Wreck Discovery Lays To Rest A 95-Year-Old Mystery
For 95 years, the gravesite of the USS Conestoga and her 56 crewmembers remained a mystery. Thought to have been somewhere in the vast Pacific off Mexico or Hawaii, the wreck of the oceangoing Navy tug was found and identified recently less than a day’s voyage from San Francisco, where she had set out on a 4,800-mile passage to her new duty station in American Samoa on March 25, 1921.
“I’ve never in my career had something like this happen: Find something where nobody thought it would be, solve a 95-year-old mystery and bring closure to the families of a ship’s crew,” says Jim Delgado, director of NOAA’s Maritime Heritage Program and co-leader of the NOAA-Navy team that identified the wreck of the 170-foot steel-hulled tug.
The Conestoga was found on the seabed in 189 feet of water, three miles off Southeast Farallon Island and 30 miles southwest of the Golden Gate. NOAA and the Navy announced their find at a ceremony this past spring to honor Conestoga’s crew and gather their families at the U.S. Navy Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.
Conestoga’s baffling loss made headlines across the country, Delgado says, coming hard on the heels of the 1918 disappearance of the 542-foot Navy collier USS Cyclops and its 306 crew in the Bermuda Triangle — a region of the North Atlantic between Bermuda, Puerto Rico and Melbourne, Florida, where 20 planes and 50 ships have been lost over the last century — and the January 1921 grounding of the five-masted schooner Carroll A. Deering on North Carolina’s Diamond Shoals without a trace of her crew.
Speculation about Conestoga’s demise ran to the conspiratorial, this period in history being the first great Red Scare in America. Some feared Bolshevik agents had infiltrated U.S. ships’ crews with the intention of hijacking vessels such as the Deering and Conestoga, and taking them to Russia. Others hypothesized garden-variety mutiny.
Delgado, NOAA colleague Robert V. Schwemmer and several senior naval officers pieced together a much less exotic explanation for Conestoga’s loss. The ocean tug, probably with a barge in tow, departed Mare Island Naval Shipyard at 9 a.m. March 25 bound