Search for the famous navy ship, Mississippi. Blown
up on Mississippi River during the Civil War somewhere
above Baton Rouge. May, 1989.
The Mississippi was the navy's first ocean sailing steam
ship. She served with distinction for twenty-three years
and established an incredible history, which is described
in the listing from the Dictionary of American Naval Fighting
Ships on a later page.
Her end came when she tried to pass the guns of Port
Hudson along with Farragut's fleet that had successfully
taken New Orleans. She ran aground and was abandoned
by her crew, whose executive officer was Thomas Dewey,
later of Manila fame. Set on fire and blazing from bow
to stern, she slid off the sand bar and began drifting
down the Mississippi, ultimately blowing to pieces when
the 24 tons of gun powder in her hull exploded. She
then sank out of sight in deep water.
There was no recorded attempt to salvage her and descriptions
of her resting place were incredibly skimpy.
She was known to have drifted for 2 to three hours
under a current recorded by Farragut himself at 4 miles
an hour. These figures would put her roughly somewhere
between 10 and 12 miles down river from Port Hudson
and well below the tip of Prophet Island. Some reports
put the site of her explosion close to the Arkansas,
but this has to be an exaggeration. The Arkansas was
destroyed by her crew a good sixteen miles below Port
Hudson just at the bend of the reach dropping toward
Baton Rouge.
In May of '89, Craig Dirgo and Clive Cussler ran search
lines beginning two miles below Prophet Island and ending
one mile north of the bottom tip. Using the EG&G
sonar and Schonstedt gradiometer, nothing resembling
a shipwreck was discovered and no targets of any consequence
worth investigating.
We weren't overly optimistic of finding the Mississippi
because the stretch of river where she most likely sank
is now a giant swamp. As you can see by a copy of the
included chart, the new course of the river is considerably
to the east of the old. Three wrecks are noted on an
old chart in the general area. The one to the north
that appears to be grounded on a bar just below Prophet
Island was dredged away many years ago, and our instruments
no longer picked her out. The two that are farther south
are already marked on the encroaching swamp ground and
by now must be a good half mile from the river.
The Mississippi would be a fascinating wreck to survey.
Not being salvaged, much of her must still be intact.
She might possibly be located with a mag trailed behind
a helicopter, but even if her final resting place is
found, the remoteness and bog conditions would make
any excavation extremely difficult if not next to impossible.
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