A lucky snag in the Gulf of St. Lawrence
Fisherman accidentally solved 100-year-old maritime mystery
Editor’s note: Atlantic Canada’s history is intrinsically tied to maritime life, and with that comes the tragedies of ships lost at sea. This Salt Wire Network series will take you on a journey of folklore and history through the tales of some of those vessels lost beneath the depths long ago.
Ronnie Campbell was just hoping to haul in a large load of lobster.
Instead, he solved a maritime mystery that had raised questions for more than a century.
Campbell was fishing for lobster about two miles off Covehead, P.E.I., on May 12, 1985 — his birthday — and was pulling up his line of 10 traps. They all came up easily, except the last one. It became snagged on something underwater.
It was at that moment Campbell remembered an old community tale of a sunken ship.
Everything started to make sense.
“I figured it out right away, I must be stuck on that damn old shipwreck,” he says, thinking back to that moment 36 years ago.
North Shore folks had been talking about it for years. As the story goes, a ship packed full of coal had become stuck in the ice and sunk somewhere off the North Shore of P.E.I. in the late 1800s.
The tale had been passed through the fishing community for generations, with coal dust even occasionally washing ashore to give validity to the tale.
Everyone knew it was out there, Campbell recalls during a recent phone interview from his home in Dalvay, P.E.I.
The only question was: where?
“For years people thought that it sank off to the east somewhere, so everyone was looking in the wrong place,” he says.
Campbell had just purchased Loran-C for his boat — for the times, a new type of technology that was an early form of GPS — but he wasn’t sure how to use it.
“I went to the Loran-C and copied down the number because I knew in a week or two I’d have figured out how to use it and then I’d know how to go back to this site I marked.”
SOLVING THE MYSTERY
Though Campbell did catch on to the Loran-C, he didn’t make a trip back to those co-ordinates until four years later, when local divers heard he might know where the shipwreck was located.
“I said, ‘listen, you bring your boat down and I’ll stop and mark the thing for you.’ So, I went out and when I found the position, I dropped the buoy with a concrete block and waited.”
The divers arrived and geared up before sinking into the depths below, quickly returning with news of their discovery.
“He wasn’t down 15 minutes before he came up and he had the bell. Once he had the bell, everything was on it, we could do research and find out where the ship was built.”
The ship was a British cargo vessel called the Tunstall. Although the date it sunk is disputed, the book Yarmouth, Past and Present, written by Lawson J. Murray in 1902, gives May 12, 1884, as the date she went down.
If the ship did sink on May 12, 1884, that means Campbell not only found the ship on his birthday, he found its location on the 101st anniversary of its sinking.
OLD SHIP, NEW LIFE
Given how long ago it was, it may never be known exactly when the Tunstall sunk, but it has found a new life long after its demise.
Due to the ship being made from steel, much of it is still under water, making it a prime location for P.E.I. scuba divers to explore.
Kelly Campbell, the administrator of the P.E.I. Scuba Divers Facebook page, says the site of the Tunstall is the most popular shipwreck for P.E.I. divers to visit due to that exact reason.
“Many of P.E.I.’s wrecks were wooden ships that didn’t survive in the saltwater and many wrecks ran ashore in storms, so they got completely destroyed by the ice, tides or salvage attempts,” Kelly said.
“The Tunstall is quite large and has a lot to see. The anchor is hanging from the bow of the ship, which is quite unique that it’s still there after over 100 years.”
The Tunstall sits in about 70 feet of water, so due to the depth, divers can only spend around 25 minutes at the site.
Exploring an over 100-year-old shipwreck under 70 feet of water doesn’t sound like the safest activity, but Kelly said anyone can do it with the proper training.
Islanders who are trained scuba divers can even take an advanced course on the site of the Tunstall with Divers Quarters, a Hazelbrooke, P.E.I. based scuba diving school.
Though Kelly hasn’t been to the Tunstall in a few years, his love of shipwreck diving is still strong.
Kelly was part of a crew who found the wreck of a ship called Ferguson in 2017 and hopes to investigate another P.E.I. maritime urban legend, the North Cape Uboat, in the future.
There were mixed reports in 1943 that a U-boat was sunk off the coast of North Cape during a failed mission to rescue Nazi prisoners of war held in New Brunswick.
Though no allied ships were credited with sinking the vessel U-376, divers like Kelly have always hoped the story was true.
“I’d love to be one of the people who help discover it,” he said.