Researchers have documented roughly 150 shipwrecks in the waters around Acadia National Park.
While some remain unidentified — their port of departure, passenger manifest and captain unknown — more than a few have storied histories, and their tales of misfortune still linger around Mount Desert Island.
Among them was a two-masted Schooner named Delhi that has sat on the bottom of Somes Sound for more than 125 years and was recently at the center of a federal salvage rights dispute. Just under two months ago, a federal judge ruled that the state of Maine owns the remnants of the Delhi.
The Delhi, which was carrying 32,000 granite paving stones when it sank in 1893, was found in late 2023 by a diver hired by the Southwest Harbor business who later filed for ownership of the vessel.
There may be more than a thousand shipwrecks along Maine’s coastline, and researchers have identified 150 vessels around Acadia, including MDI and the Schoodic Peninsula, according to a 2009 inventory completed by marine archaeologists and funded by an L.L Bean fellowship.
Four shipwrecks have been discovered around the Schoodic Peninsula — the park’s only mainland region — and nine sunken vessels have been recorded on Baker Island, at the southwestern mouth of Frenchman Bay, or the sand bar to its north, according to the inventory.
“The area around Baker Island acted as a ship trap,” the report says, noting that the island, which is now a part of the Town of Cranberry Isles and and is one of the park’s most remote pockets, has been the site of the most wrecks found around Acadia.
The Tay, a two-masted schooner on its way to Boston from Saint John, New Brunswick, ran aground at Great Head, on the eastern edge of MDI’s Sand Beach, just after midnight on July 28, 1911, according to the Bar Harbor Record. A coastal storm unearthed wreckage of the vessel at Sand Beach in January 2024.
The ship’s cook, J.B. Whelpley, died in the wreck, and the surviving crew members clung to the vessel’s mast before swimming to land.
The Tay was hauling a load of Canadian lumber owned by a Bangor company, which was later salvaged by locals and used to build a nearby boathouse.
An unidentified wooden ship in Seal Cove, whose keel was estimated to be at least 50 feet long, was excavated in 2012 with funding from the National Park Service and Institute of Maritime History. Franklin Price, a marine archeologist who led the excavation and the 2009 inventory, said at the time that the vessel was likely built in the late 1800s and had been in Seal Cove since at least the 1940s.
In the early 1880s, the steamer Wauwinnet ferried tourists from the north shore of Eagle Lake to a cog railroad that took them to the top of Green Mountain, later renamed Cadillac, which mention rumors of the steamer’s sinking.
Zach Whalen, a College of the Atlantic student, said in 2011 he had photographed the Wauwinnet wreckage, which now sits at the bottom of Eagle Lake. Diving is prohibited at Eagle Lake because it provides drinking water for Bar Harbor, but Whalen received special permission from town officials to photograph the site.