A coal run that vanished in 1877 off the coast of Australia has finally turned up—after a modern hunt for wind power, not shipwrecks. The iron steamer City of Hobart left Newcastle, New South Wales, on July 21, 1877, with more than 600 tons of coal bound for Melbourne. Damaged in heavy seas off Victoria's Gippsland coast three days later, the ship began flooding, and the crew escaped in lifeboats. The vessel went down, ABC Australia reports, but its final resting place remained unknown for almost a century and a half, despite rumors and decades of searching by divers. Southern Ocean Exploration, a dive group that began looking for the wreck in 2008, came agonizingly close—team leader Mark Ryan says one search was undertaken within about 150 feet of the site.
The breakthrough came after renewable energy company Iberdrola Australia mapped the seafloor while surveying a proposed offshore wind farm. Its geophysical scans revealed two wrecks; with that data, technical divers returned in February and confirmed one as the City of Hobart. The other wreck matched the already known SS Vicky. Built in Glasgow in 1853, the 645-ton steamer is considered historically significant because it straddled the shift from sail to steam. Ryan notes it was designed as a sailing vessel but constructed in iron as a steamship, and it carried an unusual "Beattie Propeller" mounted behind the rudder rather than in front of it. For divers, that mix of age, engineering quirks, and untouched condition made the first descent "mind-blowing," Ryan says.
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