckage thanks to bathymetric data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which Munro said he has been using for over a decade to locate such wrecks.

According to NOAA, bathymetry is the study of the floors, or beds, of bodies of water and bathymetric maps, much like land maps, identify three-dimensional features that lie underwater. NOAA's maps use various color and contour lines to show variations in the sea-floor surface.

[naviga:img class="img-responsive" alt="A 3D image of the shipwreck using bathymetric data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration." src="/Assets/news2019/OscarCAiken_Shipwreck4.jpg"/]

A 3D image of the shipwreck using bathymetric data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. (Courtesy of Mark Munro/Sound Underwater Survey)

After looking over bathymetric data of the Sound, Munro spotted something that led the divers to the Aiken.

With a group of other wreck divers, Munro said he dives several times a year to explore remains from shipwrecks in the area, mainly those that have yet to be discovered. Usually, he said, they learn the story of the shipwreck first and then find the wreckage. But in the case of the Aiken, they found the wreckage before they knew its story.

"All the wrecks have a story behind them, but every once in a while you get one like this that is much more interesting," said Munro, who has been wreck diving for more than 30 years and now owns Sound Underwater Survey.

The site of the Aiken was unique, he said, because there were no other wrecks reported or wreckage found in the immediate area.

"It was where the story said it was," said the diver, noting that the group couldn't have identified the schooner without local reporting archives.

Years after digging up a news clip from the Naugatuck Daily News, Munro said he recently stumbled across the report of an unnamed ship sinking. From there, he headed to the Public Library of New London to further scour The Day's archives, which held the story of the Aiken.

"It's been seven years that this has been a mystery, it's great to be able to put all the pieces together and figure out an identity for (it)," Munro said. "The Aiken was kind of lost to history until now."

Now that they know its story, Munro said he and his fellow divers will be heading back down into the Sound sometime soon to keep exploring the site of the Aiken.

t.hartz@theday.com